Touched With Fire by Jamison Kay Redfield

Author:Jamison, Kay Redfield [Jamison, Kay Redfield]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1996-10-18T07:00:00+00:00

“Must I too creep to the hollow …?”

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found, His who had given me life—O father! O God! was it well?—Mangled, and flatten’d, and crush’d, and dinted into the ground: There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

· · · · · · · · · ·

What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood? Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood On a horror of shatter’d limbs—?15

“Maud or the Madness,” Tennyson wrote about the poem quoted above, “is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid poetic soul … the heir of madness.”16 It was Tennyson’s favorite poem; he would recite it over and over again—bleakly, tirelessly—to family and friends. Obsessed by the “black blood” of the Tennysons, he struggled throughout his life not only with fierce and recurrent depressions but with the fear of going mad as well. Even the most fleeting glance over the Tennyson bloodline makes clear how sane his fears of madness were. Melancholy, violence, and insanity can be traced at least as far back as the seventeenth-century branches of the Clayton and Tennyson families.17 Both Alfred’s father and grandfather had recurrent attacks of uncontrollable rage and depression, and at least one of his paternal aunts, probably both, suffered from depressive illness. Tennyson’s father’s brother was described by Alfred’s grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, as also having inherited his father’s melancholic “fretfulness and irritability.”18 But it was George Clayton Tennyson, father of the poet, who suffered most and caused the most suffering: “The black blood which flowed in the veins of all the Tennysons had in his case turned to bile.”19 Robert Bernard Martin, in his excellent biography of Alfred Tennyson, describes the elder Tennyson as having been “ungovernable” from an early age, “inconstant in mood,” “vacillating between frenzy and lethargy,” an alcohol abuser, and suffering from debilitating, black depressions.20 Later in his life George Tennyson also experienced “fits,” whose nature remains unclear. Interestingly, Alfred described having seizurelike trances but, although terrified of inheriting his father’s “epilepsy,” he was reassured by his physician that he did not in fact have the disease.

Eventually, George Tennyson (Alfred’s father) became insane, endangering his own life as well as those of others. Professor Martin writes:

He kept a large knife and a loaded gun in his room, and he was with difficulty persuaded not to fire the gun through the kitchen window. In his mania he often had his time confused and probably thought he was back in Cambridge as an undergraduate, firing through the chapel window of the college…. When he was persuaded

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