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This book is essentially an essay on melancholia, and in particular an account of the profound illness into which the author sank — aged 60 the first time. The illness was characterised by ‘a state of anxiety, agitation, and unfocussed dread’, in which at one point he recalls
I could not rid my mind of the line of Baudelaire, skittering round at the edge of my consciousness, ‘I have felt the wind of the wing of madness’.
William Styron was previously best known, perhaps, for his novel, and the subsequent film, Sophie's Choice. His first novel, Lie down in Darkness, made much of the metaphor of darkness, not only in its title, and, in Darkness Visible, Styron tells us that in retrospect he wonders if there were not premonitions of the darkness of this later psychotic depressive breakdown, for long held at bay from much earlier in his life. There have been other novels in between, including The Long March, Set this House on Fire, and The Confessions of Mat Turner.
I found this essay so powerful that my first reaction was that it had brought me nearer an understanding of the subjective experience of depression than had any professional text. On second reading, I felt puzzled, for Styron evades more personal issues than he directly makes explicit; the power, I conclude, lies not in the overt content so much as in the capacity to evoke an awful experience.
Styron writes of other writers, for example William James,
who battled depression for many years, [and] gave up the search for an adequate portrayal, implying its near-impossibility when he wrote ‘It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life’.
I was moved to write to Styron, and sufficiently stimulated by his largely negative experience of the capacity of psychiatry and psychotherapy adequately and urgently to respond to his predicament, to include with my letter a copy of Eliott Jaques's ‘Death and the Mid-Life Crisis’, of which as I read Styron I had been much reminded. J