You’d be sympathetic, I assume, if you heard of a man so psychologically troubled that he compulsively saved receipts, empty food cans, old toothbrush boxes, stamps and toenail clippings, squirrelling them away in boxes. You’d feel sad to learn how difficult he found it to relate to other people – and how he referred to his portable tape recorder, which he carried everywhere, as his “wife”. Such haunted souls seem destined to live on society’s fringes, contributing little. And yet, whatever you make of his art, it’s hard to conclude that Andy Warhol, who did all of those things, made no contribution.
A recent book by the science journalist Claudia Kalb is entitled Andy Warhol Was A Hoarder, and she provides ample evidence for that claim – and for her arguments that Marilyn Monroe had borderline personality disorder; that Abraham Lincoln was seriouslydepressed; and that George Gershwin suffered from hyperactivity, to name just a few. A slight tilt in the course of history, and Warhol might only have been famous for 15 minutes – as the subject of a voyeuristic reality show.
All of which is another reminder that mental illness is a social construct: that what counts as a disorder or a gift, as craziness or genius, is a constantly shifting line. (In the new tech economy, it has been argued, some autism spectrum symptoms are the path to prestige and riches.) Kalb’s point isn’t that her subjects succeeded despite their afflictions, but that their afflictions – if that’s even the right word – helped make them who they were. It was no fun being Lincoln: “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family,” he once wrote to a friend, “there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” Yet in Kalb’s telling, that same raw sensitivity to sadness meant he felt the carnage of the Civil War in a deeply personal way; you can’t help wondering how recent conflicts might have unfolded with brooding introverts, instead of peppy optimists, at the helm.
But our stigmatisation of mental illness has always gone hand in hand with romanticising it: we like our geniuses to be “touched with fire”, as Kay Redfield Jamison puts it in her book tracing links between creativity and manic depression. There’s patchy evidence for a connection. But as the writing coach Robert Boice points out, it leads us astray when it comes to our own creative work, or encouraging creativity in children. We glamourise the high-suffering approach, telling ourselves that working in exhausting binges, or waiting for inspiration, is essential to the process; or that depression’s the price to be paid for truly profound art. The odd truth, these days, is that it’s almost as embarrassing to admit to being boringly moderate in your habits as wildly unstable. And yet, for most people, the way to make a mark, creatively or otherwise, involves cultivating the willingness to doggedly plug away, day after day, in a dispiritingly sane fashion: patience, not delirium. Figures such as Warhol show you can be highly eccentric and also highly creative – not that eccentricity is a path to creativity for the rest of us.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
