Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (22 page)

Within months Clive’s confusion gave way to the agony, the desperation, that are so clear in Miller’s film. This, in turn, was succeeded by a deep depression, as it came upon him— if only in sudden, intense, and immediately forgotten moments— that his former life was over, that he was incorrigibly disabled, and that the rest of his life would be spent in institutions.

As the months passed without any real improvement, the hope of significant recovery became fainter and fainter, and towards the end of 1985 Clive was moved to a room in a chronic psychiatric unit— a room he was to occupy for the next six and a half years, but which he was never able to recognize as his own. A young psychologist saw Clive for a period of time in 1990 and kept a verbatim record of everything he said, and this caught the grim mood that had taken hold. Clive said at one point, “Can you imagine one night five years long? No dreaming, no waking, no touch, no taste, no smell, no sight, no sound, no hearing, nothing at all. It’s like being dead. I came to the conclusion that I was dead.”

The only times of feeling alive were when Deborah visited him. But the moment she left, he was desperate once again and by the time she got home, ten or fifteen minutes later, she would find repeated messages from him on her answering machine: “Please come and see me, darling— it’s been ages since I’ve seen you. Please fly here at the speed of light.”

To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past— both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that the rest of his life, his endless night, would be spent in such a place.

But then, seven years after his illness, after huge efforts made by Deborah, Clive was moved to a small country residence for the brain-injured, much more congenial than a hospital. Here he was one of only a handful of patients, and in constant contact with a dedicated staff who treated him as an individual and respected his intelligence and talents. He was taken off most of his heavy tranquilizers, and seemed to enjoy his walks around the village and gardens near the home, the spaciousness, the fresh food.

For the first eight or nine years in this new home, Deborah told me, “Clive was calmer and sometimes jolly, a bit more content, but often with angry outbursts still, unpredictable, withdrawn, spending most of his time in his room alone.” But gradually, in the last six or seven years, Clive has become more sociable, more talkative. Conversation (though of a “scripted” sort) has come to fill what had been before empty, solitary, and desperate days.

T
HOUGH I HAD
corresponded with Deborah since Clive first became ill, it was only twenty years later that I met Clive in person. And he was so changed from the haunted, agonized man I had seen in Miller’s 1986 film that I was scarcely prepared for the dapper, bubbling figure who opened the door when Deborah and I went to visit him in the summer of 2005. He had been reminded of our visit just before we arrived, and he flung his arms around Deborah the moment she entered.

Deborah introduced me: “This is Dr. Sacks,” and Clive immediately said, “You doctors work twenty-four hours a day, don’t you? You’re always in demand.” We went up to his room, which contained an electric organ console and a piano piled high with music. Some of the scores, I noted, were transcriptions of Orlandus Lassus, the Renaissance composer whose works Clive had edited. I saw Clive’s journal by the washstand— he has now filled up scores of volumes, and the current one is always kept in this exact location. Next to it was an etymological dictionary with dozens of reference slips of different colors stuck between the pages and a large, handsome volume,
The 100 Most Beautiful Cathedrals in the World
. A Canaletto print hung on the wall, and I asked Clive if he had ever been to Venice. No, he said (but Deborah told me they had visited several times before his illness). Looking at the print, Clive pointed out the dome of a church: “Look at it,” he said, “see how it soars— like an angel!”

When I asked Deborah whether Clive knew about her memoir, she told me that she had shown it to him twice before, but that he had instantly forgotten. I had my own heavily annotated copy with me, and asked Deborah to show it to him again.

“You’ve written a book!” he cried, astonished. “Well done! Congratulations!” He peered at the cover. “All by you? Good heavens!” Excited, he jumped for joy. Deborah showed him the dedication page (“For my Clive”). “Dedicated to me?” He hugged her. This scene was repeated several times within a few minutes, with almost exactly the same astonishment, the same expressions of delight and joy each time.

Clive and Deborah are still very much in love with each other, despite his amnesia (indeed, the subtitle of Deborah’s book is
A Memoir of Love and Amnesia
). He greeted her several times as if she had just arrived. It must be an extraordinary situation, I thought, both maddening and flattering, to be seen always as new, as a gift, a blessing.

Clive had, in the meantime, addressed me as “Your Highness” and inquired at intervals, “Been at Buckingham Palace?…Are you the prime minister?…Are you from the U.N.?” He laughed when I answered, “Just the U.S.” This joking or jesting was of a somewhat waggish, stereotyped nature and highly repetitive. Clive had no idea who I was, little idea who anyone was, but this bonhomie allowed him to make contact, to keep a conversation going. I suspected he had some damage to his frontal lobes too— such jokiness (neurologists speak here of
Witzelsucht,
joking disease), like his impulsiveness and his incontinent chattiness, could go with a weakening of the usual, social frontal lobe inhibitions.

He was excited at the notion of going out for lunch, lunch with Deborah. “Isn’t she a wonderful woman?” he kept asking me. “Doesn’t she have marvelous kisses?” I said yes, I was sure she had.

As we drove to the restaurant, Clive, with great speed and fluency, invented words for the letters on the license plates of passing cars: JCK was Japanese Clever Kid; NKR was New King of Russia; and BDH (Deborah’s car) was British Daft Hospital, then Blessed Dutch Hospital.
Forever Today,
Deborah’s book, immediately became “Three-Ever Today,” “Two-Ever Today,” “One-Ever Today.” This incontinent punning and rhyming and clanging was virtually instantaneous, occurring with a speed no normal person could match. It resembled Tourettic or savantlike speed, the speed of the preconscious, undelayed by reflection.

When we arrived at the restaurant, Clive did all the license plates in the parking lot and then, elaborately, with a bow and a flourish, let Deborah enter: “Ladies first!” He looked at me with some uncertainty as I followed them to the table: “Are you joining us, too?”

When I offered him the wine list, he looked it over and exclaimed: “Good God! Australian wine! New Zealand wine! The colonies are producing something original— how exciting!” This partly indicated his retrograde amnesia— he is still in the 1960s (if he is anywhere), when Australian and New Zealand wines were almost unheard of in England. “The colonies,” however, was part of his compulsive waggery and parody.

At lunch he talked about Cambridge— he had been at Clare College, but had often gone next door to King’s, for their famous choir. He spoke of how after Cambridge, in 1968, he joined the London Sinfonietta, where they played modern music, though he was already attracted to the Renaissance and Lassus. He was the chorus master there, and he reminisced that singers could not talk during coffee breaks; they had to save their voices (“It was often misunderstood by the instrumentalists, seemed standoffish to them”). These all sounded like genuine memories. But they could, equally, have reflected his knowing
about
these events, rather than actual memories of them— expressions of “semantic” memory rather than “event” or “episodic” memory.

Then he spoke of the Second World War (he was born in 1938) and how they would go to bomb shelters and play chess or cards there. He said that he remembered the doodlebugs: “There were more bombs in Birmingham than in London.” Was it possible that these were genuine memories? He would only have been six or seven, at most. Or was he confabulating or simply, as we all do, repeating stories he had been told as a child?

At one point, he talked about pollution and how dirty petrol engines were. When I told him I had a hybrid with an electric motor as well as a combustion engine, he was astounded, as if something he had read about as a theoretical possibility had, far sooner than he had imagined, become a reality.

In her remarkable book, so tender, yet so tough-minded and realistic, Deborah wrote about the change which had so struck me: that Clive was now “garrulous and outgoing…could talk the hind legs off a donkey.” There were certain themes he tended to stick to, she said, favorite subjects (electricity, the Tube, stars and planets, Queen Victoria, words and etymologies), which would all be brought up again and again:

I would put it even more strongly and use a phrase that Deborah used in another connection, when she wrote of Clive being poised upon “a tiny platform…above the abyss.” Clive’s loquacity, his almost compulsive need to talk and keep conversations going, served to maintain a precarious platform, and when he came to a stop, the abyss was there, waiting to engulf him. This, indeed, is what happened when we went to a supermarket and he got separated briefly from Deborah. He suddenly exclaimed, “I’m conscious now…never saw a human being before…for thirty years…it’s like death!” He looked very angry and distressed. Deborah said the staff calls these grim monologues his “deads”— they make a note of how many he has in a day or a week and gauge his state of mind by their number.

Deborah thinks that repetition has slightly dulled the very real pain that goes with this agonized but stereotyped complaint, but when he says such things, she will distract him immediately. Once she has done this, there seems to be no lingering mood— an advantage of his amnesia. And, indeed, once we were back in the car, Clive was off on his license plates again.

B
ACK IN HIS ROOM,
I spotted the two volumes of Bach’s
Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues
on top of the piano and asked Clive if he would play one of them. He said that he had never played any of them before, but then he played Prelude 9 in E major and said as he played, “I remember this one.” He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it; then it may come to him. He inserted a tiny, charming improvisation at one point, and did a sort of Chico Marx ending, with a huge downward scale. With his great musicality and his playfulness, he can easily improvise, joke, play with any piece of music.

His eye fell on the book about cathedrals, and he talked about cathedral bells— did I know how many combinations there could be with eight bells? “Eight by seven by six by five by four by three by two by one,” he rattled off. “Factorial eight.” And then, without pause: “That’s forty thousand.” (I worked it out laboriously: it is 40,320.)

I asked him about prime ministers. Tony Blair? Never heard of him. John Major? No. Margaret Thatcher? Vaguely familiar. Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson: ditto. (But earlier in the day, he had seen a car with JMV plates and instantly said, “John Major Vehicle”— showing that he had an
implicit
memory of Major’s name.) Deborah wrote of how he could not remember
her
name, “but one day someone asked him to say his full name, and he said, ‘Clive David Deborah Wearing— funny name that. I don’t know why my parents called me that.’ ” He has gained other implicit memories, too, slowly picking up new knowledge, like the layout of his residence. He can go alone now to the bathroom, the dining room, the kitchen— but if he stops and thinks en route, he is lost. Though he could not describe his residence, Deborah tells me that he unclasps his seat belt as they draw near and offers to get out and open the gate. Later, when he makes her coffee, he knows where the cups, the milk, and the sugar are kept. (He cannot
say
where they are, but he can go to them; he has actions, but few facts, at his disposal.)