My Generation (24 page)

The word of my coming animadversions must have been leaked in advance. Minutes before the lecture I was confronted by a gentleman who identified himself as the acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Although friendly enough, he appeared a little distracted and nervous. After my talk, which was in a hotel ballroom, there was a press meeting billed as “A Conference with William Styron.” At the conference, where there was a microphone and podium, I faced twenty-five or thirty journalists, most of them reporters from medical and other scientific publications. They seemed generous in spirit and attentive as I approached the podium, and I felt they had reacted with considerable interest to my talk. I sensed the acting director hovering near. The first question was, “Mr. Styron, that was quite a story about Halcion. Now, what is your opinion concerning Prozac?” I replied that I had very mixed feelings about Prozac. Although I had never used it myself, I had gained contradictory evidence that it was quite beneficial for many people, while for some others it had no effect at all; for a significant few it produced sinister reactions, primarily suicidal fantasies. The many letters I had received, I continued—

But I got no further. Courteously, the acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health edged me away from the microphone. Every medication has unpredictable side effects, he said, in an I'm-taking-charge voice, but it has been clearly determined that Prozac is virtually free of the serious reactions that have plagued antidepressants in the past. No safer and more reliable treatment for depression has ever been available to therapists and physicians—a truly remarkable development in psychopharmacology. Any more questions?

There were, indeed, quite a few more questions, but none were—or could be—addressed to me, since the microphone had been, as far as I could tell, unbudgeably preempted. As the minutes ticked past I found myself
sidling ever more lonesomely off to the side of the podium. The gathering had become a conference with the acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health. There was no more talk of Halcion but a great deal of talk about Prozac, most of it from the acting director, all of it fulsome and rich with commendation. After fifteen minutes the acting director briskly declared the meeting closed. As I wandered out I felt so ludicrously discomfited that I barely heard the canny, sympathetic Deep South voice of one of the journalists: “Boy, the guv'ment sure did shut you up, didn't they?”

[
Nation
, January 4/11, 1993.]

T
he harrowing episodes I experienced during my period of grave depression eight years ago were so numerous that I could not possibly have recorded them all in
Darkness Visible
. But if I were revising the book, I would include my memory of an excruciating evening a week or so before my suicidal impulses overwhelmed me and I committed myself to a hospital. My wife and I had been invited to dinner with half a dozen friends at a fine Italian restaurant in New York. I very much feared the hour. The majority of people suffering from depression go through their worst pain in the morning. As the hours wear on there is some alleviation, and, with effort, they are often able to cope. With me this situation was reversed. Beginning in midafternoon the anxiety and gloom would slowly accelerate, until by dinnertime I felt virtually suffocated by psychic discomfort. Of course, that evening I could have stayed at home. Anyone suffering the equivalent pain of almost any other disease would surely remain in bed, or at least sequestered from social life. But in depression the anguish is lodged in the mind, so it matters little where the corporeal self is located; one will feel equal desolation at home in one's armchair or trying to eat dinner at La Primavera.

I say “trying” to eat dinner because my appetite had decreased over the previous week to a point where I was eating purely for sustenance. Two of my table companions were charming friends I had known for years. I picked
at what must have been excellent pasta without tasting it. For no particular reason, the sense of encroaching doom was especially powerful that night. But the demented stoicism that depression imposes on behavior caused me to register scarcely a flicker of this inner devastation. I chatted with my companions, nodded amiably, made the appropriate frowns and smiles.

The restroom was nearby, down a flight of carpeted stairs. On my way there the fantasies of suicide, which had been embedded in my thoughts daily for several weeks, and which I had kept at bay during the dinner conversation, returned in a flood. To rid one's self of this torment (but how? and when?) becomes the paramount need of all people suffering depression. I wondered desperately whether I would make it through the rest of the evening without betraying my condition. On my return to the floor above I astonished myself by expressing my misery aloud in a spontaneous utterance which my normal self would have rejected in shame. “I'm dying,” I groaned, to the obvious dismay of a man passing down the stairway. The blurted words were one of the most fearsome auguries of my will to self-destruction: within a week I would be writing, in a stupor of disbelief, suicide notes.

Some months later, after I had been hospitalized and recovered from the illness, my two table companions recollected that I had appeared to be behaving quite normally. The monumental aplomb I exhibited is testimony to the almost uniquely interior nature of the pain of depression, a pain that is all but indescribable, and therefore to everyone but the sufferer almost meaningless. Thus the person who is ill begins to regard all others, the healthy and the normal, as living in parallel but separate worlds. The inability to communicate one's sense of the mortal havoc in one's brain is a cruel frustration. Sylvia Plath's bell jar is an apt metaphor for the isolation one feels, walled off from people who, though visible and audible, are essentially disconnected from one's own hermetically sealed self.

In recent months the press has engaged in an orgy of speculative stories about the circumstances surrounding the death of Vincent Foster.
*
What has been largely forgotten is that there were clear signs in the months leading up to his suicide that he was suffering from a major depression. He had reportedly lost his appetite and his weight had dropped by fifteen pounds,
he had developed insomnia, he had spoken of feeling worthless, he had felt his concentration diminish—all signs of a serious affective illness. His closest friends seem to have been aware of his despondency and mystified by it.

The pattern of each person's depression is different, but there are also marked similarities. The psychic torment of depression is, quite simply (albeit mysteriously, defying analysis or explanation), as exquisite as any imaginable physical pain. I recall telling my daughter with desperate seriousness, while in the depths of my own illness, that I would greatly prefer to undergo amputation. It was reported that Foster, during the weekend before the Tuesday that he killed himself, visited friends in Maryland, where he jogged, learned to crack crabs, and talked sports. To nearly everyone this conjures up a congenial image of summertime pleasure, but to those who themselves have confronted the horror, there is the almost certain knowledge that the jogging session was beset by demonic imaginings, the cracking of crabs was accompanied by thoughts of doom, and the sports talk became a conversational mask hiding a frantic inner quest for oblivion. A close friend of Foster's has confided that, though he was clearly depressed, he never mentioned suicide, but this tells us little. Many people who kill themselves fail to give a hint of their intentions.

If Foster had suggested aloud that he was thinking of doing away with himself, would it have made any difference? Psychiatry cannot assure victory over depression, especially in its severest form, but its strategies, both pharmacological and psychological, have shown considerable success in recent years. A person suffering from depression who consults a psychiatrist has commenced a process that, however faltering, can be one of catharsis and psychic ventilation.

Like many men, in particular certain highly successful and proudly independent men, Vincent Foster may have shunned psychiatry because, already demoralized, he felt it would be a final capitulation of his selfhood to lay bare his existential wounding in front of another fallible human being. When my own depression engulfed me, I had to overcome a lifelong skepticism and mistrust of the psychiatric profession in order to seek help. A Southerner like Foster, I attended the same college he graduated from—Davidson, in North Carolina, a small Presbyterian institution of outstanding academic quality. The college's venerable Calvinism, although liberalized in recent decades, has inculcated in its students a belief that hard work, material
success, civic virtue, and creative achievement are the real guarantors of mental health. Although Foster himself was Roman Catholic, there is little doubt that Davidson's values left their mark.

The South, including Arkansas, is not fertile ground for psychiatry, and lawyers and writers who have been brought up in the tradition of Southern Presbyterianism are reluctant candidates for therapy. It has been said that Foster had been given the names of two psychiatrists whom he never contacted. Among the most troubling details in his sad chronicle is the one concerning his consultation by telephone, only the day before his death, with his family physician back in Little Rock, who prescribed an antidepressant. This long-distance procedure would seem to be appallingly insufficient, and not only because of the absurd insufficiency of antidepressant medication at that critical moment. Foster was near the brink. He needed to see a skilled practitioner who most likely would have insisted that he go to a hospital, where he would be safe from himself. There, after treatment but, as importantly, after relief from the fierce pounding of the partly real but mostly imagined afflictions he had endured, he would have eventually recovered, as the vast majority of people do. Far from destroying him, his breakdown would have been a deliverance. In a Washington he had learned to hate, the failure to survive his career in government would have been seen, after time, as of no consequence.

There remains only the need to ask why Vincent Foster became one among the legions of men and women who have suffered this shipwreck of the soul. One of the hallmarks of depression is the way it causes its victims to magnify troubles out of all proportion to their true measure. Paranoia reigns, harmless murmurs are freighted with menace, shadows become monsters. Such harassments as Foster endured in Washington could not have been entirely negligible, and they plainly triggered his collapse. One can understand why he felt betrayed and maligned, why his sense of self-worth may have been compromised. Countless stories have been written since the insinuating
Wall Street Journal
editorials about Foster. The articles claim that he must have feared exposure for some misconduct, probably connected to the Whitewater affair. But even an anxiety like this rarely leads to thoughts of drastic solutions in a normal mind. Only in someone vulnerable to depression would such worries give rise to the dementia that leads to self-murder. Foster may well have been at risk since infancy. If—as in many such cases—he had a genetic predisposition toward depression, he would
always harbor the potential for chaotic behavior in the face of crisis. This was no defect of character but one symptom of a complex and mysterious illness that afflicts millions.

The fact that Foster's destruction took place in Washington rather than Little Rock could have also been, in the end, a mere quirk of geography, for though it is unlikely that in the placid landscape of Arkansas, had he stayed there, he would have met the pressures and anxieties that so bedeviled him, it is not inconceivable. A hometown scandal, some sudden fiasco, an unforeseen grief or loss (such as his father's recent death)—any of these might have caused in Foster the same devastation. One thing, in any event, is certain: it was not Washington that became the real proscenium for Vincent Foster's tragedy. It was the stage inside the mind upon which men and women enact life's loneliest agony.

[
Newsweek
, April 18, 1994.]

T
he
Reminiscences
by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur would be remarkable if for no other reason than that they may very well comprise the only autobiography by a great man which is almost totally free of self-doubt. There is no soul-searching here, none of the moments of despair, inquietude, fits of gloom that are recorded in the lives of even the most self-possessed of heroic men. MacArthur's solitary attack of desperation—so far as one can tell—occurred when he was nineteen, while still a plebe at West Point. The occasion was the investigation of a hazing incident in which young Douglas had been one of the victims. Called upon to divulge the names of the upperclassmen involved, he was naturally thrown into a state of anguish—all the more wrenching because of the presence at the Point of his mother, who had taught him stern rules about lying and tattling. This same lady (she was of an old Virginia family, and made her home for long periods with the General until he was past fifty) sent him the following poem during a recess of the court:

Do you know that your soul is of my soul such a part

That you seem to be fiber and core of my heart?

None other can pain me as you, son, can do;

None other can please me or praise me as you.

Remember the world will be quick with its blame

If shadow or shame ever darken your name.

Like mother, like son, is saying so true

The world will judge largely of mother by you.

Be this then your task, if task it shall be,

To force this proud world to do homage to me.

Be sure it will say, when its verdict you've won,

She reaps as she sowed: “This man is her son!”

“I knew then what to do,” MacArthur adds. “Come what may, I would be no tattletale.”

The last remark is characteristic. For if a serene confidence untouched by that daily incertitude which afflicts most humans is one of the most immediate and striking features of this book, so too is the style, which, it should be said at the outset, is disappointingly juvenile. When one recalls those august periods which had rallied so many Americans during World War II, it comes as a surprise that here the tone is distinctly flat and insipid, the laborious prose having been set down with that gauche, manly earnestness that one recollects as a prominent characteristic of the adventures of Tom Swift. One wonders whatever happened to the grandiloquent MacArthur, the MacArthur who endeavored through rhetoric to transform the drab reality of American military life into something as rich and as mythic as medieval knighthood—an ideal typified in the address in 1935 to the veterans of his own World War I Rainbow Division:

Those days of old have vanished tone and tint: they have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is a land where flowers of wondrous beauty and varied colors spring, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed into fuller bloom by the smiles of yesterday….We listen vainly but with thirsty ear for the witching melodies of days that are gone….Youth…strength…aspirations…wide winds sweeping…beacons flashing across uncharted depths…movements…vividness…faint bugles sounding reveille…far drums beating the long roll call…the rattle of musketry…the still white crosses.

This is terrible junk, but it has at least a certain impassioned rhythm, while the greater part of the autobiography, when it is not simply boyish in tone, is set down in that lusterless Eisenhowerese which is so favored by corporation
executives and which may be the result of MacArthur's later years at Remington Rand.
*
At any rate, the book is often something of a struggle to get through.

The quotation above, incidentally, is taken from Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s less than admiring but very fair
The General and the President
, published in 1951. A course of supplementary reading is as essential to the
Reminiscences
as it is to Parson Weems's life of Washington; and the Rovere-Schlesinger work, although it is primarily concerned with the last, or Korean, phase of MacArthur's career, is the most informative of an abundant selection. Noting the seventeen years MacArthur spent out of the United States before his recall from Korea in 1951, Rovere and Schlesinger make the observation that “MacArthur is our greatest military expatriate; he was as much in rebellion against our civilization as ever Henry James or Henry Miller was, and he probably symbolized the non-homesick American better than they ever did. “The key phrase here is “non-homesick,” and certainly Rovere and Schlesinger's contention is more than supported by MacArthur's autobiography. For in trying to understand MacArthur it is important to remember how completely his life was dominated by the Army, by the concept of the professional soldier, and how from the moment of his birth the Army became his home and his only home.

Born in 1880, MacArthur was the son of an ambitious and extremely gifted young officer from Wisconsin, a Union veteran who married a Southern woman whose brothers had fought under Robert E. Lee; the family atmosphere seems to have been one of an exhilarating preoccupation with the military tradition and its achievements, past and present. MacArthur's father, Arthur MacArthur, eventually became the highest ranking officer in the Army. Douglas MacArthur's boyhood was spent almost entirely on Army posts, mainly in the Southwest, and after an Army education at West Point (his career there was illustrious; MacArthur does not dwell upon the exact nature of his education, but it must have been, at that time, parochial in the extreme), he rose with amazing speed to become, at thirty-eight, a brigadier general and the youngest divisional commander in the American Expeditionary Force. His military record in France was truly spectacular, and his
personal courage has never been in doubt; he returned from World War I loaded down with decorations and glory.

For a man of such—let it be cautiously called—egocentricity, there is little wonder that the following fifteen years and more, dutiful and dedicated as they were, lacked savor, and therefore make dull reading in the
Reminiscences:
a colorless tour of duty as Superintendent at West Point, a brigade command in the peaceful Philippines, a corps command in Baltimore, directorship of the Olympic Games committee. Even his five years as Army Chief of Staff (MacArthur writes with perfect aplomb that he accepted this high post solely at the demand of his mother, which must be the most awesome example we have of the influence of motherhood upon the national destiny) were singularly devoid of glamour, their only bright moment being his celebrated skirmish with the bedraggled Bonus Army on Anacostia Flats. This wasn't much of a war. It is understandable that at the age of fifty-five, having risen as high as one can rise in the Army, burdened with too much rank and heading for premature retirement, MacArthur was rent by such a keen nostalgia for the wartime days that it was like a gaping wound, and that in the midst of the early Roosevelt era—when military men were
déclassé
, anyway—he felt the need to give his Rainbow Division speech with its desperate and frustrated longing, its “thirsty ear” for “far drums beating the long roll call, the rattle of musketry, the still white crosses.” He resigned to become chief military adviser to the Philippines, six years before the cataclysm at Pearl Harbor.

If it is impossible to share MacArthur's nostalgia for war, to share his passionate identity with the world of soldiering, it is at the same time easy to understand that nostalgia in the light of these fifty-five years. Anyone who has lived as a stranger for any length of time among professional military men, especially officers, is made gradually aware of something that runs counter to everything one has been taught to believe—and that is that most of these men, far from corresponding to the liberal cliché of the super-patriot, are in fact totally lacking in patriotism. They are not unpatriotic; they simply do not understand or care what patriotism is. Most of them, having been molded within the microcosm of service—Army, Marine Corps, Navy, whatever—are spiritually bound to a service, not a country, and the homage they pay to Old Glory they could pay to anyone's flag. A true military man is a mercenary (the calling is not necessarily ignoble, but certainly
MacArthur's role in the Philippines was for all intents and purposes that of a mercenary soldier), and it is within the world of soldiering that he finds his only home. This is why MacArthur, owing no spiritual allegiance to his native land, was able to become the very archetype of an expatriate, hostile to America and understanding almost nothing of it. This is also one of the reasons why, during World War II and to a nearly disastrous degree in Korea, he found it so easy to defy civilian authority: what did these secretaries of the Army and fussy presidents—who, after all, were only Americans—know about the service, which transcends all?

Nevertheless, if one understands the nostalgia for war which marked these years of his break with America, it still remains a nostalgia that is empyreal and histrionic. Only once in his career did MacArthur lead as small a body of men as a company—one somehow feels that the idea of MacArthur, even as a boy, in command of anything less than a division verges on the ludicrous—and this helps explain why his attitude toward the drab brown, smeary side of military life seems so rosy, and why the rare notice he pays to enlisted troops, whether singly or as a lacerated frontline unit, is always so condescending. MacArthur was a genuine militarist, but like all of this breed he was a hopeless romantic and almost totally without humor; it was his misfortune to collide head-on many times with that strain in the American character which is obdurate, wry, realistic, and comical. Americans have in many ways been a bloodthirsty people, but except in odd spasms they have never been militaristic, and it is this important distinction that one must take into account when one contemplates MacArthur's amazing career. For MacArthur, military life may be symbolized by “beacons flashing across uncharted depths…faint bugles sounding reveille,” but for many if not most of his countrymen it is something else: It
is
reveille. It is training manuals and twenty-mile hikes, stupefying lectures on platoon tactics and terrain and the use of the Lister bag, mountains of administrative paperwork, compulsive neatness and hideous barracks in Missouri and Texas, sexual deprivation, hot asphalt drill fields and deafening rifle ranges, daily tedium unparalleled in its ferocity, awful food, bad pay, ignorant people, and a ritualistic demand for ass-kissing almost unique in the quality of its humiliation. The world that MacArthur thrills to makes most of his fellow Americans choke with horror.

Early in his narrative, describing how careful preparation allowed him to
win the highest marks in high school, MacArthur says: “It was a lesson I never forgot. Preparedness is the key to success and victory.” In 1939, in a statement not quoted in this book, he was saying complacently of the Philippines: “It has been assumed, in my opinion erroneously, that Japan covets these Islands. Proponents of such a theory fail fully to credit the logic of the Japanese mind.” But the evidence is now that inadequate preparedness on MacArthur's part was a central factor in the catastrophe that engulfed the Philippines immediately after Pearl Harbor, and that the General's failure to implement properly certain crucial plans involving supply led directly to the eventual defeat on Bataan. MacArthur naturally does not linger on these matters, querulously placing the blame on the Navy, on something he calls “Washington,” or an even more nebulous something called “my detractors”—a group that crops up with increasing frequency as the book drags on. There is one bracing passage from the Bataan-Corregidor section of the book, however: it is MacArthur's description of his departure by PT boat from the dock of the island, in the midst of incredible devastation:

The desperate scene showed only a black mass of destruction. Through the shattered ruins, my eyes sought “Topside,” where the deep roar of the heavy guns still growled defiance. Up there, in command, was my classmate, Paul Bunker. Forty years had passed since Bunker had been twice selected by Walter Camp for the All-American team. I could shut my eyes and see again that blond head racing, tearing, plunging—210 pounds of irresistible power. I could almost hear Quarterback Charley Daly's shrill voice barking, “Bunker back.”…

It is at this point that MacArthur begins increasingly to yammer against censorship. He had been incensed when “Washington” forbade the release of information about the Death March on Bataan, and he writes of this incident: “Here was the sinister beginning of the ‘managed news' concept by those in power.” This statement was made by a man who could not have been unaware that it was public knowledge that he himself ran the most tightly controlled news agency of the war—an organization dedicated to glorifying MacArthur and so firmly under the General's thumb that one correspondent who was there called it “the most rigid and dangerous censorship in American history.” (“If you capture Buna,” MacArthur once said to General Eichelberger during the New Guinea campaign, “I'll give you a
Distinguished Service Cross and recommend you for a high British decoration.” Then he added: “Also, I'll release your name for newspaper publication.”) Nevertheless, most of the field generals and even some of the admirals had enormous respect for MacArthur's strategical sense, and his fight back to the Philippines from Australia by way of New Guinea remains a brilliant achievement. Maybe it is unfair to complain that the General's account of these operations—which rank high among his genuine triumphs—seems to be abstract, distant, skimpy in its total effect. While it would be wrong to expect a commander of MacArthur's position to have spent much time on the front lines (although often during the war, communiqués from “MacArthur's Headquarters” misled many newspaper readers into believing that he had done just that), and therefore his account cannot be filled with the smoke of battle and the feel of troops and movement, it is precisely this lack that makes for dull reading when a general has reached that stage of command which is both Olympian and “global.” Thus MacArthur writes: “On January 2, 1943, Buna Mission fell; Sanananda followed, and the Papua campaign…ended.” This is the General's single allusion to Sanananda, a bitter and horrible struggle—unknown by name to most Americans—which resulted in as many deaths as the bloody and far more famous battle by the Marines for Tarawa. Another reason comes to mind for such a cavalier reference, and it is less pleasant. It is that in this book no less than in his wartime dispatches, MacArthur is concerned with minimizing his own loss of men.