Discovering Greenland: My Friendship With Cyril Greenland
“Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did, we could not use it." Sigmund Freud
“A readiness to let the mind change as contingency demands may be one pre-requisite of a happy life.” Lewis Hyde, “Trickster Makes the World”
As I ventured into the archives of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre on a frigid January day in 1995, little did I know I was heading down a life-changing path. In those days, the recently formed archives occupied a claustrophobic tomb of cinderblock walls. At its door stood a bronze bust of Joseph Workman, the first head of Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum that opened in 1850 in the rural expanses of Queen Street West. His guarded, Dickensian stare seemed to shout: “What the hell do you want?”
Stepping inside, I encountered a kindly, diminutive man in his seventies whom I might have mistaken for Leon Trotsky: the goateed, sharp-featured face, the large spectacles encircling the intelligent eyes, and the bald pate that housed the vitality and curiosity of a far younger man. In a precise yet warm English accent, he introduced himself as Cyril Greenland, a retired, but far-from-retiring, professor of social work and co-founder of the archives. Instantly I felt at home.
I explained my mission: I was researching a potential book on my grandfather, an eminent public health doctor of Irish blood who died 10 years before I was born. Among other heroic acts, he founded the Connaught Laboratories, mass produced the new wonder drug insulin, and spearheaded the campaign that wiped out the infectious, child-killing disease of diphtheria. Intriguingly, early in his career, he worked as a neuropathologist, cutting open the cadaverous brains of Irish paupers on the very site where I now stood. But because I lacked any “inside information” on the mysterious and elusive Dr. Gerry FitzGerald of whom my family rarely spoke, I was fending off feelings of despair that I would never get the book off the ground. Could Cyril help?
“What a remarkable coincidence,” he declared in his courtly, Old World manner. “You have come to the right place.”
He disappeared and returned with a thick manila folder. Inside, miraculously, I found 60 intense, confessional letters written by my grandfather in 1939-40 during the last months of his life in a private American sanitarium. All were addressed to Dr. C.B. Farrar, head of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, a confidant of my grandfather’s, and a former associate of Cyril’s; having sat untouched on a shelf for 45 years, the letters had been donated to the archives by Farrar’s widow mere days before my arrival. If ever I had cause to embrace the Jungian concept of synchronicity, this was it.
I devoured the feast, digesting, among other things, the news that my grandfather endured the horror of dozens of insulin shock treatments designed (and failing) to annihilate his suicidal depression. It was an uncanny “eureka moment” that gave powerful impetus to my book. Not only was I meant to discover Gerry FitzGerald’s heart-wrenching letters (now held in the University of Toronto Archives), but I was meant to discover Cyril Greenland.
As the years of grueling work passed, he remained unflaggingly supportive, together with the newly hired archivist John Court; their ceaseless acts of generosity included the engineering of a bursary from the “Friends of the Archives” (aka “Fiends of the Archives”). Cyril introduced me to his friend and co-founder of the archives, Dr. Jack Griffin; as it turned out, Jack had known my grandfather back in the 1930s and he recalled verbatim conversations which I excitedly recorded. In gratitude, I volunteered to help Cyril with his various pet projects, only to discover that his pets prowled a virtually bottomless menagerie; eventually I realized my gratitude was less than bottomless and I learned how to deliver a firm, if guilt-tinged, “No.”
All the same, Cyril cheerfully maintained the tacit role of mentor, compensating many times over for the remote, drug-addicted and suicidally depressed physician father (and similarly afflicted grandfather) whom I never knew. When my book, “What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son’s Quest to Redeem the Past”, was finally published in 2010, months short of my 60th year, I presented one of the first copies to Cyril. In the inscription, I wrote that he must consider himself a Godfather of the book.
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Right up to his death from leukemia on New Year’s Day, 2012, twelve days after his 92nd birthday, Cyril never ceased teaching me something, typically in the most tangential of ways. We’d lunch regularly at Momo’s, a favoured Harbord Street haunt, invariably greeting me at our corner, window-side table with the charming salutation: “Heigh ho, James!” After our meal – far healthier than my norm – Cyril would predictably reach for the bill and an arm-wrestling match ensued; I was learning that the professional caregiver felt more comfortable giving than being given to.
Then we’d repair to his second floor apartment of his semi-detached Victorian home at 84 Brunswick Avenue to share a pot of tea and more talk. Ensconced in his self-described “anec-dotage”, Cyril would pose some tidbit of medical trivia -- “Did you know that Sir William Osler partially diagnosed his patients by his sense of smell?” – and if I failed to dish the correct answer (far too often, I’m afraid), it seemed to give him subtle pleasure. As my eyes drifted across the papers and books scattered across the kitchen table – typically, daunting tomes by the likes of Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers and Max Weber -- my gaze would invariably climb upward to a wall-mounted 1914 photograph of a protesting parade of nude Doukhobors. (The provocative image, which originally hung in his office, so offended his department head that he demanded its removal, to which Cyril replied: “Over my dead body.”)
For my part, I’d report on my work-in-progress. One day I related an experience following a day’s digging in the archival trenches on Queen Street (the institution had since been awkwardly renamed The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, an Orwellian moniker that seemed to promote addiction). On the homeward-bound streetcar, I was overcome with a sudden, inexplicable burst of joy. Why was I feeling so happy after visiting a psychiatric hospital? Then came the epiphany – no matter how miserable or discouraged I might feel, I was a model of health compared to the muttering, medicated, father-like souls I saw wandering the corridors of CAMH in search of sustained human contact which, for the most part, eluded them. In that sense, they were my therapists, making me feel better about myself (free-of-charge, no less). Unlike them, I was just visiting.
My friendship with Cyril deepened. The curious contents of his bohemian lair -- pieces of his own woodwork, his grandchildren’s finger paintings, the cardboard toilet paper tubes masking knots of electric wires -- inevitably led down some fascinating conversational rabbit-hole, and I gradually gleaned the headlines of an impressive clinical and academic career. As a fervent historian of the 4-P Club -- psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy -- I was excited to discover that he had known many of the pioneers, from Melanie Klein to R.D. Laing, whom I had read and admired. Picking the brains of the gifted and prodigious seemed an integral part of Cyril’s modus operandi, which in turn became mine. Whose smooth pate better to pick than his—two degrees of separation and all that?
As a young man, Cyril met Anna Freud at her famous Hampstead childrens’ clinic and ruefully noted her “authoritarian” style. He trained at the Tavistock Institute with John Bowlby, the trail-blazing theorist of mother-child attachment. When he saw his colleagues blooming at Tavistock, he entered psychoanalysis with the heavily accented Viennese émigré, Oswald Schwartz, author of “The Psychology of Sex” (a book Cyril hastened to characterize as “wildly out of date”). At the Paddington Green Clinic, he watched the child therapist Donald Winnicott – widely regarded as the single most influential post-Freudian theorist and clinician – sitting on the floor to directly engage troubled toddlers -- “being with.”
“Winnicott had a benign, smiling, paternalistic way of making you feel like, ‘Poor boy, you’ll understand some day’ ”, Cyril explained, ever attuned to a hint of condescension. He added that Winnicott’s wife Clare was “the truly brilliant one”, keeping her husband on track. “But that group were all a bit kooky,” he added.
The eminent psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis challenged Cyril to gain more clinical experience, so in 1948 he travelled to Crichton Royal Psychiatric Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland, where he spent the next ten years, seven with the German psychiatrist William Mayer-Gross (and where he met his future wife Jane Donald, a Scots-born midwife-turned-psychiatric nurse). Cyril conducted the initial interviews with in-patients, an experience that sparked his lifelong interest in an unusual and often neglected phenomenon: schizophrenics who spontaneously recover without formal treatment. Observing patients closely, he theorized that acute, full blown psychotics had a better chance of recovery than those who internalized their feelings. He came to believe that schizophrenia cannot be reduced to a single cause – a fundamental rebuke to the biological fundamentalism that still pervades contemporary medical psychiatry.
I was also delighted to learn that Cyril knew the psychoanalyst John Rickman, author of one of my cherished aphorisms: “Being mad means not being able to find anyone who can stand you.”
Many were lucky to find Cyril, who often understood – and withstood. And not just the patients.
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In our rambling talks, Cyril’s therapeutic failures gained equal billing with his successes. Out came the story of the blind girl delicately dabbing the tears rolling down his cheeks; the time he raised institutional ire by merging the demented women’s ward with the retarded children’s ward; his hugging of a mad, shit-encrusted girl, day after day, until she spit in his ear, causing him to reject her, and her to regress. He was drawn to children, both civilized and feral; one day as we passed a small boy on College Street, Cyril observed: “Notice how the herky-jerky movements of a child can mimic that of a psychotic.” He once showed me a book of Renaissance art chock full of depictions of the Virgin Mary fondling the penis of the Christ child; Cyril generally deplored the lack of legal outlets for sexual expression by children, even though they are libidinous from infancy. I knew few people able to speak so even-handedly and matter-of-factly about the quirky and offbeat sides of human nature; if he was forensic-minded, I never experienced him as cold-blooded (although others might have). Indeed, his sensitivity fought an ongoing battle with the cruelty and rejection he absorbed in his own childhood; whenever he passed the local elementary schoolyard, he felt deeply pained by the sight of a little, hijab-clad Muslim girl, standing alone by the iron railing, ostracized by her classmates.
Cyril often told stories on himself of how his compassion towards the dispossessed sometimes backfired; the hand that fed might be bitten as often as kissed. He once gave a winter coat to a homeless transsexual woman, then discovered she had experience as an archivist. He hired her to work in his budding enterprise, a decision he soon regretted, for she thoroughly sabotaged the filing system of books and documents, requiring months of work to restore. One cannot always expect to be thanked for an act of altruism, but then, is that why we do it?
But it was his encounter with a one-eyed Polish war veteran, a former resistance fighter languishing in the back ward of the Whitby hospital in the late 1950s, that remains my favourite Cyril story. Deemed an intractable case, the man was spitting at the nurses, hurling insults, his “brick-red” face raging against the world; his inability to understand his English-speaking captors only exacerbated his paranoia. Studying the name on the chart, Cyril took the time to learn how to pronounce the baffling string of Slavic consonants, then returned to the ward. When Cyril addressed the man correctly, his wall of aggression melted.
Then Cyril checked the patient out of the ward and escorted him to a Polish Legion. By cosmic coincidence, they immediately encountered several comrades he had fought with during the war. Cyril said he had never witnessed such a deeply moving reunion of bear hugs and flowing tears, and naturally he was deeply moved himself. No more drugs or shock were needed and the man was discharged – an inspired, intuitive and all too rare, piece of non-invasive therapeutic intervention.
But when I tacked towards Cyril’s personal life, I sensed stricter limits. He declined to talk about his years during World War II – “too painful to recall lost comrades.” Similarly, his wife Jane, who died in 1990 from a protracted illness, seemed off limits. He told me that Jane always respected his wish not to talk about the war, and I took the hint not to broach either subject (although had I known what I now know -- that Jane worked as a psychiatric nurse at the Addiction Research Foundation at the same time my father was a patient there – I might have spoken up).
The same reticence held true of the premature deaths of a grandson in 2004 and his eldest child Erika in 2005. I had met Erika only once, sitting with Cyril in Convocation Hall to hear Oliver Sacks lecture on his book, “An Anthropologist From Mars” (which Cyril brought down to earth with a pithy critique). I sensed father and daughter were close; when he later reported the sad news in an almost formal way, I read the same tacit, and taciturn, message in his eyes: best leave the Pandora’s Box of life’s losses -- both new and old -- alone.
The one time I dared to ask about his childhood, he offered a few selective details, small but evocative. With the revelation that he grew up in Bethnall Green, the tough working class neighbourhood in East London, my thoughts (perhaps perversely) leapt to the classic Monty Python sketch, “The Piranha Brothers”, a parody of the real-life gangsters, the Kray twins, who terrorized Bethnall Green in the 1960s (“Oh, Dinsdale Piranha? He was a cruel man – but fair!”).
Cyril further revealed that his mother was a suffragette and Labour Party supporter whose progressive politics led the family into the company of birth control pioneer Marie Stopes and “Red Emma” Goldman, the notorious anarchist destined to die in political exile in, of all places, Toronto. As a five year old child, Cyril climbed onto Goldman’s lap, where he was “clasped to her iron bosom”, an experience that imprinted a lifelong fascination with “dangerous women.” Such was the family’s doctrinaire socialism that young Cyril was commanded to never stand up for the singing of “God Save the King” at the cinema, or anywhere else. His father, an army quartermaster who tailored uniforms, Cyril characterized as “a survivor” scarred by the nightmare trenches of the Western Front; the family of seven used his steel helmet as a coal scuttle -- a succinct image of deprivation worthy of a poet. I never summoned enough chutzpah to ask Cyril to confirm my suspicion that he might have anglicized his last name to disguise his true heritage. In the feral and delinquent land of Bethnall Green, a slight, bright, poor Jewish boy would not have escaped bullying, or worse. Or so my feminine intuition told me.
Knowing Cyril was fond of jokes, one day I told him how a journalist had once asked Dr. Jonathan Miller, the British polymath of “Beyond the Fringe” fame: “So, Dr. Miller, I understand you are a Jew.” To which Miller retorted: “Oh, no, no, no – I would just say… Jew-ish…”
Cyril smiled, but my journalistic ploy to invite Dr. Greenland to come clean on his bloodlines fell short.
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In 1958, just short of 40, Cyril moved his growing family to Canada. Freud’s close colleague and biographer, Ernest Jones (who had worked at the 999 Queen Street Asylum from 1908-1913, succeeding my young grandfather as clinical director), had advised Cyril that Toronto was “a nice place to emigrate to.” Destined to become an expert on Jones, Cyril soon discovered that “Freud’s rottweiler” in fact despised his sojourn in the colonial backwater. Cyril likely identified with the quick-witted contrarian (both men were born in Wales and sub-normal, if I may use that term, in physical stature), but they parted ways on opinions of Canada. Cyril once told me: “If anyone ever says, ‘You can’t say that!’ , I quickly respond, ‘Oh, yeah, watch this!’ ”
In his adopted country, Cyril pursued his career as director of social work at the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital, specializing in delinquency and serving as a policy advisor to the Ministry of Health; one of his main goals was the recruitment of social workers to support psychiatric hospitals. From 1960-65, he headed the department of social work at the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital – the former domain of C.B. Farrar -- and then moved down College Street when the TPH morphed into the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in 1966; there he served as the institution’s first research scientist. The same year, the Greenlands bought a semi-detached house at 84 Brunswick Avenue for $22,500, just a brief walk west of the Clarke Institute. Not lost on Cyril was the fact that the subversive Ernest Jones had scandalized puritanical Edwardian Toronto by “living in sin” with his sister and morphine-addicted, Jewish common-law wife just a few blocks north on the very same Brunswick Avenue.
What he did not know, until I told him, was that I had been able to procure, as next of kin, the clinical files of my father who suffered catastrophic bouts of electro-shock at the Clarke (and later at Homewood Sanitarium) during this very period. In the euphemistic language of the technocrat, my “treatment-resistant” father experienced an “adverse reaction” to the ECT, but not adverse enough to be tried again and again. Cyril, naturally, knew all of my father’s psychiatrists at the Clarke (and elsewhere), and sympathized with my prolonged quest to understand, if we ever can, the meaning of madness – not to mention the psyches of those doctors who routinely betray the Hippocratic Oath: “First do no harm.”
Appointed Professor of Social Work at McMaster University in 1970, Cyril began teaching the social aspects of health and disease, commuting between Hamilton and Toronto for 15 years. Collaborating with “progressive, change-the-world types”, Cyril researched mental illness within the contexts of violence, sex offenders, and civil liberty, and published numerous papers. Over the course of his rigorous, ten year international study of 100 child abuse deaths, he was denied access to files of the Childrens’ Aid Society, so he pulled post-mortem information from the coroner’s office; the result was his 1987 book “Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths.” A single lunch-time anecdote contained all I needed to know of the life-in-the raw that Cyril routinely experienced: boys who were abused by their mothers almost always ran away from home, not so much to escape the violence but out of terror that they might kill their mothers in retaliation. Again and again, the police returned the runaway to his home -- until the day when, inevitably, he did kill his mother. In the end, “I told you so” is doomed to accomplish nothing more than the rush to save face.
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Cyril’s archival gatherings took wing in the 1960s when he began a “passionate affair” with Dr. Richard M. Bucke, a 19th century “alienist” who had run the asylum in London, Ontario. Bucke’s 1901 book, Cosmic Consciousness, had grown out of his worshipful friendship with the American poet Walt Whitman, who lifted him to “a higher plane of existence.” Bucke spun a theory of cosmic consciousness as a fleeting moment of enlightenment when we lose all sense of sin and fear of death. The universe is experienced as a living presence, not simply inert matter. The final stage in the development of the human mind, cosmic consciousness resides in a mystic state above and beyond man’s natural state of self-consciousness, even as animal consciousness lies below.
Tenaciously tracking down Dr. Bucke’s daughter-in-law in hopes of finding Bucke’s papers, Cyril was informed they were long gone. But when he persisted, she reluctantly allowed him to search her unlit basement where, miraculously, he “struck paydirt” with the unearthing of five dusty boxes bound with rope -- a “eureka moment” not unlike my very own decades later when Cyril dropped my grandfather’s confessional letters in my lap like a squalling newborn.
“My joy in discovering these valuable documents,” Cyril later wrote, “was spiked with rage.” Why would the family neglect such an important historical legacy? (He might as well have asked: why does a parent neglect a child?) He speculated that the Bucke offspring were ashamed of their father’s eccentric ideas and his infatuation with Whitman; the poet himself was embarrassed by the Canadian’s adulation. Together with John Robert Colombo, Cyril compiled two books on Bucke and Whitman: “The New Consciousness” and “Walt Whitman’s Canada.” (When I purchased these wonderful volumes, I was a bit bewildered when Cyril declined to inscribe them for me).
Similarly, Cyril rescued the papers of Dr. C.K. Clarke, the pioneering psychiatrist who headed the 999 Queen Street Hospital for the Insane in the early 20th century (and mentored my young grandfather). Cyril “stalked” Clarke’s aging daughter, waiting for her outside her house because he was advised not to engage her directly. Eventually persuading her to trust him, the seminal Clarke biography was born.
In addition, Cyril accidentally discovered important Ontario Ministry of Health documents, destined for the dumpster, that covered his dining room table for months. At this time, his friend Dr. Jack Griffin was thinking of writing a biography of the “mental hygienist” Dr. Clarence Hincks and so an alliance was formed; the seedbed for a national archive on the history of psychiatry was germinating.
As head of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Jack’s medical credentials brought credibility to the idea of an archive, which came to fruition in 1982. From the beginning, Cyril and Jack fought a Sisyphean political battle, as the administrations of all institutions, by their very nature, tend to adhere to a state of collective amnesia when confronted by a less-than-glorious history. “The pain of the past,” Cyril liked to say, “is wasted if we learn nothing from it.” Yet painful historical truths and image-building public relations make for impossible bedfellows. And so the timeless paradox remains intact: institutions that strive to heal and educate simultaneously strive to limit, even eradicate, the human memory that forms our deepest source of healing. Or in the sage words of Freud: “Thus society turns what is unpleasant into what is untrue.”
In the pecking order of the helping professions, social work falls below psychiatry; like my grandfather’s position within public health and preventive medicine, Cyril played second fiddle to the so-called “curative” sciences. The analogy of a bickering marriage -- the feminine arts at odds with masculine science – leaps to mind. And so, while Cyril depended on the support of the administration to keep the archive alive, his assorted guerrilla actions raised hackles. He struggled, without ultimate success, to create a museum of asylum artifacts that he feared would decay or disappear. The “Friends of the Archives” failed to make many friends within the administration, especially when Cyril supported the psychopharmacologist Dr. David Healy who, in a highly publicized scandal, was dismissed from his academic post (and later won an out-of-court settlement) for daring to author a paper on the deleterious side-effects of Prozac, manufactured by the CAMH corporate sponsor Eli Lilly.
While Cyril could be prickly and mercurial, he inspired far more than he ever dispirited. As a 22 year old psychiatric nurse newly arrived at 999 Queen Street, Lisa Brown was galvanized by Cyril’s love of history. “The silver fox”, as she called him, “infused me with curiosity.” He captivated Brown with entrancing anecdotes, such as the 19th century attempt to catch and release the infamous stench of the old 999 asylum by sweeping the air with hand-held cups. Growing out of the talent shows, Brown organized on the wards, Workman Arts, a forum for “mad” artists, musicians and writers, was founded in 1987. Six years later, she started the Rendez Vous With Madness Film Festival, (named by Cyril’s son Hamish), which has since blossomed into an annual, week-long event of international reach.
During this fertile period, Cyril served as a consultant for several history-based books, plays and films, doing his best to lift the tarnished image of the old asylums as end-of the-road snakepits onto the higher ground of intellectual and moral respectability. Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace, Timothy Findley’s Headhunter, and the 1990 feature film, Beautiful Dreamers, starring Colm Feore and Rip Torn as Bucke and Whitman, all bear Cyril’s thumbprints. (During the shooting of a nude swimming scene of Whitman and Bucke, Cyril urged the director to break a long-standing -- upstanding? -- puritanical taboo by showing the actors’ genitalia on-screen -- shades of his cherished Doukhobor photo; when he was refused, Cyril was livid). He helped organize an operatic evening entitled, “Eight Songs For A Mad King”, inspired by the film, “The Madness of King George”; I relished telling Cyril that the film was originally entitled, “The Madness of King George III”, but the producers dropped the Roman numerals for fear it might be perceived as a sequel.
In 1991, twenty nine year old Randy Sorenson was abandoning a career in software when he volunteered to work for Cyril at the archives. “Awestruck by his knowledge and sophistication”, Sorenson began organizing events for Cyril which soon led him into a broader career as a hospital conference planner. Sorenson regarded Cyril as a true mentor and inspirational father figure, to the point where, in his late 40s, he decided to study to become a social worker. “There was so much depth of controversy, confusion, common sense and compassion coming from him,” he told me. “He was many people. He was a private man, yet very public, and a man who believed in learning from our history.”
When Sorenson was tending his dying father, Cyril, then in his 90th year tendered some “droll comfort” by quoting a passage from the English author Noel Coward: “The only thing that really saddens me over my demise is that I shall not be there to read the nonsense that will be written about me. There will be lots of apocryphal jokes I never made and gleeful misquotations of words I never said. What a pity I shan’t be there to enjoy them.” As Sorenson noted, Cyril was likely thinking of himself, suspecting that a writer (possibly named FitzGerald), was waiting in the wings, poised to bravely (foolishly?... ironically?…humbly?) challenge Coward’s (and Freud’s) belief in the impossibility of biographical truth.
Cyril’s co-author, Colombo, likened him to “a magnet who attracted into his orbit no end of unusual people.” The roster of his heroes and mentors ranged from Richard Titmuss, one of the fathers of the welfare state, to the renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose (in whose honour Cyril organized a fundraising evening in 2009), to countless others dotting the intellectual and ideological spectrum; if I had ever set myself the task of interviewing all the people Cyril knew, a door-stopping book would result. One year, I found Cyril sitting in the front row of the Workman Theatre with his friend, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who had come to hear Sophie Freud, the granddaughter of Sigmund, speak after a showing of the documentary film, “Hitler and Freud.” (Perhaps not surprisingly, she displayed an impressive immunity to her grandfather’s subversive wisdom). When Cyril introduced Canada’s pioneering abortion rights doctor to my partner Katy, Morgentaler asked straight off:
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
Before Katy could respond, I piped in: “I hope not!”
Cyril was a man of keen wit and humour, but I never saw him surrender to a full belly laugh. A raised Cyrilian eyebrow, in concert with a thin, ironic, knowing (and often melancholy) smile, remained his trademark.
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While some may have felt burned by Cyril’s love of devil’s advocacy, his self-appointed captaincy of the Good Ship One-Up-Man, I was able (most of the time) to semi-detach my emotional reactions and interpret some of his intellectual provocations as an unresolved dialectic playing out inside himself. (The fact that he achieved his PhD at the age of 64, one year before his retirement, seemed to suggest ambivalent, grouchy-Marxist feelings about joining the club of higher-ups he so revered; when daughter Eya jokingly referred to him as “doc”, Cyril snapped: “Don’t ever call me that!”) He habitually probed for the blind spot, picking at nits, as driven truth-seekers feel they must, yet much depends on how tactfully (yet memorably) we shine a light on the degrees of each other’s ignorance. Over my 10 year sentence at Upper Canada College, English-accented “masters” routinely jabbed poisoned verbal darts into my young nervous system -- ritual humiliation masquerading as the Socratic (Psychotic?) Method. In contrast, I experienced Cyril’s pointed questions as largely sadism-free, which helped, over time, to melt an ancient conditioning whereby I had experienced almost any simple, direct question as interrogation by the Gestapo. Ultimately I took Cyril to be saying: “Don’t for a minute think you have a corner on the truth. Examine and re-examine your assumptions, over and over again.” A worthy piece of advice in any field.
Like him, I tried to consider all sides of a debate, especially the enormously vexing issue of what constitutes a “good” therapeutic strategy. He knew better than anyone that improperly trained therapists and social workers often act out their saviour complexes, leaping before they look, thus pouring gas on the fire of an emotional crisis. Sometimes “doing nothing” – or rather, “being with” -- is the wisest option. When, if ever, do we invade war-torn Syria? Or do we watch and wait?
At the same time, it was often hard to know what Cyril truly felt on a given issue. Was he playing both sides against the middle, one minute a let’s-talk-it-out socialist softie, the next minute a hard-headed defender of drugs, shock and psychosurgery? One minute, he’d hand a homeless man a 20 dollar bill; the next minute, he’d badger another homeless man to pull up his socks and get a job. Sometimes his penchant for hero worship of the pioneering “fathers of psychiatry” (idealization of his own absent father?) seemed slightly misplaced, but the Cyril the socialist saw no conflict with Cyril the elitist. When a scholar pointed out that Dr. Bucke had endorsed gynecological surgery of women under his care, Cyril downplayed it. He passionately defended C.K. Clarke, who not only championed eugenics and the sexual sterilization of the “feeble-minded”, (like his successor, C.B. Farrar), but was also an unapologetic anti-Semite. Cyril countered that much of the progressive, left wing intelligentsia – including Emma Goldman, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Margaret Sanger -- embraced eugenics before the Nazis drove it down the tracks to the death camp; judging Victorian doctors by contemporary standards he saw as ethical anachronism and politically correct “presentism.”
At the same time, Cyril inevitably stood up to critique the failings of his more machine-headed colleagues, in private or in the lecture hall. At a Rendez-Vous With Madness festival, a woman was slated to speak about the damaging effects of her sexual sterilization, depicted in a documentary film. Cyril arranged to bring in the doctor who had performed the operation years earlier, but neither doctor or patient were informed in advance – a typical example of Professor Greenland’s bent for “disturbing-of-the-shit.” He once told me he was angry with a close colleague, an otherwise decent man, who callously wrote off “the untreatable” without a second thought. He similarly criticized a “cold fish” speaker who rattled off the history of psychotherapy as if it were a train schedule. He was incensed when a doctor suggested that “out-of-body” bereavement experiences – or visitations by ghosts -- should be listed as a pathological category in the DSM. He was wearily skeptical of the ongoing renovation of the CAMH campus designed to open up the streets to the general public as part of an anti-stigma campaign; he had witnessed a “progressive” architectural makeover only a generation earlier fail to realize its ergonomic ideals. Yet I was surprised to hear him dismiss the more strident voices of the anti-psychiatry movement; surely he understood the sources of their legitimate anger as well as anyone?
In 2000, when I made a presentation at CAMH on my work-in-progress, I quoted from my grandfather’s letters that Cyril’s archive had made available to me five years earlier. I described my grandfather’s terrible suffering when, during the last months of his life, he endured 57 insulin shock treatments, a crude and long-since discredited therapy that killed at least 5% of its recipients. There’s no doubt the harrowing experience -- an iatrogenic fiasco, the treatment being worse than the condition it treats -- deepened my grandfather’s suicidal despair. But during the Q & A session, Cyril argued in favour of the “successes” of insulin shock, a stance which I must confess shocked me.
Similarly, he knew that my 1994 oral history, “Old Boys”, was instrumental in exposing a sex abuse scandal at Upper Canada College, sparking the conviction of three former teachers and a successful, multi-million dollar class action suit against the school. I knew firsthand the profound, lifelong emotional damage inflicted on many of the victims. Yet in our conversations, Cyril suspended moral condemnation, warned of the dangers of witch hunting inquisitions, and dispassionately explored the psychological nuances of so-called sexual crimes and misdemeanours. We spoke of the publicized scandals within the psychiatric profession, notably Dr. Samuel Malcolmson of Queen Street and Dr. Alan Parkin, a pioneering Toronto psychoanalyst. Both careers were ruined when they were convicted of the sexual molestation of female patients – an occupational hazard of what Janet Malcolm has called, “The Impossible Profession.” Yet Cyril maintained that sex between therapists and their clients (and by extension between adults and children) can be harmless, and he half-persuaded me. (Only after his death did I learn that he never spoke to his own children about sex; perhaps his sanguine, laissez-faire views were born of a family-rooted, Edwardian Puritanism he longed to overcome?)
Cyril also knew that I had benefitted from a long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy; in fact, I believe it saved my life. Yet he often strenuously promoted “brief” psychotherapy, which perhaps I should not have taken as a rebuke. I am guessing he was too restless and impatient to work in the weekly trenches as a full-time, in-depth psychotherapist with a limited number of clients; he was too busy casting his net of pragmatic knowledge and influence as widely and effectively as possible. How do we do the most good for the most people in the time we have?
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On Labour Day weekend, 2002, Katy and I visited Cyril at the eccentric three storey cabin he had built in the woods near the hamlet of Croydon, north of Napanee, in the 1990s. When Cyril first met Katy, only months earlier, he took her aside and in a mock-threatening tone, instructed: “Now, be sure to take care of James – he’s a good man.” The remark endeared him to her, and she loves to repeat it to this day.
Cyril adored his Walden-like cabin, dubbed “The Lighthouse”; he likened the anticipatory feeling of puttering eastward down Highway 401 in his old car to “visiting a lover.” With a brand of symbolism we can only guess at, he grafted an old metal door frame discarded from Queen Street onto the cabin. A photograph survives of myself sitting at an old chess table that belonged to C.B. Farrar, the recipient of my grandfather’s tortured letters and, alas, the least admirable character in my book. In my research, I came to view Farrar as an archetype -- strikingly embodied in a famous Otto Dix painting hanging the Art Gallery of Ontario -- of the cold-fish, schizoid psychiatrist who hides inside the fortress of his intellect, who lionizes shock, drugs and eugenics over humane talk, who in his rigid certainties does more harm than good. As I held Farrar’s chess pieces, I thought of Cyril, the wily strategist jousting ambiguously with the white knights of bio-technology; in the end, I always wanted to believe that in his heart he sided unequivocally with the humanities, and that his courting of the Old School, Farrar-like, “biology-explains-everything” geneticists and organicists was nothing but another guerrilla tactic by a sly double agent – keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Cyril as outsider, Cyril as insider.
From his cabin, Cyril led Katy and me north to Bon Echo Provincial Park where in years past he and Jane had taken their five children, Erika, Eya, Lesley, David and Hamish for idyllic summers of camping. We were smitten by the spectacular 100 metre lakeside cliff, “Canada’s Gibraltar”, which Cyril bid us to climb, and so we did, despite the fierce heat. On its steep face was carved an inscription dedicated to “Old Walt” Whitman on the centenary of his birth in 1919 (and, coincidentally, the year of Cyril’s birth). I suppose, like living close to the memory of Ernest Jones on Brunswick Avenue, he enjoyed communing with the proto-hippie singer of the body electric, his spirit echoing across the pristine air of the Canadian wild.
Before heading home, Katy and I made the mistake of idling our car engine to rev up the air conditioning system. Cyril politely admonished us for committing the sin of air pollution, and we’ve never “idled” since.
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In December 2011, prompted by a phone call from his daughter Eya, I visited Cyril for the last time, only days before his 92nd birthday and his planned retreat into the Kensington Hospice. When, nearly a decade earlier, Cyril learned he had been diagnosed with leukemia, he told me: “It’s comforting to know what I’ll die of.” His calm refusal to accept treatment seemed to cast a decisive vote against the invasive side of medicine. (Three of his five children were born at home, and he would have died at home, if he could).
As I took my usual place at the kitchen table, my eyes passed over the photo of the protesting parade of naked Doukhobors for what I suspected would be the final time; on this day, the gothic black and white image seemed to assume the hue of a death camp. I thought of my own father’s dying days in 1992, when he clung to a different kind of refusal – to simply “be with” me, in the Winnicottian sense. My father escaped the world with the parting shot: “Here comes Mr. Know-It-All”, an irony that stung because, back then, I knew next-to-nothing. To the bitter end, he experienced even my gentlest of gestures as a threat.
But Cyril redeemed all that for me. (I valued him not only as a father figure but, perhaps more importantly, a grandfather figure; I had always sensed a similarity between the early family dynamics of Cyril and my grandfather and the genesis of their caretaking personalities, not to mention the sympatico strain in Irish-Jewish sensibilities, one of my welcome paternal inheritances). When I asked if he was in pain, Cyril insisted he only felt fatigued, joking that his doctor wrote “denial of pain” on his chart. He chatted on in his usual free-associative fashion about the books and songs and ideas that were occupying the moment: he was still learning and revising and re-thinking, like the stoic Freud, the lion in winter… a human being, being human. Yet again he was living out Winnicott’s words: “May I be alive when I die!”
He said he was enjoying his “enforced invalidism”, reading extensively as he descended the “gentle slope” to death, his voracious curiosity undiminished. He read me the definition of the word “acedia”: the slow slide into sin, sloth and sickness if we fail to regularly cultivate our emotional and spiritual lives. He struck me as a paragon of anti-acedia, keeping his own demons at bay through the art of creative living. He spoke of Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale and the virtues of living in the moment; he revelled in an old, sweet memory when “the smell of baking bread devoured me.” Thomas Gray’s immortal poem, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, lay open on the table and I recognized its resonant lines from grade school: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day...the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” When Cyril read me a passage from Psalm 90 – attributed to the Hebrew patriarch Moses preparing the soul for eternity -- I asked him if he saw himself as religious. “I’m the least religious person you’ll ever know,” came the quick response.
Cosmic consciousness – now that’s something else entirely.
I reminded him that I had once given him a tape of a musical interpretation of his beloved Song of Songs from the Old Testament – Love is stronger than death. He then recalled a memory of delivering a talk at Trinity College, Cambridge, and being viciously attacked for his phenomenological method of truth-seeking. The experience echoed his “door slamming fights with my older brother”, and so he retreated to a chapel “to listen to the sublime Evensong, calmed by the angelic voices.”
I thought to myself: “He’s still teaching – teaching us how to die.”
I noticed his breathing was laboring slightly, so I rose from the table. For a second, as we faced each other, I thought we might embrace, but instead he simply extended his hand.
“Thank you for your rich influence on my life,” I said.
“I do my best, dear boy”, he replied, then saw me to the foot of the stairs. Walking down Brunswick, I smiled when I suddenly realized that, at 6’ 3”, I stood a full foot taller than Cyril and yet I had spent years looking up to him. Yes, he had affected me, but I knew I had affected him, giving back what he had given me, most powerfully in the form of a book; if it disturbed him, I was only following his example. But there was enough of an ancient father-son tug-of-war inside us both that much was destined to remain unspoken.
When the news came of his death on the first day of January, I smiled again; in his last burst of will upon the world, Cyril insisted on ringing in the new, like a reincarnated New Year’s baby.
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Naturally, we all reserve the right not to be fully known. Cyril, like Whitman, contained multitudes; he resists capture by a mere string of anecdotes, as elusive as truth itself.
But my ongoing “discovery of Greenland” continues, even after his death. When I read in his obituary of two related and deeply scarring -- his father’s desertion of the family, and his mother’s chronic depression and death in a mental institution -- pieces on the chess board (I will not say “final pieces”) fell into line. I thought of Cyril’s backing of the government decision to empty mental hospitals of patients in the “liberationist” 1960s and ‘70s. With the subsequent spike in homeless populations, Cyril conceded years later in an interview that the policy was misguided: “We were perhaps a little naïve and we failed to consider the need to carefully build community supports.” But surely his intention derived from a maternal kind of compassion; the personal is, indeed, the political. (And most of us are grateful for the rare instance of a person in a position of power publicly admitting to a mistake).
My hunch about Cyril’s ethnic origins was confirmed when I learned that, as a young man, the Bethnall Green escape artist had indeed changed his name -- from Grundland to Greenland. I thought of his cultural kinship with Germanic-Jewish geniuses like Marx, Freud and Einstein, playing out their inner conflicts and prodigious intellectual legacies against the primal, historical drama of the Chosen People, chased down by the Master Race.
Subsequent conversations with Eya and others revealed further facts of his early years far beyond the grasp of intuition. He earned pennies a day as a “skinny little runt” helping the local milkman deliver crates of milk to the low-rent housing complex where he lived. As a soprano in the school choir, he performed the solo parts – conjuring images in my head of a Dickensian urchin singing for his supper, or simply the scarce milk of human kindness. Eya gave me a revealing article that Cyril wrote on child poverty in the Globe and Mail in 1990, citing his own “Lord of the Flies” school experiences in 1920s Bethnall Green that made the indignities I witnessed and experienced at 1960s Upper Canada College seem like, well, child’s play: “In response to stress, or perhaps as a reflection of their profound misery, [the most impoverished and passive children] would urinate or defecate in their trousers. When the pervasive smell betrayed his plight, the ‘stinker’ would be driven from the classroom – his ungainly exit hastened by the teacher’s cane and by our wildly exaggerated howls of derision. Such incidents provoked in us a sense of misery and foreboding. Deep in our hearts, I suspect, we could all identify with the victim and his utter degradation.”
Cyril was only 14 when his father abandoned his wife and five children to take up with another woman with whom he had a child; this event, traumatic enough in itself, prematurely propelled Cyril into the workforce as an apprentice watchmaker; his truncated education meant he never mastered punctuation. (Although his adult writing style was fluent, his co-author Colombo often noted that after Cyril composed an article, he’d sprinkle a “salt-shaker of commas” randomly over the pages). His schooling was further interrupted by the war when he worked in an aircraft factory and cultivated Communist sympathies. In 1945 -- the same year as his father’s death and the changing of his family name -- Cyril entered a Nazi slave labour camp in Yugoslavia where, as a 25 year old aid worker, he helped re-settle starving orphans (with whom, no doubt, he could not help but identify). His experience of the ultimate madhouse was literally unspeakable, its tableau of horror searing his conscience for the rest of life. He once told Colombo that he could not talk of it because if he did, he’d be depressed for weeks.
A wartime government program enabled his entry into the London School of Economics, kick-starting his tenacious climb up the academic ladder to a professorship. An uncle offered to pay his tuition for medical school, but he was thwarted by an inherent squeamishness about blood and needles. We can only speculate that he came by it honestly: at the tender age of six, he spent a full year in hospital recovering from the potentially fatal diseases of diphtheria and scarlet fever. He knew that one of my grandfather’s signal achievements was the Connaught Laboratories’ eradication of diphtheria in the 1920s and ‘30s, yet when I sought survivors of the scourge to interview for my book, he never volunteered himself. This simply suggests to me that one childhood trauma is invariably connected to others; to speak of one is to summon them all.
With these and other “post-mortem” revelations, I realized that I had not fully grasped how Cyril embodied the classic self-made man. Eerily mirroring the biography of Charlie Chaplin, his early circumstances -- a short, bright, poor, Jewish, London-born “fellow traveller” coping with damaged parents while fending off neighbourhood gangs, stabbing hunger and death-dealing diseases – renders his life achievements all the more remarkable. If Cyril’s intent was to cover his tracks and redeem a sense of shame through hard and good work, then he had much to feel proud of (even if it was difficult to express that pride). Mysteriously, Mother Nature compensates privation and trauma with intuitive gifts; if he could not reach his own war-torn father, he could reach a crazed, one-eyed Polish war veteran whose very name no Anglo could pronounce. And his charm made him particularly alluring to the opposite sex, as an archival colleague, Thelma Wheatley, recalled: “Cyril was a complex, fascinating, lovable man. Women flocked to him like bees to honey. I loved him dearly, although he could be infuriating.”
Donald Winnicott famously said: “It is a joy to remain hidden, a disaster not to be found.” My respect for this amazing aphorism – the psychological importance of hiding and seeking that all children know -- has happily prevented me from adopting the tactless, frontal assault beloved of many thick-skinned journalists (and psychiatrists). As much as part of me wanted to nail down “the truth” -- “So, Cyril, tell me all about your unhappy mother overwhelmed by five children, then abandoned by her philandering husband. Do you feel that you were feminized by her? Did you experience a crushing pressure as a child to set all the family travails to rights?” -- another part knew how to respect and tolerate the sleight-of-hand trickster, the charming dissembler of smoke and mirrors. A “cat-and-mouse-game” suggests predation; ours was more a Winnicottian state of play.
Except, of course, when he declined to play at all. For example, no doubt he knew that I would have been fascinated to hear of his experimental dalliance with Sandoz-pure LSD with fellow psychiatric workers at the Royal Crichton Hospital in the early 1950s, but I remained in the dark until Eya enlightened me: “Because LSD therapy was top secret, Cyril was told not to tell anyone, not even his wife. But he’d come home for lunch, stoned on acid, and gaze in awe at the stream of soup pouring from his spoon.” Pregnant with their first child, Jane was convinced she was married to a madman.
Cyril told me that he admired my book which, among other things, catalogues the horrific abuses committed over the course of the history of psychiatry. Yet he told a mutual friend (who later told me) that he did not accept my premise that my suicidal grandfather and father might have been redeemed by the process of in-depth talk and dream-work that transformed my own life. (Had he not read the book, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”, dramatizing the pioneering work of the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann who worked successfully with schizophrenics as early as the 1930s?) Once again, Eya (via her mother’s recollection) confirmed one of my hunches: that Cyril stopped his own psychotherapy at the Crichton Hospital in the 1950s (but, not, presumably, the acid trips), because the anguish grew too intense. “Perhaps,” she noted, “your book drifted too close to the bone.”
Doubtless the quality of my own therapy was light years ahead of Cyril’s; we have come a long way since the 1950s. I suppose that’s why I could forgive him for seizing the intellectual high ground (as I can still do myself) if an emotional swamp looms round the bend. Whether therapists, friends or lovers, it’s all about “letting the right one in” and I felt honoured Cyril left his kitchen door open wide enough for me – one of the chosen people, I suppose.
Ultimately, the paradox is not lost in me: here was a man uncommonly dedicated to unspooling the threads of human suffering, a man who befriended me, a known buster-of-secrets (family, school and beyond), yet who implicitly suggested that full, naked disclosure does not guarantee salvation. Even if speaking defensively, he had a point: we must each protect our right to decide how many rocky emotional miles we will travel before we sleep. At what point is forgetting as, or more, therapeutic than remembering? While a listening ear and a helping hand can accomplish wonders, we inevitably reach our existential limits, and much of life is spent learning to accept the ruthless truth. But we also sense that life is not simply an absurdist Beckett play; that if we keep going, year by year, dancing the dance, if we bravely face the fullness of our humanity in the presence of another, the rewards are priceless. For this is how we meet our first and final helplessness; and how, looking up, we find a human soul who understands...never fully, but well enough.
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When I heard that Cyril had instructed his family not to hold a funeral, I was not surprised, sensing he was playing out the central drama of his life to the end. Acts of radical self-effacement often mask a healthy human need for recognition; yet strangely, accepting the recognition we earn and deserve often stirs up uncomfortable, vaguely guilty feelings we only dimly apprehend.
Happily, the family chose to host an informal memorial at the Heliconian Club on the Victoria Day weekend, and I was able to speak a few words honouring our 17 year friendship. Funerals, after all, are for the living, and I was glad Cyril was not going to escape Scot-free. Afterwards, as I told Eya of my interest in Cyril’s photo of the Doukhobors and its symbolic expression of the “naked truth” (sex and death, just for starters), she kindly promised to give it to me. It now hangs on my own kitchen wall – a better conversation piece I could never dream of.
As I was leaving the memorial, Cyril’s son David confirmed another of my long-standing intuitions: that he could relate (as I did, within my own medical family) to the fable of the busy shoemaker whose own children ran around shoeless. I thought of the son of Carl Jung who characterized (and ultimately forgave) his father as “maddening and marvelous.” Perhaps we expect too much of gifted people, and they of themselves. Our public idealism wields the power to starve us, to blind us – especially in our private relationships -- and we pay a price.
And some things do remain unforgivable. In 2011, not long before Cyril’s death, CAMH adopted a controversial policy: the destruction of all pre-1976 patient records from the Clarke Institute and its precursor, the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital; the primary reason given – budget restraint – appears disingenuous at best. My own father’s file is in line for destruction – a policy which, if executed a few years earlier, would have made the publication of my book, and many others championed by Cyril, next to impossible. The unilateral imposition of a policy of institutional amnesia is, needless to say, has severely undercut the life work of Cyril Greenland and the research community he served.
Yet the substance and spirit of his achievements and legacy remains indestructible. As a devoted custodian of personal and institutional memory, as a son, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Cyril knew in his bones the Wordsworthian dictum that “the child is the father of the man.” He insisted that we remember the timeless plight of the young, for it is in childhood where vulnerability starts. Society must not be permitted to avert its gaze, not only from the distressed child, but the scapegoated immigrant, the alien outsider, the wretched of the earth.
He knew that conscience and wisdom are born of suffering; that “only the wounded physician can heal.” Over a long and vigorous life, Cyril the shape-shifter enacted much more good than harm -- through his kindness and sharpness; his skepticism and optimism; his refusal to treat the troubled as objects; his embrace of the sensuous consolations of music, poetry and art. Perhaps his most valuable legacy was his story-telling – his own brand of “talk therapy.” Even if, like all talented fabulists, he embellished narrative details for effect, he was striving imperfectly for something deeper, universal, timeless, and therefore healing. He knew that the veil of obfuscation was as necessary as the spotlight of clarity. He was telling us as much about the teller as the told. He was telling us about our simultaneous grasping for, and resistance to, the ultimately unknowable truth.
Heigh ho, Cyril.
Toronto, Summer, 2012