Being Depressed

The cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine in jangled hand-printing reads "I have sat in shrinks' offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover." These words surround a small dark snapshot of a woman's face looking at the camera in utter despair.

I know that face, just as I know something about the feeling those words describe. A quarter of a century ago, the writer, Daphne Merkin, fresh out of college, worked for me at McCalls, a gifted young woman, more serious than most but glowing with ambition for the literary career that stretched ahead of her.

Now, in painful detail, she tells of a life since then in a black cloud of chronic depression punctuated by constant psychiatry and mounds of medication, ending in a hospital stay anguishing over whether or not to submit to ECT, electro-shock therapy.

Her thousands of words evoke the extreme of a condition I have lived with since childhood, suffered with in loved ones and anguished over with friends and colleagues. Her account will resonate with the afflicted and baffle those lucky enough to find it exotic, perhaps even self-indulgent.

Yet it is at the heart of modern life, as painful, debilitating and destructive as cancer. Psychiatry and pharmacology almost randomly seem to help some victims but fail those who are most directly connected to life and most vulnerable, as I once wrote about Marilyn Monroe and my best friend, the photographer Ed Feingersh, both of whom died in their thirties, unable to keep living with it.

Like them, Daphne Merkin seems to have suffered from that gift and used it to connect with other human beings as a writer, perhaps never more so than in this account of her struggles.

Even those who can't understand what she is going through may find something of themselves in her and wish her well for the future.

The Madoff Mystique

He is out of sight behind bars now, but the maddeningly blank face of Bernard Madoff is still with us like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. The mild-looking little man who stole billions with minimal exertion is proving to be irresistible to the literary imagination.

In a New York Times OpEd, Daphne Merkin, who is writing a book about Jews and money, maintains, "There is no single code word--no 'Rosebud'--that will lead us to decipher the Madoff phenomenon...

"Indeed, what is lost amid the fury of some of those who handed their money over to him is that theirs was a voluntary--nay, eager--association. No one was holding a gun to anyone’s head, saying sign up with Mr. Madoff or else.

"Far from it: people scrambled to find a home within his financial orbit, auditioning for the role of Madoff client the way you would try out for a place at an Ivy League college, nudging connections to put in a good word, calling in favors to get in on a piece of the Madoff action."

She concludes that "to call Mr. Madoff a sociopath isn’t really to explain him so much as to explain our failure to pick up on his scam. 'Everything that deceives,' decreed Plato, “can be said to enchant.'"

In the New Yorker, Woody Allen conjures up two Madoff victims who have been reincarnated as lobsters in the tank of a Manhattan restaurant: "The day I found out he could handle my account I was so thrilled I cut my wife’s head out of our wedding photo and put his in. When I learned I was broke, I committed suicide by jumping off the roof of our golf club in Palm Beach. I had to wait half an hour to jump, I was twelfth in line.” When Madoff shows up for a seafood dinner, the crustacean victims see their chance for revenge.

Life and art intersect in the person of Elie Wiesel, the bard of the Holocaust, who lost all his own and his charities' money. Madoff, he recalls, "presented himself as a philanthropist," and they talked about ethics and education:

"It was a myth that he created around him...the myth of exclusivity...He gave the impression that maybe a hundred people belonged to his club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him."

The myth was an echo of the Midas Touch with no memory of the curse that comes with it. Whatever happens to Madoff himself, he is on his way to becoming a symbol of "the stuff that dreams are made on" in the long line of literature from Shakespeare to Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon."