Vignette: Breakdown, breakthrough

Summary

On 27 November 1969 the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) hosted a ‘Writers Reading’ event. Quin was nervous about reading from and exposing what she saw as the weaknesses of Passages. So rather than reading from that book she sat wordless on stage, attempting ESP (extrasensory perception) with the aim of communicating universal love. This caused considerable unrest as well as some hostility among the audience. Bowing to the pressure to speak, Quin answered some questions and gave a reading, but rather than her own words she read from John Cage: Silence replacing silence. This wasn't enough to salvage the performance and the audience were unimpressed. Quin responded differently. She smiled as she came down from the stage and described the experience as a breakthrough not breakdown.

Afterwards, Quin did have a series of breakdowns and periods of psychosis during which her mental health was highly precarious and her behaviour and delusions increasingly dangerous and unpredict-able. These began when she caught the boat to Holland with John Carter, her then lover, to see in the 1970 New Year. On the journey over, Quin remained on the freezing deck refusing to eat, experienc-ing visions of Cleopatra's barge with her father on it. When they arrived in Amsterdam, Carter had to stop her running out onto the river, which was only thinly covered in ice. Quin was given seda-tives and admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Once out and having returned to London, she became anxious that she was at the centre of a conspiracy and escaped with an Arts Council grant to Denmark, Norway and then Sweden. There, she was found in a snowdrift in a delusional state and was again hospitalised. Refusing to eat or sleep, she found herself force fed and given electroconvulsive therapy. This was a distressing and desperate period for Quin, an awful time of blankness that she described as much worse than the breakdowns, which she sometimes found to be energising and inspiring. The institutionalisation and brutal electric shock therapy ‘treatments’ completely – and completely unsurprisingly – suppressed her creativity; she said to Carol Burns that she felt as if both her angels and her demons were gone.