Shedding Light in Dark Places

French writer Henry de Montherlant once said that “happiness writes white,” suggesting that good literature is inherently the product of a troubled mind. He would know; in 1972, aged 86, one of France’s prolific and celebrated novelists and playwrights committed suicide by taking cyanide and shooting himself through the head. His thesis has ample evidence to support it: Shelley, Brönté, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Salinger, Plath, Thompson – the list is endless.

Yet given the degree to which it is examined and documented, depression is still foreign and incomprehensible to the average person. Despite most stereotypes and taboos having been broken down by scientific and social advances, it is something suffered alone.

This is perhaps why, when expressed in literature, mental illness has a voyeuristic quality – more than sex, crime, death or violence, reading madness feels like an intrusion.

What must have Libby Purves have felt, then, as she read through the collected work of her son, Nicholas Heiney, after he took his own life in 2006 aged just 23? Heiney left behind some 35,000 words of poetry, journals and essays, which writer and Radio 4 broadcaster Purves collected and faithfully reproduced, copying out his words at the start of every day in the months following his death as a form of catharsis and grieving. Fearing the interference of a commercial publishing house, Purves and her husband, Paul Heiney, released the collection themselves – a slim volume entitled The Silence at Song’s End, after a line from one of its poems.

The work was a critically acclaimed independent publishing phenomenon, selling thousands of copies out of Purves’ and Heiney’s garage; more than that, however, it is a portrait of depression which helps close the gap between those untouched by the illness and its lonely sufferers. Purves will speak about her son’s writing and the difficult journey towards its publication on Wednesday 13 August.

Bringing a less personal but thorougly academic appraisal of depression in literature – and literature on depression - will be Lisa Appagnenesi, speaking on Sunday 17 August. The Polish-born Franco-Canadian writer and academic has, over the past year, turned her wide-ranging attentions to mental illness and its treatment. Her critically acclaimed new book Mad, Bad and Sad looks at the treatment of mentally ill women by 19th century ‘mind doctors’. Given the celebrated polymath’s past forays into the topic of madnesses – The Dead of Winter looked at sexual obsession and violence against women, Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir dealt with the psychology of grief, and Sanctuary centered on the difficulties of psychoanalysis – her talk should cast the net far more widely.