By Lisa Russ Spaar
When we consider the physical and mental maladies and disabilities that artists, like other humans, have borne with courage and stamina, it is tempting to contemplate the effects these afflictions may have had not only on the physical making of works of art, but on the content and form of those creations, as well.
Could a seizure disorder (epilepsy?), for example, account for Van Gogh’s nimbused vortexes and intensity of light in some of his paintings? Did Beethoven’s fury and frustration at his own slowly advancing deafness (otosclerosis? lead poisoning? syphilis?) contribute to the complex and dissonant “arguments” of some of his later compositions? Is it possible that the eye ailment that sent Emily Dickinson to Boston for treatments and kept her from reading for what was for her an excrutiating hiatus (the first text she savored when allowed to read again was Shakespeare) explains in part the prevalence of ocular imagery in her poems and letters (“Before I got my eye put out - / I liked as well to see / As other creatures, that have eyes - / And know no other way -”)?
Insomnia, melancholy, bipolarity, postpartum depression, blindness, deafness, quadriplegia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cancer, narcolepsy, multiple sclerosis, alcoholism, anorexia, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress syndrome—when one starts making a list of the physical and mental infirmities known to affect human beings, both the noble living and the noble dead, it seems obvious that few artists could be exempt from a periodic bout, if not a chronic struggle, with the body/brain nexus. “Great nature,” poet Theodore Roethke insists, has its own wishes, “another thing to do to you and me.” At times physical affliction can feel and in fact be unendurable. In “Elegy,” Roethke writes, “I have myself an inner weight of woe / That God himself can scarcely bear.”
One wonders what effects modern pharmaceuticals might have had on the luminous work of writers with physical and mental illnesses. Such speculations are not new. As Kay Redfield Jamison writes in Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, “The fear that medicine and science will take away from the ineffability of it all, or detract from the mind’s labyrinthian complexity, is as old as man’s attempts to chart the movement of the stars. Even John Keats, who had studied to be a surgeon, felt that Newton’s calculations would blanch the heavens of their glory.” With anti-depressants making a halcyon field of the psyche, banishing the dark corners in which the Id might lurk and surprise, or with mood stabilizers evening out the roller coaster of emotional highs and lows, would writers like Virginia Woolf and William Blake, for example, have produced songs and texts of such prescient and haunting witness?
Perhaps, medicated, these writers might have led happier, more stable, and, in the case of Woolf and others, longer lives. At a party a few years ago, I overheard two poet colleagues arguing about which anti-anxiety medicine was better for poets to take, with a particular drug making one of the pair “just not able to come up with the right word when I need it.” An interesting book that engages this topic is Poets on Prozac, edited by physician and poet Richard Berlin, and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008. In 16 essays, poets articulate their battles with a variety of psychiatric and other mental/brain disorders, provoking questions about whether or not these illnesses contribute to the success of the poems, or if the real achievement is that the poets manage to succeed as writers in spite of their affliction?
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In his forthcoming memoir, My Dyslexia, due out from W.W. Norton in September, Pulitzer prize-winning poet Philip Schultz explores these and related questions as he recounts his discovery of his own dyslexia in mid-life and looks back on how his undiagnosed struggle with the disorder affected his childhood and early adult home and student life, helping to shape the writer he would become despite his long misunderstood impediment.
“Dyslexia” [<Gk dys- (abnormal, bad, difficult) lexis (word)] is a term for a wide range of learning disabilities involving the decoding and processing of language, particularly in matters of writing and reading. Schultz, now in his 60s, did not discover his own dyslexia until he was 58, when his oldest son, a second-grader at the time, was diagnosed with the disorder: “I learned from his neuropsychologist’s report that we shared many of the same symptoms,” Schultz writes in My Dyslexia, “like delayed processing problems, terrible handwriting, misnaming items, low frustration tolerance for reading and most homework assignments involving writing, to name a few.” As Schultz makes clear, dyslexia’s damage reaches beyond the learning disability itself, affecting the dyslexic’s self-esteem, maturity, and relationships. “I understood that I was different from other kids. I lived in a world of differences measured not by appearances, wealth, or even intelligence. … My differentness felt freakish. My brain wouldn’t obey me, nor my parents or my teachers. If I had trouble learning to read a clock, know my left from my right, hearing instructions—things everyone else seemed to do easily—how could I trust my own thoughts or anything about myself?”
The Levinson Medical Center for Learning Disabilities reports that over 40 million American children and adults are or have been affected by some form of dyslexia, and names Pablo Picasso, Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jay Leno, and Whoopi Goldberg among the many well-known dyslexics who have managed to thrive despite their difficulties. But because dyslexia involves the use and apprehension of language, its impediments are especially daunting and relevant for writers. Driving Schultz’s meditation on the subject (which has the same fresh forthrightness and tensile clarity of his poems) is the question of how “someone who didn’t learn to read until he was 11 years old and in the fifth grade, who was held back in third grade and asked to leave his school,” found his way to poetry, to a life involving the most intimate and deeply articulate acts of communication in language, and to the making of poems whose power and craft garnered him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for poetic achievement.
Discovery of his own dyslexia, Schultz explains, was like fathoming “a mystery I’d been grappling with my entire life.” Exploring his life before and after the revelation of his dyslexia, Schultz recounts his years-long struggle with, and sanctuary in, language. His book trains its unflinching, frank, and darkly humorous lens on a childhood and adolescence rife with difficulty, fear, anxiety, shame, self-doubt, behavioral problems, and anger. Chief among the memoir’s insights are those Schultz makes into the role his dyslexia has played in his development as a poet. Laughed at by an early tutor to whom he confessed his desire to be a writer, Schultz nonetheless persisted in his ambition. In a way, he suggests, his sense of otherness, of exile, foregrounded for him, early-on, something essential to the processes of all writing: “The life of an artist is in many ways similar to the life of the dyslexic. Both are essentially dysfunctional systems that produce in each individual volumes of anxiety, perseverance, and rejection, as well as creative compensatory thinking. Each, by their very nature, makes a victim of its creator, turning him into an outsider and misfit. It’s true of all artists, I think, at every level of success. … Each must, without appeal, strive to tolerate its own forms of self-defamation, creative excitement, and lack of forgiveness.”
Schultz’s forthcoming book will illuminate and inspire not just dyslexics and poets, but anyone struggling, in any hour, with his or her own body or mind’s seeming indifference to human volition, creativity, and desire. I would urge readers of the memoir to remember to seek out Schultz’s psychologically astute and eloquently vernacular poems, including those in his Pulitzer-winning Failure (Harcourt, 2007), whose title evokes Samuel Beckett’s admonition to “Fail again. Fail better,” and whose pieces about the narrator’s aggrieved and beset father could as well address Schultz’s private travail, as in these lines from “The Magic Kingdom”: “Bless the plenitude of the suffering mind . . . / its endless parade of disgrace / and spider’s web of fear, the hunger / of the soul that expects to be despised / and cast out, the unforgiving ghosts / I visit late at night when only God is awake . …”
It is a privilege to close with a new, previously unpublished poem by Schultz, “Getting Along.” A love poem, it confronts what Schultz calls in My Dyslexia a “true and original language” and, elsewhere in the memoir, an archeology of the soul. With its vexed pronominal exchanges (“When the I won’t stay / hidden inside the we, / forgets where it ends / and the we begins / a lush / green river of intimacy / smothers it (me)” and its “hurt / buried inside the pride / hidden inside the pain”), it is as articulate an expression of marriage (and of the marriage of the “broken” mind and the “opalescent prescience” of the poetic imagination) as one might hope to encounter, both within, prior to, and beyond language.
Getting Along
My wife and I are getting along.
Right now, she’s listening
to Bruce Springsteen
in her studio, making out
of copper wire and pieces
of broken jewelry (plastic rats
and wedding rings) a cloud
of opalescent prescience.
Yesterday, she loved me,
she said, even though
sometimes I’m an asshole.
Grateful for the sometimes,
I said much of the time
I feel like one. Everyone
does, she said, except
the ones who really are.
They think fate is messing
with them. When the color
of her eyes turns dark walnut,
it means: I loved you once;
or green: always, maybe.
Marriage is the hardest thing,
she thinks, harder than God,
childhood or childbirth.
When the I won’t stay
hidden inside the we,
forgets where it ends
and the we begins, a lush
green river of intimacy
smothers it (me.) Unrequited,
it’s the point we’re always
trying to make, the hurt
buried inside the pride
hidden inside the pain.
Love is an accident of fate,
an idea of surprising elasticity,
she thinks I think. Once,
we said nothing on the phone
for one hour. Each syllable
we didn’t speak was visible,
each breath we swallowed
swallowed us, each unspoken
allegation a covenant of fidelity,
a razor our silence rubbed
us against. As if love were
a house of mirrors we can’t
stop wandering inside,
viewing every intention
from every side. As if
we’re stuck in hindsight,
every day an anniversary,
forever crossing a January
Monday morning to meet
for the first time, how she
wouldn’t look at me, as if
everything we meant to say,
feared, and longed to be,
was there, in the stark fierce
diction of her eyes, a story
of once, maybe, and always,
waiting for us (for we) to read.
© by Philip Schultz. Printed by permission of the author.
Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure (2007), winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His awards include Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and he is the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. My Dyslexia, a memoir, is due out from W.W. Norton this fall.
Lisa Russ Spaar, poetry editor for Arts & Academe, is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
(Photograph by Alexander C. Kafka)
