Books: Drunkard’s Progress

ASYLUM — William Seabrook — Ear-court, Brace ($2).

One December evening in 1933, William Buehler Seabrook, journalist, traveler, author of widely-read adventure stories (Adventures in Arabia, Jungle Ways}, succeeded in getting himself locked up in a large and well-run New York insane asylum. His ailment was acute alcoholism.

Discovering that big psychopathic institutions did not welcome dipsomaniacs, whose cure is long and uncertain, William Seabrook encountered legal and medical difficulties in entering the institution he had chosen.* But they were nothing compared with the difficulty of getting out again.

Slow in awakening to his surroundings and to the reality of his confinement, Patient Seabrook’s first reaction was that everything was wrong. He had wanted a nice, quiet, secluded cell where he would not be able to get his hands on a bottle of whiskey. He found himself in a modern hospital resembling an expensive hotel, where he was compelled to meet and talk with other patients, and where he slept in “a wide-open show window, an illuminated dog kennel.” The medical attention was so close that, as he objected profanely, “people come walking in and out and prodding me with sticks every minute of the day and night.” Irritable, anxious to sleep, half stupefied with drink, he objected to being weighed and given a shower, objected more vehemently to being made to eat.

Doctors, nurses and stalwart male attendants treated him like a spoiled child. He objected to being politely addressed as Mr. Seabrook by people who were deaf to his complaints, objected to having the light burn in his room all night, objected more loudly when attendants removed the bathrobe he had used to shade the light.

On his first morning, after having been awakened too early and refused his customary black coffee, he was so angry that he forgot about being a drunkard, so exhausted and stimulated by rage he did not miss his usual morning half tumbler of Scotch. Thus the cure began. After he had bawled out doctors, nurses and the world in general, calling for a padded cell as preferable to modern scientific, heartless hypocrisy, another patient told him quietly: “Say, fellow, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t tell them. They tell you.” Once he had accepted its concealed, but absolutely inflexible, discipline. William Seabrook found the asylum a pleasant and interesting lockup. Soon he was walking miles through the snow, going regularly to the barber shop, whether he wanted to or not, attending compulsory dances and cinemas, and in the spring playing golf and tennis. But he could not get out.

And he could not disrupt the systematized entertainments that were part of the cure.

Had he attempted to do so, intellectual persuasion, backed by physical strength, would have coerced him to obedience.

His rebellions were quickly suppressed. On a momentary impulse, he requested prunes with his meals. The doctor agreed. But it was soon discovered that, according to the systematic cure, prunes were given only to constipated patients. Author Seabrook, annoyed with psychiatric red tape, decided to beat the system. He pretended to be constipated, which did not work. A friend brought him raw prunes, which were confiscated. He suggested, as a joke, building a fire in his room to cook them. Eventually he got his prunes, but the joke went sour, for the doctor wrote to distressed friends: “He seems to be making progress, but … he has fixations, obsessions, and if he is crossed about the most trivial matter, he turns vicious, threatens to become violent. He threatened to set the place afire, which is, as you know, an indicative symptom.”

Once & for all Author Seabrook smashes the myth that only accident separates insane patients from the normal individuals outside. His fellow-patients had one quality in common, no matter how their idiosyncrasies varied: they had lost self-control. His friend Spike had been: “enthusiastic, capable, a Don Juan in the rough, women fell for him . . . until something short-circuited in Spike’s cortex. His speed accelerated, but he lost his control and technique entirely. He began leaping on pretty girls. … I suppose all males have the leaping impulse occasionally . . . but we generally control it, or at least say, ‘Haven’t I met you somewhere?’ ‘:

Psychoanalyzed after his morale improved, analyzing himself in thoughtful moments between regularized work and systematized play, Author Seabrook unearthed the basic cause of his alcoholism, realized that all his life he had been running away from a consciousness of his own inadequacy. His trips to Arabia, Haiti, Timbuktu, although he had written of them as adventures, had actually been escapes from responsibilities. After he had become successful, in worldly terms, with a good bank balance, the old excuses no longer worked, the self-imposed compulsion to produce superb writing collided with a sense of his inability to do so. This bred doubts, hesitancies and finally systematic escape through intoxication. Evading a showdown, he found it more intimidating when he faced it at last in the quiet of the asylum. (Authorities call such institutions “mental hospitals.” but Author Seabrook, with an adventure-writer’s passion for calling a molehill a mountain, prefers the harsh term “insane asylum.”)

After seven months he was released as cured, at least to the point of being able to drink or leave it alone. He had learned the value of discipline, had made pleasant friendships with amiable and harmless psychopaths, had a few amusing and a few pathetic experiences to remember. And, as an alert journalist who was again able to write without being strangled by over-ambition, he had the material for this easy, honest, idiomatic book which is of distinct value for the light it throws on modern psychotherapy.

*Presumably Bloomingdale Hospital.