The Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was awarded in 1953 to Hans Adolf Krebs, a German with British citizenship, and to Fritz Albert Lipmann, a German-born American, for their metabolic studies. Krebs was recognized for his discovery of the citric acid cycle (the Krebs cycle), which describes the oxydization of pyruvic acid into carbon dioxide and water, but he had also studied other metabolic processes, particularly those relating to energy (a major issue of that time), as well as the ornithine cycle in the liver’s biosynthesis of urea, and the glyoxylate cycle in the metabolism of lipids. Lipmann, for his part, was rewarded for his discovery of the coenzyme A and its importance in the intermediary metabolism. He concentrated mainly on classifying the phosphates which produce energy, but his research also led him to study the thyroid gland, fibroblasts and the Pasteur effect, glycolysis in the metabolisms of embryonic cells, and the mechanism of synthesis of peptides and proteins. In 1952, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology had been awarded to Selman Abraham Waksman, a Russian-born American, for his work on antibiotics effective in the treatment of tuberculosis. His other research dealt principally with the microbiology of soils and the sea. In 1954, the Americans John Franklin Enders, Frederick Chapman Robbins, and Thomas Huckle Weller shared the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for having discovered that the poliomyelitis virus could be cultivated in various types of tissues. Their work led to the perfection of a vaccine against the deadly tuberculosis bacterium.
Even though, in the beginning, Alfred Nobel intended his prizes to go to the most extraordinary achievements of the year, those that were eventually responsible for awarding them realized that a degree of hindsight was required in order to judge the true scope of a work or discovery. This difficulty was particularly acute in the scientific fields, where one had to verify a new theory’s application. Thus, for example, the scientists who won the Nobel Prizes in 1953 were recognized for research the results of which had been published several years earlier. Similarly, two Brits and one American who published the results of their work on heredity in 1953 were only awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in 1962. Francis Harry Compton Crick, Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins, and James Dewey Watson had discovered the double-helix structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule in chromosomes (DNA) and its duplication process during mitosis. This discovery opened the way to understanding the crucial role of DNA as a transmitter of information in living matter. They identified the two essential functions of DNA: transmitting the parent cells’ code to the descendants while, at the same time, expressing this code through the organization of protein synthesis.
***
A man with no small regard for literature, the Moncton pediatrician who was treating Baby M. to the best of his ability finally succeeded in snatching her from the jaws of death. He had taken his inspiration from, among other things, a recently published American book on celiac disease. The book contained photographs of babies in the critical stages of the illness (shrivelled buttocks and thighs, morose, glassy eyes), along with photos of these same children as adults. The adults appeared relatively normal, if slightly overweight. The doctor showed these pictures to Baby M.’s mother, who derived some hope from them. This same book also provided information suggesting that Baby M.’s recovery was highly probable, the illness having been diagnosed in time. In spite of all this, Baby M. was not reacting to treatment as well as had been hoped. She was taking longer than expected to gain strength and to control her incontinence. Finally, after a dozen days of closely monitored care, and not knowing what else to do, the doctor visited Baby M.’s parents to inform them of the situation. He explained that it was a question of days. If Baby M. did not begin to react positively to the treatment, they should expect the worst. The committed scriptor felt his throat go dry and saw his wife — queen and martyr — turn pale.
In the end, Baby M. survived celiac disease. The Moncton pediatrician’s foresight certainly had a great deal to do with it, but it may well be that his calmness in the face of the possible ravages of Writing Degree Zero played an even greater part. This imperturbability alone ought to have earned him the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology. Of course, the doctor expected no such reward; he did not even imagine the case would have some future literary return. He was too busy saving the primary life to think of the other, the one that looks back on itself in order to fling itself that much farther ahead. The scientific and medical journals were piled up on his desk, burying the double-helix structure of DNA beneath the mess. How could he imagine that Baby M. would live doubly or that, through her, he would do likewise? Like Alfred Nobel through his prizes. Like Nurse Vautour through the handsome Gregory Peck. Like Baby M.’s mother through her dumbfounded children staring at the tongues of clothing emerging from the rollers of her new washing-machine. Like Baby M.’s father before the daily miracle of l’Évangéline newspaper. Like Brigitte transfixed by the power of her backhand. Like Élizabeth floating in the amniotic fluid of love. Like Claude in the never-ending risk of the body.
6
Idle Talk and Composition II
An inescapable internal rectitude — Bishop of Besancon in spite of himself — Monctonian parallel between the coronation of Elizabeth II and the sinking of the Titanic — Willie Lamothe and his Musical Rodeo in Dieppe — Sunrise over Acadia — A movie is blacklisted — Christine Jorgensen’s transformation — Where body and soul are one — The concept of professional virginity and Marian coincidences in Acadia — Once more the Te Deum — Nurse Vautour and the last train of the season to Pointe-du-Chêne
C L A U D E . In 1953, Claude was three years old. He lived in France and had knowledge of neither Acadia nor Montréal. He had no doubt heard of the Jews. He had perhaps heard of Writing Degree Zero. His father, an eminent psychiatrist, may have rubbed shoulders with Roland Barthes himself. Not being the son of a geographer, at the age of three, Claude knew nothing of the sound barrier and the two Jacquelines, but he did, in a sense, fall within Françoise Dolto’s field of observation.
Claude. The androgynous nature of this name already evokes a certain resonance. And if Claude seemed to have slipped away after awakening feelings of love in Elizabeth, he did not do so limping (the Latin Claudus meaning “one who limps,” from which is derived the French claudiquer, that is “to limp”). On the contrary, he distanced himself in response to a kind of internal rectitude. In this, he behaved not unlike his patron saint, Saint Claude, a solitary priest of the seventh century who had been unwillingly appointed Bishop of Besancon. After a while, no longer able to bear the responsibilities to which he had been assigned, the bishop finally fled, only, alas, to be recaptured and forced back to his post. Five years later, once again exasperated by the “constraints of his vocation,” the future Saint Claude resigned and went off to live in a monastery in Jura. Unfortunately for him, he was once again chosen to be a leader of men, this time in the role of Father Abbot. The independent fire and free spirit of Saint Claude have lost nothing of their ardour in the twentieth-century Claude, whom we now find once again sitting in a bar.
In Real Life, Claude met a woman in a Berlin bar who inspired him to explore the art of massage more deeply. The woman said absolutely nothing about the subject, but their meeting profoundly convinced Claude that it ought to be possible to gain access to the soul through touching the body. For a long time nothing had seemed more important to Claude than increasing his understanding — while raising others’ awareness — of the particular workings of memory and desire, the action of the two being intermingled rather than distinct. He had arrived at the conclusion that this, and nothing else, was what life was about, and that memory and desire are nothing without each other, just as the body is nothing without the soul and vice versa. Claude had personally undertaken this research, if we may be permitted to use the term, quite naturally, outside of any context. It had become the thread of his existence, a thread which, sooner or later, always seemed to lead him back to a bar. This might
take a few days, or several weeks, or months. There was no rule. Only something like a thirst lurking on the edges of time.
***
For Acadians in the Moncton area, 1953 could be divided into two periods of almost equal duration. International events dominated the first half of the year, up until the coronation of Elizabeth II, whereas local accomplishments occupied centre stage during the second half of the year, The demolition of the Imperial theatre on Main Street, only days after the coronation, might serve as a demarcation between the two periods. It must be said that, in Moncton, the celebrations to mark Elizabeth II’s accession to the head of the Empire revealed a rather troubling ambiguity. Alhough, at times, festivities were quite inoffensive — afternoon teas, for example — they also took on a rather funereal bent with the showing, at the Capitol, of the movie The Titanic. As an added value, the film about the sinister sinking was screened precisely at midnight — that is, at the first hour of coronation day.
That summer something of a circus atmosphere prevailed. On the one hand, la Société l’Assomption boasted record insurance sales, while, on the other, preparations were under way in Dieppe to host Willie Lamothe and his Musical Rodeo. He was soon followed by John Diefenbaker, Lester B. Pearson, and the King Bros, and Cristiani Circus. In August, on the show Singing Stars of Tomorrow, young opera singers Dolores Nowlan and Marie-Germaine LeBlanc proved themselves worthy descendants of the great Acadian singer Anna Malenfant, whose voice, it was said, rivalled only a winter sunset or Gabrielle Roy’s La Petite poule d’eau. During the summer, it was also announced that Canadian slums were of higher quality than those in the United States, and that Marie, “the prettiest and ‘youngest’ ” of the Dionne quintuplets, would become a contemplative nun. These months of effervescence turned out to be a fine prelude to the fall, which offered Acadians reason to rejoice in the prospects of their modest nation’s ambitions.
The upsurge operated both on the material and on the ideological planes, with concrete achievements and soaring spirits having an equal impact. It was as though the consolidation of the Empire around a new queen had also inspired Acadians to unite around their own noble institutions. In this respect, September made a powerful impact. Such an impact, in fact, that it actually struck a day early, on Monday, August 31, 1953, with the consecration of His Excellency Monsignor Albert Leménager, first bishop of the diocese of Yarmouth. This Acadian version of Elizabeth II’s coronation reverberated loudly throughout Acadia. Prepared, as always, to defend l’Évangéline’s role as “the Acadian people’s national newspaper,” Baby M.’s father spared no effort in covering the magnificent gathering, which took place nearly two hundred years after the Deportation. Baby M., who was approaching her seventh month of gestation, was not unmoved by the reddish glow that resembled a rising sun over Acadia. But there was little room to rejoice in the increasingly restricted space of her mother’s womb.
***
So powerful was September’s impact that it struck a second time at the end of August, when Moncton’s Capitol theatre screened the sacrilegious movie of the year, Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue. The film had caused controversy both in the United States and Canada. At the time of its release, the archbishop of Washington had proclaimed, in no uncertain terms, that “from time to time, Catholics are faced with a challenge, and this film is one such challenge. It is up to us to have sufficient conviction to abstain, thereby demonstrating that, for a great many of us, the moon is blue because blue is the colour of the Holy Virgin, to whom these lines from the Song of Songs apply: ‘beautiful as the moon, brilliant as the stars, terrible as an army deployed for battle.’ ” According to the major Catholic journal the Sign, the movie, which was intended to be funny, contained so much coarse language that it was disgusting, “burying any beauty in an avalanche of double entendres, without regard for common Christian morality.” In New Brunswick, where only a fraction of American films worthy of note were ever shown, the movie was screened thanks to a court of law, which annulled the provincial censor’s interdiction.
It is worth noting that the director who dared to make The Moon Is Blue had actually earned doctorates in law and philosophy. Son of a Viennese lawyer of some notoriety, Otto Preminger had taken an early interest in the stage, and worked as an assistant to famed theatre director Max Reinhardt even before completing his studies. Having earned some success as a theatre director himself, Preminger made his first movie in 1931, at the age of twenty-five. He subsequently went to work on Broadway, where one of Hollywood’s big studios snapped him up. He worked in both the theatre and film for a while, before dedicating himself exclusively to the cinema. Part of a trend with Lubitsch and Mankiewicz, Preminger-the-filmmaker achieved a kind of high point with Angel Face (1952), his fourteenth movie since his arrival in America. The change of tone which was to follow was not unrelated to the fact that Preminger had become an independent producer, entirely free of the big film studios. In bringing to the screen The Moon Is Blue, a play which had won rave reviews on Broadway, he was exploiting this freedom in order to “defy rigid American censorship.” The words “professional virgin,” “seduction,” and “mistress,” which were spoken several times during the movie, had never been heard before in the cinema.
The Catholic Centre for Cinema, which rated all films available for screening in France, recognized the comic side of The Moon Is Blue. It noted that Preminger’s film was “punctuated with humour and enhanced by sparkling dialogue.” However, the Centre regretfully added, the plot line “might have avoided dire consequences if, under the guise of comedy, true values and moral principles had not been continually ridiculed.” The film was given a 4B rating, which meant people were advised against seeing it, because it could only “harm the majority of adults and damage the spiritual and moral health of society.” The cinematic rating system to which l’Évangéline adhered expressed the same reservations, but, since the range of classification was less subtle, The Moon Is Blue simply fell into the category of totally proscribed movies. Of all the movies that played in Moncton in 1953, it was the only one to be so classified. Another such rare case arose the following year, in March, as Baby M., who was eighteen weeks old, was busy preparing her celiac crisis. The movie Martin Luther would be judged “harmful and positively bad . . . a moral and social danger.”
***
The blacklisting of the film The Moon Is Blue certainly caused some agitation, but not as much as the incredible transformation of Christine Jorgensen. The secrecy surrounding this amazing affair was first broached at the end of 1952 by a journalist from the Daily News, a New York tabloid, but the whole truth only emerged several months later, in April 1953, at the end of the second month of Baby M.’s gestation. The baby’s sex had already been determined by then, but no one could as yet be certain that the glands and sexual organs of the fetus would develop into those of a girl or boy. This lack of transparency was related, as a matter of fact, to the problem of the young George Jorgensen, who turned to Danish science in order to transform his appearance so that it might better reflect his deeper sexual identity. The treatment would require several stages, but already in June 1952, the twenty-six-year-old ex-GI had become a ravishing Christine, living a normal life in the Danish capital and pursuing a career as a photographer. From her/his home in Copenhagen, George/Christine had written his parents to tell them he was undergoing treatment in order to correct a physiological problem that had distorted his true sexual identity. The goal, he explained, was to allow his hidden feminine nature to blossom fully.
The operation may have had little impact on Danish society (several Danish journalists were aware of the affair but agreed not to speak of it), but it electrified America. In a single week, the three main American news agencies regurgitated in excess of fifty thousand words on the topic. Journalists descended on Copenhagen, attempting by various means to get inside the hospital room where Christine was recovering from one of the numerous operations necessary
to her transformation. Either in person or by transatlantic telephone, journalists posed every imaginable question. They even wanted to know whether Christine wore pyjamas or a nightgown, if her interests were masculine or feminine . . . in other words, whether she enjoyed baseball or knitting. Time and Newsweek did their best to explain the affair. They published details on the transformation process (five major surgeries and one minor, and more than two thousand hormone injections), described in great detail the frenzy of the journalists covering the story, and reported that medical specialists throughout the world felt the media tumult over the sexual transformation was laughable. These specialists claimed that transsexualization was far from a rare operation, and even quite common in several hospitals in the United States. Time went so far as to explore the nomenclature of the procedure, attempting to define for the public at large the terms hermaphroditism and pseudohermaphroditism, both perfectly respectable anomalies compared with homosexuality, which, for its part, was in no way congenital, in spite of some homosexuals’ claims to the contrary. The article went on to explain that, among other things, homosexuals refused psychiatric treatments intended to offer them a chance at a normal life. Time also managed to establish that some homosexuals had well and truly attempted to convince American surgeons to transform them into pseudowomen, but that the majority of these doctors refused any involvement in what was a crime against nature as well as the laws of forty-eight states.
1953 Page 9