Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (30 page)

We may think, in the 21st century, that we are more nervous than ever—that
our
“age of anxiety,” as W. H. Auden dubbed it in his 1947 Pulitzer-winning poem, is the most skittish of all. The reality, of course, is that human beings have been worriers for millennia. As Scott Stossel, editor of
Atlantic
magazine and author of the book
My Age of Anxiety
, puts it: “As soon as the human brain became capable of apprehending the future, it became capable of being apprehensive about the future.” Indeed, by the time Darwin died, anxiety had become a kind of cultural affliction. At the turn of the 20th century, the diagnosis du jour among accomplished and upper-crust Americans was “neurasthenia” or “nerve weakness.” Symptoms, which included depression, insomnia, migraines, fatigue, anxiety, and even premature baldness, were deemed to be caused by the stresses of the industrial revolution and an overtaxed brain.

A host of well-known figures were said to suffer from neurasthenia, including the James siblings (Henry and Alice, both writers, and William, the influential philosopher) as well as President Theodore Roosevelt. Often, they were treated with “rest cures” and sent off to bed. In 1901, a Columbia University psychiatrist proposed that Darwin himself had neurasthenia—and a chronic and severe case of it, the doctor wrote, caused by the scientist's difficult
journey on the
Beagle
and a “life of hard intellectual work.” If only Darwin had given up all work for a year or two after his return and “had lived a life of rest and diversion, free from the daily toil of writing books, correcting proofs, and correspondence,” the doctor lamented, “I believe a cure would have been brought about and his subsequent life more filled with joy and alleviation than it was.”

If only it were that simple. Throughout the course of his illness, Darwin consulted numerous doctors—even Queen Victoria's own physician—and submitted himself to a wide array of treatments, including ice packs placed on his spine, mercury pills, antacids, bismuth (the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol), lemons, codeine, and electrical stimulation of his abdomen. His favorite therapy, at least initially, was the Victorian “water cure,” which required spending several months at a spa, where Darwin sweated next to hot lamps, had his body rubbed with cold towels, soaked his feet in cold baths, and had wet compresses pressed on his stomach. The treatment also required getting up early, eating moderately, avoiding sugar, drinking water, and walking. Back home, he kept up as best he could, taking frigid showers, even in the winter, and cutting back on his wife's sweet puddings. Nothing worked for long.

Scott Stossel can relate. A “twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses” from around the age of two, Stossel has struggled with severe anxiety all his life, including panic attacks and a slew of specific phobias—heights (acrophobia), fainting (asthenophobia), flying (aerophobia), vomiting (emetophobia), and even cheese (turophobia, because the smell reminds him of throwing up). Although he has sought and tried a host of treatments, including medication, hypnosis, and even whiskey, “nothing has been a panacea,” he says. Stossel finds comfort in Darwin's story, knowing that he is “hardly alone in having both a mind and a belly so easily
perturbed by anxiety.” Plenty of others are right there with him. Barbra Streisand was performing in Central Park in 1967 when she forgot the lyrics to the song she was singing, prompting a performance anxiety so intense that it kept her off the public stage (other than small clubs and charity events) for almost 30 years. Football player Ricky Williams, who was awarded a Heisman Trophy in 1998, suffered from such a bad case of social anxiety that he resorted to giving interviews with his helmet on.

Stossel believes, though, that some of the traits associated with his anxiety, including his conscientiousness and fear of screwing things up, may have helped make him the successful person he is today. A well-known scientific principle known as the Yerkes-Dodson law supports his theory in its assertion that if you're not worked up at all, you won't ace a test or hit a home run. Nor will you succeed if you're so overly stressed that you become paralyzed with fear. The key to optimal performance: a moderate dose of anxiety that will keep you energized, focused, and motivated.

Darwin was, of course, very sick. Even if anxiety did help fuel his momentous achievements, his physical symptoms were often overwhelming. “I'm staggered that he was able to persist through his extreme debilitation,” says Stossel. Today, treatment for anxiety includes psychotherapy, medication, and lifestyle adjustments, including plenty of exercise and more sleep. The goal, says Dr. Craig Barr Taylor, director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, California, is to calm down the worry to a level that allows an engaged and satisfying existence. “A lot of what we do in clinical treatment is not really to get rid of anxiety,” he says, “it's to help you find a way to deal with it so you can lead a full life.”

I
T WOULD BE FOOLHARDY TO ASSERT
that Darwin's problem was 100 percent anxiety, plain and simple. It's entirely possible that he suffered from other illnesses as well, including Chagas' disease, irritable bowel syndrome, or cyclical vomiting, any of which could have been exacerbated by stress. Still, anxiety seemed to infuse his very being, entwining itself with whatever else may have been coursing through his brain and his body.

In the end,
On the Origin of Species
did not set off quite as great an uproar as Darwin may have imagined, in part because he dedicated a chapter to “Difficulties on Theory,” which anticipated and addressed the concerns of critics. But there was plenty of public debate, which Darwin managed to avoid as an alliance of supporters stepped forward to defend his work. His health problems persisted after publication of his celebrated dissertation, but during the last decade of his life—as he turned his attention to far less contentious topics—his symptoms subsided, and he finally found relief. His last book, one of his most popular, was about earthworms.

In the early months of 1882, Darwin experienced chest pains. Emma, his constant protector, attended to him and kept him company. On April 19, he died at age 73 of what doctors called “angina pectoris syncope,” or heart disease, after reportedly telling Emma that he was not afraid to die. By the end of his life, this kind, modest and brilliant scientist had become an intellectual celebrity. He expected to be buried in the churchyard in his hometown, next to two of his children. But in one of history's great ironies, the man who overturned religious doctrine with barnacles and pigeons and apes found his final resting place in a velvet-draped coffin at the illustrious Westminster Abbey.

For Darwin, nothing was ever simple.

G
EORGE
G
ERSHWIN FAMOUSLY WONDERED
if his music would outlive him. He needn't have worried. From the start, the composer's songs lit up the sky like fireworks on the Fourth of July—bright, exhilarating, refreshingly new. Composing at breakneck speed, he mixed the sounds of Negro spirituals, Hebrew chants, Russian folk songs, and the cacophony of an emerging new world. Dazzling tunes like “I Got Rhythm,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and “Let's Call the Whole Thing Off” seemed to flow in an unending stream. Once, when asked how his work was going, Gershwin responded, “Too fast!” His mind surged with ideas.

The clamor of life around Gershwin infused his soul, starting in childhood with the hubbub of roller skates on city asphalt, honking
traffic, and spirited street singers. As a composer, he found melodic inspiration in everyday noise. The blast of French taxicab horns catalyzed the frenetic street sounds in
An American in Paris
. The clickety-clack of a train's wheels, the whoosh of its steam engine, and the toot-toot of its whistle ignited the pulsating rhythms of
Rhapsody in Blue
, the masterpiece he completed in just three weeks.

Gershwin, the man, was just like his music: electric with energy. He walked swiftly and talked quickly, punctuating his words with “staccato beats of his left hand,” a reporter once wrote. At the piano, Gershwin's technique was masterful, his playing luminous and bustling. “He would draw a lovely melody out of the keyboard like a golden thread. Then he would play with it and juggle it, twist it and toss it around mischievously, weave it into unexpected intricate patterns, tie it in knots and untie it and hurl it into a cascade of ever-changing rhythms and counterpoints,” wrote the theater director Rouben Mamoulian. “George at the piano was like a gay sorcerer celebrating his Sabbath.”

Gershwin's early life predicted none of this. By all accounts, he was a restless, inattentive, fist-fighting boy who thought music was for sissies. His father predicted that he'd grow up to be a bum. Instead, Gershwin became one of the most prolific composers in history. He composed hundreds of songs, dozens of solo piano pieces, major orchestral works, scores for Broadway musicals and feature films, and even an opera. After Gershwin died of a brain tumor at the age of 38 in 1937, memorial concerts were mobbed to overflowing—from Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan, packed with a record-breaking 20,000 fans, to the Hollywood Bowl, where automobile traffic was so snarled that luminaries like Fred Astaire had to set out for the amphitheater on foot.

Gershwin captivated the nation and intoxicated its soul. But how? What propelled the brisk tempo of his body and mind? And
how did he morph from a feisty street kid to one of the greatest composers of all time?

G
EORGE
G
ERSHWIN WAS BORN
on September 26, 1898, at home in Brooklyn—one of 28 residences in New York City that he and his family would inhabit over the course of his meandering childhood. His parents, Morris and Rose Gershwin, were Jewish immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia. Like so many of their fellow countrymen, they had come to America seeking economic opportunity and relief from religious persecution. Morris Gershwin was a jobhopper, trying his hand at a slew of trades, from shoemaker and bookie to restaurant owner and even Turkish bath proprietor. He was an amiable guy, “a real shnook,” according to Gershwin's younger sister, Frankie. Gershwin was especially close to his mother, whom he described as loving and also “nervous, ambitious and purposeful.” Although not the doting type, Rose Gershwin insisted that her children become fully educated so that if all else failed, Gershwin later said, “we could always become schoolteachers.”

Unlike his shy and quiet older brother, Ira, George Gershwin surged with untamed energy. “George, as he himself will remind you, was the rough-and-ready, the muscular type and not one of your sad, contemplative children,” wrote Isaac Goldberg in his seminal 1931 biography of the composer. “He was a merry nature, always on the go.” The Lower East Side, one of the neighborhoods where the Gershwins lived, teemed with European immigrants. Like many adventurous young children, Gershwin roamed the city streets uninhibited, surrounded by the chaos of peddlers haggling over prices for pickles and eggs. A natural athlete, he played stickball and soon became his neighborhood's roller-skating champion.