The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: "A Walking Grove"

He lived with his parents until their death, and thereafter eked out a marginal living as a messenger, a porter, and a short-order cook—whatever he could do before he was fired, as he invariably was, because of his slowness, dreaminess or incompetence.

He lived with his parents until their death, and thereafter eked out a marginal living as a messenger, a porter, and a short-order cook—whatever he could do before he was fired, as he invariably was, because of his slowness, dreaminess or incompetence.

He had an amazing musical memory—‘I know more than 2,000 operas,’ he told me on one occasion—although he had never learned or been able to read music. Whether this would have been possible or not was not clear—he had always depended on his extraordinary ear, his power to retain an opera or an oratorio after a single hearing.

His innate, hereditary musical gift had clearly survived the ravages of meningitis and brain-damage—or had it?

Thus, he was an opera-buff, and something of an ‘idiot savant’ too.

He had also sung at the Met, and, when it was pulled down, at Lincoln Center, discreetly concealed amid the vast choruses of Wagner and Verdi.

There seemed little or no emotion in such memories—no more emotion than there is in a street-map of New York—nor did they connect, or ramify, or get generalised, in any way. Thus his eidetic memory—the freak part of him—did not in itself form, or convey any sense of, a ‘world’. It was without unity, without feeling, without relation to himself.

And yet, even here, there was a single and striking exception, at once his most prodigious, most personal, and most pious deed of memory. He knew by heart Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the immense nine-volume edition published in 1954—indeed he was a ‘walking Grove’.

His father was ageing and somewhat ailing by then, could no longer sing actively, but spent most of his time at home, playing his great collection of vocal records on the phonograph, going through and singing all his scores—which he did with his now thirty-year-old son (in the closest and most affectionate communion of their lives)...

...reading aloud Grove’s dictionary—all six thousand pages of it—which, as he read, was indelibly printed upon his son’s limitlessly retentive, if illiterate, cortex.

Such prodigious hypertrophies of eidetic memory, especially if employed or exploited ‘professionally’, sometimes seem to oust the real self, or to compete with it, and impede its development.

It was, in many respects, small, petty, nasty, and dark—the world of a retardate who had been teased and left out as a child, and then hired and fired, contemptuously, from menial jobs, as a man: the world of someone who had rarely felt himself, or felt regarded as, a proper child or man.

It was, in many respects, small, petty, nasty, and dark—the world of a retardate who had been teased and left out as a child, and then hired and fired, contemptuously, from menial jobs, as a man: the world of someone who had rarely felt himself, or felt regarded as, a proper child or man.

He was often childish, sometimes spiteful, and prone to sudden tantrums—and the language he then used was that of a child.

It was at first put down to ‘adjustment difficulties’, such as all patients may experience on giving up independent living outside, and coming into a ‘Home’. But Sister felt there was something more specific at work—‘something gnawing him, a sort of hunger, a gnawing hunger we can’t assuage. It’s destroying him,’ she continued.

He could sing, he could worship, in Bach’s music, every Sunday, and also enjoy the quiet authority that was accorded him.

‘You see,’ he told me, on my next visit, without cockiness, but as a simple matter of fact, ‘they know I know all Bach’s liturgical and choral music. I know all the church cantatas—all 202 that Grove lists—and which Sundays and Holy Days they should be sung on. We are the only church in the diocese with a real orchestra and choir, the only one where all of Bach’s vocal works are regularly sung. We do a cantata every Sunday—and we are going to do the Matthew Passion this Easter!’

What I did not realise, until I started bringing in cassettes of the cantatas, and once of the Magnificat, when I visited, was that for all his intellectual limitations Martin’s musical intelligence was fully up to appreciating much of the technical complexity of Bach; but, more than this—that it wasn’t a question of intelligence at all.

What was central to Martin, as it had been central for his father, and what had been intimately shared between them, was always the spirit of music, especially religious music, and of the voice as the divine instrument made and ordained to sing, to raise itself in jubilation and praise.

The pseudo-persons—the stigmatised retardate, the snotty, spitting boy—disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, impersonal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents.

But the marvel, the real marvel, was to see Martin when he was actually singing, or in communion with music—listening with an intentness which verged on rapture—‘a man in his wholeness wholly attending’.

All that was defective or pathological fell away, and one saw only absorption and animation, wholeness and health.

When I wrote this piece, and the two succeeding ones, I wrote solely out of my own experience, with almost no knowledge of the literature on the subject, indeed with no knowledge that there was a large literature. I only got an inkling of it, often baffling and intriguing, after 'The Twins’ was first published, when I found myself inundated with letters and offprints.

When I wrote this piece, and the two succeeding ones, I wrote solely out of my own experience, with almost no knowledge of the literature on the subject, indeed with no knowledge that there was a large literature. I only got an inkling of it, often baffling and intriguing, after 'The Twins’ was first published, when I found myself inundated with letters and offprints.

This ungainly, awkward, inelegant lady, this overgrown five-year-old, became absolutely transformed when I asked her to perform for a seminar at Boston State Hospital.

She sat down demurely, stared quietly at the keyboard until we all grew silent, and brought her hands slowly to the keyboard and let them rest a moment.

One speaks of ‘idiot savants' as if they had an odd ‘knack' or talent of a mechanical sort, with no real intelligence or understanding.

Only then did it finally become clear to me that Martin could grasp the full complexity of such a work, and that it was not just a knack, or a remarkable rote memory at work, but a genuine and powerful musical intelligence.

Meticulous study of this five-year-old prodigy, with severe mental and other handicaps due to maternal rubella, showed not rote memory of a mechanical sort, but ‘...impressive sensitivity to the rules governing composition, particularly the role of different notes in determining (diatonic) key-structure...'

‘...impressive sensitivity to the rules governing composition, particularly the role of different notes in determining (diatonic) key-structure...(implying) implicit knowledge of structural rules in a generative sense: that is, rules not limited to the specific examples provided by one's experience.'