One night in the late 1960s, David Jones was walking home with his older half brother, Terry. It had been a momentous night—a Cream show in Beckenham, Terry’s first rock concert. (Jazz had always been more Terry’s thing.) But suddenly Terry’s behavior grew strange. Claiming he could see cracks in the road with flames coming out of them, he got down on all fours and gripped the tarmac, terrified he was about to be sucked into space.…
“When he came back from doing service in the RAF he was in his early twenties and I was about ten years old,” Bowie told Crawdaddy magazine. “And he would seem miserable. We’d been told he was ultra-intelligent in school. Then he got to where he almost vegetated, wouldn’t talk, read, wouldn’t do anything.” Terry was diagnosed with schizophrenia and incarcerated in Cane Hill Hospital in Coulsdon near Croydon (see p. 232). On January 16, 1985, he walked down to the local train station and lay down on the rails: he’d attempted this method of suicide once before. That time he’d been thwarted. This time he was successful.
Mental illness ran in David Bowie’s family. The curse, as he thought of it, was concentrated on his mother’s side: his aunts Vivienne, Una, and Nora were all afflicted to some degree, Vivienne with schizophrenia, like Terry. Bowie’s fear that he might have inherited the gene gnawed at him all his life and explains the obsession with mental instability that haunts his work, from the mournful punning of Aladdin Sane to the blanked-out catatonia evoked by Low’s droning soundscapes. It’s no surprise that so many of his favorite books touch on the subject.
Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith is one of them. The last of the trio of “lesbo Victorian romps” (as the author self-mockingly described them) that made Waters’s name, it’s a loving pastiche of English “sensation novels” of the 1860s and ’70s, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Rose and the Key, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Here, madness is part of a cocktail that also includes identity theft and long-buried family secrets. The aim of sensation novels was to supply a delicious, transgressive, almost erotic thrill. Fingersmith’s plot is obligingly dense with secrets and deceptions. Richard “Gentleman” Rivers enlists orphan Sue, raised in the rookeries of London’s Borough district, as a petty thief, or “fingersmith,” to help him trick an innocent heiress called Maud into marrying him so that he can make off with her fortune. Sue will become Maud’s maid and chaperone, receiving a cut of the profits for her efforts. But she falls deeply in love with Maud—so deeply, she fails to notice that she too is being duped.
The novel’s midpoint twist, borrowed from The Woman in White, pulls the rug from under our feet, shuttling us headlong into the mansions cold and gray of Bowie’s song “All the Madmen.” But Fingersmith is much more than pastiche. What’s brilliant about it is the way it transcends its sources to become something startlingly, vibrantly new. By teasing out fresh associations and moving what was latent in the Victorian originals to the foreground, Waters mirrors Bowie’s own magpie method as an artist. As his glam peers Roxy Music put it: remake, remodel.
Bowie loved slang and occult arcana. Waters has said that Christopher Lilly, Maud’s uncle who obsessively collects (and forces Maud to read aloud from) pornography, is based on Henry Spencer Ashbee, who between 1877 and 1885 published three annotated bibliographies of erotica under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi. Ashbee is rumored to be the true identity of “Walter,” author of the Victorian sexual memoir My Secret Life that was one of Aleister Crowley’s favorite books. As a Crowley fan, Bowie would have relished this tissue of connections.