Gains and Losses

James McGonigal

Gains and Losses

Recovery was looking out after a snowfall –
every single bush and fence-post overnight
had come to life in its glow.

And falling ill the second time was like
a snowfall too – each branch and wall appeared
the same, and not the same

in glints of light. They say that it was ‘Overstudy’
brought me here. True, figures always charmed me
more than facts.

Now I can total sixteen black marks still visible
on the lawn. Each night I close my ledger of a day
and turn to sleep. Bodies nearby

and boughs stretched white and stark. The moon,
that book-keeper, tallies each silver minute
on fingers of twig.

Beside Herself

Did you ever wake
in the small hours
in the half-glow
half-dark and
see with a start

yourself asleep
in the next bed
your other self
lost in her
haplessness

might you not
unrestrained
rise to take
hold of the neck
and choke her fantasies?

We can review
even now this patient’s
cast of complexion
surface of tongue
digestive details

and so forth –
but merest hints only
at the love affair
tormenting her.
Lost altogether the hours

of a grim passage
Oban to Glasgow
one daughter shamed
or shameless
raving at waves

her father restless
up on deck
beside himself
with November clouds
boiling astern.

Good nurses chosen
in part for angelic
looks and stout arms
(some of them Highland
lassies) helped.

In barely a week
‘Relieved’ she returned
to the town
to the glances
to her single bed.

Does agony ever
fade like the ink
on her case notes,
so grey and thin now
that we strain to read?

Absent for some time

We were two loners or losers who found ourselves sat on the back row
of Ordinary English Lit in the Fore Hall of Glasgow University, full of
braying first-years trying to impress each other in private-school voices,
or so it seemed – me after a ‘signally unimpressive start, Mr McGonigal’
in French and Spanish and best not to mention Political Economy. This
was my second chance.

His story was deflected, self-deprecating in a West of Scotland-Irish manner,
pleasant but distant. I think his name was Michael. We got on. Then one day
he was gone, back to Gartnavel which he had mentioned once. I wonder now
if it might have been shock therapy had distanced him. One of the poems we
were lectured on was by Robert Lowell in his asylum days, on a violent man
after a lobotomy.

He asked me to his flat just once before he left, wanted to lend me a book of
Andalusian-Arabic lyrics (Colección Austral, 1959), its pages already slightly
foxed. Where had he come across it? Did he know Spanish too? Ground floor
room in a largish cream-painted villa above the Kelvin’s river gorge, so deep
that its bankside trees stood eye-to-eye with his window. He never came back
to university.

Or maybe I just always missed him in the crowds. So here the book is still,
its pages even browner, like autumn-term leaves of 1966. Its poems are all
ghazals, those haiku-like laments in the Persian manner. I made a version
of one of them:

Do you think my eyes burn,
bare windows for hours in the dark,
without you?

I lie still as a branch,
the distant moon shining all night
through my body.

But my Spanish has gone and I can’t find the original Andalusian poet,
nor even the little poetry magazine where I am almost certain that this
translation of a translation was published years later.

The height and depth of it

I needed to climb
the slope of Gartnavel
to survey across bare winter trees
to the line of his third-floor flat

where the old poet mentioned
one of his aunts abandoned ‘in care’ –
the villain of the piece her husband
smooth-faced and cynical.

Through the balcony window
the crenellations that I always took
for rooftop features on facing villas
must have been Gartnavel

which he never named
and which I did not pursue
sensing a no-go area
and emotion running deep.

Years later he wrote that poem
about gazing westwards at sunset
from a city balcony away out to the Firth
and then his glance swings

east to the new Gartnavel General’s
concrete and glass ablaze in reflected gold
with lines of patients clambering
down this vertical inferno

clinging to their knotted bed-sheets. A vision
not devoid of hope? At this height today
beside the fenced-off dank East Wing
I thought it possible, yes, that here

he had once sat with his aunt among the poor.

Commentary

Asylums were major features on my childhood’s horizon – substantial, stately from a distance, at once ‘public’ and intensely private. Even the sound of their names seemed to carry a threat for adults: Crichton, Bangour, Gartloch, Hartwood, Carstairs, Woodilee, Gartnavel. My mother’s brilliant but unstable brother, Alec, was for some time a patient in the first two on that list. His brother, Will, was a doctor in the third, with some expertise in aversion therapy using electric shock treatment. That was later tried on Alec in England, without any obvious success.

Reading Let There Be Light Again: A History of Gartnavel Royal (1993), I noted the connection with Woodilee Asylum near my teenage home. It took an overspill of patients from Gartnavel’s East House. Increasing patient numbers changed Woodilee’s enlightened founding policy of 1875 into a more custodial practice. But its therapeutic home farm remained into the 1960s. Father O’Hara, an Irish priest with whom I used to go to serve as an altar boy at Sunday Mass for Catholic patients and staff, would always drive to the hospital via that farm and stop to inspect the cattle. Lonely for rural life in Ireland, I suppose, he would move the beasts with his walking stick to better judge their qualities.

Mass was said on a dais in the ballroom where a band might have been. The patients sat in rows, broadly divided by gender. The hymnbooks I distributed grew thinner with each passing month, and it was only walking through the corridors after Mass to the staff refectory for breakfast one Sunday that I saw the reason. The corridor was blue with smoke, and men and women were making roll-ups from tobacco shreds sprinkled into torn strips of ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’ or ‘I’ll Sing a Hymn to Mary’. Their fingers were charred black, but there was a ritual carefulness about their delicate human movements that has remained with me. Father O’Hara at breakfast, seemingly perplexed and touched by this hospital experience, would often quote from Macbeth. The king asks his hapless doctor about his wife’s madness:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
That weighs upon the heart?

Mental illness was linked with poetry, therefore, long before this project.

Responding to two patient documents provided from the online archive was no great hardship: writing usually begins in isolation. For privacy I altered their details. ‘Gains and Losses’ was suggested by a Petition to the Sheriff to grant order for the reception into an asylum (dated 1 January 1904) of a young stonemason from Hamilton, the petitioner being his father and the supposed cause of his lunacy ‘Overstudy’. Was this a type of manic obsessive compulsive disorder? I changed his profession to book-keeper, where accuracy is all. My poems often employ unusual metaphors, that figure of speech where one thing is, rather irrationally, said to be another. I decided to embed a metaphor from an earlier unpublished poem, so that my own irrationality might echo his. A poet’s care for words might itself be called overstudy.

‘Beside Herself’ also arose from a single word in medical notes dated 20 November 1843 –‘Relieved’. The extremes of behaviour in a young woman from Oban had eased after a brief time in care. Since the ink had faded, the patient notes were difficult to read onscreen, and this becomes the final mystery. What could we, or her doctors, or her family, really know of the affair that had so deranged her? Formally the narrow lines suggest constraint or restraint, both actual and social.

I recall only ever meeting one Gartnavel patient, and wanted to include him. The prose-poem form of ‘Absent for some time’, with long lines and square stanzas, contrasts with the intensity of poem 2. The book mentioned is still on my shelves. By including a translation I turn the prose poem into something akin to the Japanese haibun form of prose leading into verse. The link between Arabic/Persian and Japanese forms speaks to my enthusiasm generally for brief glancing imagery. There is some hint of a love-interest that I did not fully register at the time of writing (linking with the young woman patient’s experience in the previous poem), and possibly of problems with sexual identity which may have led to the young man’s mental stress. So the brief translation carries a fair amount of resonance after the earlier prose, as if we suddenly move from my inexperience of life into something deeper.

Sexuality connects with Edwin Morgan in ‘The height and depth of it’. He lectured on the university course referred to in the previous poem, and later he was my research supervisor. His flat on Great Western Road overlooked Bingham’s Pond (formerly Gartnavel’s boating lake). It is a key location in two of his poems – the joyous ‘The Second Life’ from his 1968 breakthrough collection of the same title, and the bleak ‘Winter’, from his Poems of Thirty Years (1982). Love sets the mood in both, being firstly found and then lost. It struck me as odd that in none of our many meetings in his flat had we ever mentioned Gartnavel. The hospital was barely visible, yet it stood on its elevated site directly opposite his balcony. Was this a case of people of his generation and mine being unwilling to talk about mental illness? So this silence and obscurity, this unasked question, led the poem onwards from one actual brief mention of an old aunt in care to an imagined encounter in the East Wing.

‘A Sunset’, in Hold Hands Among The Atoms (1991) is the poem of his that is mentioned here in mine. The lower case titles in the latter two poems contrast with the more traditional upper case in the historically earlier ones. It strikes me now that there is a thematic pattern within the male; female+male; male+male; male+female progression of the four poems’ composition. Love evaded or lost is being explored throughout as a site of mental pain.

[Editions of The Gartnavel Gazette from 1854 and 1911, HB13/2/136 and 171, and Let There Be Light Again: A History of Gartnavel Royal Hospital From its Beginnings to the Present Day, ed. Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith (1993), HB13/2/237]