Theirs was a wartime romance, and the coming together of two unusual families. Nathalie Benckendorff was the émigré granddaughter of the last ambassador to imperial Russia, and Humphrey Brooke came from a Yorkshire woollen mill dynasty - the second oldest firm, father to son, in Europe. They courted in Vienna and married in England, in 1946. In 1952, Humphrey was appointed Secretary to the Royal Academy, a post to which he would have given his entire life had he not been cut down, at the age of 50, by a severe manic depressive illness.
For the first 20 years of their marriage, Humphrey presided at the heart of the British arts establishment; for the next 20, Nathalie weathered the storms of his uncontrollable desperations and furies. Now, nearly 20 years after his death, Nathalie has no hesitation in identifying where it was that Humphrey found meaning in his life. "He thought the most interesting and important thing about him was being a manic depressive, and how he managed it, or failed to manage it."
Intellectually brilliant, Humphrey believed that a clue to talent lay in the high states of his own illness. One of his obsessions was to study and list the great figures of history he considered to have been manic depressives: Michelangelo, Cromwell, Wagner, Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, Clive of India, Virginia Woolf, Churchill. The selection criteria for inclusion into his "team" were often eccentric. One of his favourite contenders was the Somerset batsman Harold Gimblett, the "tormented genius of cricket", who turned up late to his debut in 1935 to score a century in 63 minutes, and who ended his life in suicide.
Humphrey's principle was not quite the romantic one that genius was a byproduct of madness - he hated the term manic, because he didn't like the implication of "maniac". Rather, he saw talent as a state of heightened mental activity manifested in the highs of his illness, which he yearned for, whatever havoc they wreaked on his family. The poet Robert Lowell described the experience of emerging from depression into mania as like encountering "a magical orange grove in a nightmare".
Humphrey attempted to deal with his own nightmare through the prevailing orthodoxies of his day. The two remedies for depressions he found most effective were lithium and electroconvulsive therapy. (He was appalled to be told, after 100 treatments of ECT, that he could have no more due to the risk of cerebral damage.) The psychiatrist he most revered was the controversial figure of William Sargant, who had pioneered physical and pharmaceutical treatments for mental illness, while deriding psychotherapy.
Yet Humphrey developed a formulation for his illness that edged beyond a crude stand-off between psychological and neurobiological explanations. In 1982, he wrote an article for the Observer, describing his manic depression and the "environmental" influences that sometimes affected it. He didn't discuss the impact of the deaths of two of his children, but he happily described the curative powers of cricket, sex, kindness and smoking. He also preferred the US term for his condition: bipolar affective disorder.
Nathalie was furious with him for "bearing his breast" in this way, but when the article received more than 150 letters from sufferers and families thanking him for showing them that they were not alone, she relented. What's more, Humphrey appeared to be ahead of his time. The next year, the British Journal Of Psychiatry called for an end to the use of the term "endogenous" - implying no external influences - to describe manic depression. Bipolar disorder, mean-while, was soon to become the accepted term in the UK. With a grandiosity common to the disorder, Humphrey assumed his article had been responsible for bringing about such changes.
He didn't claim that all manic depressives were geniuses, nor that he was one. But, disregarding the pain it caused his family, he believed his was an illness that could "enhance even minuscule abilities". Having being forced out of the Royal Academy in 1968, he began to cultivate roses around his Suffolk home, Lime Kiln. Humphrey refused to prune, spray or feed his roses, finding and cultivating forgotten strains that he discovered as he travelled. He saw little need to control for disease because, he believed, strong roses recovered themselves after an attack. In his garden, they would sprawl, some of the great climbers making walls of bloom over 30ft high in summer, or draping themselves around trees. Lime Kiln became Britain's first serious rosarium.
While Nathalie recalls the horrors of Humphrey's illness, she also remembers how much the scent of a rose mattered to him. By the end of his life, he had cultivated more than 500 varieties, accumulated through the struggles of his illness: one of them has previously been known only from fossil records.
