A gift for those who struggle with psychic pain
Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Fires in the Dark” is not a book for the lazy or the linear-minded. It is a cultural history of mental healing and healers, impressively researched and broad in scope. It is often fascinating and sometimes exquisite. But it can also leave you with your head spinning, wondering why you can’t keep up.
Jamison, an acclaimed author and an expert in mood disorders who teaches at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, traces rituals, practices and philosophies of healing across countries, continents and millennia. She travels back to Neanderthal caves and to the healing temples of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians; to the bucolic grounds of Scotland’s Craiglockhart War Hospital for shellshocked World War I officers; to Moscow with the “wounded healer” Paul Robeson; to Paris, as Notre Dame is restored after an almost-fatal night of flames. And then she lands on the Chesapeake Bay.
Late in the book, after a scene-setting quote from explorer Captain John Smith (of the Jamestown colony, circa 1608) – “As for your feares that I will lose my selfe in these unknown large waters, or to be swallowed up in some stormie gust ... there is as much danger to returne, as to proceede” – Jamison’s historical journey takes a sharp autobiographical turn. “Most of us have home waters, a bay or river, a sea, to which we return in fact or longing,” she writes; the “restless and various” Chesapeake, with the “irregularity” of its geography, “its incomprehensibility, its dotting of coves and islands,” has, since childhood, been the place where her mind has always been “at home.”
And that makes everything clear.
“Fires in the Dark” is not meant to be read as a memoir. But it reads best if you think of it as one: a companion volume to Jamison’s landmark book “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness” (1995) – and, with its wide selection of the literary, philosophical, theological and historical voices that have shaped Jamison’s consciousness over the past 70 years, a topological map of her sometimes overflowing “restless and various” mind.
Jamison entered unknown, potentially treacherous waters when she published “An Unquiet Mind.” There was no mental health TikTok. Celebrities weren’t yet discussing their addictions. Mental illness was highly stigmatized. Even as a mental health professional – especially as a mental health professional – admitting to having manic-depressive illness (Jamison finds the term more evocative than today’s “bipolar disorder”) could very well have spelled professional disaster.
We have come a long way since then. In “Fires in the Dark,” Jamison circles back. And takes care of unfinished business.
“An Unquiet Mind” was, in many ways, a paean to lithium, the medication that saved Jamison’s life and restored her ability to work, think, sleep and otherwise function. Yet medication-induced healing was for her, as for many, a deeply unsatisfying thing: dreary, monochromatic and, above all, incomplete. In “Fires in the Dark,” she demonstrates how to bring the colors back in. Psychotherapy – good psychotherapy – plays a central role; it’s what allowed Jamison, once returned to “sanity” by lithium, to learn to live among those slower and divorced from the sublime, “to reconcile the glory of having reached for the stars with a more anchored, less splendid world,” as she puts it. Music does this, too, as does art, great literature – whatever can spark transcendence, religious or secular.
Jamison is a beautiful writer, with a vast store of knowledge. (And, though it’s not her stated purpose, an ability to make the case for why the humanities matter in a way that is deeper and more emotionally resonant than anything I’ve seen before.) Her book contains a blueprint for finding a way out of darkness – a great gift for anyone who sometimes struggles to overcome psychic pain. But it would have benefited from a clearer narrative through-line. For while there are some exquisite moments, the book’s power is undermined by problems of pacing. There’s too much accumulation of detail, too much repetition, a feeling at times that Jamison couldn’t decide which form of a phrase was the best and so, having tried out many, kept them all. And there are too many long digressions that suddenly end in hastily made conclusions.
Psychotherapy, Jamison writes, can be a means of “giving order to a chaotic personal universe.” Great editing can do that, too.
One snowy morning in January 2003, the French writer Anne Berest’s mother, Lélia Picabia, received a postcard in the mail. It was an ordinary tourist’s postcard, with an image of the Opera Garnier on the front. On the back, all that was written besides Lélia’s address were four names:
Ephraim
Emma
Noémie
Jacques
These are the names of Lélia’s grandparents, aunt and uncle, all of whom died at Auschwitz in 1942. Who could have sent such a thing? Who was there left alive who even knew those names? The family was shocked, but in time they managed to forget about it.
Until, as Berest describes it in her book “The Postcard,” the day 13 years later when her daughter has an antisemitic encounter at school. The violence of it, and the school’s nonchalant reaction, knocks something loose in her, and she immediately remembers the mysterious card that turned up at her parents’ house. Part novel and part documentary, “The Postcard,” translated by Tina Kover, is an account of Anne’s attempt to solve the mystery of who could have sent the postcard, and why. Moving between past and present as Anne, with her mother’s help, pieces together her family’s story, it also grapples with Anne’s own relationship to Judaism.
It all starts in early-20th-century Russia, where the family’s patriarch, Nachman Rabinovitch, warns his children that the winds of antisemitism are blowing again, and that he and their mother are leaving to grow oranges in Haifa. Ephraim – ambitious, socialist and irreligious – takes his family to Riga, Latvia, to Palestine and finally to France. There he and his wife and three children thrive and assimilate, to the point that Ephraim sighs to his wife when his father comes to visit: “He doesn’t look like a Jew ... he looks like a hundred Jews.”
As the children grow up in Paris the story shifts to their perspective, especially to that of Myriam, the eldest Rabinovitch child, who is a great success at the prestigious Lycee Fenelon (where Berest would one day be a student), and her younger sister Noémie, who reads Irène Nemirovsky and dreams of one day becoming a novelist, too.
But to be a Jew in Paris in the late 1930s is to live within the loop of an evertightening noose. Assimilated or not, the Rabinovitch family will be rounded up with all the others in July 1942: first the children, then the parents. Berest handles the deportations and deaths of her four relatives with sensitivity; she mostly avoids bathos by keeping her eye firmly trained on her subjects and their everyday humanity.
Myriam alone survives, because she happened to have recently married a non-Jew, Vicente, the bohemian son of the artist Francis Picabia and his wife, the writer Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. “All of our lives,” Lélia tells her daughter, “were spun from that impossibly slender thread of luck.”
The book alternates between the Rabinovitches and Anne herself. She and her sisters were raised in no faith except that of republicanism and socialism. But although their Judaism wasn’t mentioned during their childhood – Anne grew up believing she was Breton on one side, Provençal on the other – they were haunted by their dead relatives. Anne tells her sister in a letter that she identifies with Myriam: “I always know where the exit is. I run away from danger . ... I take the side streets . ... I prefer still waters, and I always slip through the net.”
Berest tells her mother about the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s concept of “psychomagic,” which holds, in part, that there are, in everyone’s family tree, “traumatized, unprocessed places that are eternally seeking relief. From these places, arrows are launched toward future generations. Anything that has not been resolved must be repeated.”
She also turns to the work of the psychologist Nathalie Zajde, who has studied the children of Holocaust survivors to try to understand why they have their parents’ nightmares, even when they have no firsthand knowledge of what they experienced. Accused by a romantic rival of being Jewish only “when it suits” her, Anne replies:
“I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I’ll be forced to relive it one day. To me, death always feels near. I have a sense of being hunted. I often feel subjected to a kind of self-obliteration. I search in the history books for the things I was never told.”
“The Postcard” is, in this sense, a powerful exploration of family trauma, of “psychogenealogy” or “cellular memory,” transmitted in the womb or down the generations; a longing for what we don’t know and can never know of the people whose lives are responsible for our existence, and an internalization of the very worst that humans can do to one another, visited on one’s own family.
Berest acknowledges that she has blind spots, and some of her evocations of Jewish life seem, at best, shaky; at worst, reliant on stereotypes of men with sidelocks and tzitzits. Occasionally, issues are introduced in the translation – on the whole fluid and engaging – that are not her fault at all. For instance, Kover, relying too heavily on literalism, translates a phrase that could become “Passover” as “Jewish Easter.” In a book that is literally about the attempt to exterminate the Jews and their traditions, it seems important to get elements about Jewish culture right.
What kept me engaged, despite these issues, is not the question of whether Anne will solve the mystery but how she goes about trying to ascertain the unascertainable. This is, after all, why we read: to understand that which we may not ourselves have experienced. And it is what writing facilitates, especially for our generation, at two removes from the Shoah: The devoir de mémoire, the duty to remember, has become a duty to piece together the clues we’ve been left, fragments of a vanished world.