In retrospect, it’s said sometimes that people will suddenly... that schizophrenia may present rather suddenly in someone who has been almost ostentatiously normal – friendly, gregarious, open, and then... and then they change.
Others, like Michael, have been dreamy, and perhaps a little withdrawn, and the term schizoid is used from the start. Though... though Michael was very widely read, an aunt of mine left her entire library to Michael, and to leave one’s entire library to a 15-year-old, you know, implies how... how deeply she thought of him. Michael had… went through… had a lifetime of all the medical treatments. In the 1940s, there was an insulin coma, hideous thing, you are rendered unconscious. I’m not sure that this is too good for the brain. When tranquilisers came out, thorazine, or it was called largactil in England, Michael was started on this in the early '50s, he spent a life on these things, in and out of mental hospitals, although at the same time able to hold a job, a modest job. He was a messenger and would take messages and parcels from one firm to another, although I think the very word, messenger, somehow became for him, to use the title of Galileo’s book, ‘the celestial messenger’.
Michael, as a teenager, he felt that he was the Messiah, and there were very grandiose feelings, but he also felt that he was a… always felt that he was a doomed man, and the darling of a flagellomaniac god. This was a phrase he used. Sometimes he said, 'a sadistic providence'. I think these phrases had something to do with a sadistic headmaster in Brafield who had beaten us both; the sadistic, and indeed, flagellomaniac headmaster. Michael was deeply, deeply masochistic, but he was absolutely reliable when he worked, and he had a prodigious memory, much more than mine. I think he knew Gibbons’ Decline and Fall by heart. He knew Oliver Twist by heart. Sometimes I think a single reading would... would suffice for him. But, he never had a home of his own, he never acquired social skills, he never really had much contact beyond the narrow circle of family and work, and he died about five years ago. But especially I think, since his death, I mean, I think he had a miserable, impoverished life, although whether one human being should ever say that of another, I don’t know. Who knows what rich compensations there might have been in fantasy, though I am inclined to think that feeling you’re the Messiah or feeling you’re God, and these grandiose compensations, are... are just the clothing of despair.
