The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace - Vintage Books (new ed. 1996)
June and Jennifer Gibbons were born in Barbados in 1963. Their father was an Air Force technician, and the family was constantly displaced as he was moved from base to base. They eventually settled in Haverfordwest, but the frequent relocations and the social isolation imposed upon black families in rural Wales meant that June and Jennifer grew up dependent upon each other. It took years before anyone recognized that their silence might be a problem. By that point, they had become thoroughly enclosed in their own world, governed by rules that made sense only to themselves. They obsessed over the same boys, converted their room to a gruesome doll hospital, and delved into witchcraft. Eventually, they turned to crime and were given what amounted to a life-sentence at the notorious Broadmoor mental hospital. They were condemned to indefinite confinement for setting a few small fires and stealing office supplies—a crime spree Wallace describes as ‘more pathetic than criminal.’ At Broadmoor, they were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics, a label which ‘fit awkwardly the profound and complex problems of their twinship,’ and medicated into stupefied submission.
During their early years, the twins spoke only to each other and their interactions with the external world were severely limited. On the other hand, their internal communications were uncannily overdeveloped. They moved in perfect unison, even when separated by solid walls. They walked in a single-file line, with their heads bowed and their arms raised to shield their faces from the harsh view of outsiders. Their teachers thought they might share a single mind; they seemed to understand each other completely and act upon glances or slight changes in air pressure. They were difficult to tell apart.
The adults in their lives did not see the inner turmoil because the twins were incapable of outward expression. Their silent, harmonious exteriors contained a seething ocean of conflicting currents. The desire to be an individual crashed against the desire to be absolutely identical. Love and dependence faced-off against pure, animalistic hatred. Neither twin could advance without the other. The simple act of opening a car door first could lead the betrayed twin to attack her ‘evil shadow,’ ripping the hair from her scalp and gouging bloody trenches in her cheek. Using the Manichean vocabulary of ancient literature, Wallace describes June and Jennifer as:
two human beings who love and hate each other with such intensity that they can neither live together nor apart. Like twin stars, they are caught in the gravitational field between them, doomed to spin round each other for ever. If they come too close or drift apart, both are destroyed. So the girls devised games and strategies and rules to maintain this equilibrium…Such games and rituals often embody sinister meanings which can lead the players into the darker side of life. There are penalties to be extracted, forfeits to be paid. Failure, punishment, even death await those who play too long.
The Silent Twins is an exceptional biography partly because of Wallace’s hyperbolic narrative voice, which arguably outlives the fame of her subjects. Mixing original imagery with the esoteric language of myth and destiny, Wallace effectively communicates the relationship between June and Jennifer Gibbons as they saw it themselves. It seems the only way to make sense of their ceaseless competition is to adopt the distorted perspective known to certain identical twins. By doing so, Wallace is able to grasp the psychological dimensions of the twins’ predicament in a way that professional psychiatrists—armed with a battalion of lofty condescension—never could. What certain jaded adults might see as nothing more than an exaggerated form of sibling rivalry, Wallace sees as a dramatic life-or-death struggle worthy of the gods of Ancient Greece.
But Wallace goes further. Like mad Captain Ahab, she penetrates the ‘pasteboard masks’ to uncover the ‘little lower layer.’ Wallace could have described the battles and reunions, documented the psychoanalytic reports, interviewed teachers and relations, and been done with it. The final product would still have been a biography. Instead, the peculiar urgency of Wallace’s account derives from what has been lost—what remains only in fragments. The irony of the situation is that none of the adults in their lives understood that the Gibbons were actually overflowing with words. Their external silence was merely an inevitable consequence of having too much to say and not knowing how to begin. Wallace uses the twins’ diaries—more than a million microscopic words printed on the pages of journals, loose papers, paper bags, and scraps of cardboard—to emphasize the failure of the psychiatric community in handling their case. In contrast to their teacher’s report that they showed ‘very little initiative and imagination,’ Wallace presents the twins as untapped veins of priceless creative potential. They are the embryonic authors that the bureaucratic world of the late twentieth-century chose to abort. They could have made a significant contribution to the reservoir of imaginary literature had their talents been encouraged, rather than diagnosed. Wallace’s account is especially damning because it points directly at what could have been—what we, as a culture, have lost because of an exaggerated fear of social aberration. Having scoured the internet for a complete copy of June’s ‘Pepsi-Cola Addict,’ I can only grieve its irreversible loss and cherish the remaining scraps:
There was subtle color in his bedroom; sable bricks beside yellow brimstone drawers, beside wood painted livid red. There was color in the faces, too, overlapping, blending and clashing so that the entire room displayed a world of zany popsingers. Style impassioned his thoughts in the form of pink graffiti that illuminated the name ‘PEGGY’ ten times on the freshly painted white door.
Excerpts like this do not strike me as the ramblings of the mentally deranged. Through their novels and poems, June and Jennifer emerge as intelligent, insightful individuals with an acute understanding of complex human emotions and the struggle to communicate one’s thoughts effectively. How can we possibly expect art to survive and evolve in a world where editors tell hopeful authors that:
Editors as a class dislike drunkards, lunatics, drug addicts, prostitutes and authors. Crippled or deformed key characters, unpleasant children, adolescents who smoke and drink…Intense suffering should be suggested by implication, not directly described.
The Silent Twins left me feeling uneasy precisely because Wallace underscores the similarities between those we canonize, and those we wrap in straightjackets. Why is it so easy to silence voices that should be heard? How many voices have already been lost? June and Jennifer Gibbons saw each aspect of their world in magnified detail. They found wholly original methods of description. Even their personal diaries, which Wallace describes as reflecting ‘the precision of Jane Austen and the macabre intentions of Edgar Allen Poe,’ are fountains of distinctive narration which may never flow again. With the destruction of their diaries, we lose access to an intense inner world which cannot be glimpsed from the outside. We see two identical girls lying in bed, but we do not see that:
she lay unmovable, I lay likewise, as though paralyzed by her stillness, her refusal to move. For I knew it was a refusal; it was not an inability. She had not lost her power to move. And all her perception was sharper than steel. So sharply cut, it sliced through to my own perception. They clashed, cutting into each other. Sinking in. Finding out. And so it was this. I read her mind, I knew all about her mood, in that split second I awoke from my unconsciousness to the sound of her perception; her perception which made mine ten times as sharp.
On the day the twins were released from Broadmoor, Jennifer Gibbons died of a mysterious illness. In usual occult fashion, she predicted her death well ahead of time and infused her demise with a sense of destiny. Jennifer was a necessary sacrifice to June’s liberation. And yet, after spending more than a decade in a mental institution, June no longer dreamed of winning a Pulitzer. Years of drugs and disappointment, of being told that she was sick and unworthy, had robbed her of her creative energy. I think this is the lesson that makes The Silent Twins so disturbing. The evidence of pure, imaginative talent is there—radiating through the fragments and observations—but it will never progress beyond a juvenile state. Marjorie Wallace, with her strange words and her unrelenting gaze, does a better job at psychoanalytical description than even the most meticulous of the Gibbons’ doctors. She does not construct a wall against quirks and perversions, but sees them instead as indicators of imaginative depth. She is hesitant to diagnose, to limit the complexities of an individual mind by dropping it into a pre-assembled box. Her singular narrative voice and obvious identification with the twins enables us to see that the mental differences between distinguished journalist and condemned schizophrenic are rather insignificant. The point here is that reader, writer and subject are only separated by the categories imposed upon them by a capricious, neurotic system of taxonomy.
No comments:
Post a Comment