On the essays shelf:
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.
I have written before about William Styron’s Darkness Visible, an indispensable depression memoir (he describes it so well that it is horrifying to read: it’s horrifying if you have never experienced anguish like that, and it’s horrifying if you know that anguish personally.) I go into my feelings about that book at the link. His depression was severe enough to warrant hospitalization, and his description of the year or so leading up to the crisis is harrowing, there is just no other word for it. It’s triggering to read, if you are trying to get yourself back on track. It is “darkness visible”, it is your worst fears made manifest. But that, in essence, is why it is such an important book, and so beloved by depressives everywhere. He said it, he was brave enough to say it, he put it out there. And he does it so well that I read it and think, “There. That’s what it feels like. Thank God someone put it into words.” (I am not particularly a fan of his books, although I have read most of them. I enjoy them, but am not quite sure about them, to be honest. His prose sometimes gets on my nerves. It’s the prose of a show-off.)
But not in Darkness Visible.
The purple prose is nowhere in evidence. Nowhere does he gild the lily, like he does in his novels. It is raw, short, concise, devastating, and ultimately hopeful. Not because he was “cured” – he still had relapses, he still struggled, but at least he got the help he needed. One of the reasons the book is so unbelievably validating is it describes the horror of having to go on with regular life when you are in a depressive episode, when you are mentally sick. When someone is visibly sick, having gone through surgery,or some prolonged illness, or is sick like having cancer, etc., it is assumed that that person will not be 100%. It would be unthinkable to expect a person on his death bed from cancer, or coming out of a series of chemo treatments, to go to a dinner party and socialize. And yet depressives find themselves in that situation all the time. It is inhumane. (This dovetails with my feeling that the Black Armband tradition should come back into vogue. Expecting people to go back to work and be 100% a week after they buried a parent/spouse is inhumane. Sure, going back to work is helpful, but there’s a reason people wore black for a YEAR in more intelligent times: It is a signal to the outside world, it is a warning, it is a reminder.)
Anyway, Styron is far more eloquent about all of that than I just was. He said that therapy was meaningless for him, and the only thing that saved his life was hospitalization (which removed him from everyday obligations) and medication. This is something that many therapists do not address, they who think talk therapy is the be-all end-all. (I have a bone to pick with therapy right now. This is just my opinion, and it is very well-formed. I know therapy has helped many.) However, Styron’s point that there is a difference between mild anxiety or mild not-knowing-how-to-cope with things and serious depression. The lines are, of course, sometimes blurred, and the frightening thing is that one can escalate into the other. Styron was baffled by those who wanted to ask him if something in his childhood had made him depressed, etc. It is a sickness of the mind, with a chemical component, exacerbated by certain habits (or lack of habits): everyone knows you need to eat right, get sleep, exercise, and all that. If you neglect those things, the mind will suffer. (Interestingly: I am still reading Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in the early 17th century, and it’s all the same advice as we get now. It’s comforting.)
Styron sticks up for the clinically depressed, Styron points out the absurdity of the stigma against the sickness (and treating it as a SICKNESS, not as a personality flaw) and the inhumanity of some of the prejudices. It’s a great little book.
Update: Just now went to Maud Newton’s great Tumblr, and came across this, posted yesterday. Coincidence!
In Unholy Ghost, there is an excerpt from Darkness Visible, as well as a companion essay by Rose Styron, Bill Styron’s wife for many many years. She, of course, appears in Darkness Visible quite a bit, but now we hear her side. It’s a painful essay, in many ways. Painful more for William Styron, obviously, but wrenching for his family as well. He had grown children who watched helplessly as they watched their father disintegrate before their eyes in his 60s. Horrifying. There is one episode in Darkness Visible that is painful to even think about, of his daughter coming to see him, and being shocked by his insane appearance. He said goodbye to her, apologizing, the agony was too great. Etc. Madness is a family affair.
Rose Styron here writes about that deterioration and how it took them all unawares. It’s interesting: in Darkness Visible, William Styron starts off by describing how he suddenly could no longer drink alcohol in his 60s. It turned his stomach. He quit drinking, and suddenly all of these other problems started erupting. He grieved the loss of alcohol intensely. (I may be misremembering the order of some of these events. It’s been a while since I read the book.) He realized how much he had relied on alcohol to regulate his moods. He was bereft without it. Of course, the alcohol withdrawal was just a harbinger of the horror that was to come.
Rose Styron tells it from her side. She became convinced that it was all about the alcohol: his depression HAD to be connected to that. Of course as things got worse and worse and worse, the thought that this began because he could no longer drink whiskey or wine seemed less probable. But madness is terrifying to contemplate, and it is very common to look for reasons, to point fingers, to ask “Why?” That’s a necessary part of the process. She writes about that, and her determination to figure out the connection between alcohol withdrawal and plummeting depression. This was her way of trying to manage the crisis.
She tells the story of how they met, and how they married. The glory of those early years, how fun and exciting their relationship was. William Styron was an exhilarating companion (according to her). He could be mercurial, but there was nothing odd about that, certainly not in that crowd of artists. They were all passionate literary excitable people. Comes with the territory. William and Rose had kids, they were happy. The women’s movement hadn’t really arrived yet, and Rose Styron talks a bit about that, about her desire to do wifely things, and be a good wife. (Not that feminists don’t want to be good wives. Rose Styron is talking about strict gender roles, and his expectation that she would take on a traditional wifely role. It was her expectation, too.)
But all in all, the two were very happy. Styron was as successful as you could get, pretty much, as a writer, their children were happy, they traveled a lot, they had crazy adventures, good friends, all was well. Through their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Here’s an excerpt.
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Love did not prepare me for 1985. As Bill’s sixtieth birthday loomed, he (a well-known, well-teased hypochondriac with a Merck’s Manual at our bedside), became insanely hypochondriacal. He saw THE END on every horizon. Death was on his mind – not only for himself, but for others. When his favorite dog was sick, he was certain she would die (she lived three more years to his joy). When Polly fell off her horse and Alexandra was in a car accident, both requiring stitches in their heads, he assumed death was imminent for them both. Agonized for our daughters, Bill remonstrated me. I felt genuinely guilty, that it was my fault that I had not been careful enough with them. I was away a lot – I had begun a new career as a voyager for Amnesty International and traveled extensively for human rights – and, therefore, was not able to monitor Bill’s moods as much as I would have liked.
Bill had also stopped his habitual drinking as suddenly and completely as he had given up smoking twenty-odd years earlier. His old pal, liquor, was making him nauseous. His insomnia – for which a careless Vineyard doctor, impressed by “William Styron” had prescribed Atavan (as often as Bill wanted) two years earlier – became far worse. A New York doctor switched him to Halcion. Bill paced in doctors’ offices for this or that real or imagined physical ailment. He spent long hours lying on the bed staring at the ceiling instead of writing. Or, if he did summon the energy to write, he described characters consumed by their own fears of failing health and fortune, or approaching death. I noted, bemused, that every one of his fictional heroines was a victim of suicide or murder, but I had not understood that it was a disguise for his own apprehensions.
Over the summer of 1985, attempting to understand and keep my own balance, I convinced myself that Bill’s state was caused by withdrawal from alcohol. His withdrawal from smoking in 1965 had produced a frenetic need for chocolate and the repeated theft of our children’s gumdrops. But, this year, plying him with sweets did no good. Nothing did. He took pleasure in no one. His conversations – always far-ranging and spontaneous – became self-centered, labored, obsessive. Bill stopped urging me to leave him alone at home to think and work. He stopped going off without me on splendid, short trips to Paris or Moscow. He stopped railing at me for me peccadilloes and Pollyanna turns of phrase. He suddenly wanted me there all the time, didn’t want me out of his sight, wanted to talk. He asked me to accompany him on long walks with the dogs, during which he talked about his hatred for the world and winter, his fears about work and aging.
I have to admit that on those walks, as the leaves turned in New England, when he seemed newly close and affectionate toward me, my heart was full, wifely. September was a deceptively good month for me as far as my marriage itself was concerned. I was sad for him, but I was also happy for us. I guess I believed that, when withdrawal played itself out, he’d see the colors of the leaves, the beauty of the world again.
