The Fayetteville, North Carolina, Observer of May 19, 1862, contained an unusual letter from its correspondent Long Grabs, stationed in Camp Mangum:
We learn more of Blind Tom from Edward Seguin, a French physician whose 1866 book “Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Psychological Method” contained many penetrating descriptions of individuals later to be termed “idiot savants”; and from an intellectual descendant of Seguin, Darold Treffert, whose book “Extraordinary People: Understanding ‘Idiot Savants’ ” was published in 1989. Born nearly blind, the fourteenth child of a slave, sold to a Colonel Bethune, Tom was, from infancy, Treffert writes, “fascinated by sounds of all sorts—rain on the roof, the grating of corn in the sheller, but most of all music—Tom would listen intensely to the colonel’s daughters practicing their sonatas and minuets on the piano.”
“Till five or six years old,” Seguin writes, “he could not speak, scarce walk, and gave no other sign of intelligence than this everlasting thirst for music. At four years already, if taken out from the corner where he lay dejected, and seated at the piano, he would play beautiful tunes; his little hands having already taken possession of the keys, and his wonderful ear of any combination of notes they had once heard.” At the age of six, Tom started to improvise. Word of the “blind genius” spread, and at seven Tom gave his first concert—and went on to earn a hundred thousand dollars in his eighth year. At eleven, he played before President Buchanan at the White House. A panel of musicians, who thought that he had tricked the President, tested his memory the following day, playing two entirely new compositions to him, thirteen and twenty pages in length; he reproduced them perfectly, and without the least apparent effort.
Seguin, describing Tom listening to a new piece, adds further tantalizing details in regard to his expressions, postures, and movements:
Although Tom was usually called an idiot or imbecile, such posturing and stereotypies are more characteristic of autism—but autism was identified only in the nineteen-forties, and was not a term, or even a concept, in the eighteen-sixties.
Such singular talents, usually emerging at a very early age and developing with startling speed, in minds or personalities otherwise deeply defective, appear in about ten per cent of the autistic (and in a smaller number of the retarded, though many savants are both autistic and retarded).
Prodigious calculators attracted attention in the eighteenth century; Jedediah Buxton, a simpleminded laborer, had perhaps the most tenacious memory of these. When asked what would be the cost of shoeing a horse with a hundred and forty nails if the price was one farthing for the first nail, then doubled for each remaining nail, he arrived at the (nearly correct) figure of 725, 958, 096, 074, 907, 868, 531, 656, 993, 638, 851,106 pounds, two shillings, and eight pence. When he was then asked to square this number (that is, 2139 squared), he came up with (after two and a half months) a seventy-eight-digit answer. Though some of Buxton’s calculations took weeks or months, he was able to work, to hold conversations—to live his life normally—while doing them. The prodigious calculations proceeded almost automatically, throwing their results into consciousness only when completed.
Child prodigies, of course, are not necessarily retarded or autistic. There have been itinerant calculators of normal intelligence as well. One such was George Parker Bidder, who as a child and youth gave exhibitions in England and Scotland. He could mentally determine the logarithm of any number to seven or eight places, and, apparently intuitively, divine the factors for any large number. Bidder retained his powers throughout his life (and, indeed, made great use of them in his profession as an engineer) and often tried to delineate the procedures by which he calculated. In this, however, he was unsuccessful; he could say of his results only that “they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning” in his mind, but that their actual operations were largely inaccessible to him.
Some savants have astonishing verbal powers—the last thing one might expect in intellectually defective individuals. Thus, there are savants who are able, by the age of two, to read books and newspapers with the utmost facility but without the least comprehension. (Their expertise, their decoding, is wholly phonological and syntactic, without any sense of meaning.)
Almost all savants have prodigious powers of memory. Dr. J. Langdon Down, one of the greatest observers in this realm, who coined the term “idiot savant” in 1887, remarked that “extraordinary memory was often associated with very great defect of reasoning power.” He describes giving one of his patients Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” The patient read the entire book, and in a single reading imprinted it in memory. But he had skipped a line on one page, an error at once detected and corrected. “Ever after,” Down tells us, “when reciting from memory the stately periods of Gibbon, he would, on coming to the third page, skip the line and go back and correct the error with as much regularity as if it had been part of the regular text.” Martin A., a savant I wrote about in “A Walking Grove,” could recall the entire nine volumes of the 1954 Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. This had been read to him by his father, and the text would be “replayed” in his father’s voice.
While early medical observers sometimes conceived of savant skills as the overdevelopment of a single mental faculty, few of them felt that savant talents were of much more than anecdotal interest. But in the nineteen-forties, when autism was first delineated, it became evident that the majority of “idiot savants” were in fact autistic, and that the incidence of savantism in the autistic was almost two hundred times its incidence in the retarded population, and thousands of times that in the population at large. Furthermore, it became clear that many autistic savants had multiple talents—musical, mnemonic, visual-graphic, computational, etc.
In 1977, the psychologist Lorna Selfe published “Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child.” Nadia suddenly started drawing at the age of three and a half, rendering horses and, later, a variety of other subjects in a way that psychologists considered “not possible.” Her drawings, they felt, were qualitatively different from those of other children: she had a sense of space, an ability to depict appearances and shadows, a sense of perspective, such as the most gifted normal child might develop only at three times her age. She experimented constantly with different angles and perspectives. Whereas normal children go through a developmental sequence from random scribbling to schematic and geometric figures to “tadpole” figures, Nadia seemed to bypass these and to move at once into highly recognizable, detailed representational drawings. The development of drawing in children, it was felt at the time, paralleled the development of conceptual powers and language skills; but Nadia, it seemed, just drew what she saw, without the usual need to “understand” or “interpret” it. She not only showed enormous graphic gifts, an unprecedented precocity, but drew in a way that attested to a wholly different mode of perception and mind.
The case of Nadia aroused great excitement in the neurological and psychological communities, and suddenly focussed a belated attention on savant talents, and on the nature of talents and special abilities in general. Where, for a century or more, neurologists had confined their attention to failures and breakdowns of neural function, there was now a move in the other direction—toward exploring the structure of heightened powers, of talents, and their biological basis in the brain. Here “idiot savants” provided unique opportunities, for they seemed to exhibit a large range of inborn talents: raw, pure expressions of the biological—much less dependent upon or influenced by environmental and cultural factors than the talents of “normal” people.
In June of 1987, I received a large packet from a publisher in England. It was full of drawings—drawings that delighted me greatly, because they portrayed many of the landmarks I had grown up with in London: monumental buildings like St. Paul’s, St. Pancras Station, the Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum; and others, odd, sometimes out-of-the-way, but dear and familiar places, like the Pagoda in Kew Gardens. They were very accurate, but not in the least mechanical—on the contrary, they were full of energy, spontaneity, oddity, life.
In the packet, I discovered a letter from the publisher: The artist, Stephen Wiltshire, was autistic, and had shown savant abilities from an early age. His “London Alphabet,” a sequence of twenty-six drawings, had been done when he was ten; an amazing elevator shaft, with a vertiginous perspective, when he was eight. One drawing was an imagined scene—of St. Paul’s surrounded by flames in the Great Fire of London. Stephen was not merely a savant but a prodigy. Sixty of his drawings, a mere fraction of what he had done, were to be published, the letter informed me; the author was not yet thirteen.
Stephen’s drawings reminded me, in many ways, of drawings by my patient José—“The Autist Artist” whom I had known and written about, years before—who had an extraordinary eye and gift for drawing. Though José and Stephen came from such different backgrounds, the similarity of their drawings was so uncanny as to make me wonder whether there might not be a distinctive “autistic” form of perception and art. But José, despite his fine gifts (not, perhaps, as great as Stephen’s, but quite remarkable nonetheless), was wasting away in a state psychiatric hospital; Stephen had somehow been luckier.
A few weeks later, visiting family and friends in England, I mentioned Stephen and his drawings to my brother, David, a general practitioner in northwest London. “Stephen Wiltshire!” he exclaimed, very startled. “He’s a patient of mine—I’ve known Stephen since he was three.”
David told me something of Stephen’s background. He was born in London in April of 1974, the second child of a West Indian transit worker and his wife. Unlike his sister, Annette, born two years earlier, Stephen showed some delay in the motor landmarks of infant life—sitting, standing, hand control, walking—and a resistance to being held. In his second and third years, more problems appeared. He would not play with other children, and tended to scream, or hide in a corner, if they approached. He would not make eye contact with his parents or anyone else. Sometimes he seemed deaf to people’s voices, though his hearing was normal (and thunder terrified him). Perhaps most disquieting, he did not use language; he was virtually mute.
Just before Stephen’s third birthday, his father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Stephen had been strongly attached to him, and after his death grew much more disturbed. He started screaming, rocking, and flapping his hands, and lost what little language he had. At this point, the diagnosis of infantile autism had been made, and arrangements for him to attend Queensmill, a special school for developmentally disabled children. Lorraine Cole, the headmistress at Queensmill, observed that Stephen was very remote when he started school, at the age of four. He seemed unaware of other people, and showed no interest in his surroundings. He would simply wander about aimlessly, or occasionally run out of the room. As Cole writes:
She later wrote to me, “Stephen would climb onto a play-bike, pedal it furiously, then hurl himself off it, roaring with laughter, and sometimes screaming.”
Yet at this point the first evidence of his visual preoccupation, and talent, appeared. He seemed fascinated by shadows, shapes, angles, and by the age of five he was fascinated by pictures, too. He would make “sudden dashes to other rooms where he would stare intently at pictures which fascinated him,” Cole writes. He would “find paper and pencil and scribble, totally absorbed for long periods.”
Stephen’s “scribblings” were largely of cars, and occasionally of animals and people. Lorraine Cole speaks of his doing “wickedly clever caricatures” of some of the teachers. But his special interest—his fixation, which developed when he was seven—was the drawing of buildings: buildings in London he had seen on school trips, or on television or in magazines. Why he developed this sudden, special interest and preoccupation, so powerful and exclusive that he now had no impulse to draw anything else, is not wholly clear, though fixations are exceedingly common in autistic people. Jessy Park, an autistic artist, is obsessed with weather anomalies and constellations in the night sky; Shyoichiro Yamamura, an autistic artist in Japan, drew insects almost exclusively; and Jonny, an autistic boy described by the pioneer psychologist Mira Rothenberg, for a period drew only electric lamps. Stephen, from this early age, had been almost exclusively preoccupied with buildings—buildings, by preference, of great complexity and size—and with aerial views and extremities of perspective. He had one other interest at the age of seven: he was fascinated by sudden calamities—and, above all, by earthquakes. Whenever Stephen drew these, or saw them on television or in magazines, he grew strangely excited and overwrought; nothing else disturbed him in quite this way. One wonders whether his earthquake obsession (like the apocalyptic fantasies of some psychotics) represented a sense of his own inner instability, which in drawing he could try to master.
When Chris Marris, a young teacher, came to Queensmill in 1982, he was astonished by Stephen’s drawings. Marris had been teaching disabled children for nine years, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for Stephen. “I was amazed by this little boy, who sat on his own in a corner of the room, drawing,” he told me. “Stephen used to draw and draw and draw and draw—the school called him ‘the drawer.’ And they were the most unchildlike drawings—like St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge and other London landmarks, in tremendous detail, when other children his age were just drawing stick figures. It was the sophistication of his drawings, their mastery of line and perspective, that amazed me—and these were all there when he was seven.”
Stephen was one of a group of six in Chris’s class. “He knew the names of all the others,” Chris told me, “but there was no sense of interaction or friendship with them. He was such an isolated little chap.” But his native gift was so great, Chris felt, that he did not need to be “taught,” in the ordinary way. He had apparently worked out by himself, or had an innate grasp of, drawing techniques and perspective. Along with this, he showed a prodigious visual memory, able to take in the most complex buildings, or cityscapes, in a few seconds, and to hold them in mind, in the minutest detail—indefinitely, it seemed, and without the least apparent effort. Nor did the details need to be coherent, to be integrated into a conventional structure; among the most startling early drawings, Chris felt, were ones of demolition sites, and earthquake scenes, with girders lying everywhere, exploded in all directions, everything in complete, almost random disarray. Yet Stephen remembered these scenes and drew them with the same fidelity and ease with which he drew classical models. It seemed to make no difference whether he drew from life or from the images in his memory. He needed no aide-mémoire, no sketches or notes—a single sidelong glance, lasting only a few seconds, was enough.
Stephen also showed abilities in spheres besides the visual. He was very good at mime, even before he was able to speak. He had an excellent memory for songs and would reproduce these with great accuracy. He could copy any movement to perfection. Thus Stephen, at eight, showed an ability to grasp, retain, and reproduce the most complex visual, auditory, motor, and verbal patterns, apparently irrespective of their context, significance, or meaning.
It is characteristic of the savant memory (in whatever sphere—visual, musical, lexical) that it is prodigiously retentive of particulars. The large and the small, the trivial and the momentous, may be indifferently mixed, without any sense of salience, of foreground versus background. There is little disposition to generalize from these particulars or to integrate them with each other, causally or historically, or with the self. In such a memory, there tends to be an immovable connection of scene and time, of content and context (a so-called concrete-situational, or episodic, memory)—hence the astounding powers of literal recall so common in autistic savants, along with difficulty in extracting the salient features from these particular memories in order to build a general sense and memory. Thus, the savant twins, calendrical calculators whom I described in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” while able to itemize every event of their lives from about their fourth year on, had no sense of their lives, of historical change, as a whole. Such a memory structure is profoundly different from the normal and has both extraordinary strengths and extraordinary weaknesses. Jane Taylor McDonnell, author of an excellent 1993 book, “News from the Border: A Mother’s Memoir of Her Autistic Son,” says of her son, “Paul doesn’t generalize the particulars of his experience into the habitual, the ongoing, as many (most) other people do. Each moment seems to stand out distinctly, and almost unconnected with others, in his mind. So nothing seems to get lost, repressed, in the process.” So it was, I often thought, with Stephen, whose life experience seemed to consist of vivid, isolated moments, unconnected with each other or with him, and so devoid of any deeper continuity or development.
Though Stephen drew incessantly, he did not seem to take any interest in the finished drawings, and Chris might find them in the wastebasket or just left on a desk. Stephen did not even seem to concentrate on his subject while he was drawing. “Once,” Chris related to me, “Stephen was sitting opposite the Albert Memorial: he was doing a fabulous picture of that, but at the same time looking all around—at buses, the Albert Hall, whatever.”
Though he did not think that Stephen needed to be “taught,” Chris devoted himself as much as possible to Stephen and his drawing, providing him with models, with encouragement. This was not always easy, because Stephen did not show much personal feeling. “In a way, he was responsive to us, the adults,” Chris told me. “He would say, ‘Hullo, Chris,’ or ‘Hullo, Jean.’ But it was difficult to reach him, to know what was in his mind.” He seemed not to understand different emotions and would laugh if one of the children had a temper tantrum or screamed. (Stephen himself rarely had tantrums at school, but when he was younger he sometimes had them at home.)
Chris was central in Stephen’s life between 1982 and 1986. He would often take Stephen, along with his class, on outings in London, to see St. Paul’s, to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, to see Tower Bridge being raised and lowered. These outings finally incited Stephen to words, in his ninth year. Travelling in the school bus, he would recognize all the buildings and places they passed, and would excitedly call out their names. (When he was six he had learned to ask for “paper” when he needed it—for many years, he had not understood how to ask for anything, even by gesture or pointing. This, therefore, was not only one of his first words, but the first time he understood how to use words to address others—the social use of language, something normally achieved by the second year of life.)
There were some fears that if Stephen began to acquire language he might lose his astounding visual gifts. But both Chris and Lorraine Cole felt that they had to do their utmost to enrich Stephen’s life, to bring him out of his wordless isolation into a world of interaction and language. They concentrated on making language more interesting, more relevant, to Stephen, by linking it with the buildings and places he loved, and getting him to draw a whole series of buildings based on letters of the alphabet (“A” for Albert Hall, “B” for Buckingham Palace, and so on).
Chris wondered if others would find Stephen’s drawings as extraordinary as he did. In 1985, he entered two of them in the National Exhibition of Children’s Art; both were exhibited, and one of them won a prize. Around this time, Chris also got an expert opinion on Stephen’s abilities from Beate Hermelin and Neil O’Connor, psychologists who were well known for their work on autistic savants. They found Stephen one of the most gifted savants they had ever tested, immensely proficient in both visual recognition and drawing from memory. On the other hand, he did rather poorly in general intelligence tests, scoring a verbal I.Q. of only 52.
Word of Stephen’s talents started to spread, and arrangements were made to film him as part of a BBC program on savants, titled “The Foolish Wise Ones.” Stephen took the filming very calmly, not at all fazed by cameras and crews—possibly even enjoying it slightly. He was asked to draw St. Pancras Station—“a very ‘Stephen’ building,” Lorraine Cole emphasized, “elaborate, detailed, and incredibly complicated.” The accuracy of his drawing is attested to by a photograph taken at the same time. (There is, however, a curious error: Stephen makes a mirror reversal of the clock and the whole top of the building.) His accuracy was astounding, as were the speed with which he drew, the economy of line, the charm and style of his drawings—it was these that won viewers’ hearts. The BBC program was shown in February of 1987 and aroused a storm of interest—letters poured in, asking where Stephen’s drawings could be seen, and publishers offered contracts. Very soon, a collection of his work, to be called simply “Drawings,” was slated for publication; and it was proofs of this that I received in June of 1987.
Stephen, only thirteen, was now famous throughout England—but as autistic, as disabled, as ever. He could draw, with the greatest ease, any street he had seen; but he could not, unaided, cross one by himself. He could see all London in his mind’s eye, but its human aspects were unintelligible to him. He could not maintain a real conversation with anyone, though, increasingly, he now showed a sort of pseudosocial conduct, talking to strangers in an indiscriminate and bizarre way.
Chris had been away for some months in Australia and returned to find his young pupil famous—but, he thought, completely unchanged. “He recognized that he’d been on TV, and that he’d had a book published, but he didn’t go overboard, as many children would have done. He wasn’t affected; he was still the Stephen I knew.” Stephen had not seemed to miss Chris too much during his absence, but seemed glad to see him back, said “Hullo, Chris!” with a big smile on his face.
None of this quite added up for me. Here was Stephen being exhibited as a significant artist—the former president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Hugh Casson, had called him “possibly the best child artist in Britain”—but Chris and others, even the most sympathetic, seemed to see him as greatly lacking in both intellect and identity. The tests that had been given to him seemed to confirm the severity of his emotional and intellectual defect. Was there, nonetheless, a mental and personal dimension, a depth and sensibility, in him which could emerge (if nowhere else) in his art? Was not art, quintessentially, an expression of a personal vision, a self? Could one be an artist without having a “self”? All these questions had been in my mind since I had first seen Stephen’s pictures, and I was eager to meet him.
The opportunity arrived in February of 1988, when Stephen came to New York, accompanied by Chris, to make another television documentary. Stephen had been in New York for a couple of days, seeing and drawing the sights of the city, and—his greatest thrill—flying over it in a helicopter. I thought he might like to see City Island, the little island off the Bronx where I live, and invited him to come to my house. He and Chris arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. Stephen was a demure, grave little black boy, though he clearly had an impish side. He looked young to me—closer to ten than thirteen—with a smallish head, tilted to one side. He reminded me somewhat of the autistic children I had seen before, with a head-nodding mannerism or tic, and some odd flapping movements of the hands. He never looked at me directly but seemed to glance at me, briefly, out of the corners of his eyes.
I asked him how he was finding New York, and he said, “Very nice,” with a strong Cockney accent. I have little recollection of his saying much else; he tended to be very quiet, almost mute. But his language had developed a good deal since the early days, and there were times, Chris said, when he would get excited and almost babble. He had been very excited on the plane—he had never flown before—and, Chris told me, “talked with the cabin crew and other passengers, showing his book around on the flight.” When Stephen was invited to sit in the jump seat for the New York landing, Chris recalled a prescient dream that Stephen had reported before they left London. “I am being the pilot of the jumbo jet,” Stephen had said. “And I can see the skyscrapers and the Manhattan skyline.”
Stephen wanted to show me his latest drawings, of New York—they were all in a portfolio Chris was carrying—and I admired them (especially the aerial ones he had done from the helicopter) as he showed them to me. He nodded emphatically as he displayed them, calling some of them “good” and “nice.” He seemed to have no sense of either vanity or modesty but showed me his drawings, commented on them, in an ingenuous way, and with a total absence of self-consciousness.
After he showed me these, I asked him if he would draw something for me, perhaps my house. He nodded, and we wandered outside. It was snowing, cold and wet, not a day to linger. Stephen bestowed a quick, indifferent look on my house—there seemed to be hardly any act of attention—glanced at the rest of the road and the sea at the end of the road, then asked to come in. As he took up his pen and started drawing, I held my breath. “Don’t worry,” Chris broke in. “You can talk at the top of your voice if you want to. It won’t make any difference—you can’t interrupt him. He could concentrate if the house were falling down.” Stephen did not make any sketch or outline, but just started at one edge of the paper (I had a feeling he might have started anywhere at all) and moved steadily across it, as if transcribing some tenacious inner image or visualization. As he was putting in the porch railings, Chris remarked, “I didn’t see any of that detail there.”
“No,” Stephen said, his expression implying “No, you wouldn’t.”
Stephen had not studied the house, had made no sketches, had not drawn it from life, but had, in a brief glance, taken everything in, extracted its essence, seen every detail, held it all in his memory, and then, in a single, swift line, drawn it. And I did not doubt that, had we let him, he could have drawn the entire street.
Stephen’s drawing was accurate in some ways but took various liberties in others: he gave my house a chimney where there was none, but omitted the three fir trees in front of the house, the picket fence around it, and the neighboring houses. He focussed on the house to the exclusion of anything else. It has often been said that savants have photographic or eidetic memories, but as I photocopied Stephen’s drawing I thought how unlike a Xerox machine he was. His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal; there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and, of course, Stephen’s unmistakable style. They were images and showed us some of the immensely complex neural processes that are needed to make a visual and graphic image. Stephen’s drawings were individual constructions, but could they be seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?
His drawings (like those of my patient José) had a closeness to the actual, a literalness and naïveté. Clara Park, the mother of an autistic artist, has called this an “unusual capacity to render the object as perceived” (not conceived). She also writes of an “unusual capacity for delayed rendition” as characteristic of savant artists; this, indeed, was very striking in Stephen.
Sir Hugh Casson wrote in his introduction to “Drawings”:
Artists are full of symbols and images seen second hand and bring to their drawings not only the conventions of representation they acquired as children but the entire history of Western art. It may be necessary to leave these behind, to leave behind even the primal category of “objecthood.” As Monet put it:
But Stephen (if Casson is right) and José, and Nadia and other savants, may not make such “deconstructions,” may not have to relinquish such constructs, because (at many levels, from the neural to the cultural) they never made them in the first place, or made them to a far smaller extent. In this way, their situation is radically different from that of the “normal”—though this does not mean that they cannot be artists, too.
I started to wonder, too, about the relationships in Stephen’s life—how important they were, to what extent they had developed in the face of his autism (and devastating early loss). His relationship with Chris Marris, perhaps the most crucial during his last five years at Queensmill, had threatened to end when, in July of 1987, Stephen had to leave Queensmill for a secondary school. For a while, Chris had arranged to continue seeing Stephen on weekends, to take him on drawing outings around London, and even on his first trips to New York and Paris. But by May, 1989, these expeditions had come to an end, and Stephen seemed to lack the initiative to do much drawing on his own. It seemed as if he needed another person to get him going, to “facilitate” his drawing. Whether he missed, or mourned, Chris in a more personal way was far less clear. When I later spoke of Chris to Stephen, he would talk about him—always as “Chris Marris” or “Mr. Marris”—in a very flat and factual way, without any apparent emotion. A normal child would be deeply distressed at the loss of someone who had been so close for many years, but no such distress was apparent in Stephen. I wondered if he was repressing painful feelings, or distancing himself from them, but I was not sure whether, in his autistic way, he had any personal emotion here at all. Christopher Gillberg writes of a fifteen-year-old autistic boy whose mother had died of cancer. Asked how he was doing, the boy replied, “Oh, I am all right. You see I have Asperger syndrome which makes me less vulnerable to the loss of loved ones than are most people.” Stephen, of course, would never have been able to articulate his inner state in this way, and yet one had to wonder whether he took the loss of Chris with some of the same flatness as Gillberg’s young patient, and whether such a flatness might not characterize most of the human relationships in his life.
Into this void irrupted Margaret Hewson. Margaret had been Stephen’s literary agent since the BBC program two years before and had developed an increasing personal and artistic interest in him. I had first met her in 1988, when, with Stephen, we roved around London on a drawing expedition. Margaret and Stephen, it was evident to me, got on very well. Stephen, though perhaps incapable at this point of any depth of feeling or caring, nevertheless showed strong instinctive responses to different people. He had taken to Margaret from the start—attracted, I think, by her enormous energy and impetus, the exhilarating, whirlwind atmosphere she seemed to create all around her; and by her obvious feeling for him and his art. Margaret seemed to know everyone and to have been everywhere, and perhaps this gave Stephen a sense of a larger world, of horizons far beyond the narrow ones that had confined his life hitherto. Margaret, finally, was very knowledgeable about art, a knowledge that extended from art history to the technical details of drawing.
In the fall of 1989, Margaret began obtaining drawing commissions for Stephen, and taking him out drawing every weekend, along with her husband and partner in the literary agency, Andrew. She instantly abolished the use of tracing paper and rulers (such as he had used for some of the drawings in his second book, “Cities,” published in 1989), and insisted he draw freehand in ink. “One can learn the value of a line only by going straight into ink and making mistakes,” she declared. Under Margaret’s impetus and guidance, Stephen started to draw regularly once again, and to draw more boldly than he had ever done. (And yet even in “Cities” there had been some extraordinary freehand improvisations—imaginary cities, which Stephen had conceived, conflating the features of several real ones.)
After a morning of travelling and drawing, they would all return to the Hewson house for lunch, where they would often be joined by the Hewsons’ daughter, Annie, only a few years older than Stephen. He seemed to look forward to these outings and would become excited on Sunday mornings, waiting for Margaret and Andrew to collect him. For their part, the Hewsons felt a real affection for Stephen, even though they were not sure he felt any actual affection for them. They started taking him on occasional longer excursions—a trip to Salisbury, and two weekends in Scotland.
Stephen’s obvious fondness for the visual effects of water—he lived near a canal in London and would sometimes walk along it with his mother or sister, and do little sketches of the boats and locks—suggested to Margaret a theme for a new book. Together, they would visit cities built around canals, “floating cities”—Venice, Amsterdam, and Leningrad—and draw these.
Late in the fall of 1989, Margaret impulsively phoned Mrs. Wiltshire and suggested that Stephen and his sister, Annette, come to Venice with them for their Christmas holiday. The trip went exceedingly well. Stephen, now fifteen, seemed to cope easily with the uncertainties of travel, which would have thrown him only a few years before. He portrayed, as Margaret had hoped he might, St. Mark’s, the Doges’ Palace, the great monuments of Venetian culture, and obviously enjoyed drawing them. But when asked what he thought of Venice, after a week in this high point of European civilization, he could only say, “I prefer Chicago” (and this not because of its buildings but its cars—Stephen had a passion for American cars and could identify, name, and draw every postwar model).
A few weeks later, plans were made for his next trip, to Amsterdam. Stephen approved of the trip for a very specific reason: he had seen photographs of the city, and said, “I prefer Amsterdam to Venice, because it has cars.” Once again, Stephen captured perfectly the feeling of the city, from his formal drawings of the Westerkerk and the Begijnhof to his tiny, charming sketch of an odd statue with a street organ. Stephen seemed very much alive, and in high humor, in Amsterdam and started to show new aspects of himself. Lorraine Cole, who came along on the trip, was particularly startled at the changes she saw:
One evening in Amsterdam, when Stephen was due to give an interview for a television show, Margaret developed a severe attack of asthma and had to stay in her hotel room. Stephen was very distressed, refused to do the TV show, and could not be budged from the end of Margaret’s bed. “I’m going to stay with you till you get better,” he declared. “You’re not going to die.”
Margaret and Andrew were very touched by this. “This was the first time we saw that he cared,” she told me.
Was it possible that Stephen was starting to show some belated personal development, in spite of his autism? Intrigued by Margaret’s report on the Amsterdam trip, I arranged to come along on the next visit—to Moscow and Leningrad, planned for May of 1990. I flew to London, met Stephen and Margaret there, and did some testing with Stephen. These tests, devised by the cognitive psychologist Uta Frith and her colleagues, Simon Baron-Cohen and Alan M. Leslie, require one to react to various cartoons, some of which relate simple sequences of events, while others cannot be understood without attributing different intentions, perspectives, beliefs, or states of mind (and sometimes dissemblings) to the characters involved. Stephen, it was clear, had a very limited ability to imagine others’ states of mind. (Frith writes that one researcher “carried out an informal survey in America using cartoons from The New Yorker. Very able and highly educated autistic people failed to understand them, or find them funny.”)
I also gave him a large jigsaw puzzle, which he put together very swiftly. I then gave him a second puzzle, this time face down, so that he did not have the picture to assist him. He did this one just as quickly as the first. The picture—the meaning, that is—was not necessary to him, it seemed; what was preëminent, and spectacular, was his ability to apprehend a large number of abstract shapes and to see in a trice how they fitted together.
Such performances are characteristic of autistic people, who also excel in tests of block design and, especially, in finding embedded figures. Thus, the psychologist Lynn Waterhouse, testing one visual savant, J.D. (who as a boy, his parents said, was able to complete a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle in about two minutes, and thereafter had to be given five-thousand-piece puzzles), found he performed “phenomenally well” on almost every visual-perception test she could give him: on tests of line orientation, visual-gestalt closure, block design, and so on, he obtained nearly perfect results, in each case performing the tests at many times the normal rate. Stephen, like J.D., had prodigious powers of abstract-pattern recognition and visual analysis. But this alone could not explain his drawing; J.D., despite his perceptual powers, was not especially gifted in drawing.
Stephen, then, was calling on another sort of power, of vivid representation—representation that created an external form for his perceptions, and that bore a very recognizable and personal style. Whether this power of representation entailed any depth of inner resonance or response remained completely unclear.
Given Stephen’s powers of abstract visual analysis, how important was “meaning” to him? How much did he get the meaning of what he drew? And how much did it matter whether he got it or not? I showed Stephen a portrait by Matisse and asked if he would draw it. (Margaret and Andrew are very fond of Matisse, and it was a print of theirs that I showed Stephen.) He drew it swiftly and confidently; it was not wholly, literally accurate, but it was very Matisse-like. When I asked him to draw it again, from memory, an hour later, he drew it differently, and, an hour after this, yet differently again; but all his drawings (he did five), while different in detail, were strikingly evocative of the original. In some sense, therefore, Stephen had extracted the drawing’s “Matisseness,” had permuted it in various ways, and had made it central in all his copies. Was this purely formal, cognitive—a matter of getting Matisse’s “style” in a formulaic way—or was he responding, at a deeper level, to Matisse’s vision, his sensibility and art?
I asked Stephen if he remembered my house, which he had visited more than two years before, and if he would draw it again for me. He nodded and again drew the house, but with various revisions. He now gave it one lower window instead of two; he removed a pillar from the porch and made the steps more prominent. He kept the (fictitious) chimney, and now he added a fictitious American flag on a tall flagstaff as well; I think he felt these to be the ingredients of a formulary “American” house. Thus, the Matisse and my house were conceived, and represented, in a variety of versions. In both cases, he got the style at once, and his later drawings were improvisations within this style.
After all this testing, I was still bewildered. Stephen seemed so defective and so gifted, simultaneously. Were his defects and his gifts totally separate, or were they, at a deeper level, integrally related? Were these qualities, like autistic literalness and concreteness, that might in some contexts be gifts, in others deficits? The tests also gave me a feeling of disquiet, as if I had spent days reducing Stephen to defects and gifts and not seeing him as a human being as a whole. I had just reread Uta Frith’s book “Autism: Explaining the Enigma” and wrote to her, “Tomorrow I go with Stephen to Russia. . . . I have seen something of his odd skills and defects—I have yet to see him as a mind and person. Perhaps a week of being with him will show me this.”
With these hopes, then, I set out with Stephen for Russia. Sitting at Gatwick Airport, waiting for our flight, I was impressed by his deep concentration. He sat enthralled with the magazine Classic Cars. He looked at the pictures with extraordinary intentness; he did not raise his head from the magazine for more than twenty minutes. Occasionally, he bent closer to inspect a detail; what he saw, I thought, would be forever imprinted on his cortex. Once in a while, he suddenly laughed. What, in this abstract exercise, excited his amusement?
In flight, Stephen immersed himself in a drawing of Balmoral, after studying a postcard of the castle. He was oblivious of the conversations going on around him, the magnificent landscapes and seascapes below.
At the Moscow airport, Stephen, very quiet, looked at the cars—yellow cabs and black Zils with license plates starting with “MK.” A hideous smell of unrefined gas hung over the airport. Stephen sniffed, and wrinkled his nose; he is extremely sensitive to smells. As we drove into the city, at 2 a.m., we saw tall, silvery birches by the side of the road, and an immense, low moon. Even Stephen gazed at the vast moonlit landscape with delight, his nose pressed against the cold window of the bus.
The next morning, as we walked around Red Square, Stephen was actively curious, taking snapshots, peering at buildings, struck by their novelty. Other people on the street turned around and stared at him; black people, apparently, were unusual in Moscow. He found a spot from which he wanted to draw the Spassky Tower, and had Margaret set his stool in precisely that place. Not there, or there, but here: passive in so many ways, he was entirely master now. In the middle of Red Square, he was a tiny figure, wearing a fur cap and navy-blue woollen gloves. Dozens of tourists swarmed around in the brilliant May sun; many of them peered at Stephen’s drawing. Stephen ignored them, or perhaps was unconscious of them, and drew on undisturbed. He hummed to himself as he drew, holding his pen, characteristically, awkwardly, childishly, between his third and fourth fingers. At one point, he broke into giggles and laughter—but this, it turned out, was because a scene from “Rain Man” kept entering his mind (“Don’t you dare drive!” he said). Margaret sat to one side as he drew, encouraging him—“Good! Clever boy!”—advising him on aesthetic points and architectural details. At her suggestion, for instance, Stephen examined the tower’s crenellation. She is almost a collaborator, in a way, and, though his talent is so personal and indigenous, he clearly looks to her for affectionate and always affirmative comments.
Later, we visited the History Museum, an eclectic red brick building, designed by an English architect. Margaret instructed Stephen, “Have a jolly good look at that building. Study it. Take in the vocabulary of that building now—I want you to draw it from memory afterward.” But what Stephen actually drew later was different from the History Museum: it bore half a dozen onion domes, not present in the original.
I first wondered whether this was a defect of memory and asked him if he would draw St. Basil’s from memory. He did a very accurate and quite charming sketch, in all of two minutes. Later in the day, he started a drawing of the vast shopping arcade at gum, which he finished at leisure over a Coke in the hotel. He had in his memory even the shop signs, which were to him unintelligible Cyrillic letters. There was no faulting his memory, clearly.
Margaret and I tried to think what had happened with the History Museum; Stephen was distracted when asked to memorize it (the militia in Red Square made him nervous) and when asked how he felt about it he would say only, “It’s all right” (which meant he did not like it). He tried to make it more attractive, I think, by crowning it with onion domes, but these were so out of keeping with the base that the resulting building looked hardly possible.
The next morning, as we met for breakfast in the hotel dining room, Stephen greeted me with a booming “Hullo, Oliver!”—shouted with great friendliness and warmth, or so I thought. But then I was not sure. Was it merely a social automatism? The neurologist Kurt Goldstein wrote of another autistic boy:
At an Intourist shop, I bought a piece of amber. Stephen glanced at it indifferently—it held no visual appeal for him—until I rubbed it and showed him how it became electrically charged. It attracted tiny pieces of paper now: when I put the amber a few inches away, they suddenly flew up to it. His eyes opened wide in astonishment; he took the amber from me and repeated the electrification by himself. But then his wonder seemed to fade. He did not ask what had happened or why, and he appeared uninterested when I explained it. I was excited at seeing his initial astonishment—I had never seen him truly astonished before—but then it faded, died out. And to me, this seemed rather ominous.
At dinner, chortling, Stephen drew a cartoon of us all at the table, with himself fanning me. (I am sensitive to heat and always carry a Japanese fan, which he had often seen me use.) He portrayed me as cowering under the impact of the fan and himself as large, powerful, in command; this was a symbolic representation, the first one I had seen him make.
Travelling, living with Stephen—we had now been together for five days—I became very conscious of how brittle he was physiologically, of the profound fluctuations in his state. There were times when he was animated and interested in his surroundings and could do brilliant, funny impersonations and cartoons; and there were times when he would revert to the deepest autism and respond, if at all, like an automaton, echolalically. Such fluctuations, usually lasting a few hours, rarely days, are common in children with classical autism, though their cause is not understood. They had been much worse, I was told, when Stephen was younger.
The next day, we boarded a train for the daylong journey to Leningrad. Margaret had put together a huge hamper of provisions, more than enough for us and any fellow-passengers in the compartment. As the train got under way, we started with an early breakfast—we had left the hotel at five to make this train. As she unpacked the basket, Stephen, half-convulsively, swooped his head and sniffed everything as it came out. I was reminded of some of my post-encephalitic patients, and some people with Tourette’s syndrome, in whom I had also seen olfactory behaviors of this sort. I suddenly realized that Stephen’s smell-world might be as vivid as his visual one, but that we do not have the language, the means, to convey such a world.
Stephen gazed uncertainly at our hard-boiled eggs. Was it possible that he had never cracked one open? Playfully, I took one and cracked it on my head; Stephen was delighted and burst out laughing. He had never seen a hard-boiled egg cracked in this way, and he gave me a second egg to see if I would do it again, and then, reassured, cracked one on his own head. There was something spontaneous in this egg cracking, and I think Stephen felt easier with me afterward, because I had shown him how playful—how silly—I could be.
After breakfast, Stephen and I played some word games. He was quite good at I Spy, and when I prompted him with “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘c,’ ” he quickly reeled off “coat, cat, café, coffee, cool, cup, cigarette.” He was very good at filling in letters in incomplete words. And yet, at sixteen, he was still unable, even after repeated demonstrations, to judge the constancy of volume, despite differing heights, in different vessels—a concept that, as Piaget showed, most children grasp at seven.
The train passed through tiny villages of wooden houses and painted churches, giving me the sense of a Tolstoyan world, unchanged in a hundred years. As Stephen watched it all intently, I thought of the thousands of images he must be registering, constructing—all of which he could convey in vivid pictures and vignettes, but none of them, I suspected, synthesized into any general impression in his mind. I had the feeling that the whole visible world flowed through Stephen like a river, without making sense, without being appropriated, without becoming part of him in the least. That though he might, in a sense, retain everything he saw, it was retained as something external, unintegrated, never built on, connected, revised, never influencing or influenced by anything else. I thought of his perception, his memory, as quasi-mechanical—like a vast store, or library, or archive—not even indexed or categorized, or held together by association, yet where anything might be accessed in an instant, as in the random-access memory of a computer. I found myself thinking of him as a sort of train himself, a perceptual missile, travelling through life, noting, recording, but never appropriating, a sort of transmitter of all that rushed past—but himself unchanged, unfed, by the experience.
As we approached Leningrad, Stephen decided that it was time to draw. “Pencil, Margaret, dahling!” he said. I was amused by the “dahling,” a Margaretism that he had adopted, and I could not decide whether it was automatic or conscious, a humorous parody. The train was very jolty, and I was able to make only brief notes, but Stephen was perfectly able to draw, with his usual speed and fluency. I had been amazed by this ability earlier, on the airplane. (He looked clumsy, but he picked up some motor skills, it seemed, almost instantly, as some autistic people apparently do. In Amsterdam, he had no hesitation in walking a narrow gangway to a houseboat—something he had never done before—and this reminded me of another autistic youngster I had met, who suddenly walked a tightrope, expertly and fearlessly, the day after seeing it done at the circus.)
In Leningrad, we spent a day of touring and drawing at the Hermitage, and headed back to our hotel for tea. Seeing that Stephen needed some diversion, Margaret said, “You be the teacher now—you, Oliver, the pupil.”
A glint appeared in Stephen’s eye. “What is two take away one?” he asked.
“One,” I said promptly.
“Good! Now twenty minus ten?”
I pretended to think for a bit, then said, “Ten.”
“That’s very good,” Stephen said. “Now sixty minus ten?”
I cogitated hard, screwed up my face. “Forty?” I said.
“No,” said Stephen. “Wrong. Think!”
I tried to help myself by holding up my fingers in multiples of ten. “I’ve got it—fifty.”
“Right,” Stephen said, with an approving smile. “Very good. Now, forty minus twenty.”
That was really difficult. I thought for a full minute. “Ten?”
“No,” Stephen said. “You must concentrate! But you did pretty well,” he added kindly.
The episode was a stunning imitation of an arithmetic lesson such as one might give to a retarded child. Stephen’s voice, his gestures, mimicked to perfection those of a well-meaning but condescending teacher—specifically (I felt with some discomfort), mine when I had tested him in London. He had not forgotten this. It was a lesson to me, to all of us, never to underestimate him. Stephen delighted in reversing roles, just as in his cartoon of himself fanning me.
The Russia trip was in some ways delightful, exciting, in others saddening, disappointing, disillusioning. I had hoped to get behind Stephen’s autism, to see the person underneath—the mind—but there had been only the merest intimation of this. I had hoped, perhaps sentimentally, for some depth of feeling from him; my heart had leaped at the first “Hullo, Oliver!” but there had been no followup. I wanted to be liked by Stephen, or, at least, seen as a distinct person, but there was something—not unfriendly; rather, de-differentiating—in his attitude, even in his automatic good manners and good humor. I had wanted some interaction; instead, I got a slight sense, perhaps, of how parents of autistic children must feel when they find themselves faced with a virtually unresponsive child. I had still, in some sense, been expecting a relatively normal person, with certain gifts and certain problems. Now I had the sense of a radically different, almost alien mode of mind and being, proceeding in its own way, not to be defined by any of my own norms.
Yet there were times—the egg cracking, the pupil-and-teacher game together—when I felt a current between us, so I still hoped for some sort of relationship with him and made a point of visiting him each time I went to London, generally a few times a year. On one or two occasions, I was able simply to go for a walk with Stephen. I hoped, still, that he might unwind, show me something of his spontaneous, “real” self. But though he would always greet me with his cheery “Hullo, Oliver!” he remained as courteous, as grave, as remote as ever.
There was, however, one enthusiasm we shared—a fondness for car spotting. Stephen especially liked the grand convertibles of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. My favorite cars, by contrast, were the sports cars of my youth—Bristols, Frazer-Nashes, old Jags, Aston Martins. Between us, we could identify most of the cars on the road, and Stephen, I think, came to see me as an ally or a comrade in the game of car spotting. But this was as close as we ever got.
“Floating Cities” was published in February of 1991, and quickly went to the top of the best-seller list in England. Stephen was told this, and said, “Very nice.” He seemed unaffected or uncomprehending, and that was the sum of it. At this point, he was going to a new technical school, learning to be a cook, taking public transport, and beginning to acquire some of the skills of independent life. But Sundays remained consecrated to drawing, and his work, commissioned and uncommissioned, multiplied each weekend.
The question of Stephen’s artistic talents often reminded me of Martin A., the retarded musical and mnemonic savant, whom I saw in the nineteen-eighties. Martin loved operas—his father had been a famous opera singer—and could retain them after a single hearing. (“I know more than two thousand operas,” he once told me.) But his greatest passion was for Bach, and I thought it curious that this simple man should have such a passion. Bach seemed so intellectual, and Martin was a retardate. What I did not realize—until I started bringing in cassettes of the cantatas, of the Goldberg Variations, and, once, of the Magnificat—was that, whatever his general intellectual limitations, Martin had a musical intelligence fully up to appreciating all the structural rules and complexities of Bach, all the intricacies of contrapuntal and fugal writing; he had the musical intelligence of a professional musician.
I had never before properly recognized the cognitive structure of savant talents. I had, by and large, taken them to be an expression of rote memory, and little else. Martin did indeed have a prodigious memory, but it was clear that this memory, in relation to Bach, was structural or categorical (and, specifically, architectonic): he understood how the music went together, how this variation was an inversion of that, how different voices could take up a line and combine them in a canon or fugue, and he could construct a simple fugue himself. He knew, for at least a few bars ahead, how a line would go. He could not formulate this knowledge—it was not explicit or conscious—but there was a remarkable implicit understanding of musical form.
Having seen this in Martin, I could now see analogues in the artistic, calendrical, and calculating savants I had also worked with. All of them had a genuine intelligence, but intelligence of a peculiar sort, confined to limited cognitive domains. Indeed, savants provide the strongest evidence that there can be many different forms of intelligence, all potentially independent of each other. The psychologist Howard Gardner expresses this in “Frames of Mind”:
Gardner postulates a multitude of separate and separable intelligences—visual, musical, lexical, etc.—all of them autonomous and independent: each with its own power of apprehending regularities and structures in its cognitive domain, and each with its own “rules,” and probably its own neural basis.
In the early nineteen-eighties, this notion was put to the test by Beate Hermelin and her colleagues, who explored the powers of many different forms of savant talents. They found that visual savants were far more efficient than normal people at extracting the essential features from a scene or a design, and at drawing these, and that their memory was not photographic or eidetic but, rather, categorical and analytic, with a power to select and seize on “significant features” and use them to build their own images. It was also evident that once a structural “formula” had been extracted, it could be used to generate permutations and variations. Hermelin and her colleagues, along with Treffert, also worked with the blind, retarded, and enormously gifted musical prodigy Leslie Lemke, who, like Blind Tom a century ago, is renowned for his improvisational powers as much as for his incredible musical memory. Lemke catches the style of any composer, from Bach to Bartók, after a single hearing, and can thereafter play any piece or improvise, effortlessly, in that style.
These studies seemed to confirm Gardner’s hypothesis that there were indeed a number of separate, autonomous cognitive powers or intelligences, each with its own algorithms and rules. There had been a certain tendency before this to see savant abilities as freakish, but now they seemed to have been brought back into the realm of the “normal,” differing from ordinary abilities only by being isolated and heightened in degree.
But do savant powers really resemble normal ones? One cannot have contact with a Stephen, a Nadia, a Martin—with any savant—and not sense something deeply other in action. It is not just that savant performances are off the scale, statistically, or are incredibly precocious in their first appearance (Martin could sing bits of operas before he was two), but that they seem to deviate radically from normal developmental patterns. This was particularly clear with Nadia, who seemingly skipped the normal scribbling, schematic, and tadpole stages, and, when she drew, did so in a way unlike any normal child. So it was with Stephen, who at seven, we know from Chris, did “the most unchildlike drawings” he had ever seen.
The other side of the prodigiousness and precocity, the unchildlikeness, of savant gifts is that they do not seem to develop as normal talents do. They are fully fledged from the start. Stephen’s art at seven was clearly prodigious, but at nineteen, though he may have developed a bit socially and personally, his talent itself had not developed too greatly.
Savant talents, further, have a more autonomous quality than normal ones. They do not seem to occupy the mind or attention fully: Stephen will look around, listen to his Walkman, sing, or even talk while he is drawing; Jedediah Buxton’s huge calculations moved ahead at their own fixed, imperturbable rate while he went on with his daily life. Savant talents do not seem to be connected, as normal talents are, with the rest of the person. All this is strongly suggestive of a neural mechanism different from that which underlies normal talents.
It may be that a savant has a highly specialized, immensely developed system in the brain, a “neuromodule,” and that this is “switched on” at particular times—when the right stimulus (musical, visual, or whatever) meets the system at the right time—and immediately starts to operate full blast. Thus, for the twin calendar savants, seeing an almanac at the age of six set off their extraordinary calendrical skill: they were able straightaway to see large-scale structural regularities in the calendar, perhaps to extract unconscious rules and algorithms, to see how the correspondence of dates and days could be predicted—a feat that the rest of us, if we could do it at all, could do only with consciously worked-out algorithms and a great deal of time and practice.
The converse of this sudden kindling, or turning on, is also seen on occasion in the sudden disappearance of savant talents, whether in retarded or autistic savants, or in normal individuals with savant capacities. Vladimir Nabokov possessed, in addition to his many other talents, a prodigious calculating gift, but it disappeared suddenly and completely, he wrote, following a high fever, with delirium, when he was seven. Nabokov felt that the calculating gift, which came and went so mysteriously, had little to do with “him” and seemed to obey laws of its own—that it was different in kind from the rest of his powers.
Normal talents do not come and go in this way: they show development, persist, enlarge, take on a personal style as they establish connections, and embed themselves increasingly in the mind and personality. They lack the peculiar isolation, uninfluenceability, and automaticity of savant talents.
But a mind is not just a collection of talents. One cannot maintain a purely composite or modular view of the mind, as many neurologists and psychologists now try to do. This removes that general quality of mind—call it reach or range or size or spaciousness—that is always instantly recognizable in normal people. It is a capacity that seems to be supramodal, and that shines through whatever particular talents there are. This is the quality which we are referring to when we say that someone has “a fine mind.” What is no less important is that a modular view of the mind also removes the personal center, the self, the “I.” Normally, there is a cohering and unifying power (Coleridge calls it an “esemplastic” power) that integrates all the separate faculties of mind, and integrates them, too, with our experiences and emotions, so that they take on a uniquely personal cast. It is this global, or integrating, power that allows us to generalize and reflect, to develop subjectivity and a self-conscious self.
Kurt Goldstein was especially interested in such a global capacity, which he referred to as the organism’s “abstract-categorical capacity,” or “abstract attitude.” Part of Goldstein’s work was concerned with the effects of brain damage, and he found that whenever there was extensive damage, or damage involving the frontal lobes of the brain, there tended to be, over and above the impairments of specific abilities (linguistic, visual, whatever), an impairment of abstract-categorical capacity—often as damaging as the specific impairments, and sometimes far more damaging. Goldstein also explored various developmental problems and—with his colleagues Martin Scheerer and Eva Rothmann—published the deepest study ever made of an idiot savant. Their subject, L., was a profoundly autistic boy with remarkable musical, “mathematical,” and mnemonic talents. In their 1945 paper “A Case of ‘Idiot Savant:’ An Experimental Study of Personality Organization” they comment on the limitations of a multifactorial, or composite, theory of mind:
[If] there exists . . . only a composite of individual capabilities which are so independent from each other . . . L. should have theoretically been able to become a proficient musician and mathematician. . . . Since this contradicts the facts of the case, we have to explain [why he did not] despite his “interests” and “training.”
He did not, they conclude, because, for all his impressive and real talents, there was something else, something global, irremediably missing:
If Goldstein’s formulations about idiot savants and autism are generally valid, and if Stephen is indeed lacking, or relatively lacking, in abstract attitude, how much of an identity, or a self, may he be able to acquire? What power of reflective consciousness may be possible for him? To what extent can he learn, or be influenced by personal or cultural contact? To what extent can he make such contact? How much can he develop a genuine sensibility or style? How much is any personal (as opposed to technical) development possible for him? What may be the resonances of all this for his art? These and many other questions, which one encounters with the paradox of an immense talent attached to a relatively rudimentary mind and identity, become sharper in the light of Goldstein’s considerations.
In October, 1991, I met Stephen in San Francisco. I was struck by how much he had changed since I last saw him—now seventeen, he was taller, handsomer, and his voice was deeper. He was excited to be in San Francisco and kept describing, in short, haikulike phrases, the scenes he had seen on television of the 1989 earthquake: “Bridges snapped. Cars crushed. Gas bursting. Hydrants flowing. Gaps opening. People flying.”
On our first day, we climbed to the top of Pacific Heights. There Stephen started drawing Broderick Street, which snakes up to the top of the hill. He looked around vaguely while he was drawing, but was mostly engrossed in listening to his Walkman. We had asked him earlier why Broderick snaked, instead of going straight up. He could not say, or see, that it was because of its steepness, and when Margaret said “steep” to him he just repeated it, echolalically. He still seemed clearly retarded or cognitively defective.
As we walked, we came upon a sudden, enchanting revelation of the bay, dotted with ships, and with Alcatraz set like a gem in the middle. For a moment, though, I did not “see” this; I did not see a scene at all—just an intricate pattern of many colors, a highly abstract, uncategorized mass of sensations. Was this how Stephen saw it?
Stephen’s favorite building in San Francisco was the Transamerica Pyramid. When I asked him why, he said, “Its shape,” and then, with an uncertain air, “It’s a triangle, an isosceles triangle. I like that.” I was struck by the fact that Stephen, with his often primitive language, should use the word “isosceles”—though it is typical for autistic people, sometimes in early childhood, to acquire geometrical concepts and terms to a far greater degree than personal or social ones.
Stephen has very little explicit understanding of autism. This came out in an unlikely incident on Polk Street. We had, by a million-to-one chance, got behind a car with a license plate that spelled “autism.” I pointed it out to Stephen. “What does that say?” I asked.
He spelled it out, laboriously: “A-u-t-i-s-m.”
“Yes,” I said. “And that reads?”
“U . . . u . . . utism,” he stuttered.
“Almost, not quite. Not ‘utism’—‘autism.’ What is autism?”
“It’s what’s on that license plate,” he answered, and I could get no further.
Clearly, he recognizes that he is different, that he is special. He has a veritable passion for “Rain Man” and, one must suspect, identifies with the Dustin Hoffman character, perhaps the only autistic hero ever widely portrayed. He has the entire soundtrack of the film on tape, and plays it continually on his Walkman. Indeed, he can recite large segments of the dialogue, taking every part, with perfect intonation. (His preoccupation with the film and his constant playing of the cassette has not distracted him at all from his art—he can draw wonderfully even though his attention seems to be elsewhere—but it has made him far less accessible to conversation and social contact.)
Accompanying Stephen’s obsession with “Rain Man” was a fervent desire to visit Las Vegas. He wanted, when we got there, to spend time in a casino, as Rain Man had, and not, in his usual way, to see the buildings in town. So we spent a single night there, and then, in a 1991 Lincoln Continental, set out across the desert for Arizona. “He would have preferred a 1972 Chevrolet Impala,” Margaret told me, but this, to Stephen’s disappointment, was not available.
We pulled up to a parking lot near the Grand Canyon. Part of the Canyon was visible from there, but Stephen’s attention was immediately distracted by the other cars in the lot. When I asked what he thought of the Canyon, he said, “It’s very, very nice—a very nice scene.”
“What does it remind you of?”
“Like buildings, architecture,” he answered.
We found a spot from which Stephen could draw the North Rim of the Canyon. He started to draw, less fluently and assuredly, perhaps, than he would draw a building; but he seemed to extract the basic architecture of the rocks nonetheless.
“You’re a genius, Stephen,” Margaret remarked.
Stephen nodded, smiled, said, “Ya, ya.”
Knowing Stephen’s love of aerial views, we decided to fly over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter. Stephen was excited, and kept craning his neck in all directions as we flew low through the Canyon, skimming the North Rim, and then higher and higher to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole. Our pilot kept talking about the geology and the history of the Canyon, but Stephen ignored him, and, I think, saw only shapes—lines, boundaries, shadows, shadings, colors, perspectives. And I, sitting next to him, following his gaze, started, I imagined, to see the Canyon through his eyes, relinquishing my own intellectual knowledge of the rock strata below, and seeing them in purely visual terms. Stephen had no scientific knowledge or interest; could not, I suspect, have grasped any of the concepts of geology; and yet such was the force of his perceptual power, his visual sympathy, that he was able to get, and later draw, the Canyon’s geological features with absolute precision, and with a selectivity not to be obtained in any photograph. He would get the Canyon’s feel, its essence, as he had got the essence of the Matisse.
One morning in Phoenix—the last morning of our trip—I was up at seven-thirty, watching the sunrise from my hotel-room balcony. I heard a cheery “Hullo, Oliver!” and there was Stephen on an adjacent balcony.
“Wonderful day,” he said, and then, holding his yellow camera, he snapped me as I smiled back from my balcony. This seemed such a friendly, personal act—it would stay in my mind as our farewell to Arizona. As we left the hotel, he went over to the cacti: “Bye, Saguaro! Bye, Barrel! Bye, Prickly Pear, see you next time!”
At one point on our Arizona trip, stopping at a Dairy Queen, Stephen ogled two girls sitting at a table and, indeed, was so fascinated by them that he forgot to go to the rest room. In some ways, he is a normal adolescent boy; neither his autism nor his savantism precludes this. He went up to the girls. He is not unpersonable on first impression, but he spoke to them in a manner so inappropriate and childlike that they looked at each other, giggled, and then ignored him.
Adolescence, both physical and psychological, was perhaps slightly belated but now seems to be rushing ahead with great speed. Suddenly, Stephen has developed a strong interest in his appearance, his clothes, rock music, and girls. He had never seemed to notice mirrors when he was younger, Margaret said, but now he is always checking himself, preening before them. He has developed very decided tastes in clothing: “I like Western-style jeans, light-blue, garment-washed, and shirts, and black Western boots.”
“What do you think of Oliver’s shoes?” Margaret asked archly on one occasion.
“Boring,” he said, throwing a glance at them.
And yet, very little social life is possible for Stephen. He meets people, superficially, but does not know how to talk with them and has few friends or real relationships outside his own family or the Hewsons. He is very close to his sister, Annette, and can be affectionate to her. He feels himself the man of the house, a protector of his mother; and he feels that Margaret is very much a protector of him. But for the most part he is thrown back on his drawings, and on increasingly charged and detailed daydreams.
The world that really excites Stephen at this point is that of “Beverly Hills 90210,” a television show he adores. Last year, I asked him about it: “I love Jennie Garth,” he said. “She’s the coolest girl in L.A. She’s got red lipstick. . . . She’s twenty-one years old. She’s from Illinois. She’s in ‘Beverly Hills 90210.’ I fell in love with Jennie Garth. It started in 1991, I think. She plays Kelly Taylor. She always wears jeans and Western-style shirts and bodysuits.” It is not just Jennie Garth but the entire cast of the show that Stephen is in love with, and he now incorporates its members in more and more elaborate fantasies. “I collect their pictures,” he said. “I sent them several drawings.” Now he wants to design a penthouse for them on Park Avenue. They will all live together, and he will live with them, as “artist-in-residence.” He will decide who may visit them and who may not. In the evening, after they have worked all day, they will all eat out together, or have a picnic in the penthouse. He has drawings of all this.
He has also been making sexy fantasy drawings of girls. Margaret discovered this by accident one day while they were travelling: she wandered into his hotel room and found a drawing by his bed. His other drawings—even the grandest ones, which he has spent days making—he is almost indifferent to; they can get lost or damaged, and he scarcely cares. But the sexy drawings are manifestly different. He seems to feel these as his own, and keeps them in the privacy of his room; he would not think of showing them to anyone. They are wholly different from his other drawings, his commissioned work, for they are an expression of his inner life and dreams and needs, of his emotional and personal identity; whereas the architectural drawings, however dazzlingly accomplished, are not intended as anything more than likenesses, reproductions.
Stephen’s interest in girls and his fantasies of them seem very normal—very adolescent, in a way—and yet they are marked by a childishness, a naïveté, that reflects his deep lack of human and social knowledge. It is difficult to imagine him dating, much less enjoying a deep personal or sexual relationship. These things, one suspects, may never be possible for him. I wonder whether he feels this, and perhaps feels sad about it sometimes.
In July of 1993, Margaret phoned me, beside herself with excitement. “Stephen’s erupted musical powers,” she announced. “Huge powers! You must come and see him straightaway.” I was startled by her call; I had never heard her so excited.
It had been clear to all of us for years that Stephen had an immense ability to reproduce instrumental sounds, voices, accents, intonations, melodies, rhythms, arias, songs, complete with words or lyrics when need be—an effortlessly large and accurate auditory memory. And, significantly, he liked music, too; it moved him with an almost physical pleasure—almost more, I think, than drawing did.
But Margaret, who knew all this better than I, was obviously referring to something more, to some quite new and unexpected breakthrough. The crucial factor, she had said, had been finding the right music teacher for Stephen (“She’s marvellous, darling!”), and they had struck up an instant rapport. I timed a visit to London to coincide with one of their weekly music lessons and took along my niece Liz Chase, a music teacher and pianist with a very acute ear, skilled in improvisation, analysis, and theory.
Liz and I had been chatting with Evie Preston, his music teacher, for a few minutes when Stephen came in, gustily, at the stroke of twelve. “Hullo, Evie, how are you I am fine,” he said, then “Hullo, Oliver Sacks, how are you?” and, when I introduced my niece, “Hullo, Liz Chase, how are you?” He then rushed over to the piano and, at Evie’s bidding, proceeded to play scales, then to sing arpeggios, starting with major triads. He did all this very easily, and gleefully. The idea of thirds, fifths—this Pythagorean, numerical sense of musical intervals—seemed innate in Stephen. “I never had to teach him,” Evie remarked.
He seemed hungry for more. “Let’s do sevenths now,” Evie said, and Stephen nodded and chortled as if he had been promised a chocolate.
Next, Evie said, “Now we’ll do the blues—you take the top, I’ll do the bass.” Using only three fingers (it looked ungainly, but worked brilliantly), Stephen now improvised an upper voice, full of fascinating, delightful complications. At first, he confined his improvisations to the lower half of one octave, but then became bolder, his improvisations steadily growing wider-ranging, more complex. He did six improvisations in all, rising to a climax in the last one. But, Liz said, “improvisation is easy, you do it off the top of your head.” If one had the musical intelligence to catch the variational structure, she added, an ability to generate variations was almost automatic, a defining quality of intelligence itself. What she did find remarkable was how Stephen had imbued his improvisations with feeling, with something of himself; how he had made them “creative, daring, and dramatically interesting.”
Evie asked Stephen if he would sing “Wonderful World.” His singing seemed to be full of genuine feeling, and his gestures while he sang were not his usual stilted, ticlike ones. As soon as the song was over, Evie asked him to analyze it harmonically, to sing and number all the chords. He did so without a moment’s hesitation. “It is clear that he is possessed of quite extraordinary powers of harmonic identification, analysis, and reproduction,” Liz noted. Then Evie gave him an exercise in “interpretation,” as she does every week, playing a theme he has never heard before. This time, it was Schumann’s “Träumerei.” Stephen listened intently and told us his “associations” as he listened: “It’s about . . . air in the field, daffodils in springtime . . . a stream . . . sunshine . . . (I love it) . . . rose gardens . . . light breezes, fresh . . . children come out to play with their friends.”
Was Stephen—so lacking feeling or cut off from it, for the most part—actually feeling these affects and moods? Or had he learned—been taught, somehow—to “decode” music, to learn that such-and-such forms were “pastoral” or “vernal,” and, as such, would have appropriate images? Was this a sort of trick, performed without any real feeling? I mentioned this thought to Evie later, and she told me that at first his associations with music were random or egocentric, strikingly irrelevant to the actual tone of the piece. She then explained what feelings or images “went with” different forms of music, and now he has learned these. But she thinks he also feels them.
Finally, it was time for Stephen to choose a song he wanted to perform. He wanted to do “It’s Not Unusual,” a song much to his liking—a piece on which he could really let himself go. He sang with great enthusiasm, swinging his hips, dancing, gesticulating, miming, clutching an imaginary microphone to his mouth, addressing himself in imagination to a vast arena. “It’s Not Unusual” has become the theme song of Tom Jones, and Stephen, in his version, took on Jones’s flamboyant physicality, adding to it a flavor of Stevie Wonder. He seemed completely at one with the music, completely possessed, and at this point there was none of the skewed neck posture that is habitual with him, none of the stiltedness, the ticcing, the aversion of gaze. His entire autistic persona, it seemed, had totally vanished, replaced by movements that were free, graceful, with emotional appropriateness and range. Very startled by this transformation, I wrote in large capitals in my notebook, “autism disappears.” But, as soon as the music stopped, Stephen looked autistic once again.
Until now, it had seemed to be part of Stephen’s nature, part of his being autistic, to be defective precisely in that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a “self” for the rest of us. And yet in the music he seemed to have been “given” these, to have “borrowed” an identity—even if they were lost the moment the music ended.
It was as if, for a brief time, he had become truly alive.
Stephen’s music lesson, then, was a revelation to me—not just of further talents (which would not be wholly unexpected in an autistic savant) but of a mode of being that I would not have thought available to him. Nothing of what I had seen with him before, and nothing in his art, had quite prepared me for this. He seemed to be using his whole self, his whole body, with its full repertoire of movements and expressions, to sing, to enact the song—though it remained unclear to me whether this was basically a brilliant piece of pantomime or a true entering into the words, the feelings, the inner states of the song. It raised for me, even more acutely than some of his Matisse drawings, the question of whether he treated the originals (paintings or songs) as representations of inwardness, of others’ states of mind, or as objects. Did he, so to speak, enter the painter’s or the songwriter’s head, share their subjectivity, or merely treat their productions (like houses) as purely physical, as objects? (Was his repetition of “Rain Man,” for that matter, just a literal playback, a mimicry or echolalia, or was it charged with a sense of the significance of the film?) Were his gifts no more than mindless, “ament” talents, in Goldstein’s term, or were they genuine achievements of mind and identity—achievements which might assist him, despite all that impeded him, to a fuller personal consciousness and identity?
Goldstein is quick to equate “mind” with the abstract-categorical, the conceptual, and to regard anything else as pathological, as sterile. But there are forms of health, of mind, other than the conceptual, although neurologists and psychologists rarely give these their due. There is mimesis—itself a power of mind, a way of representing reality with one’s body and senses, a uniquely human capacity no less important than symbol or language. Merlin Donald, in “The Origins of the Modern Mind,” has speculated that mimetic powers of modelling, or inner representation, of a wholly nonverbal and nonconceptual type may have been the dominant mode of cognition for a million years or more in our immediate predecessor, Homo erectus, before the advent of abstract thought and language in Homo sapiens. As I watched Stephen sing and mime, I wondered if one might not understand at least some aspects of autism and savantism in terms of the normal development, even hypertrophy, of mimesis-based brain systems, this ancient mode of cognition, coupled with a relative failure in the development of more modern, symbol-based ones. And yet, even if some analogies can be drawn here, they are very limited, and must not mislead us. Stephen is neither an ament nor a computer nor a Homo erectus: all our models, all our terms break down before him.
We do not know, finally, how Stephen thinks, how he constructs the world, how he is able to draw and sing. But we do know that, though he may be lacking in the symbolic, the abstract, he has a sort of genius for concrete or mimetic representation, whether drawing a cathedral, a canyon, a flower or enacting a scene, a drama, a song—a sort of genius for catching the formal features, the structural logic, the style, the “thisness” (though not necessarily the meaning) of whatever he portrays.
Creativity, as usually understood, entails not only a “what,” a talent, but a “who”—strong personal characteristics, a strong identity, personal sensibility, a personal style, which flow into the talent, interfuse it, give it personal body and form. Creativity in this sense involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and re-create worlds fully in one’s mind—while supervising all this with a critical inner eye. Creativity has to do with inner life—with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings.
Creativity in this sense will probably never be possible for Stephen. But the catching of “thisness”—perceptual genius—is no small gift; it is quite as rare and precious as more intellectual gifts. I once referred to José as living not in a universe but in what William James called a “multiverse,” consisting of innumerable, unconnected, though intensely vivid, particulars, and as experiencing the world as, in Proust’s term, “a collection of moments”—isolated, with no before or after. I imagined José, who liked to draw animals and plants, as an illustrator for botanical works or herbals (and, indeed, I have since heard that an autistic artist has been employed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew).
Is autism necessary to, or an ingredient of, Stephen’s art? Most autists are not artists, as most artists are not autists; but in the chance of their coming together (as in Stephen or José), there must, I think, be an interaction between the two, so that the art takes on some of the strengths and weaknesses of autism, its remarkable capacity for minutely detailed reproduction and representation, but also its repetitiveness and stereotypy. But whether one can speak of a distinctive “autistic art” I am not sure.
Is Stephen, or his autism, changed by his art? Here, I think, the answer is no. I do not have the feeling that his art spreads or diffuses, in any sense, into his character, or alters the general tone of his mind. But this, perhaps, is not entirely surprising: there are many examples of artists who are great, even sublime, in their art, but whose personal lives are unremarkable, incoherent, or vile. (There are others, of course, whose lives match their art.)
Of those with classical autism, fifty per cent are mute, never use speech; ninety-five per cent lead very limited lives. Stephen, in a sense, has escaped from these statistics, in part through his art, in part by virtue of those who have stood so committedly behind him. Gifts and art, unrecognized, unsupported, are not enough: José is almost as gifted as Stephen but has never been recognized, never supported, and continues to languish on a back ward, whereas Stephen lives a varied and stimulating life—he travels, goes out drawing, and now attends art school. Margaret Hewson, Chris Marris, and others have played an essential part in supporting him and nurturing his gifts, making possible for him his present creative life. But his passivity remains extreme, and he will continue, I think, to need such personal support, as Blind Tom needed the support of Colonel Bethune.
Stephen’s drawings may never develop, may never add up to a major opus, an expression of a deep feeling or theory or view of the world. And he may never develop, or enter the full estate, the grandeur and misery, of being human, of man.
But this is not to diminish him, or to call his gifts small. His limitations, paradoxically, can serve as strengths, too. His vision is valuable, it seems to me, precisely because it conveys a wonderfully direct, unconceptualized view of the world. Stephen may be limited, odd, idiosyncratic, autistic; but it is given him to achieve what few of us do—a significant representation and investigation of the world. ♦
