Books: Escape from Life

BRAINSTORM—Carlton Brown—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

“This is a true story,” says Author Brown, “about a close friend . . . who went out of his mind.” Michael Kelly Jones (the friend’s pseudonym) was born in New York in 1912, free-lanced for a while, served on the editorial staff of a magazine. Carlton Brown, born in New York in 1912, has contributed short stories and articles to The New Yorker, Esquire, The New Republic. For the past two years he has been an associate editor of Pic. This is his first book.

Mike Jones was the child of divorced parents. He lived in almost puritanic simplicity with his mother, enjoyed the fleshpots of Brazil and Europe with his father. As a young man he slashed his wrists, ineffectually, over a faithless mistress. At 27 he was married and a father. He drank too much, spent too much, quarreled almost continually with his wife. Life seemed intolerable, and in the summer of 1940—helped by a fall on his head—Mike escaped into unreality.

For some six weeks he was mad as a hatter and happy as a lark. He saw signs and portents everywhere. When he proclaimed the Second Coming at the World’s Fair, he was unsympathetically bundled off to the city hospital for observation, a “purification” he cheerfully endured. Transferred to a state hospital, he was cruelly beaten for a supposed misdemeanor. “After that beating,” said Mike, “I was more sane than insane.” In a few weeks, without further treatment, he was released.

Author Brown tells the story swiftly and easily in the first person. Not a word or an emotion, however intimate, is omitted. The picture of life in a mental hospital is detailed and accurate. But not all the questions are answered. What, for instance, caused Mike’s madness? The doctors said they did not know. Mike evidently attributed it to the conflicting attractions of his “good” mother and his “free-living” father. No doubt his own emotional instability helped; Mike clearly was never happier than as a refugee from reality.