On the night of December 23, 1888, in Arles, France, Vincent van Gogh, enraged that fellow painter and possibly romantic partner Paul Gauguin was about to leave him, took a razor and sliced off his left ear—not just a part but all of it.1 With severed lobe in hand, van Gogh then walked to a nearby brothel and presented the trophy to a young prostitute, Gabrielle Berlatier. Authorities quickly apprehended the self-assailant and placed him in a mental hospital.
The story of van Gogh mutilating his ear is well known, and immortalized in the artist’s famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe (1889). We associate van Gogh with mental instability and wild behavior, and we project those qualities onto his art. Did van Gogh really paint his hallucinations? Similarly, did the eccentric and half-crazy Beethoven really compose sounds he couldn’t hear? Simple anecdotes may help us understand complex issues. But are these tales of “mad geniuses” accurate representations? Or have they been exaggerated because we love a good story? Is there a greater incidence of insanity and suicide among geniuses, or do a few notoriously disturbed creators distort our view?
SINCE THE ANCIENT GREEKS, THE LINE BETWEEN GENIUS AND INSANITY has been seen as hazy. Plato referred to genius as a “divine mania.”2 His pupil Aristotle linked creativity to insanity when he said, “There is no great genius without a touch of madness.”3 The seventeenth-century poet John Dryden voiced this same sentiment by rhyming, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”4 Having been called insane, Edgar Allan Poe responded, “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—where all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought.”5 “You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head,” said Charles Dodgson’s Alice in Alice in Wonderland, “But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”6 And the comedian Robin Williams brought this ancient trope of the mad genius into modern times when he said wistfully, “You are only given a little spot of madness, and if you lose that, you are nothing.”7
Although psychologists have debated the relationship between genius and mental illness for more than a century, there is still no unanimity of opinion. As early as 1891, the Italian criminologist Dr. Cesare Lombroso, in his book The Man of Genius, posited a link among heredity, mental disorder, degeneracy, and criminal behavior, associating all with genius.8 “Genius is just one of many forms of insanity,” he said. More recently, the psychiatrists Kay Redfield Jamison and others have associated illustrious creators with identifiable mental disorders, as classified by the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).9 Rates of unbalance, it seems, can be minutely quantified. Jamison’s conclusions regarding poets, drawn from her 1989 study of forty-seven “eminent British writers and artists,” is typical of the statistical approach: “A comparison with rates of manic-depressive illness in the general population (1 percent), cyclothymic (1 to 2 percent), and major depressive disorder (5 percent) shows that these British poets were thirty times more likely to suffer from manic-depressive illness, ten to twenty times more likely to be cyclothymic or have other milder forms of manic-depressive illness, more than five times as likely to commit suicide, and at least twenty times more likely to have been committed to an asylum or madhouse.”10 Scientists, according to one study, had the lowest prevalence of psychopathology (a 17.8 percent increase above the general public), and the rate increased steadily through composers, politicians, and artists, with the highest prevalence present in writers (46 percent) and, again, poets (80 percent).11 The greater incidence among artists may confirm a saying attributed to the rapper Kanye West: “Great art comes from great pain.”12
Pain, however, is no guarantee of great art. Many individuals have great psychic pain but no art (or science) to show for it. Conversely, many individuals generate great art or science without pain. Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky, and McCartney come to mind among well-integrated composers; Faraday, James Maxwell, and Einstein likewise among scientists. For every certifiably insane Bobby Fischer, there is a seemingly normal Magnus Carlsen; for every van Gogh there is a Matisse.
Taking a very unscientific look at genius and mental disorder, what do the nearly one hundred luminaries considered in this book tell us? At least a third of the group—a high percentage—were or are seriously affected by mood disorders. Hildegard of Bingen, Newton, Beethoven, Tesla, Yayoi Kusama, van Gogh, Woolf, Hemingway, Dickens, Rowling, Plath, and Picasso, among others, displayed some form of affective disorder. Geniuses don’t have a habit of being unbalanced, but they do have a proclivity to it. Mathematicians and scientists, according to the experts, experience less psychic disorder than artists, possibly because they deal in logical precepts and rational limits rather than boundless emotive expressions.13 An orderly, step-by-step protocol often plays out within the lines of the scientific method as well as in solving a mathematical equation.
The Nobel Prize−winning economist and mathematician John Nash, the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, was an exception to the “sane scientist” rule. A schizophrenic since his late teens, Nash told the Yale Economic Review in 2008, “[Creative insight] is something of a mystery. It’s a special area where smart thinking and crazy thinking can be related. If you’re going to develop exceptional ideas, it requires a type of thinking that is not simply practical thinking.”14 And elsewhere he stated, “The ideas that I have about the supernatural came to me in the same way that my mathematical ideas did, so I took them seriously.”15
When Nash said these ideas “came to me in the same way,” he implicitly raised an additional question: Is the creativity that is generated by the unbalanced brain coincidental or causal? In other words, is the capacity to create caused by the psychosis, or does it happen at the same time but independent of the psychosis? Vincent van Gogh provides a test case that yields no clear answer.
PHYSICIANS HAVE POSITED MORE THAN A HUNDRED THEORIES AS TO the cause of van Gogh’s deranged state, among them bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, neurosyphilis, interictal dysphoric disorder, sunstroke, acute intermittent porphyria, temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated by the use of absinthe, subacute angle closure glaucoma, xanthopsia, and Ménière’s disease.16 In addition, there was a strong genetic component in the painter’s mental unbalance. Vincent killed himself at thirty-seven; his younger brother Theo became deranged and died in a psychiatric hospital at age thirty-three, six months after Vincent; their younger brother Cornelius died, apparently of his own hand, also at thirty-three; and a sister, Wilhelmina, spent forty years of her life in a mental institution, where she died in 1941 at age seventy-nine.17
Van Gogh understood that he was often mad. “Either lock me up in a madhouse straightaway, I won’t resist if I’m wrong, or let me work with all my strength,” he wrote Theo on January 28, 1889.18 Both came to pass. In May of that year, van Gogh entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France, and was assigned to two rooms with bars on the windows, one of which he used as a studio. During the next year, he produced some of his most beloved creations, including Irises, as he saw them in the courtyard at Saint-Rémy, and The Starry Night, painted while looking out his sanatorium window. His final work, Tree Roots, done after his release, “Is one of those paintings,” said the art historian Nienke Bakker, “in which you can feel van Gogh’s sometimes tortured mental state.”19
But the question remains: Was Vincent van Gogh a genius because he was mad (did madness shape his visionary art), or was he a genius who just happened also to be mad? All of the peculiarities of van Gogh’s style—his theory about painting, color, and perspective, his swirling textures and shimmering lights—were carefully explained in his letters to his brother Theo long before they were fully executed on canvas later in his life.20 The exclusive use of yellow, the intense reds and greens together, the twining of bicolor striated brushstrokes were all part of a radically new but wholly rational aesthetic.21 In van Gogh’s case, mental disintegration and artistic production may have been two separate, albeit collateral, parts of his life experience. When he was sane, van Gogh knew exactly what he was doing.
Most important, van Gogh also knew when he was sane and when he was not. When impaired he did not paint, as he said on July 6, 1882: “As a patient you are not free to work as one should, and not up to it either.”22 Hallucinations may or may not have been a source of artistic material for him, but they were certainly a frightful experience to be avoided. To do so, and to stay alive, van Gogh painted. As he said in 1882, “Yes, I can understand why there are people who jump into the water . . . [but I] thought it much the better to get ahold of myself and seek a medicine in work”;23 and in 1883, “Work is the only remedy. If that does not help, one breaks down.”24 Van Gogh’s cry for survival, as he emphasized in his letters in many ways many times: “I must paint.”
And so he painted, manically producing nearly a hundred and fifty works during his last year. Eventually, toggling between mania and depression, insanity and lucidity, and asylum and outside world, even painting was not enough. On the morning of July 27, 1890, van Gogh wandered off into a field near the Oise River north of Paris and shot himself in the stomach with a revolver.
ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 28, 1941, VIRGINIA WOOLF, AGE fifty-nine, filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the Ouse River north of London, to the same fatal end. Woolf’s mental unbalance met the clinical criteria for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.25 As her nephew Quentin Bell wrote, “This was one of the difficulties of living with Virginia; her imagination was furnished with an accelerator and no brakes; it flew rapidly ahead, parting company with reality.”26 Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s long-supportive husband, concurred: “In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind raced; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attack, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices, for instance she told me that in her second attack she heard the birds in the garden outside her window talking Greek; she was violent with the nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days.”27 Earlier, in 1904, Woolf had thrown herself out a window but had survived.
Where did Woolf get the ideas for her introspective novels? Herman Melville acquired “deep background” for Moby-Dick while sailing on a whaling boat in the South Seas, and Ernest Hemingway similarly got journalistic “context” as a reporter on the front lines during World Wars I and II. Some writers are keen observers of the everyday. Some rely heavily on their own vivid but rational imagination—Shakespeare seems to have had both a keen eye and an expansive imagination. Occasionally, a writer will journey deep into her own psychotic mind.
In the most self-revelatory of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf transfers to her characters her own experiences, both real and hallucinatory. Mrs. Dalloway is the sane, conventional Virginia; Peter Walsh serves as her hypomanic alter ego; and Septimus Warren Smith portrays her psychotic doppelganger who hears birds singing in Greek, comes to think that the staff wishes to harm him, and escapes by jumping out a window to his death. “As an experience,” Woolf said, “madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.”28
Writing was how Woolf exorcised her demons—the demons of madness that drove her genius. Most patients talk to their psychiatrist as part of the “talking cure,” but Woolf, acting as her own psychiatrist, simply wrote. In an essay of 1931, she demonstrated through her writing the connection between a psychotic experience and self-therapy and thereby eliminated a threatening alter ego. “I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. . . . It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. . . . I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. . . . I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard.”29
Like many manic-depressives, Woolf toggled between highs and lows and the balanced (euthymic) state in between. As she once wrote about coming down from manic to normal, “I saw myself, my brilliancy, genius, charm, [and] beauty diminish and disappear. One is in truth rather an elderly dowdy fussy ugly incompetent woman, vain, chattering & futile.”30 But only in this latter, normal state, when her discord could synthesize into a coherent narrative stream, was Woolf stable enough to write. This she realized one night in June 1933 while driving through the London suburb in which she lived: “I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing.”31 One of the hidden habits of some geniuses is the capacity to step over into an imaginary world and then come back. Woolf could do this—until she couldn’t.
THE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929) IS STILL toggling back and forth between the Seiwa Psychiatric Hospital in Tokyo, Japan, where she has lived since 1977, and the world outside. Named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2016 and arguably among the world’s best-known living artists, Kusama still follows the same obsessive-compulsive regime: “Across the street from the hospital I built a studio, and this is where I work each day, commuting back and forth between the two buildings. Life in the hospital follows a fixed schedule. I retire at nine o’clock at night and wake up the next morning in time for a blood test at seven. At ten o’clock each morning I go to my studio and work until six or seven in the evening.”32 Elsewhere in her autobiography she added, “I fluctuate between the two extremes: the sense of fulfilment an artist gets from creating, and the fierce inner tension that fuels the creativity . . . between feelings of reality and unreality.”33
Kusama has been experiencing unreality since she was a child. She described the sort of psychotic occurrence that came to mark her stay in New York City (1957–1973) as a young adult:
I often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. I woke one morning to find the nets I had painted the previous day stuck to the windows. Marveling at this, I went to touch them, and they crawled on and into the skin of my hands. My heart began racing. In the throes of a full-blown panic attack I called an ambulance, which rushed me to Bellevue Hospital. Unfortunately this sort of thing began to happen with some regularity. . . . But I just kept painting like mad.34
FIGURE 7.1: Yayoi Kusama photographed in the room installation titled With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever at the exhibition Eternity of Eternal Eternity (City Museum of Art, Matsumoto Nagano, Japan).
IconicPix: Alamy Stock Photo
Moving on from infinity nets, Kusama obsessively painted infinities of polka dots (see Figure 7.1) or some other quickly reproducible fixation. Critics have dubbed her “The High Priestess of Polka Dots” and “The First Obsessional Artist.” She herself has labeled her work “psychosomatic art”—art arising from psychosis. Her aim? To remove the obsessional disorder from which she suffers and thereby allow her spirit (and that of the viewer) to transcend into an infinite, undifferentiated “vertigo of nothingness.” “My art,” she says, “originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. . . . By translating hallucinations and fear of hallucinations into paintings, I have been trying to cure my disease.”35 And in her autobiography, she wrote, “You might therefore say that my painting originated in a primal, intuitive way that had little to do with the notion of ‘art.’”36
AS THE EXAMPLES OF VINCENT VAN GOGH, VIRGINIA WOOLF, AND Yayoi Kusama show with increasing certainty, mental “disorder” can not only disable but also enable. Creative expression can protect and heal the psyche, and from that process of personal survival emerges a work of art. A creator can impose upon a reader, viewer, or listener his or her life experiences. The artist says, “I see it, I feel it, I want you to see and feel it as well, and when you do, I and you will be more in infinite harmony within ourselves individually and with each other.” Below are the declarations of a few exceptional people for whom a mental “imbalance” was the driver of their art.
Vincent van Gogh: “I must paint.”
Virginia Woolf: “I write to stabilize myself.”
Yayoi Kusama: “Art is a release as well as a treatment.”
Pablo Picasso: “[Les Demoiselles d’Avignon] was my first canvas of exorcism.”
Anne Sexton: “Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.”
Winston Churchill: “Painting came to my rescue at a most trying time.”
Martha Graham: “When I stopped dancing I lost my will to live.”
Robert Lowell: “[I’d] escape into writing and be healed.”
Chuck Close: “Painting saved me.”
Amy Winehouse: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head and need to get something good out of something bad.”37
Every human needs an activity with a salutary forward trajectory. Even if what you are creating is insignificant to others, thinking that it is important can be a lifesaver.
IN A DESPONDENT LETTER WRITTEN IN 1803, CALLED THE HEILIGENSTADT Testament after the Vienna suburb in which it was written, the then-suicidal Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) explained why he had decided not to end his life: “It was only my art that held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me. So I endured this wretched existence.”38 That was not the only time Beethoven had contemplated taking his own life. In 1811, for example, he had gone missing for three days in the woods and had been found in a ditch by the wife of another musician. Beethoven had confessed to her that he “wanted to let himself die of starvation.”39 Beethoven had a lot wrong with him. He suffered from bipolar disorder, paranoia, long-term gastrointestinal disease, and lead poisoning and was a functioning alcoholic.40 The disability that we remember him for today, however, is deafness.
Beethoven began to have a ringing in his ears (tinnitus) and increased difficulty in hearing higher tones during the 1790s, when he was in his twenties. In 1801, he wrote to a friend, “My ears continue to hum and buzz day and night. . . . In the theater I have to place myself quite close to the orchestra, lean against the railings, to understand the actors. . . . Sometimes, too, I scarcely hear those who are speaking softly, I hear the tones, but not the words.”41 By 1814, Beethoven no longer appeared in public as a performer. Yet not until 1817, when he was forty-seven, did his deafness become so extreme that he could no longer hear music at all. When he died, an autopsy revealed that his auditory nerves were “shriveled and destitute of neurina; the accompanying arteries were dilated to more than the size of a crow quill and cartilaginous.”42
Two points provide context: First, Beethoven continued to hear, albeit with greatly diminished capacity, throughout the decade 1803 to 1813, during which years he wrote the music that is most beloved by concertgoers today: his most popular symphonies, concertos, and piano sonatas; the notion of “deaf Beethoven,” therefore, is not entirely accurate but is dependent on the time in question. Second, many gifted composers, best exemplified by Mozart, have the ability to create music without external sound, composing by means of an “inner ear”; Beethoven, too, had the capacity to hear music in his head, make written sketches, and finish the final score writing at a desk without the aid of a sound-making instrument.
But a disability can make a difference. The process that made Beethoven’s music the stuff of the ages was, in part, his response to a “deficit.” Ironically, the “deaf” Beethoven’s contribution to music history was that he discovered musical sound. That is to say, his music privileges not so much the musical idea but rather the sound of that idea repeated again and again. Beethoven created his unique music by setting a chord, melodic phrase, or rhythm into place and simply repeating it over and over, increasing the volume and often raising the pitch with each iteration. Reducing music into its basic elements and then insistently pushing them forward in a growing tidal wave of sound gave unprecedented power to Beethoven’s music: “I cannot hear, I cannot hear, I cannot hear. LOUDER!” he seemed to say.
The hearing impaired often “hear” only vibrations—poundings of the earth—when they experience music. Is that why so many of Beethoven’s compositions are stylized dances (music reduced to basic pulsations)? Perhaps the best way to experience dancing Beethoven and the vibrating earth is to listen to the first movement of his Symphony No. 7, where the composer repeats the same motif fifty-seven times in succession. Most telling are the beautifully strange textures and abstract dislocations—call it extreme interiority—to be found in the now completely deaf Beethoven’s last quartets and piano sonatas.43 “Deafness did not impair and indeed may even have heightened his abilities as a composer,” concluded Beethoven expert Maynard Solomon.44 Indeed, to a degree, Beethoven’s genius rests in the sounds his disability forced him to hear internally and then transmit to paper.
WHICH ARTIST FACES A GREATER CHALLENGE, THE COMPOSER WHO cannot hear or the painter who cannot see? The painter Chuck Close (b. 1940) is unable to recognize friends, family members, or acquaintances no matter how many times they meet. In addition to dyslexia and other cognitive impairments, Close suffers from “face blindness,” a disability to which neurologists have given the clinical name prosopagnosia.45 Face blindness results from a disorder of the fusiform face area within the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, which links the neural pathways related to visual recognition.46 As the Nobel Prize−winning neurologist Eric Kandel said to Close in an interview, “You are the only face-blind artist in the history of Western art who has chosen to do portraits.”47
FIGURE 7.2: Chuck Close’s 2006 portrait of Bill Clinton is an assemblage of 676 individual diamonds, which reflects Close’s artistic response to his disability, known as prosopagnosia (gift of Ian and Annette Cumming, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
dbimages: Alamy Stock Photo
Chuck Close cannot recognize faces in part because he cannot conceptualize three-dimensional images, but he can do so if the subject is two-dimensional. To create a portrait, Close takes a photograph of a face and then divides the two-dimensional image into a myriad of small incremental units, each of which he paints separately in a distinctive manner. For a portrait of his friend Bill Clinton (2006; Figure 7.2), Close created an assemblage of 676 individual diamonds. What resulted was something akin to an atomization of the face, a disassemblage that causes us to realize that a person—and every potential genius—is a composite of countless small elements that may or may not come together. Close points specifically to Clinton’s disassembled teeth: “Each tooth was separate, and I had to smoosh them together so they look like teeth.”48 Forced to see the world in a different way, the prosopagnosiac Chuck Close improvised his way to a solution. Close’s portrait of Clinton today hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., both a president and a disability memorialized.
If the portraitist Chuck Close cannot remember faces, the artist Stephen Wiltshire sees and remembers everything. Wiltshire has an eidetic, or photographic, memory. He can look at a cityscape or scene in London, New York, Rome, Dubai, or Tokyo just once, for twenty minutes or so, and later meticulously replicate what he has seen in every detail. His drawings, which may take hours to generate, sell in his London gallery for tens of thousands of pounds.
Is Stephen Wiltshire a genius? Impressive as his feats of memory are, he is not. An autistic savant, Wiltshire has the capacity to process visual information at computerlike speed, but he possesses the general cognitive development of a five-year-old.49 Wilshire paints exactly what he sees; no more, no less. What about other so-called savant geniuses: the calculating wonder Kim Peek, the inspiration of the Oscar-winning film Rain Man (1988), and the musical prodigy Derek Paravicini, who can play back any piece note for note after just one hearing? Lightning-fast processing is one thing; originality is another. By hand painting each of his incremental units and assembling them in a unique way, Chuck Close adds value to his portraits; Stephen Wiltshire and Derek Paravicini merely replicate existing things. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks has pointed out with regard to Wiltshire and other autistic savants, true art must involve a personal process in which the creator takes the borrowed material, “places it in relation to oneself and expresses it in a new way, one’s own.”50
“FOR SUCCESS IN SCIENCE AND ART A DASH OF AUTISM IS ESSENTIAL,” said Hans Asperger, after whom Asperger’s syndrome is named.51 A dash of autism may be needed, but so, too, is a large dollop of imagination, the ability to visualize and make new connections. Isaac Newton, who saw relationships across the galaxy, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), who solved mathematical problems previously thought unsolvable, and Alan Turing (1912–1954), who played a key role in developing modern computing as well as decoding the Nazi Enigma machine—all were said to manifest symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, but all additionally possessed expansive imaginations. The latter two geniuses have been popularized in recent films, Ramanujan in The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) and Turing in The Imitation Game (2014). Yet among recent public figures exhibiting extreme ability and disability, no one had a crazier, more cosmic imagination than the late comedian Robin Williams.
To say that Robin Williams’s frame of reference was wide-ranging does his mind a disservice. Once, after riffing on ways of defusing terrorists from the Near East, he quickly pivoted to the United States and added, “If you are ever in Amish country and you see a man with a gun buried in a horse’s ass, that’s a mechanic, not a terrorist.”52 Williams had a mind that moved with lightning speed. Billy Crystal once said of his friend, “If I was fast tonight, he’d be faster.” And James Lipton introduced Williams on Inside the Actors Studio by asking, “How do you explain the mental reflexes that you deploy with such awesome speed? Are you thinking faster than the rest of us? What the hell is going on?”53 The answer, perhaps, is attention deficit disorder (ADD).54
“I’d try to have a conversation with Robin,” said drama school classmate Joel Blum, “and it would go okay for about ten seconds. And then he would go into a character voice, he would do a bit. He would almost literally bounce off the walls with craziness. And then he would be gone.”55 Although never officially diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, in Williams’s case numerous mental health observers suspected as much.56 Many people with ADD are also known to have highly active imaginations, allowing for special creative gifts.57 They are also prone to developing Lewy body dementia (LBD),58 a disease that manifests in an abnormal buildup of neurochemical proteins in the brain. Williams suffered from LBD, and it likely hastened his death by suicide at age sixty-three. In many cases, accompanying both ADD and LBD is depression. Despondency, however, may be the source of black humor, giving rise, ironically, to a therapeutic good joke. “I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out,” said Lord Byron, “but for the recollection that it would have given such pleasure to my mother-in-law.”59
Gallows humor, a tragic sense of irony—so many minds of genius have possessed it. The deeper the pit, the more humor is needed to dig out. The depressive comedian Jonathan Winters, a mentor to Williams, once said, “I need that pain—whatever it is—to call upon it from time to time, no matter how bad it was.”60 “Isn’t it funny,” Williams himself observed, “how I can bring great happiness to all these people, but not to myself.”61 Williams’s own dark thoughts gave rise to bright laughter with toss-offs such as “In Texas there are so many electric chairs, even Santa Claus has one. And they give you an alcohol swab on your arm before administering a lethal injection. That way you don’t get an infection.”62 Williams saw it coming: “That’s what is exciting: the idea of exploratory activity. This is what we are dealing with as artists, comedians, actors. You are going to come to the edge and look over, and sometimes you are going to step over the edge, and then you are going to come back, hopefully.”63
DID ADD EMPOWER THE LIGHTNING-FAST CONNECTIONS ROBIN Williams made in the service of comedy? Chuck Close had prosopagnosia, which necessitated a “workaround,” one that opened a new direction for modern art. Stephen Hawking had ALS and, according to his friend Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, “had to learn an entirely new way” to progress as a physicist.64 British scientists have attributed Isaac Newton’s extraordinary capacity to concentrate, as well as Andy Warhol’s propensity to produce repetitive images, to Asperger’s syndrome.65 Asperger’s was added to the DSM in 1995 but then removed in 2013 and reclassified within the diagnostic category of autism spectrum disorder. Times and cultures change. So do our attitudes about genius and perceived disabilities.
IN APRIL 2015, JOSEPH STRAUS, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR AT THE Graduate Center of the City University of New York, came to my Yale “genius course” to speak on autism. Straus has written a book on the subject of disability (Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music, 2011), drawn to that subject by the fact that his older son is autistic. At the end of his lucid presentation, Straus and the assembly of about eighty students engaged in an increasingly heated discussion. Many in the audience were psychology or neurobiology majors; several had had summer internships in labs where NIH money was supporting autism research. They were all keen to learn about recent advances in finding a “cure” for autism.
Straus would have none of it. He and his wife had spent much of their lives accommodating and embracing the human potential of their son in all its diversity and fullness. “For the autistic person,” Straus said, “the special interests or skills arise not in spite of the autism but precisely because of it: autism enables the skill. Disability is a difference, not a deficit that requires medical professionals to remediate, normalize, or cure.” When class time ran out, only one conclusion could be agreed upon by both sides: here was an urgent ethical dilemma relevant to millions. Would we want to eliminate autism, or any disability, if we could? Are not these “other” psychological profiles merely alternative modes of intelligence that might lead to genius?66
Martin Luther King, Jr., valorized the unbalanced when he said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”67 Geniuses need to create, and we need them to do so. Similarly, many neurological differences prove to be hidden enablers of genius. Rather than thinking of them as insurmountable barriers or disabilities, we might view them as opportunities from which original thinking can emerge.
Were Beethoven alive today, surgery could ameliorate, if not eliminate, the inner-ear otosclerosis from which he suffered. Psychoanalysis and antidepressants might have helped Woolf go on writing, but at what cost? Kusama tried the “talking cure” of Freudian psychoanalysis for six years, but her art suffered. “Ideas stopped coming out no matter what I painted or drew,” she said, “because everything was coming out of my mouth.”68 Robin Williams knew he would never be balanced and doubted that he wanted to be, for fear of losing his comedic genius. “Then you’re fucking dead, okay!” he said.69 Scientists may one day discover a way to eliminate or radically reduce such “dis-ablers” as deafness, autism, Asperger’s, OCD, and ADD. But can this really be considered progress if it means no more “Ode to Joy,” no more theory of gravity, no more Starry Night on my coffee mug, no more laugh-till-you-cry jokes? You make the call.
A final point: We often think of the genius as a star who flames brilliantly but burns out quickly. Taking van Gogh as an archetype, we imagine a suicidal crazy man who dies young, in his case at age thirty-seven. But van Gogh was an outlier. Although his single, sensational life makes for a compelling story, it obscures the fact that geniuses have a habit of living long lives.
We may debate who the greatest geniuses are among painters, scientists, or classical musicians—it depends, again, on your values and cultural perspective. But to make a simple point regarding longevity, I conducted a very unscientific study. I went to Google and searched for “the ten greatest classical composers,” which gave me a list of names including Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Richard Wagner, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. For those ten musical geniuses I computed that the average life span was 51.4 years. Moving on to painters, my Google search identified Picasso, Leonardo, van Gogh, Michelangelo, Warhol, Kahlo, and others, and their average life span was 67.2 years. Those famous painters lived, on average, thirty years beyond van Gogh. When I did the same calculation for the scientists—Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Hawking, Tesla, and their colleagues—I found an average life span of 75.3 years. To put these numbers into context, almost all those geniuses were born before the general use of antibiotics (1940) when life spans were much shorter; the life span of the general population for white males, adjusting for infant mortality, was approximately 35 years in 1750, 40 years in 1830, and 47 years in 1900. Thus, according to these rough calculations, many geniuses seem to live perhaps as much as a decade longer than the general populace. These numbers call into question an old Latin proverb, Dum spiro, spero—“while I breathe, I hope.” Our geniuses suggest reality is the reverse, Dum spero, spiro—“while I hope, I breathe.” Why?
Why do optimists live on average a decade longer than pessimists? This according to a 2019 Harvard−Boston University study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.70 “When individuals were compared based on their initial levels of optimism, the researchers found that the most optimistic men and women demonstrated, on average, an 11 to 15 percent longer lifespan, and had 50–70 percent greater odds of reaching 85 years old compared to the least optimistic groups.”71 Although the physiology of the “why” remains unknown, the important fact becomes clear: optimists, like geniuses, live longer.
But geniuses—the creatively maladjusted—are mainly optimists. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said in 2017, “Optimists tend to be successful, and pessimists tend to be right. . . . If you think that something’s going to be terrible and it’s going to fail, then you’re going to look for the data points that prove you right. And you’ll find them. That’s what pessimists do. . . . But if you think that something is possible, then you’re going to try to find a way to make it work.”72 Finding that “way to make it work” is the genius’s mission, passion, perhaps compulsive obsession. Genius or plodder, we all need a mission that we think we can accomplish. No matter how “crazy” or “maladjusted” it may seem, simply having that mission helps keep us alive.