And yet, even here, there was a single and striking exception, at once his most prodigious, most personal, and most pious deed of memory. He knew by heart Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the immense nine-volume edition published in 1954— indeed he was a ‘walking Grove’. His father was ageing and somewhat ailing by then, could no longer sing actively, but spent most of his time at home, playing his great collection of vocal records on the phonograph, going through and singing all his scores— which he did with his now thirty-year-old son (in the closest and most affectionate communion of their lives), and reading aloud Grove’s dictionary—all six thousand pages of it—which, as he read, was indelibly printed upon his son’s limitlessly retentive, if illiterate, cortex. Grove, thereafter, was ‘heard’ in his father’s voice— and could never be recollected by him without emotion.
Such prodigious hypertrophies of eidetic memory, especially if employed or exploited ‘professionally’, sometimes seem to oust the real self, or to compete with it, and impede its development. And if there is no depth, no feeling, there is also no pain in such memories—and so they can serve as an ‘escape’ from reality. This clearly occurred, to a great extent, in Luria’s Mnemonist, and is poignantly described in the last chapter of his book. It obviously occurred, to some extent, in Martin A., Jose, and the Twins but was also, in each case, used for reality, even ‘super-reality’—an exceptional, intense, and mystical sense of the world . . .
Eidetics apart, what of his world generally? It was, in many respects, small, petty, nasty, and dark—the world of a retardate who had been teased and left out as a child, and then hired and fired, contemptuously, from menial jobs, as a man: the world of someone who had rarely felt himself, or felt regarded as, a proper child or man.
He was often childish, sometimes spiteful, and prone to sudden tantrums—and the language he then used was that of a child. ‘I’ll throw a mudpie in your face!’ I once heard him scream, and, occasionally, he spat or struck out. He sniffed, he was dirty, he blew snot on his sleeve—he had the look (and doubtless the feelings) at such times of a small, snotty child. These childish characteristics, topped off by his irritating, eidetic showing off, endeared him to nobody. He soon became unpopular in the Home, and found himself shunned by many of the residents. A crisis was developing, with Martin regressing weekly and daily, and nobody was quite sure, at first, what to do. It was at first put down to ‘adjustment difficulties’, such as all patients may experience on giving up independent living outside, and coming into a ‘Home’. But Sister felt there was something more specific at work—‘something gnawing him, a sort of hunger, a gnawing hunger we can’t assuage. It’s destroying him,’ she continued. ‘We have to do something.’
So, in January, for the second time, I went to see Martin—and found a very different man: no longer cocky, showing off, as before, but obviously pining, in spiritual and a sort of physical pain.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What is the matter?’
‘I’ve got to sing,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I can’t live without it. And it’s not just music—I can’t pray without it.’ And then, suddenly, with a flash of his old memory: ‘“Music, to Bach, was the apparatus of worship”, Grove article on Bach, page 304 . . . I’ve never spent a Sunday,’ he continued, more gently, reflectively, ‘without going to church, without singing in the choir. I first went there, with my father, when I was old enough to walk, and I continued going after his death in 1955. I’ve got to go,’ he said fiercely. ‘It’ll kill me if I don’t.’
‘And go you shall,’ I said. ‘We didn’t know what you were missing.’
The church was not far from the Home, and Martin was welcomed back—not only as a faithful member of the congregation and the choir, but as the brains and adviser of the choir that his father had been before him.
With this, life suddenly and dramatically changed. Martin had resumed his proper place, as he felt it. He could sing, he could worship, in Bach’s music, every Sunday, and also enjoy the quiet authority that was accorded him.
‘You see,’ he told me, on my next visit, without cockiness, but as a simple matter of fact, ‘they know I know all Bach’s liturgical and choral music. I know all the church cantatas—all 202 that Grove lists—and which Sundays and Holy Days they should be sung on. We are the only church in the diocese with a real orchestra and choir, the only one where all of Bach’s vocal works are regularly sung. We do a cantata every Sunday—and we are going to do the Matthew Passion this Easter!’
I thought it curious and moving that Martin, a retardate, should have this great passion for Bach. Bach seemed so intellectual— and Martin was a simpleton. What I did not realise, until I started bringing in cassettes of the cantatas, and once of the Magnificat, when I visited, was that for all his intellectual limitations Martin’s musical intelligence was fully up to appreciating much of the technical complexity of Bach; but, more than this—that it wasn’t a question of intelligence at all. Bach lived for him, and he lived in Bach.
Martin did, indeed, have ‘freak’ musical abilities—but they were only freak-like if removed from their right and natural context.
What was central to Martin, as it had been central for his father, and what had been intimately shared between them, was always the spirit of music, especially religious music, and of the voice as the divine instrument made and ordained to sing, to raise itself in jubilation and praise.
Martin became a different man, then, when he returned to song and church—recovered himself, recollected himself, became real again. The pseudo-persons—the stigmatised retardate, the snotty, spitting boy—disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, impersonal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents.
But the marvel, the real marvel, was to see Martin when he was actually singing, or in communion with music—listening with an intentness which verged on rapture—‘a man in his wholeness wholly attending’. At such times—it was the same with Rebecca when she acted, or Jose when he drew, or the Twins in their strange numerical communion—Martin was, in a word, transformed. All that was defective or pathological fell away, and one saw only absorption and animation, wholeness and health.
When I wrote this piece, and the two succeeding ones, I wrote solely out of my own experience, with almost no knowledge of the literature on the subject, indeed with no knowledge that there was a large literature (see, for example, the fifty-two references in Lewis Hill, 1974). I only got an inkling of it, often baffling and intriguing, after ‘The Twins’ was first published, when I found myself inundated with letters and offprints.
In particular, my attention was drawn to a beautiful and detailed case-study by David Viscott (1970). There are many similarities between Martin and his patient Harriet G. In both cases there were extraordinary powers—which were sometimes used in an ‘a-centric’ or life-denying way, sometimes in a life-affirming and creative way: thus, after her father had read it to her, Harriet retained the first three pages of the Boston Telephone Directory (‘and for several years could give any number on these pages on request’); but, in a wholly different, and strikingly creative, mode she could compose, and improvise, in the style of any composer.