Word: nicolson
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...clinician" who presented most of the data was Harold Nicolson, urbane British author, onetime diplomat and M.P. To nail the "popular fallacy" that creative writers are prone to be sickly, psychopathic, and "doomed to an untimely death," Nicolson examined the health and lives of Britain's literary great. "Since of all writers poets are . . . the most 'creative,' I . . . concentrate my observations upon the behavior and temperament of poets." Some of his findings...
Alluring Strangeness. Nicolson admits that all great writers have been the least bit peculiar, at that. Germany's Schiller whetted his inspiration by keeping rotten apples in his writing table drawer. Charlotte Brontë often mooned about the house for months without being able to put pen to paper. Milton could write only between October and March; Balzac, Byron, Dostoevsky and Conrad, only at night...
Most famed neurotic of all was Shelley. A brooding hypochondriac (Nicolson says flatly: "All creative writers are hypochondriacs . . . all creative writers are nervous"), Shelley was long obsessed with the conviction that he had tuberculosis. Once, overcome by the thought that he had caught elephantiasis from a lady with thick legs, he fell on the floor and writhed with an imagined attack of the disease. On another occasion he had a hallucination that he had seen a baby rise from the sea and clap its hands at him. But Nicolson insists that Shelley was "on the whole" sane: "After all, even...
Dull Norm. Poets, says Nicolson, seem crazy to themselves and others because they possess a "special nervous sensibility." This not only makes them extraordinarily receptive to inspiration, but the intervals between inspirations afflict them with a neurotic sense of "loneliness . . . failure and pathetic incompetence." When inspired, "almost all creative writers have at some moments of their lives been panic-stricken by the conviction that their imagination was getting the better of their reason. . . . The God visits them, not amicably, but in a flash of flame and fire." In Shakespeare's phrase: "Such tricks hath strong imagination...
Castlereagh's power-balancing, which looked so evil to so many of his contemporaries, to Author Nicolson now looks like the path of wisdom. The deals of Europe's Big Three of that day brought most of Europe peace, if not necessarily a just one, for 100 years...