The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation

by Schechter, Harold

  He began fighting with his mother, too, mostly over religion. He resented her demand that he study at least three chapters of scripture every night when he preferred reading dime novel Westerns, Hugo’s Les Misérables, and the stories of Mark Twain. She also insisted that he memorize a new psalm every Sunday—a chore he found increasingly onerous and eventually refused to perform. She called him a young infidel. He told her to stop “stuffing the Bible down his throat.” Their quarrels grew increasingly bitter.17

  In July 1919, less than a week before Fenelon’s twelfth birthday, his mother filed a court petition, charging that she was unable to supervise or care for him. A few weeks later, he was committed to Juvenile Hall. “It relieved her of a heavy burden,” Irwin would bitterly recollect, “and she had more time to serve the Lord.”18

  Like every new admittee to the detention center, Fenelon was given a medical exam—the first thorough checkup he had ever received. His blood sample tested positive for syphilis.

  In later years, reports would circulate that the disease had been transmitted by his mother. According to these accounts, his maternal grandmother, who owned slaves in Louisiana, had mistreated one of them, a “black mammy” infected with syphilis. To get her revenge, the woman snuck into the nursery of Fenelon’s mother—still, at that time, a suckling infant—and “fed her from her black breasts.”19

  This remarkably unpleasant tale has all the hallmarks of an urban legend—one of those widely credited scare stories that have more to do with lurid (and in this case racist) fantasy than historical fact. A more likely explanation, given the whoremongering hypocrite who sired him, is that Fenelon’s father was the ultimate source of the disease.

  Whatever the case, the results of Fenelon’s blood test was consistent with those of his brothers. As authorities had already determined, both Vidalin and Pember Irwin, like twelve-year-old Fenelon, were afflicted with congenital syphilis.20

  7

  * * *

  Epiphany

  AFTER THREE MONTHS IN JUVENILE HALL, Fenelon was sent to join Pember in the Strickland Home for Boys. Not long after his arrival, he badly beat up another inmate who (so he claimed) had called him a sissy. A few days later, convinced that “the other boys there hated him,” he ran away, taking his little brother with him. Within twenty-four hours, a railroad guard found the pair sleeping in a freight car. Fenelon—indulging his dime novel fantasies—explained that he had planned to go to Montana “to fight Indians.” Returned to the Strickland Home with Pember, he continued to get embroiled in fistfights and, in March 1920, was committed to the Whittier reform school, where he was reunited with his older brother, Vidalin.

  With her children now wards of the state, Mary was free to devote herself fully to her Pentecostal pursuits. By 1919, when Fenelon was sent to Juvenile Hall, she had become an acolyte of a former Azusa Street coworker, Florence L. Crawford.

  A close associate of William Seymour, Mother Crawford (as she came to be known) conducted an evangelistic campaign that took her throughout the Midwest and as far north as Winnipeg. After receiving a direct communication from God that she “establish the headquarters of her ministry in Portland, Oregon,” she repaired to the “Rose City” and began holding meetings in an old converted blacksmith shop. Her charismatic preaching quickly attracted followers from throughout the Pacific Northwest. Within a year, she had established her own church, the Apostolic Faith Mission.1

  Her annual camp meetings, held in the summer and lasting as long as two months, became more elaborate by the year. A great open-walled tabernacle, surrounded by a city of tents, stood in a clearing in the woods. Adherents from as far away as Pennsylvania and New York filled every one of its 1,200 seats, wailing, weeping, and raising their hands high in prayer, while hundreds of redeemed souls hurried up to the altar to kneel in the sawdust and testify to “the great things God had done for them.” Ministers preached fiery sermons, and rousing hymns were chanted to the accompaniment of a sixty-piece orchestra—coronets, slide trombones, clarinets, saxophones, mellophones, and stringed instruments of every variety. A chartered barge, the Bluebird, ferried hundreds of worshippers to a nearby island for the water baptismal service.2

  In the summer of 1920, Mary Irwin journeyed northward to take part in Mother Crawford’s camp meeting, held in Rose City Park in northeast Portland. By the time the meeting ended seven weeks later, she had decided to make Portland her permanent home. With no place to live or means of support, she turned to her coreligionists for assistance. One, a widow, Mrs. L. M. Bispham, offered to take Mary in “until she found work and established herself.” Mrs. Bispham also urged Mary to send for her two youngest sons. There was plenty of room in the house, and they would make good companions for her own son, a ten-year-old named Royal.3

  In later years, Fenelon would remember his brief time at Whittier as one of happiest periods of his boyhood. Supplied with a clean suit of work clothes and three substantial meals a day, he was better dressed and fed than at any other time in his life. Unlike his incorrigible older brother, he maintained a spotless record of behavior, did well in his vocational training classes, and was awarded first prize in a school-wide essay-writing contest. His stay there lasted less than seven months. In October 1920, by order of the juvenile court, he was discharged from Whittier and restored to his mother’s custody. Bidding farewell to Vidalin—who, having recently turned seventeen, still had four years to serve on his sentence—Fenelon reluctantly took his leave of the reformatory and, with Pember in tow, boarded a train to Portland.4

  A strong creative streak ran in the Irwin family. Mary was a talented pianist who, during her time in Los Angeles, had met the celebrated composer (and future Polish prime minister) Ignacy Jan Paderewski and impressed him with her playing. Pember had inherited some of her talent and, in his later years, earned a living as a teacher of classical guitar.5

  Fenelon’s forte wasn’t music but the visual arts. Throughout his life, he loved looking at paintings and statues and, from his early boyhood, showed a particular aptitude for sculpting. His earliest creation, molded out of strained mud when he was twelve years old and inspired by a picture of Michelangelo’s Moses, was a bust of Abraham.6 It was while boarding at the Bispham home in Portland, however, that his hobby blossomed into a passion. Deprived of conventional art supplies, he worked with whatever materials came to hand. Initially, his preferred medium was oleomargarine, taken from the Bisphams’ icebox and fashioned into busts of his two main historical heroes, Attila the Hun and Napoleon. He also sculpted little figures out of pilfered laundry soap.

  On one occasion, he and Pember went to visit the grave of a local celebrity, Sam Simpson, Oregon’s unofficial poet laureate and author of the beloved lyric “Beautiful Willamette.” Coming upon a shattered tombstone, Fenelon took a small piece home with him “and carved a hand on the back of it in relief.” Eventually he managed to scrounge up enough money to acquire a small quantity of modeling clay and used it to produce “his first permanent piece of sculpture.” Titled “The Horrible Greek,” it was “a nine-inch bust molded on classical lines but with wildly bulging eyes and a fantastically leering mouth,” toothless except for a single tusk-like canine.7

  Enrolled in the local public school, Fenelon distinguished himself scholastically, though he ran afoul of officials after removing several art history books from the library and returning them with torn-out illustrations—a practice that would eventually land him in far more serious trouble. When he completed seventh grade with honors in June 1921, his formal education was over.8

  By then, Mary had scraped together enough money from her work as a cleaning lady to move herself and her sons into a little corner shack at 170 NE 3rd Avenue. That summer, she spent every spare moment at Mother Crawford’s camp meeting, where she served as an exhorter, helping to guide the assembled sinners on the road to salvation. What little income she earned as a menial was further reduced by her regular donations to the church. Left largely unattended, her sons
were “forced to subsist for weeks at a time on bread and buttermilk begged from bakeries and dairies.”9

  Their situation improved somewhat when fourteen-year-old Fenelon got a job as a stock clerk at the Meier & Frank department store in downtown Portland. He lasted there for less than six months. Sometime in early 1922—in a pattern that would repeat itself throughout his working life—he was fired after savagely assaulting a coworker over some trivial slight. It took two burly men to subdue the frenzied Irwin. “He was crazy mad,” the store manager recalled.10

  This shocking outburst of rage was not the only early sign of his growing instability. During that same brief period of employment, he conceived an idea that, elaborated into a full-blown delusional system, would come to dominate his later life.

  It first occurred to him while he was folding up a bolt of polka-dotted silk fabric in the department store stock room. All at once, as he described it, “the material seemed to leave my hands and without any human effort move straight up to my face.” He felt his legs go weak and had to lean against a doorway for support. His boss, who was standing nearby, saw him falter and asked what was the matter.

  “That’s when the whole thing came to me in full force,” Irwin later explained. “The reason people have so much difficulty in doing things is that they have such a hard time getting things in their head. You have to visualize first. Before a sculptor can make a statue he has to make a mental statue, and the reason that even the greatest sculptor has such a difficult time making a statue is because he doesn’t get it clearly in his mind first.”11

  This realization—that an artist has to create a “mental prototype” of his subject before giving it material form—seems not merely self-evident but blindingly obvious. After all, what novelist, in describing a scene, doesn’t first imagine it in all its physical and sensory richness? What painter doesn’t first see with his mind’s eye the design he then renders on canvas? Moreover, the practice of “visualization”—as Irwin would call his supposedly revolutionary theory—was already a well-established aspect of the late-nineteenth movement known as New Thought. Springing, among other sources, from the Transcendental philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke of an all-pervasive “Over-Soul” accessible to individuals through the faculty of intuition, the various organizations and sects of this widespread metaphysical movement shared a belief in the miraculous healing and creative power of human thought—that disease could be cured, riches acquired, and happiness attained through the power of positive thinking.

  As someone who gobbled up all manner of writings on religious and philosophical subjects, Irwin was likely familiar with some of the popular New Thought literature of the day, such as the best-selling self-help books of Wallace D. Wattles, who preached that “creative visualization” was a key to success. “Man,” wrote Wattles, “can form things in his thought and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the things he thinks about to be created.”12

  Immediately following his epiphany with the polka-dotted cloth, Irwin became convinced that, with enough concentration, he could create a mental picture so utterly real that he merely had to copy it in clay to produce an artistic masterpiece. “I expect some day to be able to form an absolutely clear and perfect image in my mind; to be able to actually project it into the air before me so that I can actually see it there with my material eyes just as I see material objects. I expect to be able to hold it and make other people see it.” He would then “become the most famous and unique sculptor that ever lived.”

  To achieve this end, he threw himself into a series of daily exercises, designed to perfect his powers of visualization. The art illustrations he had torn from his school library books, originally intended as inspirations for his sculptures, were put in the service of this new obsession. He would study them for hours—François Joseph Sandmann’s painting of Napoleon in exile on Saint Helena, Antonio Canova’s statue of Theseus slaying a centaur, Arnold Böcklin’s eerie Isle of the Dead. Then, seated on the edge of his bed in his darkened room, he would attempt to re-create them so completely in his mind that he “could project them in front of him at will and actually see them,” like a moviegoer watching images onscreen.13

  His initial results were not encouraging. Try as he might, he found it difficult to maintain the necessary focus to form a complete mental image of his subject. “Anybody can concentrate entirely on a thing for a moment or two,” he later explained. “But after that, it gets to be a strain.” Deciding that he needed assistance, he enlisted a young boy from the neighborhood, hiring him to sit in an adjoining room with a pocket watch and call out the time at regular intervals, while Irwin “concentrated on one mental picture after another,” gradually increasing the clarity and duration of each visualized image. “This form of behavior led other people to consider him as being queer,” one psychiatrist would subsequently note with classic clinical understatement. When the father of Irwin’s young assistant got wind of “what was going on, the boy’s services were summarily terminated.”14

  To augment the stolen pictures in his collection, Irwin began to borrow art books from various branches of the public library, often under a fictitious name, strip them of their illustrations, then toss the mutilated volumes into the Willamette River. Eventually, he would acquire an enormous number of these plundered images—at least a thousand, according to one official estimate—all carefully indexed and catalogued.15

  In the meantime, Pember had reverted to his own delinquent ways. In early 1923, he stole several bicycles. Exactly what he did with them is unclear, though he evidently gave one to his older brother. Records show that, on February 16 of that year, Pember was sentenced to a term at the Oregon State Training School for Boys. Fenelon, charged with possession of stolen property, was given probation.16

  By then, Mary had found work in a shirtwaist factory. Between her job and her evangelical activities, she was rarely at home. On those infrequent occasions when she and Fenelon were together, they were generally at each other’s throats. He remained bitterly resentful of the tithe exacted by her church and continued to blame her for their indigent circumstances. For her part, Mary had come to see her middle son as the most irredeemable of her offspring. Though she supported his artistic ambitions and listened patiently to his rambling “discourses on the great powers that would come to him through visualization,” she was horrified by another passion he had recently acquired: the writings of Robert Ingersoll.17

  Known to his freethinking admirers as the “Great Agnostic,” Ingersoll, born in upstate New York in 1833, was the son of an itinerant preacher. Seeking to account for his intense antireligious convictions, critics would later offer two contradictory theories: “On the one hand, they suggested that he was reacting to an upbringing filled with hellfire and damnation called down on him by his father; on the other, that young Robert had not been threatened with enough hellfire during his childhood.”18 Following a brief stint as a schoolteacher in southern Illinois, he apprenticed himself to a prominent attorney and, after assiduous self-study, was admitted to the bar. Though his uncompromising attacks on religious benightedness made him too controversial for political office (a term as attorney general of Illinois was the only post he ever held), he was a brilliant orator on behalf of other candidates and gained national renown after delivering an electrifying speech at the 1876 Republican National Convention, naming James G. Blaine as the party’s presidential nominee.

  For the next two decades—an era when public lectures were a major form of popular entertainment—he crisscrossed the country on more than a dozen tours, drawing sell-out crowds who often stood in line for hours and paid hefty ticket prices to hear him speak (one dollar or more at a time when the average American worker earned less than five hundred dollars a year). Luminaries from Mark Twain to Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman to Clarence Darrow regarded him as the greatest of all their country’s orators. Speaking without notes for as long as three uninter
rupted hours, he offered spellbinding talks on literary, scientific, political, and historical subjects: Shakespeare’s plays, the poetry of Robert Burns, the life and work of Alexander von Humboldt, the Declaration of Independence, women’s rights, and dozens more, all eventually published in a twelve-volume collection.

  His greatest fame and notoriety, however, derived from his scathing attacks on religion. He proudly proclaimed his iconoclasm. “I care nothing for what the church says, except insofar as it accords with my reason,” he declared, “and the Bible is nothing to me, only insofar as it agrees with what I think and know.” One of his best-known talks, “Some Mistakes of Moses,” was a ruthless dissection of “the errors, contradictions, and impossibilities contained in the Pentateuch”—a document he characterized “simply as a record of a barbarous people, in which are found a great number of ceremonies of savagery, many absurd and unjust laws, and thousands of ideas inconsistent with known and demonstrated facts.”19 Little wonder that this stalwart champion of science, rational thought, and humanism was reviled by fundamentalists, who regarded him as “one of the Devil’s chief allies.”20

  Besides the art books he was vandalizing, Fenelon had been borrowing a wide range of reading material from the public library—everything from Bulfinch’s Mythology to John Clark Ridpath’s three-volume History of the World. Sometime around his fifteenth birthday, he discovered—and became enthralled by—Ingersoll’s collected essays. His mother was predictably appalled at Fenelon’s enthusiasm for the godless “Injuresoul” (as his religious critics called him). Worried that he might corrupt his impressionable younger brother, still confined to the Oregon State Training School, she dashed off a letter to Superintendent L. M. Gilbert, urging him to intercept any correspondence from Fenelon to Pember. “Fenelon is my child and has some good qualities, but he is brimful of poison,” she wrote. “He is an atheist and well-versed in that pernicious literature.…Pember is just as easily influenced as can be toward the good or toward the evil. Just a little association with Fenelon will ruin him forever.”21