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“A well-written biography,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century, “is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” Perry's book, manifestly a labor of love, is a well-written biography. I once heard a bookseller say that biographies should be printed in black and red, black for the truth and red for the fiction. Readers should be warned, he thought.
Psychiatrist of America, a fact-laden book, is 462 pages of convincing black ink.
Black is the color of the Harvard University Press production, but the dye of Sullivan's soul was many-colored. Unlike Freud's life, which by comparison was ordered and conventional, Sullivan's was a series of emergencies and successes wrung from anxieties. Unlike Freud's life, which looms over us like a skyscraper in a great city, Sullivan's life is more like an ordinary building — perhaps a venerable brownstone saved from being an eyesore with great effort. The attraction of Sullivan's life is that it is like ordinary lives — our lives — lives that may make it and then again may not. “We are much more simply human than otherwise,” wrote Sullivan, “be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered ….” His own life fluctuated between these extremes.
In Chenango County of upstate New York, a rural and remote county, Harry Stack Sullivan and his family found themselves outsiders. It was a defeated county, a county that did not produce a single city and watched American Progress pass it by. The Yankees blamed the immigrant Irish and grieved that the “Irish came and built the railroads and never left.” All four of Sullivan's grandparents were Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine.
Chenango County was the setting for Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Even today in the 1980s, Perry reports, the county newspaper reflects a “peculiar fascination for suicide and homicide.” Chenango County had the highest rate of suicide of any rural county in the United States during the years that Sullivan was a child. One w