Seabrook - Asylum

ASYLUM

WILLIAM SEABROOK

INTRODUCTION AND NEW COVER BY

JOE OLLMANN

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

MINEOLA, NEW YORK

Copyright

Copyright 1935 by William Seabrook

Copyright Renewed 1962 by Constance Seabrook

Introduction Copyright 2015 by Joe Ollmann

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2015, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Harcourt, Brace and Company New York, in 1935. A new introduction by Joe Ollmann has been specially prepared for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seabrook, William, 1884-1945.

Asylum / William Seabrook ; introduction and new cover by Joe Ollmann.

pages cm

Unabridged republication of the work originally published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, in 1935Title page verso.

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-80631-0

1. Seabrook, William, 1884-1945Health. 2. AlcoholismHospitalsNew York (State)Westchester CountyHistory20th century 3. AlcoholicsRehabilitationNew York (State)Westchester CountyHistory20th century 4. Mentally illCareNew York (State)Westchester CountyHistory20th century 5. AlcoholicsNew York (State)Westchester CountyBiography 6. Psychotherapy patientsNew York (State)Westchester CountyBiography I. Title.

RC564.74.N7S43 2015

362.29209747277dc23

2015006988

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

79810001 2015

www.doverpublications.com

AUTHORS NOTE

None of this book is fiction or embroidery. It is not a novel. It is straight fact. All the characters and episodes are real, but all proper names, except my own, whether of fellow-patients, places, doctors or attendants, have been completely changed.

PREFACE

Acute alcoholism was the way my commitment read, to which was added when the doctors and psychiatrists had checked me over:

Chronic

Neurasthenic symptoms; marked

Psychopathic symptoms; zero.

This was in the winter of 1933 when friends succeeded, just before Christmas, in having me committed, through the New York courts, for treatment and possible cure, to one of the oldest and largest insane asylums in the East.

I had asked for it. I mean, I had asked for it literally, though I hadnt specified any particular sort of place. I had been begging, pleading, demanding toward the last, to be locked up shut up chained up anything and had begun to curse and blame my dearest friends for what seemed to me their failure to realize how desperately, how stupidly, I needed to be shut up where I couldnt get out and where I couldnt get my hands on a bottle.

I had become a confirmed, habitual drunkard, without any of the stock alibis, or excuses. My health was otherwise excellent; I had plenty of money in the bank, a pleasant home on the French Riviera; my work had been going well enough until the drink put an end to it and promised soon to put an end to me. Then I had tried to stopand couldnt. I knew that I was killing myself by drinking, and I did not want to die.

I was pragmatic about it, with a lucid, drunken, persistent, one-track clarity. I had direction. My direction brought me back to the United States, to my own country, obsessed with the specific desire to be put behind bars where I couldnt get liquor, and where, if I changed my mind, I couldnt wheedle or bribe my jailors, or break the bars down. I never once blamed cognac, wine, or whiskey. I blamed myself, with angerand disgust. I wanted to be cured, if cure were possible but I perhaps also wanted to be punished. There was perhaps a twisted puritanical, or perhaps even definitely masochistic, quirk in my wish to be locked up, but I think there was an intuitive element of survival-wish in it too. I knew, better than any of my friends didfor they seldom saw me maudlin and never saw me violentthat I had already slipped past the point where any sanitarium, hospital, treatment or environment which depended on my volitional coperation, could hold out any hope. I knew that I had lost my will with relation to alcohol. I knew that there was only left to me the wishwhich is entirely different from the willto be saved from my own weakness. I repeat here, just as I repeated to my friends, over and over again until they and I were sick of it, that I knew I was drinking myself to death, that I couldnt stopand that I wanted to be stoppedby force.

It seems, however, that this had presented to my friends a somewhat more difficult problem than I realized, particularly since I had no immediate surviving familyfather, mother, brother, blood relationswith direct legal authority to do anything about it. There is no law anywayand of course there shouldnt be anyto stop a man from drinking himself to death if he doesnt disturb the public peace. And it seems that it is against the criminal law for private individuals, even family or doctors, to lock up or chain up an individual without due legal processeven though the individual invites it.

Fortunately I found one friend who was capable enough, influential enough and hard-boiled enough to call what might have been a hysterical bluff and hand me the big-league works tied up with a piece of strong red tape and signed by a judge who had never heard of me.

I was a little surprised.

The friend said:

You know, this isnt Arabia or the moon, or the Sixteenth Century, or a novel by the Marquis de Sade. Its the free United States of America in 1933. The big psychopathic institutions are not very keen on taking drunks, but times are hard and their entrance requirements are not quite so strict as they used to be. If you are willing to sign this court commitment yourself, I can get you into tomorrow.

My friend named a place so big and so universally known that its proper name was once a vaudeville synonym for the sort of place it is. I was a little surprised, not having thought precisely of that sort of place, and it also surprised some devoted but less hardboiled friends who were present, with my welfare at heart. I gulped down the rest of a big drink of prescription Scotchit was in a penthouse overlooking Gramercy Park on the night before the repeal of the dry lawand said:

Okay. Send for the wagon and net.

I was locked up in next day, and kept locked up there for seven months. It proved a queer way to be locked up, for pretty soon I walked miles in the snow whether I wanted to or not, went regularly to the barber shop whether I wanted to or not, went to dances and movies whether I wanted to or not, was made to play golf and tennis when spring came, was taken on hikes in woods full of pheasants, quail, and rabbitsyet all this time I was locked upand competently. It put no strain whatever on my drunkards honor or my drunkards will. It would have been just about as hard to escape from this place as to escape from Sing Sing, and if I had escaped, I understood that the state police would bring me backin handcuffs if necessary.

As a matter of fact, for that very reason, I never thought seriously of trying to escape. I puzzled over escaping occasionally, as you puzzle over schemes to steal the British crown jewels after the first time youve seen them in the Tower of London, but it was purely academic, like anagrams or crossword puzzles. I felt occasionally, less academically, that Id like to wreck the dump, but that was before I began to understand what it was all about. It wouldnt have made any difference. They were prepared for that!