To the amateur dramatics of the Beat generation (who declared mental illness a myth) add the hypocrisies of neo-Marxist critics such as Paul de Man and Frantz Fanon (for the latter of whom violence was a cleansing force with a healing property), and the half-truths of anti-psychiatrists such as Félix Guattari, who hid his clinic’s use of electro-convulsive therapy to bolster his theory that schizophrenia was a disease of capitalist culture. By the summer of 1968, the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, was sponsoring events under the heading “The Value of Psychotic Experience”. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, “spinning the culture around him,” says Rosen, “into alignment with his mother’s psychosis”. As a young man, the poet Allen Ginsberg (whose Beat poem Howl, with its opening line about “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”, gives this book its title) gave permission for his mother’s lobotomy.
It will take Rosen more than 500 pages to unpick Costello and Laudor’s tragedy, but he starts with the Beats – that generation of writers who, he says, “released madness like a fox at a hunt, then rushed after – not to help or heal but to see where it led, and to feel more alive while the chase was on”. Her name was Caroline Costello and, says Rosen, she would not have been the first person to ascribe everything in Laudor’s disintegration, “from surface tremors to elliptical apocalyptic utterances, to the hidden depths of a complex soul”. But in June 1998, in the grip of yet another psychotic episode, Laudor stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death. Through what followed – debilitating schizophrenia law school national celebrity, as he publicised the plight of people living with mental illness – Laudor became something of a hero for Jonathan Rosen. This is the story of the author’s lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor: his neighbour growing up in 1970s Westchester County his rival at Yale and his role model as he abandoned a lucrative job for a life of literary struggle.
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