Dialogue: If there's one thing makes me mad...

By JOE BENNETT

Have you heard them? Surely you've heard them. The people who claim to be nuts. They say it smugly. They announce it like a badge. They trumpet their lunacy.

"When I'm dancing, you know, I just go mad. Absolutely mad."

They pretend to be ashamed, but they invite us to admire their disdain for convention, their rich courage.

It is chic to be mad, they suggest, admirable to be outre, to step beyond the perimeter fence of sanity and dance to the light of the moon.

Then there are the self-styled artists - the writers, the potters, the sculptors and, worst of all, the painters. The painters - the women in particular - are especially keen on their madness. It's as if their supposed madness stamped their visa to the country of creation. It validates their canvases.

"My family," say the women painters with the arch smile implying that their family, oh dear, have got it right, "all think I'm mad. And I suppose you have to be a little mad to want, you know, to want to paint, to need to paint, as desperately as I do. Yes, I suppose you could say I'm a little mad."

They lie. The lie makes my teeth grind. I hate it more than I hate prunes. These people are not mad. They are as sane as accountants and a lot less honest.

Let's get this straight. The truly permanently mad don't know they're mad. Their madness is ghastly and useless. It offers no insight, no worth, no good. Only grief.

Madness is disconcerting, wearing, scaring. Most of us will choose to keep our distance unless we've had the ill luck to love someone who has gone mad. Then we try to stand by them and suffer their madness with them and everything hurts forever.

These days we don't say "mad." We say "mentally ill." And unusually for our softened inoffensive tongue, the change is right. Mad is ill in the head.

And most people who are mentally ill are ill in episodes. The illness comes and goes. The awful cruelty of it lies in knowing that it will come again.

Head doctors can't do much. They'll tell you so themselves.

For the rest of us, many will be briefly ill at some time in our lives - depression in adolescence or the menopause or whenever - and we'll come right again quite soon under sweet old Dr Time. But none of it is pretty. Madness is never good or brave or pretty.

So why should art and romance have attached themselves to it? Why should those who are evidently well brag of a tinge of ill-health? Why should they want to?

Shakespeare has to cop a bit of blame here.

It was he who wrote that "the poet and the lover and the lunatic are of imagination all compact." And I for one can remember a time when I believed him.

I was a sighing, youthful lover who fancied himself ethereal and spiritual but who was rather afraid of bodily contact. I thought it rich to be nuts. I thought it creative to be out of my tree. I cringe to think of it. My excuse is that I was young. I knew nothing.

What's their excuse? What's the excuse of the dancers and the lady daubers?

Of course Shakespeare's lines aren't Shakespeare's lines. He wrote plays. His characters said the lines.

Shakespeare himself, the poet who out-poets every poet since, was sane as a bank balance. Of the few documents we have with his signature on, one's a will and another's a mortgage, neither of which suggests a madman frothing through the world of men with never a care for reality. He held shares in his theatres. He wrote for dosh.

When he'd got enough dosh, he snapped his pens and bought a house and took it easy.

None of the greats has been mad. They may have been drunks or fighters, but drunks and fighters are 10 a penny. The drunken, fighting writers who write well, write sober. Take bardic Dylan Thomas, the soak and ne'er-do-well, the idle sponger. He was as sane and sober a writer as you could hope to find the length of Serious Street.

He wrote, Lord love him, with a thesaurus. You can read the number references in the margins of his manuscripts. And only when the text was done and every page of the thesaurus scoured did he reach for the whisky to celebrate.

No madman he, nor did he ever claim to be.

It is one of the myths of our society that genius and lunacy are twins. They are not twins. They are not of the same family.

Those who boast of being touched in the head are untouched by anything but the blessing of ordinariness.