By Chris Lehmann,
deputy editor of Book World, whose e-mail address is lehmannc@washpost.com
Tuesday, April 20, 2004; Page C08

THE AIR LOOM GANG

The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness

By Mike Jay

Four Walls Eight Windows. 306 pp. $24

On Dec. 30, 1796, Britain's House of Commons convened to debate the weighty question of war with France, then in its highest throes of revolutionary fervor, and hence a grave threat to all European monarchies. As Lord Liverpool took the floor to lay out the case for war, an agitated spectator named James Tilly Matthews gave a great cry of "treason!" After a group of stewards carted him off to court, Matthews was transported to a workhouse, and then, in late January 1797, to the infamous English charitable asylum Bedlam, where he would spend nearly all the rest of his days, until he died, in another state-subsidized facility for the mentally ill, in 1815.

But as Mike Jay makes clear in his suggestive if overheated biography, James Tilly Matthews was anything but your garden-variety madman. When he was taken into custody, he explained to authorities that he had been an envoy to France's revolutionary government and served as an emissary for the British and French alike to broker a last-minute peace accord and stave off the threatened Napoleonic wars. What's more, he appeared to be telling the truth. Remarkably, Matthews -- an obscure tea merchant of strong republican sympathies -- had traveled to France in 1792, in the company of the renowned Welsh republican reformer David Williams, who was named an honorary French citizen that year. Still more remarkably, both Williams and Matthews were indeed recruited to work on behind-the-scenes peace negotiations as the leaders of the two nations prepared publicly for war.

Many complications ensued -- including one furtive meeting Matthews had with Prime Minister William Pitt, under the guise of acting as a British special agent, and a long tour in a revolutionary prison, at the behest of a largely baffled French Committee on Public Safety, which in the absence of any other clear idea of what to do with Matthews, released him back to England in 1796. This was a great deal of excitement for a young tea wholesaler with a family of three, and somewhere in transit James Tilly Matthews went mad.

Matthews developed one of the first -- and certainly the most copiously documented -- paranoid-schizophrenic delusions in the medical literature of the West: His attending apothecary at Bedlam, John Haslam, devoted the better part of his classic text "Illustrations of Madness" to documenting the elaborate design of Matthews's delusion. Matthews believed that an enormous underground contraption, called the Air Loom, controlled his actions, and the actions of nearly every other human (most emphatically including Pitt, Lord Liverpool and the other dramatis personae in Matthews's abortive espionage career). The Air Loom operated out of a basement in a building near the Bedlam grounds, sending out magnetic waves that shaped the breathing patterns, thought processes and utterances of any hapless soul who came under its influence. It was tended by a colorful group of seven conspirators who appeared to be representations of those Matthews saw as responsible for his own suffering. The leader was one Bill the King, a master of "murderous villainy . . . [who] has never been observed to smile." His main adjutant was Jack the Schoolmaster, an assiduous chronicler of the Air Loom's operations who paused to deliver the occasional wisecrack like "I'm here to see fair play." A woman named Augusta seemed to serve as the gang's public face, confabulating with all manner of spies and corresponding with other villainous gangs.

It is all, as Jay writes, incredibly fertile material for any diligent interpreter. And he duly ascribes to the Air Loom all manner of weighty cultural significance. He descries in Matthews's lonely ravings the emerging romantic distrust of machines; the prototype for many schizophrenic disorders that involve similar sorts of "influencing machines"; and the boom in modern conspiracy-mongering in literature and pop culture, from Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" to the many gnostic fables composed by pulp science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Indeed, Jay writes that the Air Loom represents nothing less than "the birth of a modern myth that increasingly permeates our culture."

This is all, to put things mildly, a bit much. For one thing, conspiracy culture and schizophrenia, while not yet given their full modern nomenclature, were very much with the world long before Matthews's delusion took root, as any cursory consultation of Greek myth, the plays of Shakespeare or the Book of Revelation would quickly confirm. For another, however rich and suggestive Matthews's delusion may appear, it remains a delusion, and it's the character of such things, broadly speaking, to match up only erratically with broader currents of cultural change. The Air Loom, in other words, was first and foremost a myth about James Tilly Matthews.

And this, alas, is the signal weakness of "The Air Loom Gang": Jay's increasingly doctrinaire special pleading for the import of Matthews's delusion has the curious effect of crowding Matthews out of his own story. It's only midway through the book, for example, that Jay notes the "absence of any information about [Matthews's] early life" -- the sort of information that is crucial in piecing together an account of any individual case of mental illness. Even though Matthews appears to have refrained from indulging the Air Loom delusion later in life and settled into a fairly placid routine of gardening and distinguished architectural draftsmanship, Jay can never set this foundational delusion aside, insisting that Matthews's "persistence in his madness represents a prodigious feat of strength and personal honour" and -- in yet more of a stretch -- that our own wireless, communications-mad world has arranged our own lives so that we, too, are "finally ready for the Air Loom." Such asides are more than tendentious biography; for anyone who has seen mental illness at close remove, they are downright offensive. People who suffer delusions are not especially romantic, let alone strong or "visionary" souls; they are desperately sick, and often unimaginably miserable. They would trade all the vatic wisdom in the cosmos for a chance to function simply as an ordinary person. So while "The Air Loom Gang" indeed makes for a remarkable glimpse into a remarkable man's life, it also bespeaks a certain unhealthy vogue among scholars to imprison their subjects in constructs shaped rather opportunistically out of real-life suffering. That is an irony that Bill the King, Jack the Schoolmaster et al. would heartily relish. I'm not at all sure that James Tilly Matthews would be amused, though.