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Redwood holds court in a straight-backed chair in front of his high altar – an antique chest of drawers with a Tibetan Buddharupa perched on top. |
Strange silence of the Buddhist of suburbia
Is he a philanthropist and saviour of the suicidal, or dangerous psychopath? Simon Wroe meets Redwood Fryxell, the extraordinary monk of Sumatra Road
A SPIRITED, self-styled Buddhist monk called Redwood Thomas Walcott Fryxell has been sheltering homeless people in Camden for 25 years.
Doctors consider the Abbot Redwood to be a highly dangerous psychopath and have sectioned him at least 20 times under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act.
By contrast, the many homeless, suicidal and migrant lodgers whom Redwood has put up in his impossibly cluttered open houses, first in Hampstead and now in West Hampstead, generally regard him as a saint.
Police have repeatedly broken down the door to the Bamiyan Coelestial Void, Redwood’s one-bedroom basement flat and monastic refuge in Sumatra Road, to remove the landlord and guru on medical orders.
Redwood, a 71-year-old former academic from Moline, Illinois, takes great umbrage at this treatment and has not spoken a word to any figure of authority since 1995.
Out of their earshot, he regards psychiatrists as “ignorant criminals and chronic spiritual idiots” and himself “a hideous thorn in their side”. He continues to show up at the wards and hospital meetings in silent protest, brandishing religious icons or books on anti-psychiatry. “They say I’m a very dangerous man – well I guess I’m beginning to show it,” he likes to say.
The subject of psychiatry brings out a pugnacious streak in Redwood somewhat at odds with his Buddhist principles of never harming a living thing. He is, however, a magnanimous host whose door is always open.
“It was once my ambition to serve a million cups of tea in my lifetime but I once got my calculator out and saw it was impossible. Now, I’m glad to say, other people make the tea,” he says.
Everything in the house is free. Redwood asks his guests only for “noble” or, failing that, “tolerable” behaviour and adherence to the Five Precepts of Buddha: not to kill, steal, engage in sexual wrongdoing, use wrong speech or take alcohol or drugs “that befuddle the mind”. He pays all bills from his disability benefits and teaches his lodgers how to scavenge for food.
“Sometimes we live like kings,” he says. “I haven’t found any Beluga Caviar yet, but I’m satisfied with delicious spaghetti. Some of my people get food from what is thrown out by the supermarkets; I do desultory scavenging.”
Redwood is completely bald, with a fleshy nose and a friar’s paunch. Years of powerful anti-psychotic drugs have caused nearly all his teeth to fall out. He holds court in a straight-backed chair in front of his high altar – an antique chest of drawers with a Tibetan Buddharupa perched on top. He speaks eloquently, with a prophet’s projection, and puts particular relish on certain words, such as “ping pong” and “lithium carbonate”.
Between six and eight people live in the Coelestial Void at present, although nobody seems exactly sure. One of them, a Satanist called Peter, is Redwood’s official carer. Brother Satan, as Redwood calls him, receives £55 a week for this service and lives, while the weather is clement, in the larger garden shed. During the day, the sounds of his meditative chanting can be heard. Another man called Richard lives in the smaller shed, in the shade of a sprawling laurel tree. The garden, where Redwood burns the waste in a large Indian copper pot every morning, backs onto a railway line.
Redwood sleeps on a bed of bricks in the corner of the back room, while the front room is shared by a philosophy student, Willemina, a Ghanian gentleman called George, and Sue from Sunderland. A Slovakian named Otto is staying in the coal chamber, once the home of Peter Cook’s friend, the “celebrity tramp” Bronco John.
Hundreds of people have stayed with Redwood since he began his Hampstead tea evenings in Denham Road for the nascent Manic Depression Fellowship in 1984. Most are psychiatric patients Redwood knows from hospital or who have heard about it through word of mouth.
“It gave me some reason for existence,” he says. “Then it all just coalesced and now I’m open all the time, in principle. Only a few people have stopped by from the upper world. I’ve put up thieves, murderers... After the initial gush of gratitude they begin to revert to their old habits.”
The telephone was disconnected some years ago when guests ran up a £2,500 phone bill and there is a chair jammed into the bathtub to stop people using the hot water.
“People don’t mind wasting the abbot’s money,” Redwood proclaims with a note of peevishness.
The flat is devoid of any TV, radio, computer or fridge, though it does not lack stuff. Every inch is filled with books, Buddhist prayer banners, Tibetan tankhas, Buddha statues and manjushri scrolls collected from Redwood’s travels around the world. The only toilet has more than a thousand books in it: Redwood’s explanation is that he took a book in every time he was bored with his company.
Like every religious site, the monastery has a concomitant mythology. Its inhabitants speak of “The Great Flood” of August 7 2002, when heavy rainfall submerged the flat in three feet of water. The lower shelves of the high altar were soaked and dozens of books were destroyed. In 2004, Ushi Bahler, an elderly lady known as the “Angel of West Hampstead”, died of pneumonia in the back room. There was a fire that destroyed two sheds and, in a brazen looting of the temple, a lodger called Rusty stole the chief Buddharupa and pawned it to the furniture shop at the end of the road.
“I’ve been looted time after time,” says Redwood, eating grapefruit from a saucepan. “It’s taught me a great deal about non-possessiveness.”
Redwood is sore about one item though: a Cambridge MA gown – “a fantastically utilitarian garment” – which police apparently destroyed on one of their visits. “Even if I had murdered someone, they shouldn’t have done that,” he says, shaking his head. He has since bought another gown, and never leaves home without it.
A conversation with Redwood cannot be evoked by tidy, choice quotations. His mind is constantly revolving, though it is not for turning; questions often seem to bounce off him. When asked why he never accepts money from his guests, he replies: “I try to emulate the teachings of Buddha. I don’t worship him – he’s dead! Ha! I try to do the things he did, yes, practise love and kindness. And I get certified as a psychopath in return by the greatest doctors in the land. I was a fool to go to them countless years ago. There are two kinds of fool according to Buddha. Wise fools who know they’re fools and foolish fools who don’t. I was a foolish fool.
“I call psychiatry a false, fundamentally flawed, pernicious, modern secular pseudo religion. I would hope to destroy the department of psychiatry of that hated place, the Royal So-Called Free, that hated web on the side of Hampstead’s beautiful hill. They say that I suffer from delusions of grandeur. One of my delusions is that I shall succeed in destroying psychiatry from the face of the earth. Ha ha!”
Psychiatrists have cast a long shadow on Redwood’s life ever since he suffered a breakdown in his early twenties brought on by a “tremendous pressure” to live up to the achievements of his father, Fritiof Fryxell, an eminent naturalist and mountaineer, and the puritanical standards of his Lutheran organist mother.
He escaped his “cultured but suffocating” family for St Andrews University, where he read botany, metaphysics, then geology, and later Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar.
One evening, as a postgraduate at Berkeley, he had the sensation of “horrific, inconceivable physical weight, as if the weight of the whole universe was centred on my brain”. After that, he regularly experienced “oceans of depression”, bleak moods exacerbated by the death of his elder brother John, who was killed in a road accident in France on Thanksgiving Day 1954.
Redwood insists he has never been suicidal or violent to others. According to one lodger “the worst he might do is throw a spoon at you”. David Fox, an old friend of his, says: “I have never known him to attack or be dangerous to anybody. The man is a saint. He’s helped thousands of people and I’ve never known him not to be logical, generous, and philanthropic.”
Redwood’s repeated sectionings, often for six months at a time, appear to stem from a single moment on the Underground in 1966, when an Evangelical Christian leaned over the Tube carriage to shake Redwood’s hand and Redwood did not let go. “I was so overcome with his kindness,” he says. “I was in the deepest grief. I can’t remember beyond that.”
Doctors diagnosed him with “manic schizoaffective psychosis” and medicated him with numbing, anti-psychotic drugs such as Haloperidol. A man with a great regard for academic credentials and letters after names, Redwood went along with the psychiatrists, until his marriage fell apart and he lost his home in Hampstead.
Some time after that, he cannot remember exactly when, he became a Buddhist.
“You cannot meditate if you are on drugs,” says Redwood. “And for the Buddhist the only way to achieve enlightenment is through meditation. So I rebelled against psychiatry, the godforsaken, hopeless interviews at the Royal So-called – if I used the King’s English with the doctors they got out the hypodermic syringe. I stopped going there so they started coming to my door, I did not let them in so they started breaking it down.”
Through the offices of his Satanist carer, Redwood is no longer on the psychiatric register. Police have not stormed the flat for a year or more and the doctors let him be. An element of caution persists: Redwood still locks himself in the toilet when he hears a knock on the door and strangers are admitted only after careful questioning.
Recently, a leaked memo from a Royal Free psychiatrist that nervously describes a bald man in a robe silently haunting the psychiatric wards has emboldened the abbot; he believes the tide may finally be turning.
“Chairman Mao’s philosophy of war says when the enemy retreats one advances. I would destroy all psychiatry and replace it with love and kindness,” he says. “The unpleasant teachers are the greatest teachers. I’m beginning to feel increasing compassion for those psychiatrists to have had such an unwillingly patient. I haven’t felt so good for countless years. I know I have not found the secret to immortality, but my sun is rising.” |
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