The Lightning Cage (2 page)

There was an unexpected quality to this; it gave off a sinister glow like marshlight and it held me. When I then checked and found that nothing of any substance had been written about this man since the nineteenth century, I took him for my subject. And so it begins.

The Mad-Doctor

It was once my privilege to have in my care that remarkable though damaged man, Richard Pelham.

THOMAS PARKER
,
The Chelsea Asylum

 

The man who owned the Chelsea Asylum where Richard Pelham was incarcerated, Dr Thomas Parker, had been highly thought of in his time, though doubts have of late been cast upon both his competence and his integrity. He had been regarded for many years as at least a blessed alternative to the corrupt Monro family and their indifferent rule at Bethlehem Hospital, but scholars have recently begun to establish that Parker's own account of his private institution in Chelsea was perhaps somewhat under-motivated in its pursuit of the diamond edges of the truth.

To begin with, increasingly on the agenda nowadays is the character of Parker himself. He had no medical qualifications, unless you include his patent medicine, Parker's Liquid Panacea, an indigestible concoction whose sale and subsequent consumption led to the pharmacologist being violently thrown out of many towns and villages in the south-west of England. The substance, according to its inventor, could cure insomnia, gout, indigestion, impotence, infertility, insanity, scrofula, worms and baldness. But that was only what was printed on the bottle. It was reported that, in his roadside homilies, Parker made much heftier claims for his mysterious mixture. It was said that one child, having had half a bottle of the filthy brown elixir shaken down her throat by a mother desperate to quell her incessant wailing, had very nearly died. The mother did subsequently admit that the little girl was never to complain so intemperately again throughout the whole of her childhood, though modern interpreters are inclined to put this down to the irreparable damage caused to certain parts of her throat. There was also a man in Taunton who, having been assured that a large swig of the stuff each evening would undoubtedly alleviate the embarrassment of his detumescent state in bed with his much younger bride, chased Parker out of town while wielding a sabre, threatening that in the event of the quack's return, he'd cut the fellow's own instrument of passion off completely. Whatever the effect of Parker's medication, it was evidently not the one anticipated by its disgruntled purchaser.

Then there was the printing house in Exeter, which specialised in medical treatises. It was owned by Parker and was heavily in debt, until it burned to the ground one fine May evening, thereby absolving Parker of a multitude of responsibilities and commitments. Many local people were in no doubt who had borne the torch aloft through the streets that night.

So by the time he opened the Chelsea Asylum, Parker's provenance was hardly impeccable, but for the better part of two hundred years it had been assumed that his treatment of the mad and the supposedly mad had at least been superior to the other alternatives on offer. Yet even in the exiguous, extant text of
The Instruments of the Passion
there were passages which indicated a considerable degree of cruelty in Parker's treatment of his wards, and a remarkable degree of absenteeism on the part of the institution's presiding spirit – eleven and a half months out of every twelve, to be precise. And as for the famous lost invention, the star-machine, the discovery a few years back of the unpublished diary of Nathan Albert, around whom the original machine had been built, established that, far from being an early anticipation of the healing properties of nature as previously thought, this therapeutic contraption was an iron bed provided with vicious restraints of steel and leather, so that lunatics could be pushed out into the garden at night to gaze without blinking (that being one of the more precise and ingenious restraints) at what Parker supposed might still conceivably be the cause of their lunacy: namely, the moon. To gaze without interruption for hours at a time in the middle of the night, particularly in winter when the sky is so much clearer, at the source of the complaint, might bring about a reversal in the condition and thus facilitate enlightenment. Though, as in the case of Nathan Albert himself, pneumonia, lung collapse and a rapid death were considerably more likely, and claimed a number of victims. But nobody cared much, for only a few ever paid any attention to what went on behind the asylum walls.

Still, Pelham was relieved to find himself in Chelsea instead of Bedlam, despite the coded messages and cries for help embedded in his hermetic text. And he survived the star-machine, though the following lines exhibited the terror it had produced in him:

Eyes tied open while the heavens weep

Laments for man on his cold bed

Strapped to the contrivance of his exile.

(One must assume that it had rained at some point during Pelham's therapeutic session.) Given the conditions that often obtained regarding the treatment of the mad in the eighteenth century, the greatest blessing bestowed upon the poet Richard Pelham was undoubtedly to be left alone for most of the time. Apart from his subjections to Parker's inventions, and the periods of what were called his ‘sudden Insanities', he was usually shut up in a room by himself with pens and paper to write
The Instruments of the Passion,
and as the asylum records make plain, Parker himself only really remembered he was still there when that famous letter arrived from Lord Chilford.

To Thomas Parker Esq.,

The Chelsea Asylum.

Sir,

It has been brought to my attention lately that you are responsible for the continuing supervision of one Richard Pelham, a poet of some distinction, afflicted I am informed with periodic bouts of derangement.

I have been reading Pelham's
Psalms of Solace
and also his
Silent Endearments
and have remarked constantly to myself a certain preternatural astuteness of mind in the observation and description of natural phenomena, & cetera.

Enquiring of a colleague at the Royal Society, who follows such matters of letters more closely than I, if he knew anything of the man, he informed me that – far from inhabiting some docile country living in a parsonage as I had assumed – this precocious observer of natural phenomena had spent ten years amongst the most insalubrious passages of London, and was now incarcerated under the aegis of your care, his wits having disintegrated some time before.

I have a particular interest in this matter. I daresay you may already be acquainted with the little treatise I wrote a while back, and which the Society published as a pamphlet last year, entitled ‘An Aetiology of Insanity'.

I have for some time wished to examine a gifted man, and if possible a man of evident genius, afflicted with a severe distemper of the mind. Along with the Society itself, I have long regarded the repeated use of metaphor as in some way emblematic of many of the mind's disorders.

My informant, who I grant may well be ignorant of the present facts, has told me that the word on Pelham is that the poor wretch, while patently incompetent, is mostly neither violent nor malicious, and indeed continues to compose verses of sorts, despite his unhappy condition.

If this is truly the case, then he would make an ideal subject for my proposed inquiry. I would wish to take the fellow under my own care for some time and study his behaviour intently during that period. My findings would almost certainly be published as a longer essay by the Society. Obviously your assistance would be generously acknowledged. Equally obviously, any promised incomes to yourself from the anticipated clinical care of Pelham over the forthcoming years, would be made good.

I remain,

Yours,

Chilford,

Chilford Villa,

Twickenham

Parker did not see this letter for at least a month, such being the ramshackle nature of communications within his domain. He was in Birmingham at the time of its arrival, having recently founded a new asylum there, and had been busy soliciting potential inmates from disgruntled families, particularly ones where testaments were in dispute. When he finally had sight of the letter, he was so flattered by the scientific lord's condescension that he dashed off the following reply to him, delivered to Twickenham by a courier on horseback the next morning.

My gracious Lord,

Anything I might do to assist your study, which I have no doubt will come to be seen as of the greatest importance, shall assuredly be done. Perhaps we could meet to discuss the nicer points of Pelham's dilemma before I hand him over to you?

I am your obedient servant,

Thomas Parker

The log of the Chelsea Asylum, made out dutifully during those years by its chief keeper, Ezekiel Hague, records that upon Parker's return to the place the following Monday he shouted as soon as he was through the stout oak door, ‘Remind me, will you, which one's Pelham? Didn't I machine him once?'

‘Yes, sir,' replied the ever-dutiful Hague, ‘and tried the other treatment too, during one of his visitations.'

*   *   *

As I read and re-read
The Chelsea Asylum
in the university library up in Leeds, I kept turning back to these remarks, which Parker had banished to a footnote: ‘Pelham's wife returned to Dublin, and lived thereafter in the bosom of her Papist family. Her own attempted description of her husband's curious condition was, I concluded, typical of the medieval superstition that still characterises her religion, so I resolved to ignore it entirely, and proceed with Pelham's treatment as I would with any other of my wards.'

I looked up from the book. So Pelham's wife had been a Roman Catholic, even though he himself had belonged to the established Church: it was not unknown. But what was this ‘attempted diagnosis' that made Parker think of the popish idolatries of the Middle Ages? I didn't like the sound of that. I felt a pull backwards, in a direction where I really didn't want to go. I had spent enough of my life kneeling in the darkness of ill-lit chapels in Rome, and I had resolved to be done with it, to live in the daylight from now on, in a region untouched either by the angels above or their opposite number below.

The Dangerous World

My mother groan'd, my father wept,

Into the dangerous world I leapt.

WILLIAM BLAKE
, ‘Infant Sorrow'

 

And so, little by little, after working my way through the available Pelham texts, and much surrounding material, I started to let the books sit closed on the table. The flat I rented was at the edge of Roundhay Park, where I went running every day. At weekends I was out on the crags climbing with the boys. I even started going up there during the week too sometimes. It was the nearest I ever came to total freedom, even in the wind and rain. When the only urgency is making the next move, or falling off a sheer face of granite, the mind achieves true clarity. But other urgencies were already pressing in on me.

Money had certainly started to seem urgent enough, largely because I never had any, and I was perhaps getting a bit long in the tooth to be shuffling by on a student grant. My thesis, as you've probably realised, was by now going nowhere in a hurry. It was called ‘Decorum and Insanity: Eighteenth-Century Literary Convention and Revolt'. My supervisor, an obese and bearded man with a permanent snuffling air of disgruntlement, had forced me to open up the subject a little. He had no interest whatsoever in Pelham, whom I think he had barely read, and though he insisted I should bring in the careers and psychological disablements of Cowper and Smart, he was most insistent that this should not turn out to be a panegyric to derangement.

‘There are enough idiots out there pitting madness against enlightenment without you joining in too,' he said, scowling. I don't think he liked me much and I didn't like him at all. We silently agreed to leave one another alone and gradually I came to leave my thesis alone too. Then I came back one day from my early morning run in the park, and found this telegram lying on the mat:
Father very ill. Please come quickly. Mother.

By the time I arrived in Tooting, my father wasn't merely very ill: he was dying, and in the days that followed, as I sat for hours at his bedside, I had time to examine my feelings about him. I was surprised to discover that they were almost entirely retrospective: I didn't seem to have brought any feelings about him into the present at all. They were all historical, wrapped up in a filament of departed years. He was a tall, handsome man, in an understated English sort of way, a thin shingle of brown hair still raggedly in place above his reliable brown eyes. He was fifteen years my mother's senior, and a well-regarded chartered accountant. I stared at his face on the pillow, and unerased glimpses of my childhood flickered briefly through me.

Once I had thought my father the very perfection of man, but then I suppose that's a gift given by every son to his father, at least before he gets to know any better. By my early manhood I had begun to wonder a little. The strangest thing about him was his excessive normality. He seemed determined to eschew every idiosyncrasy. Each time a new Rover model appeared, my father would buy it, and this was I think the nearest thing to any extravagance of gesture I ever detected in him. He did love those Rovers, though he would never drive one above fifty miles an hour. I once asked him to show us what it would do flat out, and he pulled in at the nearest lay-by, where he gave me a lecture, a long one, on the subject of road safety. He had found himself incapable of speaking to me on the subject of my decision to go to Rome and become a priest. Whatever pleasure my vocation gave my mother, it undoubtedly gave my father at least as much pain. A man should take charge of his own affairs – I think that was his real religion. A man's savings are penance enough. It wasn't that he objected to priests; after all, the one down the road administered the sacraments to him each week. But that didn't mean that his own son actually had to
be
one. I think it embarrassed him. It was aberrant behaviour and it was financially inept.