In My Blood

John Sedgwick

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061745065
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Biographies historiques

While working on his second novel, John Sedgwick spiraled into a depression so profound that it very nearly resulted in suicide. An author acclaimed for his intimate literary excursions into the rarified, moneyed enclave of Brahmin Boston, he decided to search for the roots of his malaise in the history of his own storied family—one of America's oldest and most notable. Following a bloodline that travels from Theodore Sedgwick, compatriot of George Washington and John Adams, to Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol's tragic muse, John Sedgwick's very personal journey of self-discovery became something far greater: a spellbinding study of the evolution of an extraordinary American family.

PART ONE

PRELIMINARIES

ONE

MY FALL

In the fall of the millennial year of 2000, my fall, I was up on the third floor of my house, and I was pacing like a wild man, each step a drumbeat that pounded inside my skull. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” I chanted over and over. Each time I’d stress a different word, as if these were lines from some demonic Dr. Seuss poem, but the meaning was the same: I can’t go on like this. Not the way I’m feeling. I was pouring sweat; my pulse thudded in my ears. My eyes jumped from the pine floor to the white wall to the open door to the window. Seeing, but not taking in. The room, the world, was senseless to me; it had no form, no order, certainly no purpose. It seemed alien, frightening, just as I did. I was a stranger to myself, a crazed weirdo who’d leapt into my clothes, taken over my body, seized my brain.

At that point, I’d gone three weeks without a solid night’s sleep, but I was more wired than exhausted. I might have been a jungle warrior, ready to jump at the sound of a twig snapping. I’d stopped eating, pretty much, since I’d decided I wasn’t worth food. In the mirror I could almost see my eye sockets hollowing, as if, any minute, my bones might burst through the skin. Thoughts hurtled through my head like meteors, burning out before I could quite track them.

“I can’t do this. I can’t…”

I’d been toying with death for a while by then, almost daring myself to take a suicidal plunge. To feel nothing—feel nothing forever. I craved that. In my scarce moments of calm contemplation, I pondered various ways of bringing about my own demise. It was a comfort, like the prospect of a cool drink on a broiling hot day. Hanging myself, blowing my brains out—such acts seemed not at all ghoulish.

Most of all I wanted to take a long fall from a high place. I’d always had a fear of heights, but I started to think that was actually an attraction. A few days before, I’d stood by the bannister on the second floor, lifted a foot onto the railing, and hopped up a little, to see what it might be like to hurtle downward to the first floor like Primo Levi. It wasn’t much of a drop from there, barely a dozen feet, and I’d probably have crashed down onto the front hall table without much harm. But now, on the third floor, as I paced about the room, I kept returning to the window. From there, it was a long way down, a good forty feet to a concrete walkway. Such a plunge seemed so right. I was falling, so I should fall.

I reached for the window, flipped the latch.

THE PROXIMATE CAUSE, as the lawyers say, was the two Ambien sleeping pills I’d taken the night before. I was desperate for sleep, but the bed was hell for me. As I lay there, I felt a prickling heat all over me, as if my body were being licked all over by infernal flames. Breathe deep, just breathe deep, my wife, Megan, sleepily counseled, having conquered insomnia this way during her two pregnancies. But I spent most nights twisting about in agony, trying to find a spot of coolness on the rumpled, sweat-soaked sheets on my side of the bed. I got good at judging the time by the shade of gray on the ceiling, the rate of the cars passing by the street out front.

My brother, Rob, no stranger to sleep troubles as a harried New York lawyer, recommended the Ambien to me as if it were a hot stock. “No side effects,” he assured me. “Every lawyer I know is on it.”

“Including you?” I asked.

“Of course!” He gave a throaty chuckle.

He’s my older brother. Tall and energetic, he’s almost invariably cheerful, and he made the pills seem cheerful, too.

I scored an Ambien prescription through a doctor friend. In retrospect, she should probably have asked me a few more questions, but at the time I was really glad she didn’t, since I didn’t have many good answers. I hurried off to the pharmacy like a junkie, sure that happy, sleep-filled nights were soon to be mine.

That night, I moved upstairs to the guest bedroom on the third floor, since I didn’t want to disturb Megan any more with my writhing.

I took the pill, then lay back on the bed, eager for the letting-go. But the pill didn’t give me the milky calm I’d expected; if anything it made me feel alert, as if I should be doing quadratic equations, composing Elizabethan sonnets, inventorying my sins. So I took another, which set my thoughts racing even faster; I felt my heart rate rise. I didn’t take another. Sleep, even the notion of it, fled. I didn’t close my eyes the whole night, just lay there staring in terror at the ceiling until morning. Then I got up and went nuts.

AS I SAY, the Ambien was the proximate cause. But there were others. I’d recently placed my mother in a locked ward at McLean Hospital for her fourth hospitalization for major depression, a disease that she’d been fighting since college. Always a tender person, she’d become increasingly frail with age, both emotionally and physically. After my father’s death in 1976, she’d had trouble adjusting to the solitude, the exposure, that had come once her big bear of a husband was no longer around to protect her.

It was during hospitalization number three that I’d had the bright idea of writing a novel about her. Not her exactly, but someone like her, an elderly Bostonian patient, proud but broken, at an old-line mental hospital that, like McLean, had seen better days. The thought came to me in a rush as I sat with her in a dingy office while a psychiatric nurse did a brisk intake exam, asking about her mental history. As my mother haltingly answered the questions, her eyes going everywhere except to the woman’s face, my mind flitted off like a little bird, perching somewhere above me to take in this miserable scene from a safe remove, where it all seemed rather interesting, and not at all as dismal as it actually felt.

In a fit of magical thinking, I imagined my fiction might cure her. Once I plunged into the novel, though, I found it difficult to cure even the woman in the book. The fictional psychiatric resident to whom I’d entrusted her care was exhausting herself in her patient’s ser vice—just as I was in my mother’s—and, again like me, she was becoming overly identified. Progress on the book faltered as I began to feel overwhelmed by what I had undertaken both in literature and in life. Then, in the pivotal summer of 2000, my mother collapsed again, breaking up into the shards of worry that I myself was coming to know only too well. And she returned to the place where my story had started, to McLean.

As it happened, the previous novel, my first, had come out just three days before. A psychological thriller, it was itself a crazy sort of book—I can see that now—about a man who likes to follow people in his car. It was supposed to take me to a literary height that I imagined was my destiny, my proper place. I come from a line of writers, after all. My grandfather Henry Dwight Sedgwick, a dapper man who wore knickers until his death at ninety-five, wrote a shelfful of learned biographies of historical figures like the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés, and George Sand’s lover, the poet Alfred de Musset. Henry’s more robust brother Ellery Sedgwick had owned and edited the Atlantic Monthly for three decades. And there were many others, going back generations to the country’s first prominent female novelist, the sensitive and autocratic Catharine Maria Sedgwick, four of whose books are still in print. Every Sedgwick, it appeared, had his novel, or hers. Sometimes intimidated, sometimes bored, I’d never been able to get through a single one of them, but, enshrined in bookcases at Sedgwick houses throughout the country—whether it be in my half brother Harry Sedgwick’s brownstone on the Upper East Side, my late avuncular cousin Cabot Sedgwick’s sprawling ranch in Arizona, my cousin Tod Sedgwick’s manse in Georgetown, or the Pomona, California, ranch house of my distant cousin Dennis Sedgwick, the faithful caretaker of a Web site devoted to family lore and genealogy—they seemed to set a certain imposing standard.

For generations, Sedgwicks had commanded the nation’s attention. Our family’s founder, the imperious Theodore Sedgwick, had served in the House of Representatives in Washington’s presidency, and rose to Speaker in John Adams’s; his grandson befriended Tocqueville, argued the Amistad case. More recently, my tragic cousin Edie was the sixties It girl before she crashed, and my niece Kyra is a gifted actor married to Kevin Bacon, a fellow movie star.

All in all, it gave me a need to measure up. Up, that was the whole idea. Height was what mattered. Elevation.

The truth was, I both knew these ancestors, and didn’t. For the most part, the dead ones were merely “back there.” Occasionally an exotic figure from the past, like my jovial cousin Shan, a former New York Times war correspondent, would flit into my presence and, with a lot of wild gestures, tell stories that lit up the image of these Sedgwicks of yore. But mostly they seemed to exist in some dim mausoleum of family memory, a place lit by flickering votary candles, where only the truly devout would ever visit.

But in that millennial year, I’d turned forty-six, tipping toward fifty, itself a kind of continental divide between youth, and—God, what? And I’d started to brood a bit about my losses. I’d married early, at twenty-six, had two delightful daughters, a thriving writing career, a big house in the leafy Boston suburb of Newton. I was a squash fanatic, full of health, had plenty of friends. There was nothing seriously wrong with this picture.

Yet I had reached the age my mother was when I first began to know her. She was forty when I was born, the last of her three children. My father had been fifty-five, and died when I was a senior in college. And in the months before my fall, I found myself glancing backward more, wondering about life from their perspective. Ruminating. Little things would catch me up. I found my father’s old double-edged razor on a remote shelf in the family summer house in New Hampshire. When I held it in my hand, I was surprised by its heft, its age. I thought of his scratchy cheek when he kissed me—on the mouth, well into my teens—me on tiptoe, craning my neck upward as he leaned down. And his whole elaborate morning ritual, standing before the mirror, slathering hair tonic onto twin hair brushes, then sweeping his hair back on either side, with two hands. Prowling in a closet, I found the double-breasted Groton School blazer he had always worn so proudly at Sunday lunch, like the emblazoned armor of a knight. It hung limp off a wire hanger now, powdered with mildew, nibbled by moths. It all seemed so long ago.

OTHER CALAMITIES PILED up that fall. I’d overinvested an inheritance I’d received from my father in the Nasdaq stocks that were all the rage—frenzies that he, as an investment adviser, would have scrupulously avoided. It felt as if large chunks of my body were being cut out of me as they plummeted. Our older daughter, Sara, a high school soccer star, was coming off a year lost to knee surgery; when she went down hard again during one of her first games back, I watched, stricken. The injury proved to be only a nasty ankle sprain, but I took it like a spear in my chest. In a rare dream from this period, I was standing in a swamp when, below me in the murk, an alligator sliced my legs off just below the knee.

Pinpricks started at the back of my neck, spread across my shoulders, and then slithered down my arms. Mail piled up. Phone calls went unreturned. Bills went unpaid. I lost eight, ten, twelve pounds. My pants started hanging off me; there was no hole on my belt tight enough. I couldn’t concentrate on anything—couldn’t read a book, barely glanced at the newspaper. Exercise became a strain, conversation a chore, sex out of the question. And as the insomnia deepened, I developed nervous tics—a regular shudder under my left eye, a quivering on the left side of my neck. I thought increasingly, obsessively, about heights, about falling, being brought low. I could almost hear the wind whistling in my ears as I plunged.

It was in this state that I took the Ambien. And that’s what brought me to the window. I unlocked it, drew my hand back, and stared down at the ground below: the grass that was starting to fade as winter came on, the rock garden where a few hardy chrysanthemums still bloomed. In his memoir of depression, William Styron tells of a moment when hearing a bit of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, with its many childhood associations, saved him from doing himself in. I didn’t hear any music; the room was silent except for my breathing. Still, I did not raise the sash, draw up the screen, hurl myself out. A failure of will, I guess. Or was it a triumph?

Instead, I called the psychologist I had been consulting intermittently, and he referred me to a psychopharmacologist, whom I saw that afternoon. She made the diagnosis: I was suffering from a depression that, while “major,” was not “severe.” I think the difference was that I was able to haul myself to her office. And she offered me a cure, putting me on Prozac. For now, I will skip over the details of my months as yet another citizen of Prozac nation, except to say that the cheery little pills worked possibly too well.

COMMON AS DEPRESSION is, I felt mine was custom-made—it seemed to exaggerate the me-ness of me. But at moments it hinted at something beyond me, too, something vast and timeless. I first perceived it as a kind of augury late in the pivotal summer of 2000, after I put my mother in McLean but still some weeks before I started to fall apart. My wife, two daughters, and I were at the family farmhouse in New Hampshire. When the first cool gusts of autumn pushed through the trees, I found myself unusually sensitive to the swirls of chilly air as they tossed the reddening maple leaves and spread cattails across the cooling water of the pond. As if by primitive glands I had never been aware of possessing before, I sensed active menace in those icy gusts of wind. Sure enough, as the fall deepened, the days shortened, the light dimmed, the leaves flared and fell, and the warm summer gave way to what seemed like endless cold, gray drizzle, my inner weather turned bleak, too.

That was the start of it, and, oddly, that is the part of it that stays with me most sharply, the dividing line between before and after, then and now. It was a wind that had been pushing through my world for a long time, but I had never noticed.

IT TOOK ME nearly a year before I felt like myself again after the depression, and then, when the new novel I’d struggled with so mightily came out, I felt a kind of echo of it once more. Since then, with the aid of a Jungian therapist, I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about my fall, its causes and meaning. No doubt it expressed a kind of mourning, just as Freud would suppose, in my case mourning for the death not of a corporeal person, but of the person I’d hoped to become, the stunning success, the one who could stand confidently with the ancestors whose exploits, while mysterious to me, still hung over my head, the one who was worthy of my father’s pride.

But I kept returning to those swirling gusts of chilly air.

A year after my fall, my half brother Harry Sedgwick—now in his seventies, a full generation older than me, but still remarkably youthful—called to say that he was coming down with what I’d had. I could hear it in his voice, which had sunk into a deep bass, and the words came very slowly. He, too, had suffered a blow to his self-esteem. A “private venture capitalist,” as he called himself, he’d been searching for a big hit since he’d backed an invention called Trig-a-tape for marking the price on grocery items in the 1960s, and now, with a recession deepening, the economic times seemed against him. “Well,” he said sadly, his voice gravelly. “I think we’ve got the family disease.”

He’d been speaking to a psychiatrist who’d been astounded by the high incidence of mood disorders in his pedigree. At that point, I’d thought of any genetic defect in a far more limited way, as something that had come down through my mother, whose father before her had been almost morbidly depressed.

“From the Sedgwick side?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. God!” And he started to tick off the names. “Think of Edie.” She’d died of a heroin overdose. “And Bobby, Minty.” Her brothers, both suicides. “And Fuzzy.” My father’s brother...