An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (33 page)

The opportunity came in February of 1988, when Stephen came to New York, accompanied by Chris, to make another television documentary. Stephen had been in New York for a couple of days, seeing and drawing the sights of the city, and—his greatest thrill—flying over it in a helicopter. I thought he might like to see City Island, the little island off New York where I live, and invited him to come to my house. He and Chris arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. Stephen was a demure, grave little black boy, though clearly with an impish side. He looked young to me, closer to ten than thirteen, with a smallish head, tilted to one side. He reminded me somewhat of the autistic children I had seen before, with a head-nodding mannerism or tic, and some odd flapping movements of the hands. He never looked at me directly but seemed to glance at me, briefly, out of the corners of his eyes.

I asked him how he was finding New York, and he said “Very nice” with a strong Cockney accent. I have little recollection of his saying much else; he tended to be very quiet, almost mute. But his language had developed a good deal since the early days, and there were times, Chris said, when he would get excited and almost babble. He had been very excited on the plane—he had never flown before—and, Chris told me, “talked with the cabin crew and other passengers, showing his book around on the flight.”
96

96. When Stephen was invited to sit in the jump seat for the New York landing, Chris recalled a prescient dream that he had reported before they left London. “I am being the pilot of the jumbo jet”, Stephen had said. “I can see the skyscrapers and the Manhattan skyline.”

Stephen wanted to show me his latest drawings, of New York—they were all in a portfolio Chris was carrying—and I admired them (especially the aerial ones he had done from the helicopter) as he showed them to me. He nodded emphatically as he displayed them, calling some of them “good” and “nice.” He seemed to have no sense of either vanity or modesty, but showed me his drawings, commented on them, in an ingenuous way and with a total absence of self-consciousness.

After he had shown me these, I asked him if he would draw something for me, perhaps my house. He nodded, and we wandered outside. It was snowing, cold and wet, not a day to linger. Stephen bestowed a quick, indifferent look at my house—there hardly seemed to be any act of attention—glanced then at the rest of the road and the sea at the end of the road, then asked to come in. As he took up his pen and started drawing, I held my breath. “Don’t worry”, Chris broke in, “you can talk at the top of your voice if you want to. It won’t make any difference—you can’t interrupt him—he could concentrate if the house was falling down.” Stephen did not make any sketch or outline, but just started at one edge of the paper (I had a feeling he might have started anywhere at all) and steadily moved across it, as if transcribing some tenacious inner image or visualization. As he was putting in the porch railings, Chris remarked, “I didn’t see any of that detail there.”

“No”, said Stephen, his expression implying, “No, you wouldn’t.”

Stephen had not studied the house, had made no sketches, had not drawn it from life, but had, in a brief glance, taken everything in, extracted its essence, seen every detail, held it all in his memory, and then, in a single, swift line, drawn it. And I did not doubt that, had we let him, he could have drawn the entire street.

Stephen’s drawing was accurate in some ways, but took various liberties in others—he gave my house a chimney where there was none, but omitted the three fir trees in front of the house, the picket fence around it, and the neighboring houses. He focused on the house to the exclusion of anything else. It has often been said that savants have photographic or eidetic memories, but as I photocopied Stephen’s drawing I thought how unlike a Xerox machine he was. His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal—there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and, of course, Stephen’s unmistakable style. They were images and showed us some of the immensely complex neural processes that are needed to make a visual and graphic image. Stephen’s drawings were individual constructions, but could they be seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?

His drawings (like those of my patient José) had a closeness to the actual, a literalness and naïvety. Clara Park, the mother of an autistic artist, has called this an “unusual capacity to render the object as perceived” (not conceived). She also writes of an “unusual capacity for delayed rendition” as characteristic of savant artists; this indeed was very striking in Stephen, who, after a single glance at a building, would retain it effortlessly for days or weeks, and then draw it as if from life.

Sir Hugh Casson wrote in his introduction to Drawings:

Unlike most children, who tend to draw less from direct observation than from symbols or images seen secondhand, Stephen Wiltshire draws exactly what he sees—no more, no less.

Artists are full of symbols and images seen second hand and bring to their drawings not only the conventions of representation they acquired as children, but the entire history of Western art. It may be necessary to leave these behind, to leave behind even the primal category of “objecthood.” As Monet put it:

Whenever you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have in front of you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever—Merely think, here is a little squeeze of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

But Stephen (if Casson is right) and José, and Nadia and other savants, may not have to make such “deconstructions”, may not have to relinquish such constructs, because (at many levels, from the neural to the cultural) they never made them in the first place or made them to a far smaller extent. In this way their situation is radically different from that of the “normal”—though this does not mean that they cannot be artists, too.

I started to wonder, too, about the relationships in Stephen’s life: how important they were, to what extent they had developed, in the face of his autism (and devastating early loss). His relationship with Chris Marris, perhaps the most crucial during his last five years at Queensmill, had threatened to end when, in July of 1987, Stephen had to leave Queensmill for a secondary school. For a while, Chris had arranged to continue seeing Stephen on weekends, to take him on drawing outings around London, and even on his first trips to New York and Paris. But by May 1989 these expeditions had come to an end, and Stephen seemed to lack the initiative to do much drawing on his own. It seemed as if he needed another person to get him going, to “facilitate” his drawing. Whether he missed, or mourned, Chris in a more personal way was far less clear. When I later spoke of Chris to Stephen, he would talk about him (always as “Chris Marris” or “Mr. Marris”) in a very flat and factual way, without any apparent emotion. A normal child would be deeply distressed at the loss of someone who had been so close for many years, but no such distress was apparent in Stephen. I wondered if he was repressing painful feelings, or distancing himself from them, but I was not sure whether, in his autistic way, he even had any personal emotion here at all. Christopher Gillberg writes of a fifteen-year-old autistic boy whose mother had died of cancer. Asked how he was doing, the boy replied, “Oh, I am all right. You see I have Asperger syndrome which makes me less vulnerable to the loss of loved ones than are most people.” Stephen, of course, would never have been able to articulate his inner state in this way, and yet one had to wonder whether he took the loss of Chris with some of the same flatness as Gillberg’s young patient—and whether such a flatness might not characterize most of the human relationships in his life.

Into this void irrupted Margaret Hewson. Margaret had been Stephen’s literary agent since the BBC program two years before and had developed an increasing personal and artistic interest in him. I had first met her in 1988, when, with Stephen, we roved around London on a drawing expedition. Margaret and Stephen, it was evident to me, got on very well. Stephen, though perhaps incapable at this point of any depth of feeling or caring, nevertheless showed strong instinctive responses to different people. He had taken to Margaret from the start—attracted, I think, by her enormous energy and impetus, the exhilarating, whirlwind atmosphere she seemed to create all around her, and by her obvious feeling for him and his art. Margaret seemed to know everyone and have been everywhere, and perhaps this gave Stephen a sense of a larger world, of horizons far beyond the narrow ones that had confined his life hitherto. Margaret, finally, was very knowledgeable about art, a knowledge that extended from art history to the technical details of drawing.

In the fall of 1989, Margaret began obtaining drawing commissions for Stephen and taking him out drawing every weekend, along with her husband and partner in the literary agency, Andrew. She instantly abolished the use of tracing paper and rulers (such as he had used for some of the drawings in his second book, Cities, published in 1989), and insisted he draw freehand in ink. “One can learn the value of a line only by going straight into ink and making mistakes”, she declared. Under Margaret’s impetus and guidance, Stephen started to draw regularly once again, and to draw more boldly than he had ever done. (And yet even in Cities there had been some extraordinary freehand improvisations—imaginary cities, which Stephen had conceived, conflating the features of several real ones.)

After a morning of traveling and drawing, they would all return to the Hewson house for lunch, where they would often be joined by the Hewsons’ daughter, Annie, only a few years older than Stephen. He seemed to look forward to these outings and would become excited on Sunday mornings, waiting for Margaret and Andrew to collect him. For their part, the Hewsons felt a real affection for Stephen, even though they were not sure he felt any actual affection for them. They started taking him on occasional longer excursions—a trip to Salisbury, and two weekends in Scotland.

Stephen’s obvious fondness for the visual effects of water—he lived near a canal in London and would sometimes walk along it with his mother or sister and do little sketches of the boats and locks—suggested to Margaret a theme for a new book. Together they would visit cities built around canals, “floating cities”—Venice, Amsterdam, and Leningrad—and draw these.

Late in the fall of 1989, Margaret impulsively phoned up Mrs. Wiltshire and suggested that Stephen and his sister, Annette, come to Venice with them for their Christmas holiday. The trip went exceedingly well. Stephen, now fifteen, seemed to cope easily with the uncertainties of travel, which would have thrown him only a few years before. He portrayed, as Margaret hoped he might, St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, the great monuments of Venetian culture, and obviously enjoyed drawing them. But when asked what he thought of Venice, after a week in this high point of European civilization, he could only say, “I prefer Chicago” (and this not because of its buildings but its American cars—Stephen had a passion for these and could identify, name, and draw every postwar model ever made in the United States).

A few weeks later, plans were made for his next trip, to Amsterdam. Stephen approved of the trip for a very specific reason: he had seen photographs of the city, and said, “I prefer Amsterdam to Venice because it has cars.” Once again, Stephen captured perfectly the feeling of the city, from his formal drawings of the Westerkerk and the Begijnhof to his tiny, charming sketch of an odd statue with a street organ. Stephen seemed very much alive, and in high humor, in Amsterdam and started to show new aspects of himself. Lorraine Cole, who came along on the trip, was particularly startled at the changes she saw:

When he was little, nothing was amusing to Stephen. He now finds all manner of things funny and his laughter is incredibly infectious. He has gone back to caricaturing people around him, and he takes great pleasure watching his victims’ reactions.

One evening in Amsterdam, when Stephen was due to give an interview for a television show, Margaret developed a severe attack of asthma and had to stay in her hotel room. Stephen was very distressed, refused to do the TV show, and could not be budged from the end of Margaret’s bed. “I’m going to stay with you till you get better”, he declared. “You’re not going to die.” Margaret and Andrew were very touched by this.

“This was the first time we saw that he cared”, she told me.
97

97. Visiting the autistic artist Jessy Park, I was struck by the great affection her parents showed for her. “I see how you love her”, I said to her father. “Does she love you, too?”

“She loves us as much as she can”, he replied.

Is it possible that Stephen was starting to show some belated personal development, in spite of his autism? Intrigued by Margaret’s report on the Amsterdam trip, I arranged to come along on the next visit, to Moscow and Leningrad, planned for May of 1990. I flew to London, met Stephen and Margaret there, and did some testing with Stephen. These tests, devised by Uta Frith and her colleagues, require one to react to various cartoons, some of which relate simple sequences of events while others cannot be understood without attributing different intentions, perspectives, beliefs, or states of mind (and sometimes dissemblings) to the characters involved. Stephen, it was clear, had a very limited ability to imagine others’ states of mind. (Frith writes that one researcher “carried out an informal survey in America using cartoons from The New Yorker. Very able and highly educated autistic people failed to understand them, or find them funny.”)

I also gave him a large jigsaw puzzle, which he put together very swiftly. I then gave him a second puzzle, this time face down, so that he did not have the picture to assist him. He did this just as quickly as the first. The picture-meaning—it seemed, was not necessary to him; what was preeminent, and spectacular, was his ability to apprehend a large number of abstract shapes, and to see in a trice how they fitted together.