The December 31 issue of the New York Times carried an article on the work of psychiatrist Joseph J. Schildkraut. Dr. Schildkraut’s early interest in the paintings of Spanish artist Joan Miro led him to explore the connection between depression and creativity.
Examining the Abstract Impressionists, such as Rothko, Gorky and Pollack, Dr. Schildkraut found that about half of them suffered from depressive disorders and preoccupation with death. He came to the ironic conclusion that it was precisely these suicidal tendencies that fueled these artists’ creative powers. Depression, he wrote, “may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery at the very heart of the tragic and timeless art that they aspired to produce.”
The article went on to suggest that Dr. Schildkraut’s theories confront society with a moral dilemma: Does restoring a troubled creative mind to full mental health mean that our culture may lose uncreated masterpieces?
Reading the article reminded me of a time when I heard the poet Richard Wilbur give a public reading of his work. By way of introduction to his poem, “Cottage Street, 1953”, Professor Wilbur explained that he was once asked to counsel a seriously troubled young woman who had shown enormous promise as a poet.
The young woman, a junior at Smith College, was afflicted with severe depression. In her despair, she became obsessed with the idea that a poet had to suffer deeply in order to create. She found the prospect unendurable, and so had attempted suicide.
The young woman’s name was Sylvia Plath.
Mutual friends pleaded with Wilbur –- an established poet who enjoyed both artistic and financial success and a happy home life to boot –- to explain to the poor girl that one could be a poet without paying an intolerable price in mental torment for the privilege.
A meeting was arranged between Sylvia and her mother and Wilbur and his wife at the home of Wilbur’s mother-in-law, Edna Ward. It was a dismal failure, as Wilbur recounts in his poem:
It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless,
I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept by his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned,
And stares through the water now with eyes of pearl.
How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.
For Sylvia, life ended with a successful suicide in 1963. Despite Wilbur’s compassion and common sense advice, she would, in his words,
…study for a decade, as she must
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.
Is mental illness inseparable from creativity? Not for every artist, to be sure. But for too many of them, it seems, they must descend to hell before they can scale the heavens.
