So he provides the description of the crème de la crème of Bedlam, of patients crazy in a colorful way, crazies worth admiring, as well as people locked in the hospital, possibly for the rest of their lives, but who (he expresses such suspicion) are not crazy, rather political prisoners of a small caliber. Lach-Szyrma sees patients who belong somewhere else: if not the madhouse, then prison or an even worse punishment would doubtlessly await them. The author is not interested in the disease—it’s vulgar. He deals with what is more intriguing, albeit baffling, though he doesn’t know how to organize the information.
“It gave me chills,” the Polish traveler writes later on, “seeing myself suddenly surrounded by so many madmen,” and it’s hard not to be surprised—after all, he went to Bedlam of his own will and had to suspect what he would find. “Nothing makes one so distrustful and disgusted toward another man like the loss of the most needed gift of reasonable behavior, the gift of reason itself,” he continues. It is not the superiority of normalcy over madness that keeps him from walking among the inhabitants of Bedlam, but the fear of them. Unable to make reasonable judgments, they would do things to him unworthy of a human being. The custodian, however, sets his mind at ease. Nothing bad should happen. They meet madmen of all kinds, free to roam, because “these beings were harmless, thus they allowed them to wander wherever they wanted, and even satisfy their favorite fantasies. The dangerous ones are kept behind bars, their arms and legs chained. I have seen a few with their hands tied so they won’t scratch themselves or others.” They meet a young man who knew many foreign languages and read books—it was a student from Heidelberg who “intended to save Napoleon from deportation to St. Helena.” Lach-Szyrma ends the paragraph about the student by saying “relata refero” because he doesn’t want to take responsibility for facts he didn’t witness himself.
The reasonable and meticulous author of the memoir, an experienced chronicler, takes very little away from Bedlam: “Bedlam is a huge edifice, five hundred and eight feet in length, with a dome in the middle, an expansive garden in the back for the sick to walk in. Its façade rests on Corinthian columns and bears the coats of arms of the three united kingdoms: the lion, the thistle, the harp—as if all the Britain had equal right to the building.” Later, he mentions sculptures: Madness and Melancholia. At the end of his visit, he relates that over five hundred madmen reside there; the women loose their minds mostly because of love and commit crimes less frequently than men. That’s it for the facts. The rest consists of the astonishment of a free man, convinced of the unshakability of his own mental faculties, terrified by the conversations he’s having, by the madness and the grandeur of tragedy he witnesses. But he seems to fail to notice those behind bars, because such treatment of madmen doesn’t agitate anyone too much at that time.
The two Bedlams, Hogarth’s and Lach-Szyrma’s, overlap, but not closely. One shows the entire moral chain that leads a man (even the wealthiest one) to the bottom of darkness where he lies unconscious, naked, madmen crowding behind him like in Bosch’s painting, only less skillfully executed, thus less colorful. The Polish traveler sees in Bedlam not the pit of degradation, but a laudable institution for the masses. But when you take away the lion, the thistle, and the harp, the Corinthian columns and impressive length of the building, when you forget about the garden in the back and, more importantly, about the stocks to which the most troublesome patients were cuffed, what’s left is the same thing: a chamber without escape, a black hole with a tiny window at the top with solid iron bars, and Bosch’s characters, only less exciting in their representations. What remains are the misunderstood stories and helplessness exhibited for the public to see. After all, Lach-Szyrma says that he doesn’t want to “distinguish them by their madness” because he’s unable to, just like the doctors must’ve also been unable to. Bedlam must be thought of as prison, an inferno laid out with rotten hay, and yet these words never appear in the memories of travels across England and Scotland. Krystyn Lach-Szyrma is focused on admiration.
I was thinking about all those crowded madmen while lying in my too narrow and too short bed—on a Swedish island—perfect for staying in for just a while, but when you sleep in it for a month, questions start to come to mind: why did they make it so small, what kind of punishment is this? They know how to make bigger ones, my own Swedish bed barely fits my bedroom; and this bastard son of carpentry seems to be in that hotel room only to remind that sleep is a luxury not everyone can afford; that it needs to be conserved like water. I was in bed during my last night on the island, unable to sleep out of fear I might not get up. I was in bed, unable to sleep out of stress, shaken by a reisefieber, thinking about madness and immersing myself in madness, thinking about the disease, trying to remember who was in a hospital and why, what was the order. I was counting all the stays, the visits, and promised myself I’d write it down, although I don’t know what for. I suddenly thought it was important. And in the morning, as usual, I didn’t remember a thing.
Bedlam won’t leave me alone.
Lach-Szyrma only briefly, and without any indignation, says the shackles in the madhouse are a natural attribute of madness itself. I stare at a print I dug out from somewhere. It shows a good-looking man named Willam Norris—an American sailor. The print shows him on a simple wood-framed bed with a hay mattress; he’s sitting up with a painful frown, dressed in a shirt and with a headscarf or a nightcap on his head. He’s restrained with something that resembles metal suspenders, his arms tightly pressed against his torso and the suspenders chained to a wide pipe behind him. He can sit, nothing more; he can move his legs, but this legs won’t go much farther; he can move his hands, but not his arms. This is how Norris spent thirteen years of his life.
A hundred years before Lach-Szyrma, in 1725, César de Saussure, a young Swiss traveler who arrived in London, reporting in his letters on what was worthy of attention during his voyages across Germany, the Netherlands, and England. He visited Bedlam as well. He described a corridor and cells on the main floor, with little windows in the doors enabling one to look inside. “On the first floor,” he wrote, “there is a section designated for dangerous madmen, mostly restrained, and terrifying to even look at. On their free days, people of both genders, mostly the lower classes, come in great numbers to visit the hospital and entertain themselves with sights of those poor wretches who evoke nothing but laughter in them.”
Even though Bedlam changed buildings and moved between different boroughs of London, the main principle remained intact, recalls Peter Ackroyd, the city’s biographer: “The conditions of the interior were as sparse as before, as if once again the whole purpose of the building was a theatrical display designed to depict the triumph over lunacy in London. The two sculpted giants of madness, known popularly as the ‘brainless brothers’ were kept in the vestibule. Methods of treatment remained severe, and were largely dependent on mechanical restraint . . .” (The restraints, by the way, are called by their real names: whips and chains.) “Outside it seemed to be a palace; inside, it closely resembled a prison. The price of admission was a penny . . .”
The era of pharmacological treatment, combined with occupational therapy, began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Engravings from 1860 show idyllic scenes: therapy rooms look like gentleman clubs, patients are placed in spacious rooms with huge windows or little trees in pots. Every month a ball took place; supposedly it was a moving spectacle. But even though that era started in the 1850s, Edmondo de Amicis, author of Heart, who published his travel memoirs from London in 1874, doesn’t even mention Bedlam anymore.
And since I went all that way back in time, I’ll go a little further. Jakub Sobieski—father of Jan Sobieski III, future king of Poland—who penned memoirs of his travels around Europe, found himself in Paris on the day of the assassination of Henry IV of France by François Ravaillac in 1610. It took place on Rue de la Ferronnerie, the street of the lilies. Ravaillac—what became obvious immediately—was sick in the head, and exper
ienced visions that these days we can treat normally, but which back then were treated with an ax. Sobieski writes: “At noon, after the killing of the King Henry IV, Paris was engulfed in panic. It seemed as if Judgment Day had come. All of the city took to the streets upon hearing of the King’s death; women flocked outside their houses, screaming, crying, running with their children, but not knowing themselves where to. Others roamed the streets aimlessly in their buggies, without destination; some men locked themselves in their houses, others, half dressed (as was their custom at that time of day; the French would rest at home), ran barefoot in the streets, or mounted their horses, sometimes bareback, but all with their sabers drawn, threatening, cursing, screaming. To refer to them at the time as a crazed nation was accurate.”
I thought this image may be exaggerated, too colorful, because Sobieski describes a city gripped in madness, and no medic from the Holy Ghost Hospital, nor an old fashioned doctor from Bedlam, would take it easy on a city like this: it needs treatment, a phlebotomy, a straight jacket, chains. And yet, I find in the writings of Samuel Pepys, half a century earlier, something of an echo of that Paris in the state of utmost agitation, of a fever that threatens life. In Pepys’s work it is a feverish London in the times of restoration: “Waked in the morning about six o’clock, by people running up and down . . . talking that the Fanatiques were up in arms in the City. And so I rose and went forth; where in the street I found every body in arms at the doors. So I returned (though with no courage at all, but that I might not seem to be afeared), and got by sword and pistol, which, however, I had no powder to charge; and went to the door, where I found Sir R. Ford, and with him I walked up and down as far as the Exchange, and there I left him. In our way, the streets full of Train-band, and great stories, what mischief these rogues have done; and I think near a dozen have been killed this morning on both sides. Seeing the city in this condition, the shops shut, and all things in trouble, I went home and sat . . .” And then Pepys notes, poor soul honest to itself: “. . . in short it is this, of all these Fanatiques that have done all this, viz., routed all the Trainbands that they met with, put the King’s life-guards to the run, killed about twenty men, broke through the City gates twice; and all this in the day-time, when all the City was in arms; are not in all about 31. Whereas we did believe them. . . . to be at least 500.”
After the mass madness of a people—because Sobieski clearly states that he observed a nation of madmen suddenly awaken to their madness, just like Pepys did in his mild manner—there follow the necessary proceedings: a coronation, a court process and punishment, and only at the very end the funeral. That is the order of necessities: interregnum can’t last too long, the king’s assassin must be punished accordingly and swiftly, and the funeral is last because the guests coming for the ceremony will need time to arrive. Out of all of this, the description of the punishment is the most severe, due to Sobieski’s completely transparent style, and without any signs of disgust, because what was he supposed to be disgusted about anyway?
Jakub Sobieski sits by the window facing Place de Grève and describes what he can see from there, how they torture Ravaillac in different ways. And I think that magnate Sobieski, whose portrait in Polish dress I still remember, must’ve looked a little bit like a savage in the Paris of those days. “First,” Sobieski writes, “he was led to the street on which he murdered the king, and then he was given the very knife, covered in the royal blood, to hold in his hand; and this very hand was burnt, causing him unimaginable pain as first his fingers slowly fell off; then he dropped the knife and the rest of his hand soon followed; exhausted, they took him by oxcart to the front of the finest cathedral in all of Paris—the Holy Mary. He wore a shirt and some ragged, blue-linen pants. When finally there, a crier started to pronounce him a traitor, a criminal, and a cruel king slayer who had wiped the great King Henry IV of the face of this world. The crowd raised a great outcry, cursing and slandering him. From there, when they brought him to one corner, the executioner started tearing through his breast with pincers and then brought him to another corner and pronounced him traitor again; and they tore apart the other side of his breast. Then, they grabbed him with the pincers under his armpits and started tearing and the crier kept pronouncing his guilt; the crowd was so thick, with people on foot or mounted or in their buggies, that oxen could hardly have pushed their way through it. Finally, they brought him to a decent-sized square they call à la Grève, where the worst criminals in Paris are executed.”
“The crowd,” continues Jakub Sobieski, “was so thick, one could walk across their heads. But the roofs and windows were just as crowded, mostly with foreigners, and I was there too, with the Radziwił princes, and had rented one window, and was far overcharged for it, too. Soon, as they made room for the rowdy crowd, they prepared to execute him. He died being pulled apart by horses.”
At this point I have to retract the future king’s father’s right to speak—he who, from a window like a theater box, watches the death of a murderer and a madman—because there are so many inexplicable things in this story, unacceptable in our aseptic times, which, while reading the quoted pages, I agree with after all. Here I am, taking the ripping of live flesh with pincers and being torn apart by horses for something obvious. In that, I think, lies the strength of literature.
It’s similar with Pepys; the Englishman also describes such spectacles of his own day. He writes: “. . . I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.” These are not the only words of admiration, or surprise, for those people who, at the time of their death, apparently mocked their fate. But I read somewhere else that that was the fashionable attitude; fashionable among the sentenced: not to be afraid, but to laugh. “. . . His head and heart,” Pepys writes later on, “were shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again. Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross . . . I went by waterway home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine basket, which I had bought her in Holland, and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it.” That’s all Pepys for you in his coded notes, mixing freshly torn-out heart, triumphing crowds, and small domestic worries, mostly caused by his wife: “This morning Mr. Carew was hanged and quartered at Charing Cross; but his quarters, by a great favor, are not to be hanged up. . . . After that done to sleep, which I did not very well do, because that my wife having a stopping in her nose and she snored much, which I never did hear her do before.”
And Sobieski, the father, writes: “they, a few hundred men, barely got off their horses before they grabbed their sabers and in a great rage almost chopped him to pieces.” But that was not the end of punishment regicide suffered that day, one that he might’ve deserved, an eye for an eye after all: “A great numbers of people carried parts of Ravaillac’s body home with them in their handkerchiefs. There was one bookbinder,” the author tells us, “a seemingly stable man with a large beard, who was so full of hate for Ravaillac that he brought a few pieces of flesh home and, in his great spite and loathing, fried them up and ate them with his scrambled eggs—that is what my own eyes and the eyes of His Majesty Branicki saw. He even dared to invite us to this banquet of his, to help him eat, in response to which we both spat at him and went away. I understand that the man went mad like a dog from his own venom running through his veins. Other remains of Ravaillac’s body were thrown into a fire that was prepared beforehand, and his ashes were scattered by the wind.”
And if that was not enough, numerous punishments were administered to the Ravaillac family and house, so that the infamy would befall everyone and everything that had anything to do with t
he king’s death. But instead of a hole burned in the ground by Ravaillac’s stake, there is an image burned out in memory, a description of the regicide and his execution; maybe deserved, but cruel and, because of the bookbinder’s scrambled eggs, sentenced to an eternal existence.
Moorings
The train was leaving the station in Czerniowce. I stood on the platform; I hadn’t managed to buy a ticket. That always happens at one point during travel—a mechanism grinds to a halt and there’s no longer any movement. A hotel was out of the question. A man smelling of beer approached me, “What’s up? You’re not going?” he asked. “Then come with me, I live right here, right outside the city, there, not far.” It was sixty kilometers. First we hitchhiked, and then we took a bus; it had started to grow dusky by the time we got there. He borrowed a few hryviens from me and sent a young boy to the store.
The house was well proportioned, and pretty; they planted cabbage and had some plum trees. In the corner of their property was a lone pig in its pen, and next to it an outhouse. “If you need to go, go there,” he said. His wife came out, “You’re drunk again,” she stated sadly, “and who’s that?” she asked pointing her chin at me. “Me,” I started to explain, “I’m from Poland,” and she immediately warmed up to me because she used to work in Poland, of course, and, as would soon become clear, also in Germany, Italy, Portugal, and soon she would go to Greece. But she’d have to come back because this one here would squander everything on drinking. She belonged to the legion of people always on the road, transients, seasonal workers for whom the season never ends; mainly Ukrainian women, and then Moldovan and Albanian women who, just like the Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Turks, and Poles decades earlier, roamed Europe and its outskirts, searching for decently paid but illegal work. She told the story of her life as Odysseus. Her husband sat next to her, sadly shaking his head, acknowledging her every word, all of her accusations. “I keep running myself into the ground,” she said, “with no life of my own, and he keeps guzzling. All he can think about is drinking.” And then he, without a hint of aggression, somewhat calmly, said simply: “Cut the crap, go, make something to eat.” She went to the kitchen as if he had struck her. We ate whatever she brought, pumpernickel bread with cumin, pickles, speck made from the last pig they slaughtered, a little bit of pressed curd-cheese. We ate and drank, immersed in the yellow glow of a light bulb; no one uses light bulbs that weak anymore. We drank vodka, which the boy had just brought back from the store; we smoked on the bench outside the house and didn’t talk too much because there was nothing really to talk about; everyone was tired. “And,” he said finally, “she just keeps talking like that.” “It’s not my fault there’s no money in it, I’m just a teacher, a school principal, here, in the village. School starts soon.” “I’m a school principal,” his aggravation increased. “School starts tomorrow, you hear me?” “I hear you,” she answered, “go to sleep.”
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