In the Spotlight: Philip OâConnor
In last monthâs In the Spotlight, we wrote of the oft-supposed link between âgeniusâ and âmadnessâ that âwithout ever coalescing into a testable hypothesis, âŚfinds anecdotal support within both popular culture and academic discourseâ. An example we might have cited is that of the bohemian writer and poet Philip OâConnor (1916-1998), who (in his autobiographical Memoirs of a Public Baby) admitted that at one time he had shared the âprevailing scientifically ignorant conception of neurosis as the unemployed, wasted part of imaginative talentâ. OâConnorâs own experience of psychological imbalance and hospitalisation must have contributed to his eventual rejection of such an easy identification. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to the Maudsley Hospital at the age of twenty on 21 September 1936, declaring (according to his autobiography) that, whilst willing to be there, he had no hope of changing.
OâConnor despised his doctors: âI couldnât believe them capable of understanding me, and certainly didnât want them toâŚThey appeared to me desperately on the outside of a world theyâd give their world to enter; I treated them as unprivileged gate-crashers.â Yet of the Maudsley he wrote: âI liked the place very much, being allowed more or less to do as I pleased, painting, writing and not having to âworkâ; and certainly having my psyche seriously considered wasnât, in a coarse way, unflatteringâ. The atmosphere on the ward he found ânormalâ but âheightenedâ. Of one memorable night, that of 30 November 1936, he wrote âI awoke as from a trance, and, in the glare of the Crystal Palace which was burning â we could see it from the veranda where we slept â I caught a snap-glimpse of other patients, some dressed, and felt them, from their clothes mostly, to be thrillingly contemporary, of today, absolutely, and I imagined an element of cure in this experienceâŚâ
OâConnorâs recovery, though sufficient to warrant his discharge on 20 March 1937, did not serve to lift his spirits. âI leftâŚwith the consciousness of having become a grubby, conventional âintellectualâ; and that a thick glass pane, as is proper to such âintellectualsâ, had been fixed between me and the worldâ. If the Maudsley was OâConnorâs university, he certainly rued his graduation. âI felt old, cynical, departmentalised, my mind in its sensory remove from the world working much harder and more consistently, but lacking the original spurts and âinspirationsâ, and on a thinner dietâ.
Nevertheless, the Maudsley seems to have been the accidental crucible of OâConnorâs future career. On admission, his occupation was given as âpainterâ, and he is the one person included in this series of posts whose artistic work features in the collections of the Archives & Museum. As part of an experiment conducted by Drs Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay OâConnor was given the drug mescaline and asked to represent its hallucinogenic effects in his art (an example of which is given below). Yet OâConnorâs first piece of published poetry was written while he was in hospital, and seeing his name in print set him on the literary course for which he subsequently became known.
There is more about Philip OâConnor in Andrew Barrowâs Quentin and Philip: A Double Portrait (MacMillan, 2002).