To achieve great things, it’s generally held that the recipe should include brains, talent, charisma or luck, preferably all four – not forgetting a more recent theory that it also takes 10,000 hours of practice.
But what if an alternative route was a nasty, brutish, Dickensian childhood, grinding poverty or persecution? The terror of war could be another kick-starter, as could witnessing innocent people being killed or abandoned and shamed.
“Let’s be clear, I’m not advocating that parents go and wreck [their children’s] childhoods,” says Matthew Parris, author of a book making the case that trauma can unlock greatness or special qualities and abilities that might otherwise lie latent. “But there does seem to be something of a pattern.”
The British journalist, author and former MP has noticed it over 14 years hosting a BBC Radio 4 series, Great Lives, in which prominent people choose a figure they like and admire and discuss their life stories.
Time and time again, the subjects had undergone difficult, sometimes horrific early experiences. Genghis Khan, Freddie Mercury, Frida Kahlo, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Martin Luther King Jr, Coco Chanel, Marie Curie – the list was a veritable dolly mixture of history. Even some figures who’d had affluent beginnings, including the absurdist Edward Lear and the anti-slavery campaigner Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, had nevertheless suffered profoundly damaging early experiences on which their future lives seemed to hinge. These experiences would break most people, and had certainly broken these great people at the time. But out of the emotional rubble rose greatness.
Cause and effect?
Parris set about researching the degree to which trauma might have “cracked open” aspects of their personalities and set them on course to achieve extraordinary things they might, given other circumstances, not have managed.
His Fracture: Stories of how great lives take root in trauma seems miraculously well timed for the Covid-19 era, the exigencies of which have forced most households to draw deep on reserves of resilience. But the book was planned long before the emergence of this coronavirus, and resilience is, surprisingly, not an indispensable part of the Fracture thesis.
“I do draw a distinction between this and ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’,” Parris says. “Some of the people I’ve written about were not at all resilient. Some of them remained basket cases all their lives. But they nevertheless achieved extraordinary things.”
Lear’s ground-breaking nonsense poems, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and The Dong with a Luminous Nose, grew out of the most fragile personality imaginable. Far from the blithe, playful storyteller one would imagine from his works, Lear was a fearful, withdrawn adult who never recovered from a childhood of private suffering after being rejected by his parents. A key distinction Parris is careful to make is that Lear, as with many of his subjects, was painfully aware that it was he personally who was being singled out for unfairness while others around him were not similarly affected.
This helps explain, perhaps, why traumas such as natural disasters and privation-causing wars don’t produce hundreds of geniuses and high-achievers, Parris says. When people are all going through trauma, such as the Canterbury earthquakes or the London blitz, there’s at least a sense that the suffering is largely shared, and who suffers most is a matter of luck more than anyone else’s design. “The sense of unfairness, even persecution, seems to be a key factor. The person is acutely aware, ‘this is only happening to me’,” Parris says.
The fracture effect appears to be more drastic in children because, although they understand they’re experiencing terrible pain or fear, they can’t comprehend why it’s happening.
One of Parris’ most affecting examples is writer Rudyard Kipling, who by today’s mores seems almost a parody of manliness and stoicism. He was pitched by his well-meaning parents from his idyllic and indulged early childhood in India to being bullied and tormented by his foster mother in England, who treated his sister and her own son with kindness. Among her punishments was to deprive him of books and make him wear a sign in public declaring that he was a liar. She also told the young Kiplings their parents had banished them from their home in India because they were “tiresome”, and she had taken them on out of pity.
The way Parris tells it, the formerly boisterous, confident child was “broken and born again”. He did not appear to have been embittered, or to have had his soul crimped, by his miserable childhood. But in rebuilding himself from a virtual breakdown as a child, he developed remarkable storytelling skills that inspired his own and subsequent generations. His famous stories, including Kim and The Jungle Book, feature children dealing with adversity.
By contrast, Lear never overcame his fracture in a personal sense. After his happy start as the second-youngest in a prosperous London family, he was rejected by his mother after his father defaulted on the London Stock Exchange. When the rest of his family, its wealth later somewhat restored, was able to move back into their large home, Lear was parcelled off to an older sister. Having borne 21 children and weathered a brush with poverty, Mrs Lear was almost certainly simply exhausted, and anxious to reduce her burden. But, at the age of four, Lear was able only to comprehend the pain of rejection.
Although not maltreated in his new home, Lear soon developed asthma, epilepsy and what he privately called “the morbids”. He was particularly ashamed of the latter two and strove to keep the suffering secret. He remained reclusive and emotionally insecure his entire life. Parris surmises that his intense shame and self-defensiveness as a child caused him to develop a remarkably vivid inner life. His sensitivity to the inner lives of children must have played a huge part in his sparkling, mischievous rhymes and stories.
Terror seekers
Parris was fascinated to discover how far back the motif of child suffering goes in human folklore. Given that storytelling was an oral tradition, “and that children get bored fairly quickly if things don’t start happening”, the tales that survive are heavily centred on children facing cruelty, terror or adversity on their own, and finding the mettle to survive. From Hansel and Gretel and Dick Whittington and His Cat to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Narnia books, the motif is baked in across generations. Bambi, in 1942, began with haunting infant trauma, as did Kimba the White Lion some 20 years on, and The Lion King another three decades later. Modern authors reprise all this to great effect: The Hunger Games children literally fight in a dystopian world for their survival; Harry Potter is made to sleep in a stair cupboard, and fights terrifying adversaries with his own and his young friends’ still-developing powers.
In a funny way, terror is something we actually seek, even as children, Parris says. There’s a fascination with it, and a compulsion to experience it. “I had this book when I was a little boy, Pookie, which was about a winged rabbit. In one adventure, Pookie had to go to the North Pole to see this terrifying ogre. I used to turn my torch on in bed at night and look at this face, with icicles dripping down for its fingers, and an icicle for its nose, and I’d stare and stare at it until I’d scared myself silly, then hide under the covers.”
In contrast, Swallows and Amazons, a “very fine book children were always encouraged to read”, left him cold, because “all they did was go places and fool about in a boat. Nothing bad ever happened to them.”
Parris says he’s not offering Fracture as a thesis or any kind of rule of thumb, and he has had to defend using words such as “genius” and “greatness”, saying they’re a form of shorthand for extraordinary lives and achievements. Clearly not everyone thinks rapper Tupac Shakur is a genius, that Simón Bolívar or Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquests necessarily made the world a better place, or that Vladimir Lenin’s tracts equalled greatness, especially in their applied form.
Criminals & gangsters
Fracture is more a series of case studies in which trauma seemed to burnish something extraordinary. “It’s just as likely to wreck a person’s mental health. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the person goes on to do extraordinarily good things.” Parris postulates that great evil and harm have been done by people whose malign abilities were forged by hardship. “I’m quite sure some of the most brilliant criminals and gangsters were the result of fracture. Robert Maxwell comes to mind, too, given the new biography of him.”
Indeed, the notoriously autocratic disgraced press baron – his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein sexual-abuse cases – seems a useful further exhibit. When Maxwell’s rather rotten media empire was crumbling around him, his son once found him pressed right up close to a television screen, scouring footage of Jews being loaded on to a train for Auschwitz, explaining, “I’m trying to see if I can spot my parents.” This is according to his latest biographer, John Preston, whose Fall, recounts how, having lost most of his family to the Holocaust, the young Maxwell joined the exiled Czech army and achieved a fighting career of both outstanding bravery and brutality. It was a combination of qualities that endured through his extraordinary career until his still-mysterious disappearance from his yacht in 1991.
Maxwell’s fracture might have been both the trauma of loss and the isolation he suffered in his adopted home. Preston says he wanted to be more British than the British, but also to destroy much that was cherished by them – both to sit at the top table and to annihilate all those there with him.
Genghis Khan is a Fracture example who was no sweetie-pie. Although born into a family of dominant warlords, he experienced childhood betrayal and a sense of imminent peril on a scale normally only found in Greek mythology. It turned him from a rather snivelly, timid, 12-year-old into both a murderer and the ultimate warlord who would, with extreme prejudice, go on to unite Mongolia. Although he had been set to inherit a chiefly title, his life became precarious at his father’s premature death. He and his mother were forced into a humble, hunger-gatherer existence, at the potential mercy of rival tribes that, as he became well aware, could easily usurp his rights. When his half-brother betrayed him by stealing a day’s hunting spoils, and his mother declined to intervene, young master Temüjin, as he was then known, snapped. This rather vulnerable child recruited a friend to help him kill the sibling and immediately ascended to head of the clan and, in time, every other clan. He conquered more people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400.
Frustratingly functional
Parris laughingly admits he has had people express their puzzled disappointment to him that, despite having had horrible childhoods, they have not gone on to become geniuses or do anything special. His mirth is kindly. Surviving bad starts and going on to lead functional, rewarding lives is obviously nothing to be ashamed of. We can’t all discover radium or co-found the Beatles.
Parris suspects, though, that the opposite scenario to “fracture” may hold water: that some people with secure, happy childhoods perhaps don’t go on to develop their full potential “because they’re too happy”.
He likens the process to the Australian bush, where some plants never bloom unless their seeds have been through fire.
Again, he adds hastily, this is in no way advocacy for ensuring all children receive some mistreatment.
Parris says although all the terrible experiences he chronicles in Fracture are to be bitterly regretted, there’s an important corollary that those who get too frictionless a start in life can fail to develop character. The overindulged can form a strong habit of expecting to get away with bad behaviour because that’s always been their experience.
The day of the Listener’s interview, Parris’ newspaper, the Times, carried a report of a study suggesting higher-income families’ offspring are more likely to dabble in drugs and crime during their student years than those from less-advantaged backgrounds.
Parris does not shrink from speculation that former US President Donald Trump’s emphatic dishonesty was forged by a well-intended upbringing that focused on the doctrine of positive thinking, as conceived by American pastor Norman Vincent Peale. Peale’s 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking was a profound influence on Trump’s father, Fred, who brought his son up to banish any focus on the possibility of negative outcomes, and to attract positive outcomes by sheer force of belief and will.
Parris’s fellow Times columnist, David Aaronovitch, is among analysts who put Trump’s denialist approaches to issues such as Covid-19 and climate change down to his conditioning in this doctrine. He was brought up to consider that giving headroom to problems was a self-defeating form of weakness.
Others have pointed to his lifelong experience of wealth and inherited authority to conjecture that he simply never had to develop the wiring to recognise adversity or disagreement with his views.
Also, somewhere in the Fracture ecosystem is Scottish writer Douglas Stuart, whose semi-autobiographical novel Shuggie Bain, which won the 2020 Booker Prize, chronicles an impoverished Glasgow childhood. Parris says Stuart, also a gay youth in an environment when that alone was enough to get a lad’s head stoved in most days, could as easily have turned out a successful criminal as the unembittered, genial author who has so impressed the most caustic of literary critics.
Parris allows there may be degrees of fracture in some of the adverse factors of childhood that are perhaps not obviously traumatic, galvanising extraordinary new abilities and resourcefulness, but which cause people to be strongly driven or troubled to a degree that it moulds their behaviour.
Staying in their cages
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, of whom Parris is a long-time critic, is an example he finds interesting. He suffered erratic parenting, which appears to have affected him more strongly than it has his siblings. From numerous accounts of his upbringing, Johnson’s mother suffered serious mental-health issues, which often made her unavailable to her children, and his father was a charming philanderer, often absent and unsupportive and who could be abusive when he was around. Parris is far from the only professional Boris-watcher who attributes Johnson Jr’s armoury of intelligence, charm and cheerfully unaddressed character flaws to an early sense of abandonment and pain.
Parris says his own childhood had no fracture events, although his early experience of realising he was gay, long before the social and legal taboos began to abate, has given him insight into the trauma of that sort of enforced secrecy, including to some of Fracture’s subjects. He writes movingly of his father, who “laughed at the same jokes about pretty boys that all fathers of his generation laughed at”, being utterly outraged when a public official who’d been sacked for incompetence complained bitterly about his treatment, as “it was hardly as if he had been discovered to be a homosexual”.
“My father retorted that it was the stupidest remark he’d heard in a long time, and itself justified the man’s sacking.” The remark brought Parris “almost ecstatic relief” and honed his admiration of his father.
Parris has ruefully recalled outing himself during an evening debate in the House of Commons in 1984, when he was a Conservative MP, but later realising that no one had noticed. He later had more success coming out in a weekly newspaper column, but has said British politics has scores of gay people who have never felt able to disclose their sexuality publicly.
Though the increasingly miserable experience of several lengthy Covid lockdowns in Britain does not by itself set people up for fracture-grade trauma, Parris says it’s having some concerning effects. He’s particularly worried that so many people now feel so fearful, they will have trouble venturing out, even after vaccinations and the general all-clear. “It’s Stockholm syndrome. People have perhaps become over-sensitised to the messages of danger and they now feel safe where they are. I’m worried they will want to stay in their cages.”
A read of the Fracture account of the African-American slave Frederick Douglass, or even a refresher on Hansel and Gretel, may be useful lockdown reading for such folk.
For their pains
Five highly influential world-historical figures are revealed through their personal experiences with trauma.
In Fracture, Matthew Parris catalogues “five horsemen of the childhood apocalypse” – events or circumstances that create a visceral experience of trauma.
Unsurprisingly, the loss or desertion of parents is a very common one, but the presence of bad parents can be just as devastating in Parris’ canon.
Poverty and war, or a state of constant imperilment, are also common scenarios. Often, the Fracture case studies are multifactorial, in the following broad categories:
Affliction: The painter Frida Kahlo’s crippling polio was later compounded by attendant muscle atrophy and spinal curvature. Her upbringing was by impecunious and rancorously ill-suited parents, themselves often ill, who failed to notice when, at 13, she was sexually abused by a teacher. A bus crash at 17 compounded her physical afflictions with literal fracture: a crushed foot and pierced pelvis, leading in time to gangrene and leg amputation, and derailing Kahlo’s dream of studying medicine.
Out of this was born one of the greatest ever chroniclers of pain. Her husband, Diego Rivera, aptly called her “the only artist in the history of art who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings”. He, incidentally, kept the afflictions coming by way of repeated infidelities, which added emotional pain to her chronic physical suffering. Her art is among the most widely reproduced globally; exhibitions of her work are regarded as gold-standard box office by museums and galleries the world over.
Isolation: Fashion pioneer Coco Chanel’s seminal experience was being abandoned by her father following the death of her mother – deposited on the doorstep of a remote Catholic orphanage. She had two sisters with her, but such was her personal fury at being so relegated that her first act was refusing to accept food from the nuns, in a display of mulish pride.
Chanel’s history is partly a matter of speculative dot-joining, as she assiduously misdirected others about her past all her life – again, chiefly through pride. But it seems beyond doubt that the trauma of being left with strangers, feeling isolated from society because of her likely illegitimacy, and experiencing the austere, scrubbed discipline of an orphanage childhood stoked her steely ferocity – at first just to survive as a young woman alone with no support, but later to upend the ethos of fashion for women, to popularise freedom of movement and comfort.
Chaos: At nine, having already seen his great-aunt, great-uncle and mother die of a mysterious illness, Abraham Lincoln and his sister were left by their father, Thomas, with their 18-year-old cousin on their remote farm, on a harsh, barely productive 300 acres, while he looked for a replacement wife. This was no Little House on the Prairie idyll of honest toil. Lincoln later wrote of his frontier childhood: “The panther’s scream, filled night with fear. And bears preyed on the swine.”
When Lincoln senior returned, the trio were living like feral animals. Life did not, thankfully, then supply Abe with a wicked stepmother. Life with a kindly new mother to restore food and clothing was an improvement, but it was still tough. A second fracture point seems to have been chronic father-son acrimony. Historians disagree on the degree to which Thomas Lincoln Sr resented Abraham’s hunger for books and knowledge. The future president and national unifier was to say that his father would have liked nothing better than to beat it out of him, regarding him as insolent and work-shy. But from the chaotic, frightening, precarious life of subsistence farming, and the example of a father who embraced this hardscrabble existence despite there being better alternatives, a great statesman was forged.
Cruelty: As a young black slave in the United States of the 1800s, Frederick Douglass knew from the start that cruelty was a bedrock of his life – violence, privation and maltreatment were all around him. He did not expect to dodge it. He barely knew his mother; his father is believed to have been a white plantation owner. When he escaped captivity as a young adult, he remained a hunted fugitive for nine years.
But it was a most perverse sort of early cruelty that may have set him on course to be one of the era’s most effective emancipation activists. A plantation owner’s wife took a shine to the eight-year-old slave and started teaching him to read. He was prodigious. It began to occur to him that although he couldn’t keep himself physically safe, through reading he could achieve freedom of the mind.
Fracture point may well have been when his teacher’s husband found out about the lessons and hit the roof. She then capitulated and would even rip the newspaper out of his hands if she caught him reading. However, Douglass now determined that his life depended on reading and took to bartering his food for periodicals and sneaking books from the big house. He later began teaching other slaves, for which he was sent to a brutal “slave-breaker” for reconditioning. But in years to come, his hard-won skills of reading and oratory made him one of the most powerful forces in abolition, and a founder of the American civil-rights movement.
Shock: The indomitable spirit of Muhammad Ali seems highly likely to have been forged in the heat of his own astonished rage at learning that a young black man, Emmett Till, at 14, the same age as him, had been lynched. His alleged crime: being rude to a white lady in a shop. His murderers were absolved by the courts. This electrified the then Cassius Clay, but not into boxing – the discovery of his unearthly skill came almost incidentally, after a police officer to whom he reported his bike stolen at age 12 urged him to join his gym. That chance meeting with influential trainer Joe Martin was history. The fire beneath it was the boy’s pain and sorrow at the treatment of African Americans. His parents hoped the boxing would keep him from lying awake crying in bed about racism so often, and derail his budding gang-vandalism retaliations against white people.
Ali’s “fracture” was the realisation that, given the world was tailored to favour white people, money was the most reliable tool with which to oppose inequality. Boxing emerged as his path to win the fights he really wanted to have.
This article was originally published on 6 March 2021.