'Proud of His Hostility to Falsity'

I’ve just learned the name of a condition I witnessed in person several times as a newspaper reporter: Diogenes syndrome. The disorder takes its name from the Greek philosopher (c. 412-323 B.C.) whose reputation is mixed. On the one hand, he endorsed a simple life and lived in a barrel. On the other, he reveled in provocation. According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato called Diogenes the Cynic “a Socrates gone mad.” There’s a difference between benign eccentricity and histrionic provocation. The latter makes for a pain in the ass.

Diogenes syndrome takes the philosopher’s mode of living, subtracts its philosophical content and turns it into self-destruction. Its sufferers are hoarders and usually elderly. They live in squalor and neglect their health and hygiene. They withdraw from the world. Twice as a cop reporter I accompanied police officers into dwellings filled to the ceilings with newspapers, sacks of garbage and other refuse. We walked through narrow canyons flanked by trash. In one case, the man had killed himself by drinking a can of red lead-based paint and other substances. We found him sitting upright on the floor, propped against the wall. He was covered with paint. This was almost forty years ago. The syndrome had already been identified and named but the cops and I didn’t know that.

In 1961, Marianne Moore’s contribution to a special issue of the journal Sequoia dedicated to Yvor Winters was a poem titled “Yvor Winters--,” in which the title was the start of the poem’s first line:

“something of a badger-Diogenes—

we are indebted technically; and

attached personally, those of us who know him;

are proud of his hostility to falsity;

of his verse reduced to essence;

of a tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.

He does not hesitate to call others foolish,

and we do not shrink from imputations

of folly—of annoying a man to whom

compliments may be uncongenial;

--wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness

is too strong to suppress.”

Winters’ high literary standards, brusqueness and indifference to being a conventionally jolly fellow are legendary. He and Moore had known each other for forty years. Never close, they were mutually admiring and respectful, most of the time.