Social skills are a must these days, but outsiders can be leaders too
Professor Michael Fitzgerald believes that there's a strong link between autism and men of exceptional ability, and suggests that each of the three men showed clearly autistic behaviour throughout their lives.
Post-mortem psychoanalysis of political and literary figures is always problematic, tending, as it does, to diminish their achievements by re-categorising them as resulting from disease or disability, rather than effort and ability. The ultimate reductio ad absurdum of this approach is the view of the Battle of Waterloo which holds that Wellington won it, not because he managed his 'infamous army' superbly, but because of Napoleon's piles. According to this theory, the Little Corporal's haemorrhoids were so inflamed, he couldn't think straight and so made the massive misjudgments which caused his defeat.
Historical diagnosis, dodgy enough when the figures diagnosed are dead a couple of centuries, becomes extremely controversial when it involves people dead a couple of decades, whose families, friends and admirers inevitably take exception to it. Professor Fitzgerald's standpoint is that people with what's called 'high-functioning autism' or Asperger's Syndrome frequently have an unusually high level of creativity. That major genetic endowment (as he sees it) in tandem with the obsessive focus associated with high functioning autism, allows them to have an unusually powerful influence on the societies in which they live. If an historic, literary or scholarly figure of great influence is known to have been eccentric in a way which indicates the presence of Asperger's or high-functioning autism, then it's perfectly legit not only to study it but to draw attention to the benefit society may get from it.
In the past, it may have been easier for society to benefit from eccentrics, because, while there may have been less tolerance for those with obvious disability, there was rather more acceptance of highly intelligent loners who were a bit strange. Geniuses were expected to be a bit loopy. It came with the territory.
Nowadays, a toddler who averts his gaze from other toddlers in the playgroup gets spotted early on and referred for help. Few parents want their three-year-olds to be interesting exceptions. They want them to fit in. Social interaction has become the core life skill, and peer acceptability the litmus test at every developmental stage.
Yet, according to Prof Fitzgerald, one of the most charismatic political leaders of the last century showed evidence of isolating behaviour and was always regarded as "something of an outsider". He quotes Dr Ken Whittaker, former Secretary of the Department of Finance, who knew de Valera well, as saying that he "had no social graces". The implication is not that the former President had bad manners, but rather that he had a social impairment: he simply did not understand how other people were feeling at any given time and could not, as a result, respond to those feelings by easy or sensitive congeniality. This newspaper's T Ryle Dwyer, referring to this odd disconnectedness, more bluntly suggested that "if behind [de Valera's] cold, impersonal countenancethere seems to be no real humanity, possibly it's because there was none".
Lack of empathy is a distinguishing characteristic of autism and Asperger's. It doesn't mean the person with the syndrome is cruel. It simply means that they do not understand how other people feel. They don't and can't pick up the normal cues human beings give each other.
To give an example: a young man with Asperger's did a work experience stint in the company where I work. When someone asked him about a book he was reading, he responded by telling them about the book's content. It was interesting. He had detailed recall of the history involved. But he didn't notice the signals he was getting after ten minutes of solid monologue. Signals that said: "Enough. Thank you. Let's move on to something else." He simply kept going until someone told him to stop. But when he was told to stop, he was unembarrassed by that instruction. He was a foreigner in the land of feelings. Once the people around him understood that, including him in a work team was no problem.
In Eamon de Valera, that incapacity to imagine what other people are feeling would have led to him looking into his own heart (rather than into the faces or lives or views of others) to seek solutions for Ireland's problems. If you're not that pushed to learn how other people tick and, by definition and diagnosis, high functioning autistic people are NOT that pushed to learn how other people tick you have a lot of isolated time on your hands for reading, and Tim Pat Coogan's biography of de Valera portrays him as a voracious reader, always reading non-fiction books.
HOWEVER, although they may have been loners, both Yeats and de Valera managed to pick wives who worked around them beautifully, not unlike the way the human body can create a bunch of capillaries to carry blood around a blocked vein. Sinéad bean de Valera, was so warm, winning and charming in her approach that her husband's social distance often failed to register with people who met them or, when it did register, seemed appropriate to a living symbol. Her interest in myths and fairytales complemented his mathematical focus.
Yeats' marriage might not have survived its first night, if his wife hadn't been such a smart operator. Instead of hitting him with a handy water jug when, on their wedding night, he told her he could "summon up no desire for her" she indicated to him that she was receiving messages from "the other side" knowing how fascinated he was by the occult.
"Clearly Yeats' marriage was enormously important and successful," Fitzgerald writes, "as his wife organized him and devoted herself to helping him express his creativity."
Of course, Sinéad de Valera and Georgie Yeats each met their mate as adults, when the genius and charismatic presence of de Valera and Yeats were well established. Sinéad shared Eamon's passion for nationalism, and de Valera's simple bravery must have been enormously appealing to a young woman of the time. Similarly, Yeats was a cultural icon in Ireland by the time his future wife met him. Bright women marrying such men have some appreciation of the challenges they're going to encounter.
Children born to such figures have less choice about the matter and may find it harder going. Michael Yeats remembered being little moved by his father's death. The son had no concept of a father as an actively engaged member of the family, playing games with the children, reading to them or ticking them off when they did something wrong. Instead, he saw his father as "a remote, towering figure" who spoke at his children rather than with them. Living with him, according to Michael, was "like living with a national monument".
None of de Valera's children or grandchildren has been as critical of the towering figure in whose shadow they grew up. They, together with Dev's hero-worshippers, will find hard to stomach Professor Fitzgerald's conclusion that "his narrow autistic outlook seriously damaged the development of Ireland".
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