Sleep-talker
Benny Green
What Is This Thing Called Sleep ? Jack Bradley Hoskisson (Davis-Poynter £4.50)
About ten years ago I began paying visits to one J. Bradley Hoskisson, an osteopath who briskly ran his fingers down my spine and deduced that I must once have followed some sedentary occupation involving a forward angle. When I told him that I had indeed frittered away some of the best years of my youth as a saxophonist poring over music-desks in scattered palais de danse, he was delighted, and immediately launched, in mid-manipulation, into an impassioned tribute to Duke Ellington. In the visits that followed, as he explored my back, so he also explored my mind. and I his, until in the end consultations had evolved into exchanges on every subject from the effect of Bosanquees googly on off-play to speculation on Rabelais's table manners. Hoskisson was blind, but had so informed an ear that he would attend theatres, hear the performance, and then return after formulating the most acute theories as to what was happening on stage. He once came to hear a musical I had written, and endeared himself to me afterwards by actually offering constructive criticisms instead of the conventional idiotic flatteries.
It must have been around 1970 that the pattern of his behaviour changed slightly. Now when I arrived in his rooms he would often be poring over tape-recordings; once or twice he asked me to read aloud the headings on some typewritten sheets of paper, and because these headings were of the medical-polysyllabic kind, they conveyed nothing to me until he told me he was conducting researches into the nature of sleep. He hoped to publish a book eventually on his findings, and asked me searching questions about the mechanics of writing: how many words did I write a day, how long did a thousand words take me, did I rewrite much, did I compose straight on to a typewriter, and so on. Once or twice I was persuaded to read aloud a paragraph from something I had written but usually I cried off, pleading that I was not a declamatory writer; he would then ask me what kind I was, with which we would both bury the conversation in laughter.
His researches into sleep merely added another item to the agenda of our small-talk. He believed that insomnia could be cured by submitting the mind to something so boring that the sufferer would drift into sleep as a refuge. [then told him that once, when I had suffered a spell of waking in the night followed by difficulty in returning to sleep, I had whiled away the time by compiling
teams of Test cricketers whose names began with this or that letter of the alphabet. At first it had worked, like a dream, as you might say. I would choose, say, P. get as far as Ponsford, Palairet, Perrin, Pollock G; and then—oblivion. Once or twice I explained to a court of spectral examiners that although Perrin had never played for England he should have. But gradually the exercise began to intrigue me. I raced through the P eleven with ease. . . Paynter, Poore, Jim Parks Junior, Procter, Pollock P. Peel, Parkin. Within a fortnight! was getting out of bed in the middle of the night to look up Wisden to find a wicketkeeper for the Rs (there wasn't one) or check how many Test players there were beginning with Z (there were three, Zulch, Zaheer and Zulq ifar). When I told Hoskisson, he laughed and said I was the first subject he had ever heard of who had beguiled himself with his own tedium-device.
I remember also talking to him about that blinding moment in Edwin Drood where Dickens, probing the possibilities of twin states of consciousness, says, 'thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where'. Hoskisson liked that observation, because to him sleep was not so much oblivion as a different kind of consciousness. At first when he asked me what I thought sleep was and I replied, 'A condition of unconsciousness,' he reminded me that when we have nightmares we can rouse ourselves from them at the climacteric of terror, that in our sleep we respond to all sorts of stimuli, that we can condition ourselves to awake at a certain time, and that if we sleepwalk we hardly ever imperil our lives. Sleep, he explained, was not a lack of awareness but awareness on a different level. How beautifully he expresses this belief in the book which he eventually completed : 'If we had not the capacity to look after ourselves during sleep, it would be ridiculous to climb on to a structure raised off the ground, there to submit ourselves to unconsciousness.'
In that remark, and hundreds like it scattered through the text, the quiddity of Hoskisson's spirit comes through. He was a scientist, but also a bit of a comedian, and it is this sense of fun which saves him from pedantry and renders his book such a priceless surprise to those who think they are in for a dry treatise from yet another expert.
I like particularly his straightfaced joke at the expense of those who think every dream holds a significant secret only to be revealed by an analyst : 'There is some slight evidence that patients undergoing analysis tend to dream about the activities of their previous psychoanalytical session'. Most rare of all, Hoskisson's book will perhaps be of practical help to uneasy sleepers, poor sleepers, or irregular sleepers. He says that, before his researches, he would worry if he had less than the conventional eight hours a night ; he then discovered that most people shared this irrational anxiety, and that his own true average was around six and a half hours—at which point he stopped worrying about it.
He put much science and scholarship into his book, and has succeeded, through sheer force of personality, in conveying his meanings to a non-specialist reader like myself. Almost before he completed the book, he was killed in a horseriding accident, which makes the appearance of What Is This Thing Called Sleep7 doubly poignant. The title is, of course, a paraphrase of Cole Porter's 'What Is This Thing Called Love ?' Hoskisson was crazy about Cole Porter; as I say, he was a man of great sensibility.
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