Department of Mathematics and Statistics

A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton


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9.   Harry; University; breakdown and recovery; friendships

Harry began at the University of Otago in March 1924, taking Mechanics, Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, and continued in Mathematics and Chemistry in his second year.

I shall be leaving here [Roxburgh] in about a fortnight now, to snatch another year at the University. I rather live from hand to mouth as far as education is concerned. But I have passed the first section of the BSc, which is a big thing.63

Aitken wrote to Pearl towards the end of 1925:

It is good to hear of Harry’s entering into capping celebrations with gusto. I also learn that he is doing very well in his studies at ’Varsity. He seems to enjoy the work, and also to find it easy, which is, of course, more than half the battle. I look to hear of his making quite a name for himself in a year or two. Another good thing is that he is taking up seriously the study of the violin, and that under the direction of Wallace, a good teacher. It is curious that he should take it into his head to do this just about the same age (slightly older) that I did myself, but under Wallace he will go ahead more quickly than I did.64

Harry was to take Mathematics and Chemistry in his third year (1926), adding History and Education as the first part of a BA, but the term began badly. Finally, it seemed, the blue devils would not be placated. He wrote to Pearl,

I have just been fixing some matters up at the Varsity – fees etc. Dr Borrie sent a note to my prof. and I then interviewed him myself with a view to getting the first term off. I shall have to do extra work in the summer to make up for it, but of course I do not mind that in the least. [...] The doctor says I would be well to stay in town for a week before going away. I shall almost certainly be going to stay with Bill at his farm. So that is good. If I can get this year put in successfully I shall be well on the high road to success. [...] I owe a big debt to Les [his brother] for his patience in getting me out of my muddled state.65

But it was a makeshift respite.

Name: Harry Aitken
Form of Mental Disease: Dementia (Praecox)
Previous History: Returned from Roxburgh 7 weeks ago where he had been fruit picking for two months suffering from insomnia. Memory bad absent minded.
Dr William Evans: Patient appears dull and confused. His memory is defective, does not know what day or month it is. He admits that he does not eat or sleep as he is worrying about his [condition?]. He states that the reason why he disappeared from home was to go to Seacliff Mental Hospital as he felt he could not get well at home.
His father states that for the past 6 weeks he does not sleep, has become depressed, wanders away from home and stayed away all one night about a fortnight ago.

This is an extract from Harry’s case notes at Ashburn Hall, a private psychiatric hospital in Dunedin to which he was admitted on 29 March 1926. The ‘supposed cause of insanity’ was ‘Over study’.

The term dementia praecox was coined in the nineteenth century to describe a condition of progressive mental deterioration with early onset, and by the 1920s was used to differentiate ‘processes of mental deterioration’ from manic-depressive psychoses (or ‘periodic mental illnesses’). Of terms commonly used today, schizophrenia is an approximate equivalent, although the taxonomy of mental illness has altered and comparisons are inexact.

Setting aside questions of diagnosis and classification, the contemporary associations of dementia praecox are enough to explain Aitken’s pessimistic conclusion that ‘it seemed that my brother’s health and career were irretrievably broken’.66 Yet remarkably, despite the seriousness of his illness and his prolonged treatment (he left the hospital on probation on 5 June and was formally discharged at the end of that month67), Harry returned to the university and passed all subjects.

There were changes however. His boyhood dash evolved into an extravagant adult style. In the slovenly student milieu, he dressed in a suit and tie, wore a fedora hat and carried a cane. For a time he was a rival to Dan Davin for the able and passionate Winnie Gonley. Winnie referred to Harry mysteriously as ‘Alpha’ and Davin’s biographer described him in vaguely sinister terms.

He knew the classics, spoke French, and was a witty though sometimes threatening conversationalist. He suffered from terrible headaches, and could be morose, cutting, sarcastic, and nihilistic. But he offered a glimpse into the world of the mind that was at once exciting and terrifying in pedestrian and provincial Dunedin: a gothic world where all the emotions – love and hate, terror and exhilaration – were magnified.68

Mabel McIndoe was also drawn to Harry, whom she had met through her brother Ken, a close friend of Harry’s. Her mother a painter and her father a prosperous printer, she had the double privilege of unconventionality and money. She began a letter to me: ‘Two tribes, and their descendants, have haunted me all my adult life – one is the Irish Catholic Agnostic Davins, the other the Scottish Calvinist (Agnostic?) Aitkens.’

There is no doubt that Harry was an extraordinary person affecting everyone with whom he came in contact. Physically he didn’t conform to any known ideal. He was of medium build, awkwardly proportioned, ungraceful, unathletic, white skinned and very hairy. His long, pale monk’s face, always well shaven but showing dark where the beard should have been, was lit by large greenish grey eyes which could flash with amusement or close down in disdain. There was about him, in fact, an air of refined detachment which was intriguing. But it was his mind which attracted and finally conquered me.69

Harry began to keep a diary in 1928, which at the onset of his last illness came into Alec’s hands. Alec wrote to Mabel McIndoe, who was then in London:

Harry has kept a diary, entered almost continuously these several years past, and I have glanced over the entries of the last eighteen months or so. They are more than enough; and the disclosures are so shattering that unless I were able, as I am, to see the whole sad history as an objective study in cause and effect, I might well crack myself under it. No fear of that, however; I am even aware that the sun is shining at this moment.70

Again, somewhat later:

As to the diaries, I had no wish in the world to pry; other people’s affairs bore me mostly. But I did think I might find a clue in the entries just at the time of the crash; so I read backwards, until I decided to read no further; such introspection and shameless hedonistic recordings left me with a rancid taste in the mouth. If the rest is like this sample, then the record (at present under lock and key) needs dissolving in fluoric acid. The doctors want it as diagnostic evidence, of course; but I shall not satisfy them.71

There is as much here of Alec as Harry. Taking Alec’s account of the diaries at face value, the contrast in their confessional styles is revealing. Aitken’s writing about himself is infused with a Hardyesque fate that constrains the freedom of our wishes. More than once he quoted the line from Housman: ‘There pass the careless people’, the helpless innocents unaware of the doom he sensed. His experience merged with undefined external presences:

I believe we are surrounded the whole time by marvelous powers, are immersed in them, closer than breathing, and I think that all great music, poetry, mathematics, and real religion come from a world not distant but right in the midst of everything, and permeating it.72

These presences gave rise to ecstatic outpourings, mathematical insights or mystically illuminated landscapes, but also threatened to transport him into alien and insecure territories. His communion with meaning was thus ambivalent – sought, but feared for its power to destroy him. Repeatedly he drew back from the abyss by abstracting and patterning experience: ‘unless I were able, as I am, to see the whole sad history as an objective study in cause and effect’; or by indifference: ‘other people’s affairs bore me mostly’, a chilling reflection in the context of a brother’s collapse. Harry, from Aitken’s remarks about the diary, recorded his mental life without regard to its moral or metaphysical propriety. He may have demanded less of himself in the way of existential justification than did Alec. It is impossible to imagine Alec delving into the spectacle that Margaret described, of himself crawling on the floor as he relived the terrors of bombardment so coolly described in Gallipoli to the Somme.73 Insights were disciplined with counter-insights to keep meaning from flying apart. ‘I felt that the levels of existence were multiform and unstable,’ he wrote of the premonitory distortions that preceded his 1927 breakdown, but then drained them of potency with a detached reflection:

How much is body, how much mind in these impressions? Probably they are inseparable; cause and effect are sometimes interchangeable and oscillatory.74

Surely when he wrote:

Harry has at all times been unduly susceptible to the influence of words, and odd verses from the Book of Revelation, lines from Blake and so on, have had an effect on him quite disproportionate to their intellectual content; so much so that I have formed the opinion that, for a certain type of sensitive adolescent, the more apocryphal parts of the Bible are dangerous, even pernicious75

he was speaking from self-knowledge? Aitken’s visionary writing could have been lifted whole from Blake. Harry was haunted by one image in particular, the octopus from the terrifying childhood episode at Lake Logan,76 a speck around which a host of fears might crystallize; but Aitken had ghosts of his own.


63  Harry to Pearl, 4 Feb. 1925.
64  ACA to Pearl, 24 Sept. 1925.
65  Harry to Pearl, 11 Mar. 1926.
66  Memoir, 85.
67  One presumes. The notes give the date as 31/6/1926.
68  Keith Ovenden, A Fighting Withdrawal, The Life of Dan Davin (Oxford, 1996), 54.
69  Cockabully Story, the Memoir of Elizabeth Mason (née Mabel McIndoe), 116.
70  ACA to Mabel McIndoe, 17 Oct. 1933.
71  ACA to Mabel McIndoe, 25 Oct. 1933.
72  Aitken to Minnie, 17 June 1947.
73  MM to me 8 June 1995.
74  Memoir, 86.
75  ACA to Mabel McIndoe, 25 Dec. 1933.
76  Perhaps this is what is referred to in Harry’s notes from Ashburn Hall: ‘delusional sees things on wall’.
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