The man who mistook his wife for a hat (27 page)

   And yet, even here, there was a single and striking exception, at once his most prodigious, most personal, and most pious deed of memory. He knew by heart
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
the immense nine-volume edition published in 1954- indeed he was a 'walking Grove'. His father was ageing and somewhat ailing by then, could no longer sing actively, but spent most of his time at home, playing his great collection of vocal records on the phonograph, going through and singing all his scores- which he did with his now thirty-year-old son (in the closest and most affectionate communion of their lives), and reading aloud Grove's dictionary-all six thousand pages of it-which, as he read, was indelibly printed upon his son's limitlessly retentive, if illiterate, cortex. Grove, thereafter, was 'heard'
in his father's voice
- and could never be recollected by him without emotion.

   Such prodigious hypertrophies of eidetic memory, especially if employed or exploited 'professionally', sometimes seem to oust the real self, or to compete with it, and impede its development. And if there is no depth, no feeling, there is also no pain in such memories-and so they can serve as an 'escape' from reality. This clearly occurred, to a great extent, in Luria's Mnemonist, and is poignantly described in the last chapter of his book. It obviously occurred, to some extent, in Martin A., Jose, and the Twins but was
also,
in each case, used for reality, even 'super-reality'-an exceptional, intense, and mystical sense of the world . . .

   Eidetics apart, what of his world generally? It was, in many respects, small, petty, nasty, and dark-the world of a retardate

   who had been teased and left out as a child, and then hired and fired, contemptuously, from menial jobs, as a man: the world of someone who had rarely felt himself, or felt regarded as, a proper child or man.

   He was often childish, sometimes spiteful, and prone to sudden tantrums-and the language he then used was that of a child. 'I'll throw a mudpie in your face!' I once heard him scream, and, occasionally, he spat or struck out. He sniffed, he was dirty, he blew snot on his sleeve-he had the look (and doubtless the feelings) at such times of a small, snotty child. These childish characteristics, topped off by his irritating, eidetic showing off, endeared him to nobody. He soon became unpopular in the Home, and found himself shunned by many of the residents. A crisis was developing, with Martin regressing weekly and daily, and nobody was quite sure, at first, what to do. It was at first put down to 'adjustment difficulties', such as all patients may experience on giving up independent living outside, and coming into a 'Home'. But Sister felt there was something more specific at work-'something gnawing him, a sort of hunger, a gnawing hunger we can't assuage. It's destroying him,' she continued. 'We have to
do
something.'

   So, in January, for the second time, I went to see Martin-and found a very different man: no longer cocky, showing off, as before, but obviously pining, in spiritual and a sort of physical pain.

   'What is it?' I said. 'What is the matter?'

   'I've got to sing,' he said hoarsely. 'I can't live without it. And it's not just music-I can't pray without it.' And then, suddenly, with a flash of his old memory: ' "Music, to Bach, was the apparatus of worship", Grove article on Bach, page 304 . . . I've never spent a Sunday,' he continued, more gently, reflectively, 'without going to church, without singing in the choir. I first went there, with my father, when I was old enough to walk, and I continued going after his death in 1955. I've
got to go,'
he said fiercely. 'It'll kill me if I don't.'

   'And go you shall,' I said. 'We didn't know what you were missing.'

   The church was not far from the Home, and Martin was welcomed back-not only as a faithful member of the congregation and the choir, but as the brains and adviser of the choir that his father had been before him.

   With this, life suddenly and dramatically changed. Martin had resumed his proper place, as he felt it. He could sing, he could worship, in Bach's music, every Sunday, and also enjoy the quiet authority that was accorded him.

   'You see,' he told me, on my next visit, without cockiness, but as a simple matter of fact, 'they know I know all Bach's liturgical and choral music. I know all the church cantatas-all 202 that Grove lists-and which Sundays and Holy Days they should be sung on. We are the only church in the diocese with a real orchestra and choir, the only one where all of Bach's vocal works are regularly sung. We do a cantata every Sunday-and we are going to do the
Matthew Passion
this Easter!'

   I thought it curious and moving that Martin, a retardate, should have this great passion for Bach. Bach seemed so intellectual- and Martin was a simpleton. What I did not realise, until I started bringing in cassettes of the cantatas, and once of the
Magnificat,
when I visited, was that for all his intellectual limitations Martin's musical intelligence was fully up to appreciating much of the technical complexity of Bach; but, more than this-that it wasn't a question of intelligence at all. Bach lived for him, and he lived in Bach.

   Martin did, indeed, have 'freak' musical abilities-but they were only freak-like if removed from their right and natural context.

   What was central to Martin, as it had been central for his father, and what had been intimately shared between them, was always the
spirit
of music, especially religious music, and of the voice as the divine instrument made and ordained to sing, to raise itself in jubilation and praise.

   Martin became a different man, then, when he returned to song and church-recovered himself, recollected himself, became real again. The pseudo-persons-the stigmatised retardate, the snotty, spitting boy-disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, im-

   personal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents.

   But the marvel, the real marvel, was to see Martin when he was actually singing, or in communion with music-listening with an intentness which verged on rapture-'a man in his wholeness wholly attending'. At such times-it was the same with Rebecca when she acted, or Jose when he drew, or the Twins in their strange numerical communion-Martin was, in a word, transformed. All that was defective or pathological fell away, and one saw only absorption and animation, wholeness and health.

   
Postscript

   When I wrote this piece, and the two succeeding ones, I wrote solely out of my own experience, with almost no knowledge of the literature on the subject, indeed with no knowledge that there
was
a large literature (see, for example, the fifty-two references in Lewis Hill, 1974). I only got an inkling of it, often baffling and intriguing, after 'The Twins' was first published, when I found myself inundated with letters and offprints.

   In particular, my attention was drawn to a beautiful and detailed case-study by David Viscott (1970). There are many similarities between Martin and his patient Harriet G. In both cases there were extraordinary powers-which were sometimes used in an 'a-centric' or life-denying way, sometimes in a life-affirming and creative way: thus, after her father had read it to her, Harriet retained the first three pages of the Boston Telephone Directory ('and for several years could give any number on these pages on request'); but, in a wholly different, and strikingly creative, mode she could compose, and improvise, in the style of any composer.

   It is clear that both-like the Twins (see the next chapter)- could be pushed, or drawn, into the sort of mechanical feats considered typical of 'idiot savants'-feats at once prodigious and meaningless; but that both also (like the Twins), when not pushed or drawn in this fashion, showed a consistent seeking after beauty and order. Though Martin has an amazing memory for random, meaningless facts, his real pleasure comes from order and coher-

   ence, whether it be the musical and spiritual order of a cantata, or the encyclopedic order of Grove. Both Bach and Grove communicate a
world.
Martin, indeed, has no world
but
music-as is the case with Viscott's patient-but this world is a real world), makes him real, can transform him. This is marvellous to see with Martin-and it was evidently no less so with Harriet G:

   This ungainly, awkward, inelegant lady, this overgrown five-year-old, became absolutely transformed when I asked her to perform for a seminar at Boston State Hospital. She sat down demurely, stared quietly at the keyboard until we all grew silent, and brought her hands slowly to the keyboard and let them rest a moment. Then she nodded her head and began to play with all the feeling and movement of a concert performer. From that moment she was another person.

   One speaks of 'idiot savants' as if they had an odd 'knack' or talent of a mechanical sort, with no real intelligence or understanding. This, indeed, was what I first thought with Martin-and continued to think until I brought in the
Magnificat.
Only then did it finally become clear to me that Martin could grasp the full complexity of such a work, and that it was not just a knack, or a remarkable rote memory at work, but a genuine and powerful musical intelligence. I was particularly interested, therefore, after this book was first published, to receive a fascinating article by L. K. Miller of Chicago entitled "Sensitivity to Tonal Structure in a Developmentally Disabled Musical Savant" (presented at the Psychonomics Society, Boston, November 1985; currently in press). Meticulous study of this five-year-old prodigy, with severe mental and other handicaps due to maternal rubella, showed not rote memory of a mechanical sort, but '. . . impressive sensitivity to the rules governing composition, particularly the role of different notes in determining (diatonic) key-structure . . . (implying) implicit knowledge of structural rules in a generative sense: that is, rules not limited to the specific examples provided by one's experience.' This, I am convinced, is the case with Martin, too- and one must wonder whether it may not be true of
all
'idiot

   savants': that they may be truly and creatively intelligent, and not just have a mechanical 'knack', in the specific realms-musical, numerical, visual, whatever-in which they excel. It is the
intelligence
of a Martin, a Jose, the Twins, albeit in a special and narrow area, that finally forces itself on one; and it is this
intelligence
that must be recognised and nurtured.

   
23

   
The Twins

   When I first met the twins, John and Michael, in 1966 in a state hospital, they were already well known. They had been on radio and television, and made the subject of detailed scientific and popular reports. * They had even, I suspected, found their way into science fiction, a little 'fictionalised', but essentially as portrayed in the accounts that had been published. +

   The twins, who were then twenty-six years old, had been in institutions since the age of seven, variously diagnosed as autistic, psychotic or severely retarded. Most of the accounts concluded that, as
idiots savants
go, there was 'nothing much to them'- except for their remarkable 'documentary' memories of the tiniest visual details of their own experience, and their use of an unconscious, calendrical algorithm that enabled them to say at once on what day of the week a date far in the past or future would fall. This is the view taken by Steven Smith, in his comprehensive and imaginative book,
The Great Mental Calculators
(1983). There have been, to my knowledge, no further studies of the twins since the mid-Sixties, the brief interest they aroused being quenched by the apparent 'solution' of the problems they presented.

   But this, I believe, is a misapprehension, perhaps a natural enough one in view of the stereotyped approach, the fixed format of questions, the concentration on one 'task' or another, with which the original investigators approached the twins, and by which they

   *W.A. Horwitz, etal. (1965), Hamblin (1966).

   +See Robert Silverberg's novel
Thorns
(1967), notably pp. 11-17.

   reduced them-their psychology, their methods, their lives-almost to nothing.

   The reality is far stranger, far more complex, far less explicable, than any of these studies suggest, but it is not even to be glimpsed by aggressive formal 'testing', or the usual
60
Minutes-like interviewing of the twins.

   Not that any of these studies, or TV performances, is 'wrong'. They are quite reasonable, often informative, as far as they go, but they confine themselves to the obvious and testable 'surface,' and do not go to the depths-do not even hint, or perhaps guess, that there are depths below.

   One indeed gets no hint of any depths unless one ceases to test the twins, to regard them as 'subjects'. One must lay aside the urge to limit and test, and get to know the twins-observe them, openly, quietly, without presuppositions, but with a full and sympathetic phenomenological openness, as they live and think and interact quietly, pursuing their own lives, spontaneously, in their singular way. Then one finds there is something exceedingly mysterious at work, powers and depths of a perhaps fundamental sort, which I have not been able to 'solve' in the eighteen years that I have known them.

   They are, indeed, unprepossessing at first encounter-a sort of grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, indistinguishable, mirror images, identical in face, in body movements, in personality, in mind, identical too in their stigmata of brain and tissue damage. They are undersized, with disturbing disproportions in head and hands, high-arched palates, high-arched feet, monotonous squeaky voices, a variety of peculiar tics and mannerisms, and a very high, degenerative myopia, requiring glasses so thick that their eyes seem distorted, giving them the appearance of absurd little professors, peering and pointing, with a misplaced, obsessed, and absurd concentration. And this impression is fortified as soon as one quizzes them-or allows them, as they are apt to do, like pantomime puppets, to start spontaneously on one of their 'routines'.