England’s Last Acceptable Asylum Seeker?
The Lesson of the Piano Man
by
Patrick Wright
(posted 26 May 2021)
As you drive east, Marine Parade seems to leave
Sheerness at two different speeds. To the left the sea wall closes in on the road abruptly,
having at first wandered off to secure a no longer so dishevelled Georgian house that
was once the combined home and HQ of Mr. D. T. Alston, king of the 19th
century Kentish oyster trade. To the right the town thins more
gradually, extending through a line of houses, a pub named ‘The Ship on Shore’, and a
chalet park before yielding to a stretch of watery marshland on which malaria-bearing anopheles mosquitoes were still worrying the responsible medical officer in the 1940s. The junction with The
Leas is overlooked by a solitary building known as The White House. Since 2008, this has been an Indian restaurant. At the time of the events described here, it was still battling on in its traditional role as a pub.
Being on the
northern shore of the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames estuary where
the London river finally flows out into the North Sea, the shingle beach at
Scrapsgate has long been known for its distinctive harvest of washed-up objects. On 19 June 1756, the Oxford Journal reported that ‘A monfstros
Fifh, fuppofed to
be a young Whale, is come afhore . . . It meafures thirty fix Feet and a half
in Length, twenty-two Feet in Circumference, and eight Feet from the Eyes to
the Tip of the Nofe.’
If whales can founder here so too can ships, hundreds
of which have run aground on this coast, including, in 1848, a vessel named the
Lucky Escape, which carried a cargo of barrels.
The ship was salvaged—the Kentish word for this semi-piratical activity was “hovelling”—by islanders who had good reason to be optimistic about their
find. Two years previously, a revenue
cruiser named the Vigilant had boarded a vessel seen acting suspiciously
offshore a mile or two from here and, having dragged the water beneath her,
recovered 122 barrels of ‘contraband
spirits’ roped together and sunk for later recovery.[i] The barrels on the Lucky Escape, however, turned out to be filled with Portland
cement, a material that was then manufactured on the southern shore of the
island and transported upriver to supply Victorian London’s building booms. They were only
good for ornamenting the distinctive ‘grotto’ (now one of Sheppey’s Grade II listed
buildings), which to this day adorns the
car park of another pub—opportunely renamed the ‘Ship on Shore’—across the
road.
Smaller but still
noteworthy objects have turned up in these waters too. In June 1893, a diver from the Admiralty
dockyard at Sheerness picked up a bottle floating in the sea: inside he found an undated message reading only ‘Lost off the Goodwin Sands. Please tell my wife A. Chamberlain,
Lavender-hill, Enfield.’[ii] On September 4th 1963, Mr. Jones
of 139 Coronation Road, Sheerness, was getting out of his boat near the ‘Ship
on Shore’ when he noticed a mail bag drifting in the sea. He immediately telephoned the Sheerness police
who ‘raced to the scene and took possession’ of it. Although inspection
revealed the bag to be so ‘well-worn’ that the markings on it were
indistinguishable, the excited police still alerted their colleagues in
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, on the hunch that their find might be connected to
the sensational Great Train Robbery of the previous month. [iii]
Human bodies have also been found on this disconcertingly productive shore: drowned sailors and fishermen, and others who have made
the same decision as Thomas Kirkham, a 40-year old private in the Royal Marines
who put an end to his troubles here on Tuesday 15 January 1878. He had, as his wife would inform the coroner at
an inquest held at The Ship-on-Shore, been ‘rather fond of drink lately’ and had
probably also gone ‘absent’ from his military duties.[iv] The
landlord told the coroner that Kirkham had been in ‘the
grotto’ by 7.20 that morning. He was
later seen wandering about on the beach, ‘apparently without any object’. The following
evening a boatman with the coastguard service came across his corpse, washed up
by the sandheap on which he had early been pacing aimlessly. ‘Found
drowned’ was the verdict in this case as in others before and since. That couldn’t be said of the corpse some
local boys found floating here in August 1976.
Wrapped in brown paper and placed in a green canvas bag tied with
“ordinary parcel string”: it was probably, so the police declared after announcing
that ‘foul play has been ruled out,” the embalmed corpse of a woman who had
been incompetently buried at sea about three years earlier.
From Local Story to Global Legend
There was nothing
dead about the young man who was spotted by residents looking washed up and confused on the beach opposite the White House. The sighting was duly reported to the police, and the man was picked up in
the early hours of April 7, 2005 by two officers who had found him behaving strangely in Sheerness. Both agitated and speechless, he had nothing on him to reveal his name
or identity. There had been heavy rain
that night, but the arresting officers noted in their log that the stranger,
who was soaking wet and shivering, did indeed appear to have been in the sea.
A month or so
later, the first newspaper report about this discovery appeared in the Sheerness Times Guardian. Headed ‘Piano clue in bid to identify
hospital patient’, it was a small item, printed at the top of page 7 on May 5,
2005, which happens also to have been the day of the general election in which
Tony Blair won his third term of government for the Labour Party.
“Do you know
this man?” asked this local weekly of its readers, before explaining how he had
been taken by the police to the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, across
the Swale on the mainland, where he was now being ‘cared for by NHS and Social
Services staff.’ The paper reported that
the man, who had remained mute since being found, appeared to be between 20 and
30 years old, and “approximately 6 ft tall with what looks like either dyed
blonde hair or unusually greying hair and light brown eyes.” It added that “When he was found he was
wearing a black suit, black tie and white shirt.” According to a spokesman from the hospital, “the
only other clue is that he can play and read classical music on the
piano.” Readers with “any information
about the man’s identity” were asked to contact a social worker named Michael
Camp of the Rapid Response Team at the hospital.
This
moderately stated notice was illustrated with an indistinct photograph of a
face, pulled back and staring at the camera from behind a barricade of defensively
gathered bedsheets. The poor quality of
that unattributed snap may help to explain why, by the time it appeared, a Kent-based photographer named
Mike Gunnill had already received a call from the Daily Mail picture desk informing him that ‘a man has been found,
he isn’t talking.’[v] Like the Sheerness-Times
Guardian, the Mail had been
alerted to the story by Michael
Camp, who explained that the clinicians needed
help in identifying their patient.
Meeting up with Camp at the hospital, reportedly on May 6th, Gunnill
had struggled to photograph the man, who ‘covered his face every time and
started to become distressed.’ As the
photographer would later explain to a French journalist, he “screams and cries
like a baby when he sees someone new.” He also stared around “as if seeing the
world for the first time.”[vi]
Realising that Gunnill
might fare better when he took the man out for his daily walk, Camp had shown him
a place “partly hidden by trees,” and told him to be standing there with his
camera ready at the appointed time.
Gunnill, who seems by now to have been working as an NHS-assisted
paparazzi, managed to get five shots (only three of which were in focus) before
‘the mystery man’ spotted his lens and took evasive action. The photographs
show a tall, pale, stick-thin, and lightly bearded figure with spikey upthrust hair, wearing his by now dried-out suit
Photo: Mike Gunnill
with a white shirt and every possible button done up. In one of Gunnill’s artfully stolen shots,
the solitary figure sees the camera and stares back, clutching his plastic
folder of music in both hands as if it were the only thing that stands between
himself and some dreadful dissolution.
In others he shields his face completely, or glares at the camera from
behind the folder with a single fierce eye.
Having sent his pictures
to the Daily Mail Gunnill heard
nothing until two weeks later when his contact at the paper called to explain
that publication was proving difficult because ‘several Associated Newspaper
executives thought my mystery man was just a “****** asylum seeker trying it
on.’ Since the Mail was still being bothered by ‘that social worker’, who was allegedly
phoning several times a day to ask when the story would appear, Gunnill was
urged to take his pictures elsewhere. The
photographer had then spoken to a journalist, described as the ‘well-respected’
Richard Creasy, who wrote the article that eventually appeared, alongside one
of Gunnill’s shots, in the Mail on Sunday on May 15. While the main article was on
the inside pages, a small version of one of Gunnill’s photographs was also printed
on the front page. According to
Gunnill, the picture stayed there for ‘the first three editions’ but was then
‘spiked’ thanks to the suspicions of senior executives, who remained convinced
that the man was “just another asylum seeker” bent on ripping off the British
tax-payer.
The Sheerness Times Guardian may have been
first with the story, but it was Creasy’s article, captioned ‘Who is this
silent genius they call the Piano Man?’, that projected Sheerness’s latest washed-up waif
into the wider world. The dishevelled man,
who was said to have “turned up in a rainstorm”, had by this time become ‘immaculately
dressed in an expensive dinner suit, shirt and tie’. As for the doctors and carers at the Medway
Maritime Hospital, they remained puzzled both by his distraught condition—manifest
in rapid breathing and acute terror of other people—and by his protracted
silence. Creasy, who had interviewed
Michael Camp, described how the carers had got their best clue so far when they
left their charge alone with a drawing pad and pens ‘in the hope of a
breakthrough’. Returning an hour or so
later they found he had produced a sketch of a grand piano, also photographed
by Mike Gunnill, and drawn a paper keyboard on tacked-together sheets of
A4. They had then taken him to the
piano in the hospital chapel, and been amazed when he ‘began to play long passages
of classical music.’
These recitals prompted the realisation that
their now mysterious as well as unidentified patient had, as Camp was
quoted as saying, been found ‘dressed as if he had come from a concert’. He may, as the social worker added, ‘have had
a traumatic experience that has led to him losing his memory or suffering a
breakdown. . . All we know is that he appears to be a professional pianist of
exceptional ability, and has amazed
everyone who has heard him. He plays for hours every day from memory and from
sheet music he has written. It is
difficult to stop him and he sounds concert standard.’ Camp admitted that, even though it was hoped
that the man’s ‘so special’ gift for music would surely help friends or
relatives to recognise him, enquiries sent to ‘concert organisers and musical
groups’ had so far drawn a blank.
Following publication
of Creasy’s article, which gave Sheerness’s smudged and sheet-clutching figure new
life as ‘the Piano Man’, the story of this now enigmatic stranger was quickly
taken up by other papers and media organisations in Britain and, indeed, around
the world. The tide of reportage quickly
became a matter of acute concern to the managers at the West Kent NHS and
Social Care Trust. Camp himself, who
could never have anticipated this explosion of interest, would be suspended from
work until it was established whether he had acted with the appropriate
permissions as he sought to discover the identity of his charge.
Mike Gunnill, the
photographer who was now the only available source of information about the launching of the Piano Man, remembers how his phone went crazy.
He would pick it up in the middle of the night and find himself talking
with Japanese papers and television channels, people who were entirely convinced
that the Piano Man was actually an
‘alien’ who had dropped in from outer space or another dimension. One Japanese
company made a pile of money by stealing his photograph and printing it on T-shirts
with the slogan ‘Who am I?’ written under it.[vii]
Meanwhile, journalists and television crews from
farflung places were finding their way across the Kingsferry Bridge to the Isle
of Sheppey, where they carried their questions into the Sheerness Times-Guardian’s office on the
High Street. Jérôme Cordelier, who worked with the French
news and political weekly Le Point, was
among them. No mere pedlar of
sensations, Cordelier was a man of broad social sympathies who, only a year or
so previously, had joined the president of France’s Emmaus movement to write a
‘Manifesto against Poverty’[viii] renewing the plea for an ‘uprising of kindness’ made on behalf of the homeless
and derelict more than fifty years earlier by that same founding president, a
Resistance hero and priest named Abbé Pierre who went on to be revered as ‘the
conscience of France’. Cordelier discovered
Sheerness to be a “sad port in South-eastern England, battered by winds and
disfigured by industrial facilities.”[ix] He also found the Sheerness
Times-Guardian’s staff reeling in amazement at the sudden efflorescence of
international interest in their normally ignored island. ‘This is really bizarre, no?’, muttered a local
reporter, pointing to a Japanese television crew that had turned up on the High
Street at about the same time. The editor, who had just taken a call from the Los Angeles Times, is likely to have
shared his reporter’s sympathy for Riichiro Harayama, of the Tokyo Broadcasting
System, who had flown for 20 hours only to be told that there really was nothing
for him to see in Sheerness. The shingle beach known as The Leas was still
there, of course, perhaps attended by a few paddle-boarding families and the odd dog walker, but what else could
be said about the place? The Sheerness Times-Guardian had 27,000 readers on and around the Island but their request for information
about the stranger had received no response at all. It was, so the paper itself would conclude,
‘pretty safe to say that the Piano Man has no connection with the Island.’[x]
Stepping out of
the Sheerness Times Guardian’s office, Cordelier soon discovered that this
sudden wave of offshore interest seemed frankly incredible elsewhere in Sheerness
too. The people he asked about the sudden fame of their unknown visitor appeared
to be ‘torn between compassion, desolation and a good laugh.’ In the White House pub, outside which the
newly dubbed Piano Man had been apprehended, Cordelier encountered a
saleswoman named Debbie, who insisted that the fellow had earlier come into
the grocery store where she worked, staring around wide-eyed but not buying anything:
‘he gave the impression of seeing but not thinking.’ The publican, Mike
McAlister, took a more downbeat view of the stranger. ‘We are,’ as he explained for the French
journalist’s benefit, “located midway between the Channel and the mouth of the
Thames, which leads to London...” He had
little doubt that the Piano Man was ‘part of a group of illegal immigrants. We
get many here . . .’ This experienced grader of human flotsam reckoned that the
smugglers were ‘surprised by the police boat, and threw them into the sea.’
The pages of the Sheerness Times Guardian confirm Cordelier’s
account of the amazement that filled the paper’s office as their apparently
incidental story was taken up in the world beyond their shunned and much maligned
island. By May 15, the paper had adopted
Gunnill’s superior photograph and also the upbeat new interpretation of the
Piano Man. It noted that the National Missing
Person’s Helpline had received 160 calls since ‘national and international
media’ had picked up on the story.[xi] By 26 May, the Times-Guardian was getting a little possessive, claiming that ‘Our
Piano Man is world famous’[xii] and describing how its little office on
the High Street had been ‘inundated’ with
calls from journalists: ‘I’m used
to asking the questions, not answering them,’ muttered one bemused reporter.
Having lost control of its story, the local paper was now running to keep up. Far from standing back from the ‘rumour mill,’
its reporters could only repeat the questions that were now being asked around the world — ‘Where has he come from? Why is he not talking? Was he thrown from a
boat or did he jump ship?’ — before adding a suspicious thought that just might have
been entirely its own: “Is he secretly trying to gain recognition for his
musical talents?”
Two developments
were necessary for the story to take off as it did, and Creasy’s article for
the Mail on Sunday had successfully initiated
both of them. The drama had to be raised
above the never entirely vanquished suspicion that the Piano Man was, in the Sunday Express’s headline, ‘Just a
Clever Conman’ trying to enter Britain illegally and ‘playing the system as
well as he plays the keyboard’ (12 May 2005, p. 45). The story also had to be
removed from the Isle of Sheppey (’an odd outpost of Kent’, as the Sunday Times would call it), and re-voiced
as a universal allegory about, in the quoted words of an already interested
Hollywood producer, ‘the fragility of the human mind, the nature of
communication, and the importance, or unimportance, of identity.’ The producer in question, Bard Dorros of Smart
Entertainment, further explained that ‘great stories raise, and often attempt
to answer, questions about the nature of the human mind, how it works, who we
are. The Piano Man’s story frames that in a mystery – what is at stake is this
man’s identity.’[xiii] So it was that Michael Camp’s silent patient had emerged from
the Mail on Sunday as a latter day
version of Everyman, adrift in a world in which he could no longer find his
bearings. Emancipated from the contingent
misery of its origins in Sheerness, the story was eagerly embraced as a fable
proving the proximity of art and reality.
That is how it seemed to the novelist, Chris Paling, who sat down to
write an article for the Daily Telegraph, claiming that he himself had already written the ‘Piano Man’ in his
just published and duly plugged novel, in which a forgetful man crawls out of
the sea and heads into a nearby town.[xiv]
As the fable expanded
into a global allegory, it also threatened to devour the ‘very highly strung’ young man who was by now lodged at Little Brook Hospital at the edge of Gravesend. Journalists, who were now the missionaries of the
expanding fable, tried frantically to winkle further details out of more
or less reluctant carers and managers. It was reported that all the identifying
labels had been cut or otherwise removed from the Piano Man’s clothes.[xv] It was disclosed that the ‘silent genius’s’
carers had tried various techniques alongside the Medway Maritime Hospital’s chapel
piano, which the Sunday Times had
inspected and was pleased to identify as a Challen 50 key model. They had brought in interpreters in an
attempt to engage the silent genius in Russian, French and German. They had showed him a map of the world and been
encouraged when he ‘doodled on the coast of Sweden’. Reporters also teased further
concessions out of Michael Camp, who told the Sunday Times that, when agitated, the Piano Man tended to ‘hyperventilate’
at a rate of 70 or 80 breaths per
minute: ‘I’ve never seen anyone breathe
like that. Anyone else doing that for a bit might faint, but he does it for as
long as he is agitated.’ And that was by
no means his only peculiar mannerism: ‘He never walks in a straight line. If he
enters a room, he will not walk across it. He will walk round the room, keeping
his back close to the wall. This way he maintains
eye contact with everybody. If more than
one person is in the room, his eyes flicker from one person to another.’ ‘Locals
on Sheppey’ meanwhile were said to persist in the suspicion that the Piano
Man had ‘slipped off a passing vessel’ like so many others before him.
Enquiries had been made with the owners of ships passing into Sheerness port
that night – a vessel from Norway, a container ship from St. Petersburg, another
from Sweden. Although no-one had been reported
missing, ‘it is, of course, possible that he was a stowaway.’
The Sunday Times also
revealed that Sheerness, where ‘strangers tend to get noticed’, had seen rather more of the Piano Man than
was initially understood: ‘After about two weeks in hospital the Piano Man had
been transferred to a Sheppey hostel’ (the obvious candidate is a place named ‘The Foyer’, almost beside Sheerness-on-Sea’s railway station, which was not
a secure unit but did have staff at hand). There he remained, it was suggested, until
one night he walked out. ‘He was spotted
sidling along the street in Sheerness, with his back against the shop windows,
trying to keep his eyes on anybody who came near.’ The police had picked him up
again and he was returned to the Medway Maritime Hospital, where he had this
time been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and transferred to his present
residence the Little Brook psychiatric hospital at Gravesend.
Learning that
there was no chapel piano at Little Brook, the Sun made the mistake of trying to donate an electric keyboard to be
placed in the Piano Man’s new room to make the story true: ‘he obviously wants a proper piano or
nothing,’ Camp told the rival Sunday
Express of this rejected offer.[xvi] Meanwhile, the Piano Man’s recitals kept
getting better and better. There was
talk of the young maestro’s ‘meandering, melancholic airs’, and of the brilliance
with which he cruised through Lennon and McCartney tunes while girding himself
up for ‘a complete rendition of Swan Lake’[xvii].
Piling it on
As the story spread through the summer, the Piano Man was the subject of a
great efflorescence of speculation in which the suspected illegal
immigrant and NHS scrounger was converted into a tortured artistic
genius—a fellow of unique brilliance who must, so some of his carers appeared to have
concluded, have suffered some sort of
nervous breakdown after a disastrous performance. Indeed, he’d not even had time to change out
of his concert clothes before stepping onto the boat from which he must have leaped,
distraught, as it approached the Thames estuary. The search for the “mystery man’s”
identity produced an escalating array of contenders. The National Missing Person’s Helpline was said to have received 400 calls by 18 May (Guardian). The Mail
on Sunday followed up its first article with another, claiming that the man
was called Tomas and had once played in a Czech rock band. Other contenders included a performance artist
of uncertain nationality who had been seen in France or Spain, a Swedish pianist, Martin Sturfalt, who turned
out to be in his flat in Stockholm after all, and a Canadian drifter known as
‘Mr. Nobody’ who had once tried to enter Britain illegally. Various women
announced themselves convinced that the Piano Man was their missing boyfriend
or husband. Hundreds of names were put
forward. If Mark Lawson is to be
believed, so many Hollywood producers were interested in his ‘story’ that the doctors
and nurses could hardly get through the crowd at his bedside (Guardian, June 18).
There was also a flurry
of armchair diagnosis. One psychiatrist, Dr Felicity de Zulueta, who had never met the
victim of her assessment, was nevertheless confident that he had been hurled into a
‘fugue-state’ by trauma and may only have been able to access ‘the right hemisphere of his brain through the
piano.’ (Sunday Times). Pop
psychologists also took to the prints to offer their interpretations of his plight. Oliver James was in little doubt that
the Piano Man was suffering from a ‘borderline personality disorder’. Dr Judith Gould of the National Autism
Society recognised him as belonging on her organisation’s spectrum but at least requested
access so she might pursue her diagnosis more closely. As the legend grew it attracted
the meta-commentators too. Not content with commending the man’s
‘glorious, enchanting music,’ the allegedly Lacanian analyst, Darian Leader, used theTimes to declare that the story,
which was ‘Striking a chord in all of us,’ was made of the ‘stuff of folklore
and myth’. It had also, so this expert confidently
remarked, activated ‘the common fantasy of escaping a humdrum existence’ (Times, 21 May).
This heaping up of speculative theories,
in which an unknowing and apparently terrified psychiatric patient was drafted
into service as an involuntary hod-carrier for the world’s fantasies, went on
for the best part of four months. By late July, the doctors were reduced to
wondering whether their mute patient’s voice box was damaged, or had even been
removed: they hoped to investigate but were impeded by the difficulty of getting
his formal consent for an endoscopic examination. On 8 August, the Independent reported that the NHS were
worrying that “the talented musician in a wet suit” might never be identified”,
a fear that was reiterated by the Sheerness
Times Guardian on 18 August.[xvii].
All this, however, came to an abrupt close the following morning, when a nurse went into the Piano Man’s room and asked routinely, ‘Are you
going to speak with us today?’ Unexpectedly, the mysterious patient looked across and replied ‘I think I will’. He went on to identify himself as a
twenty-year old Bavarian named Andreas Grassl: a farmer’s son who, far from having
been ‘washed ashore with no identifiable co-ordinates’ as Darian Leader had
surmised, had actually travelled to England by Eurostar from Paris, and had
been trying to drown himself in the hours before he was picked up by the
police. Informing the hospital staff that
he had two sisters and was gay, he also announced that he had only drawn a
piano because ‘it was the first thing that came to mind’. As for his musical skills, the hospital
chaplain had been right to warn the Sunday
Times that he really could not play the piano very well at all.
The
embarrassed hospital managers were careful to ensure that, by the time the press was informed of this development, Andreas Grassl was back with his dairy-farming
parents in the tiny village of Prosdorf in Bavaria, whence he would only speak
in carefully measured statements issued through the family’s solicitor. He explained that he had known nothing of the
media storm brewed up around him, and, having thanked the psychiatrists and nurses
who had looked after him during this distressing episode, and also the many sympathetic people who had written
to him while he was in hospital. He was said to have announced that he had no memory of how he had reached Sheerness. He wanted no further contact
with the media and intended to withdraw in order to consider his future. By the time the gay news service Pink News revisited the story two years
later in 2007, Grassl was said to be living in Basel, in Switzerland, and studying
French Literature at the university. By
then reporters had found various of his former friends and acquaintances
who allegedly spoke of the difficulty of growing up gay in a conservative Bavarian
village, and who suggested that his crisis had become acute in the French
coastal town of Pornic, in South-Eastern Brittany, where he had gone to find
work and entered a relationship that had gone wrong.
The British press was by no means
unanimously content to have its summer fable so rudely breached by reality. Some commentators used merely plangent
terms to lament the sudden disenchantment caused by Grassl’s recovery. In a leading article for the Independent, Charles Nevin, who claimed to have dreamed that the
piano man was another wandering genius like Paderewski, regretted that ‘a little touch of magic and mystery is
no more’. Other papers, and not just the
old tabloids, reacted angrily to the sudden desublimation, as if they had been grievously
let down by Grassl, who had surely proved quite unworthy of the fame they had so generously bestowed upon
him.
The fable had all along been pitched against
the now resumed suspicion that the piano man was actually a ‘f*****g asylum seeker’ or, at best, a trickster perpetrating ‘some performance art prank’ (Sunday Times). In this disillusioning light Grassl, who had unwittingly demonstrated that already in 2005 a foreigner seeking help in England had to be a creative genius to avoid the
suspicion and hatred not just of large sections of the British press, but also of the
Home Office under the Labour Home Secretaries David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, was now multiply denounced as a ‘fraud’ for not being authentically mute
and a ‘sham’ for not really being able to play the piano either. It was alleged that his ‘glorious,
enchanting music’ (Darian Leader) was much worse even than the ‘good amateur’
level claimed by the hospital chaplain and had actually consisted of ‘hitting a
single key repeatedly’. Grassl, who was
surely not having a go at Terry Riley’s ‘In C,’ was nothing but a ‘suicidal gay German,’ no
longer a pianist but ‘just a fiddler’ who had made disreputable use of his past
experience as a ward orderly in Bavaria to act mad in order to freeload on Britain’s
cherished NHS. As Grassl’s journey back from maestro to scrounger proceeded, various papers gleefully declared that the
Health Authority was considering legal action to recover the costs of his care:
a wishful recommendation that went nowhere, thanks partly, as may be
surmised, to the clinicians who appear never
to have doubted that Grassl had been in the midst of a genuine personal crisis
that was now at least partly resolved.
Many of the
higher commentators,who offered their retrospective thoughts on the meaning of
this drama, had shared the assumption that the story had been so evocative
because the Piano Man represented what Darian Leader had called a ‘blank
canvas’ onto which people felt invited to project their own longings and fantasies (Times, May 21). In reality, ‘canvas’ was not the medium that had
supported the clouds of speculation, and neither was the screen on which they
were projected in any way ‘blank’.
In the words of
the Sunday Telegraph, the story of
the Piano Man was ‘strangely cinematic, from the shock of his dyed blond hair
to the unusual formality of his attire.
He is a walking plot yet to be unravelled.’[xviii] In the early weeks, that unravelling had
taken various forms, each one prompted by a different film. Many, including the Mail on Sunday’s Richard Creasy and some of Grassl’s carers, saw the Piano Man as a version of the Australian film Shine (1996) – which turned
the tormented pianist David Helfgott into an embodiment of what an
American psychiatrist diagnosed as ‘movie madness’: i.e. a ‘celluloid amalgam of schizophrenia,
manic-depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and idiot savant’ (Kenneth
Paul Rosenberg, M.D., letter to the editor, New
York Times, March 15, 1997). For
those inclined to emphasise the ‘idiot savant’ in this winning mix, corroboration
was provided by Dustin Hoffman’s performance as Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man (1988). Writing in Le Point, Jerôme Cordelier, added a more recondite film
- The Man without a Past (2003) by
the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, the hero of which is a welder who loses
all knowledge of himself after being beaten up and robbed a few hours after stepping
off a train in Helsinki, and then builds a new life among the city’s
container-dwelling outcasts. Other commentators, in Germany especially, reached further back to Werner Herzog’s historical drama The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), in
which the people of Nuremburg wake, on
the morning of 26 May 1828, to find a strikingly inarticulate young man
standing in a small square and holding out a letter explaining that he had been raised in almost complete isolation in an unnamed village
on the Bavarian border and wished to become a cavalry officer like his alleged late
father.
Bruno S as Kaspar Hauser in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser