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Julia Keay's lively biography, Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Who Unwrote the Bible, assumes a readership for whom denominational differences are inscrutable. In the first ten pages we are twice helped to comprehend Scottish Calvinists by being invited to think of them as a lot like Muslims. Keay never alludes to the notion that Cruden "unwrote" the Bible. If that was a marketing copywriter's desperate attempt at sensationalism, it mercifully ends with the subtitle. Nor does Keay make any effort to present her subject as a "genius." The book is largely taken up with the argument that Cruden was "tormented." Every other source will tell you that he was, if not insane, then at least someone whose mental grip was not always that tight. Keay advances the simple antithesis that he was not mad.
Her argument is grounded in some first-rate scholarly sleuthing and is often cleverly advanced. Nevertheless, this reader thought that she overplayed her hand. To secure for Cruden a clean bill of mental health, Keay has to offer an alternative reading of the evidence that makes him the victim of four separate grave injustices, each perpetrated by different people.
Alexander Cruden was first institutionalized when he was twenty-one years old. In order to take into account all the known facts—but still assert that his mind was sound—Keay's counter theory is that a woman whom Cruden was pursuing was pregnant with a child by her brother; that the child was successfully passed off as the offspring of the woman's parents; that the woman later married a different brother and had a child by him as well; that the woman's father—one of the leading ministers in Aberdeen—colluded in a plot to get Cruden out of the way in order to cover up the scandal (Cruden apparently being the only person in town observant enough to notice all this); that Cruden's own parents possessed such a strong sense of deference for the minister and his power that they went along with their son being shut up in a prison-cum-madhouse; and that Cruden referred to this man who fathered three incestuous children and unjustly imprisoned him (thereby ruining much of the rest of his life) as a "pious and great minister" in his will simply as a way of showing that "he harboured no grudge." And this is only one of the times that he was allegedly victimized!
Three of Cruden's forced confinements are well known, but Keay herself has uncovered a stay in Bedlam that has hitherto been kept secret. She is so enthralled in her revisionist work, however, that this is instantly batted away as a presumed "nervous breakdown." Would there have been a need to send him to a madhouse, however, unless his behavior was also threatening?
On another occasion, Cruden had apparently gone to break up a brawl but ended up spending the best part of an hour admonishing disorderly soldiers not to swear while periodically whacking them on the head with a shovel. He also would propose to women with whom he had established no romantic bond (one such intended he had not even met). Being unable to take no for an answer, he would then turn himself into a persistent nuisance, if not a stalker.
It would have been helpful if Keay had explored some intermediate terrain between the verdicts of sane or insane, such as the possibility that he was suffering from a non-psychotic mood or personality disorder. Nevertheless, she is right to redress the balance by reminding us that Cruden was more eccentric than mad, and more socially inept than malicious. He was no Don Juan, but rather a Don Quixote.
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