All is connected. While I was preparing my Janet Frame Memorial Lecture, I met a person who had trained and worked at London’s famous Maudsley Hospital. This institution was significant in Janet Frame’s life.
Having spent years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, Frame escaped a scheduled prefrontal lobotomy only when her first published book, The Lagoon, won a literary prize.
She travelled to London and in 1958 doctors at the Maudsley Institute rejected her diagnosis of schizophrenia. A Maudsley psychiatrist, RH Cawley, advised Frame she was suffering more from her treatment than from illness, and encouraged her to spend her life writing.
I described a memory of Frame. We visited her in a small New Zealand town and discovered that she was dealing with her hypersensitivity to noise by lining the walls of her house with furniture. I remember wondering about the noise problem because the street outside was silent.
It made an impression on me. This charming, shy, quietly humorous writer had been called “mad” and subjected to barbaric treatment. Frame’s mother had signed permission for the proposed lobotomy. One assumes this was well-meaning, that the mother had been persuaded it was the right thing to do.
With the memorial lecture in mind, I thought about the full range of motivation, from the well-meaning to the ruthless. I tried out this theory on my Maudsley-trained acquaintance: do most of us operate on the assumption that everyone’s motivation is benign?
At a dinner in London, I’d met a clever young man who’d written a rigorous and perceptive book review. He considered himself a fan of the man whose work he’d reviewed. He described his review as “fond”. I thought he was making an assumption: since he himself was benign and clever, he expected the writer would tolerate his light scoldings, his uncomfortably acute criticisms.
The young man didn’t know who he was dealing with. He didn’t anticipate the implacable rejection he was in for, because he hadn’t perceived the writer’s ruthlessness. Most of us operate from this standpoint, expecting to be met with goodwill.
On a spectrum of “sticking your neck out” there’s book reviewing at one end and standing up to dictators at the other. The conversation turned to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
After Navalny was poisoned with Novichok in 2020, he was evacuated to Germany to recover. When I read he’d decided to return to Russia I was horrified. It seemed sickening, the wrong choice. Here was a man facing death. Putin was predictably merciless and Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.
What had been Navalny’s state of mind? My Maudsley acquaintance thought Navalny had chosen to die. He was making a point. Let Putin do his worst; perhaps then the people would rise in protest.
I wondered, though, if on some level Navalny had thought he could succeed. He was energetic, tough, optimistic. He didn’t seem like a man who’d welcome martyrdom. Perhaps in some unrealistic part of his mind he was making the reflexive assumption: he was on the level; he had right on his side. He would come at the king and survive.
It’s the kind of default optimism that allows us to get through life without expecting to be murdered. We don’t suppose our parent would sign an order for the cancellation of our mind. If they did, we’d assume goodwill: it was just what the doctor ordered.
Real pitilessness is uncanny. In the Shakespearian sense it’s “unkind”, meaning perverse, unnatural. If, like the young book reviewer or Navalny, you come up against it, the natural response is disbelief. He won’t throw me to the wolves. Surely not. Not me, of all people?
