by Peter Ford
The removal of Joseph to his new quarters was easily accomplished, but convincing him that the rooms were truly his for as long as he needed them turned out to be more difficult. It was all so much more than he had or could have hoped for. At a stroke he was provided with the sanctuary he had sought ever since the first time he ran away from home. The small basement rooms brought him a degree of privacy beyond his dreams. Their very remoteness from the general life of the hospital gave him security.
He surveyed them with an air of wonder, but his good fortune was too bountiful for him to be able to grasp all at once. He could only accept it with bewildered surprise and a barely comprehending gratitude. Meanwhile, with Joseph finally settled in quarters of his own, Treves in no way relinquished his care of his patient. He made a point of visiting him each day, and instructed his house surgeons to follow his example.
The position of house surgeon was a six-monthly appointment, and the honour of acting in this capacity was much sought after by newly qualified doctors, despite the fact that it was an unpaid labour, involving many long hours of work in the general wards, receiving room and operating theatre. Among these many chores, the visit to Joseph was not always regarded as the most welcome of routine tasks.
One of the first of the young doctors to find himself undertaking the duty was Wilfred Grenfell, a student of Treves who eventually achieved fame as Sir Wilfred Grenfell of Newfoundland, where he worked as a doctor attached to the Christian missions among the great fishing fleets of those days. In his autobiography, A Labrador Doctor, he wrote of the period when the Elephant Man came under his care, recording how Joseph was exceedingly sensitive about his appearance, yet pathetically proud of his normal left arm. He felt that in spite of everything, Joseph managed to keep up a cheerful disposition, and described how he would speak freely as he speculated on how he would look preserved in ‘a huge bottle of alcohol – an end to which in his imagination he was fated to come’.
Grenfell attempted to measure the Elephant Man’s hat, but found that his arms could not reach about its circumference. He also recorded how, in due course, the accommodation in Bedstead Square came to be called ‘the Elephant House’. ‘Only at night could the man venture out of doors, and it was no unusual thing in the dusk of nightfall to meet him walking up and down in the little courtyard.’
Dr Tuckett, who was responsible for Treves’s initial visit to the Elephant Man, similarly remembered from his tour of duty the intense pride that Merrick took in his good arm. He too spoke of his love of beauty, his great gentleness of character and the fascination fine clothes held for him. He thought also that he would probably have been quite a good-looking young man if he had not suffered from such a frightful disability.
Someone who found that visiting the Elephant Man had more to it of duty than pleasure was Dr D. G. Halsted, who held the appointment in 1887 and whose own book of memoirs, A Doctor in the Nineties, was published as late as 1959. He seems to have found that Joseph had a consistently dispiriting effect on his own state of mind. In the patient’s features he could make out nothing of the suggested resemblance to an elephant; rather he felt that the deformed face was more like that of a tapir, ‘but I suppose a “Tapir Man” would not have been such a powerful attraction as a sideshow’. He could never bring himself to see Joseph as anything but pathetic, yet he would try to cheer him up if he found him miserable and depressed. He confessed that he always felt happier when, duty done, he could slip away to other responsibilities.
While Treves continued to pay at least one visit a day to the basement rooms, it also became his habit to spend a couple of hours in Joseph’s company each Sunday morning. He deliberately set out to study and cultivate an understanding of his patient, and grew fluent in interpreting the distorted speech from Joseph’s lips. It was therefore inevitable that he should become the person most closely acquainted with the Elephant Man. On Joseph’s side, the pleasures of educated conversation were a new experience that he seized on eagerly. It was as though there existed in him a passion for talking that had lain dormant for lack of comprehending company. Now his Sunday mornings would pass in a pleasant haze of chatter with Treves.
At the time when he had carried out his first clinical examination two years earlier, Treves’s assumption was that Merrick was more or less imbecilic. It was an impression reinforced by the trouble Joseph had in giving outward sign to inner feelings. His facial deformities prevented him from forming any expression, either of pleasure or grief, and the movements of his limbs were so clumsy that any gesture had lost all spontaneity by the time it reached completion. Only by a use of words was he able to convey his thoughts, and since his speech was as distorted as his mouth, his genuine intelligence and awareness could tend to go unrecognized.
In the early days of their conversations, Treves tried to manoeuvre Joseph into talking about his past, but here he encountered many gaps and odd reticences. (‘It was a nightmare, the shudder of which was still upon him.’) There were undoubtedly areas of trauma in Joseph’s remembrance of his early life, and walls of silence that Treves never succeeded in breaching, despite their special relationship. While Joseph was willing to acknowledge he came from Leicester, he would never talk of his childhood there. He gave Treves the impression that he knew nothing whatsoever of his father; never did he mention his crippled sister, Marion Eliza, nor his dead little brother, William Arthur. Of his mother he did speak a little, but his description of her was so surrounded by a romantic and idealized glow that Treves firmly believed it to be only an elaboration of Joseph’s deeply wounded imagination. Treves’s insight was probably correct in so far as Joseph had eliminated from his memory the fact of her, too, being a cripple.
Joseph would talk of his mother as beautiful, and his most precious possession remained the small painted portrait of her that he carried everywhere and had managed to preserve through many vicissitudes. When Carr Gomm was first shown the picture, he sensed how Joseph displayed it with pride. It was as though the picture served as a constant reassurance that while Joseph was himself so hideously disfigured, at least he could preserve a myth of coming from undisfigured stock.
The perplexity Joseph felt in the matter of his own distorted body was once expressed to Treves in a remark he made about how odd it was that he should be so deformed when his mother had been so beautiful. He could never speak of her without his emotions welling over, and he never told Treves she was dead. It was this that led the surgeon privately to conclude that Joseph’s mother abandoned him when he was still an infant. In fact all Joseph’s memories of Mary Jane Merrick were those of a mother who had shown her son a constant gentleness and unfailing love.
If he could not be persuaded to talk of his family, neither would he discuss his experiences as an exhibit in the freakshows. He did, however, constantly perplex Treves by refusing to disparage the showmen who had managed him, stressing only the gratitude he felt towards them. By contrast, his memories of the workhouse invariably caused an outburst of bitter indignation. It was clear that returning to such an institution was intolerable for him to contemplate. Yet in all other things he gave the impression of looking back on his life without rancour and of accepting his misfortunes with quiet resignation. If there was bitterness at the indignities to which fate had submitted his physical body, he gave no sign.
Treves, as he listened, found himself increasingly fascinated by the world Joseph seemed to inhabit. The ideas and opinions were often apparently curiously coloured by their owner’s isolation. It was as though his disorder had forced him to become a bystander in the business of living, starving him of social relationships and of the most basic human experiences. All things intrigued him: descriptions of meetings, places, people, occasions; there was nothing that failed to arouse in him a wistful curiosity.
As the curtains screening Joseph’s personality were slowly drawn aside, Treves discovered how many of his impressions of the world came not from first-hand knowledge but rather from books. He was an
avid reader, having learnt to read as a child, and books had been a constant source of solace in his loneliness. His knowledge of literature was both eccentric and diverse, for his selection of reading matter had been determined more by what chance brought to hand than by consciously exploring or developing reading tastes. He had simply devoured anything that presented itself: the Bible and the Prayer Book several times, so that he knew both intimately. He had an extensive acquaintance with newspapers and magazines of all kinds, even a patchy knowledge of the works of more serious novelists, including Jane Austen. He had struggled with a string of lesson books and enjoyed a host of stories. In fact he had read and considered any scrap of writing that fell into his hands.
Whenever he discussed his reading, the void his books had filled and the reality they took on in his mind soon became apparent. He was apt to speak of novels as if they were factual accounts not fictional narratives. He described plots as though they were events that had happened recently, recounted conversations in animated detail and spoke of characters as if they possessed lives of their own, discussing their plights and predicaments with sincere concern. Through taking his books into his head, he thus led a kind of surrogate life to parallel his own realities and compensate to some extent for the denial to him of experiences in the real world.
At such moments, watching his excitement and involvement, Frederick Treves realized that Merrick possessed unguessed-at emotional depths; that beneath the grave and rather hesitant courtesy lay a turmoil of emotions. Joseph could be moved to excitement and agitation, even compassion and grief, as easily as a child, but in his case the stirring up of feelings was powerful, profound and lasting. The discovery of such fundamental and easily provoked emotions in his patient was something that both startled and disturbed Treves.
From his reading Joseph therefore derived most of his impressions of human nature, having had few opportunities to study people closely. He had met men from many walks of life and in wide varieties of circumstance: idle sightseers, doctors, music-hall entrepreneurs, Poor Law officials, showmen, policemen, workhouse keepers, surgeons. From them he had received wide varieties of treatment and reaction, unkind, kind and professional. His ideal of manhood meanwhile remained a strangely compounded creature. It was derived in part from novels with descriptions of the manly virtues of heroes drawn, it seemed, almost exclusively from the aristocracy and living lives of idle luxury; in part from the advertisement columns of the newspapers, with their emphases on such necessary accessories to the outward show of a gentleman as travelling bags, patent-leather shoes or dressing cases. It was a vision of the romantic hero, though as the rather demanding ideal of a gentleman it bore little resemblance to men he had actually met.
His image of the opposite sex was even more difficult, and several degrees more intense. But his attitude to women might be defined in the most simple terms: he felt an admiration bordering on idolatry. Perhaps with somewhat ominous undertones, he confided to Treves that his favourite reading consisted of stories dealing with love and romance.
At the age of seventeen, Joseph had been admitted to the segregated wards of the workhouse; at twenty-one, he emerged into the carefully screened-off world of the showman’s booth; for the past seven years, the pattern of his life had been practically monastic. Women were an enigma, a totally unknown quantity, and his vision of womanhood was largely an amalgamation made up from his books, his imagination and the transcending memory of his mother.
Women were thus creatures to be set apart, beings of a gentler and purer spirit. He saw each one as the heroine of some untold story, a person to be regarded with such reverence and awe that she must be unapproachable, let alone obtainable. Women were and should be as they existed in the pages of romantic chivalry: delicate, more finely moulded creatures than men, needing to be protected, cherished but above all worshipped.
It was the image to which he clung throughout his life, even though it was cruelly at odds with his experience. His actual encounters with women had been associated with pain and distress. Invariably in any woman whom he met there would be immediate and obvious signs of shock and revulsion. In some cases the reaction was so extreme that they screamed and ran away, even fainted on the spot. Only from the matron of the London Hospital, Miss Eva Lückes, and her nursing staff did he receive unflinching courtesy and consideration, but even here there was a sense of a certain instinctive constraint. They were, he recognized, but nurses carrying out a necessary duty in a professional way.
While Joseph now had rooms of his own, the burden of nursing him remained no light matter; and in spite of the care lavished on him, his day-to-day life was far from easy. His condition continued to grow more troublesome; his hip was painful, his movements slow and stubborn. The weight of his enlarged limbs tired him quickly and he found it impossible to perform many small tasks on his own account. Even in bed it was difficult for him to rest since he found it impossible to lie flat. Should he do so, the weight of the fleshy and bony growths on his skull made it unmanageable and he was overcome by a sensation of the head rolling backwards, stretching and constricting the neck muscles. To sleep, he found it essential to continue to crouch upright on the bed in a foetal parody, his legs drawn up, his arms clasped about them and his heavy head resting on his knees.
There were occasions when Treves found himself peering in on something of the boredom and loneliness to which Joseph was essentially condemned all his life. At certain periods Joseph became hopelessly despondent. For hours at a time, when he thought himself unobserved, he might sit staring before him, beating slowly and rhythmically on his pillow or the arm of his chair with his deformed right arm. It seemed to Treves that Joseph was keeping time to a tune heard only in his mind – one which he was unable to voice, for he could never attempt to whistle or even sing. The surgeon saw the habit as an expression of inward cheerfulness, but a trained observer today would rather interpret it as a classic depressive symptom.
Once, during such a period of depression, Joseph startled Treves by returning to the subject of his future care. It was clear that he had still not grasped that the new quarters were his to occupy for life. Some of the suggestions members of the public had made when Carr Gomm launched the appeal found an echo in his own thoughts, for he inquired about the time when he would have to move on, suggesting that he might perhaps find a refuge in some out-of-the-way spot, such as a lighthouse or an asylum for the blind. It was a distressing task trying to convince this small and infinitely vulnerable man that he had no need to journey further.
But Treves was also coming to realize that Joseph’s sanctuary in the basement rooms was in danger of turning into a prison. Joseph’s sense of isolation was increasing and Treves felt certain that much of his patient’s distress sprang from the loneliness life had forced on him. To Treves it seemed that these sufferings came at least in part from having been rejected by so many fellow human beings. More than anything else, he felt it necessary to convince Joseph that he could be accepted on equal terms as a normal person. One possible solution might be to introduce him to people who would disregard his hideous appearance and communicate with him with courtesy and consideration. For this particular task, who more suitable than a well-bred lady of the British upper middle class, versed in composure and social virtue? Yet the failure of such an experiment might well turn into irreparable disaster. Treves cast about in his mind for such a person who might be persuaded to meet Merrick and who could be relied upon to be strong-minded enough to keep her nerve whatever her inner feelings.
At last, Treves said, he asked a friend, ‘a young and pretty widow, if she thought she could enter Merrick’s room with a smile, wish him good morning and shake him by the hand’. It was essential that she should betray no trace of revulsion or embarrassment. The young widow whom Treves approached was Mrs Leila Maturin, who had lost her husband, Dr Leslie Maturin, in 1883 within only two months of their marriage. She listened to Treves’s proposal and his description of the Elephant Man. Then,
without hesitation, she accepted the role in which he cast her: an introduction of beauty to the beast, though with strict limits on the hopes of a transformation.
Treves accompanied Leila Maturin as she was taken to the little basement room to meet Joseph. She entered with an easy grace, smiling as she approached, reaching out and taking his hand as Treves presented him.
It was all too much. Speech was beyond him. Slowly he released her hand and slowly he bent his great head forward to his knees as he broke into heart-rending sobs and wept uncontrollably. The meeting ended as quickly as it had begun.
Afterwards Joseph confided to a rather shaken Treves that it was the first time any strange woman had smiled at him, let alone taken his hand in greeting. The event itself turned out to be a landmark, ushering in a wholly new phase in the life of the Elephant Man. Treves pinpointed it as the moment when a renewal of self-confidence began for Joseph Merrick. The old hurts and haunting fears of spying eyes and whispered wonderings slowly began to heal and dissolve. The impulse to hide himself from the world was transformed into a renewed curiosity and a wish to reach out to grasp some of the small everyday experiences that were commonplace in the lives of ordinary people but hitherto as beyond Joseph’s reach as if they had something to do with life on the moon.
After this time Treves gained the impression that Joseph fell in love with every attractive woman he met – though ‘in a humble and devotional way’, he was careful to qualify. Treves’s thoroughness in ensuring that no mirror came his way in which he might catch a chance glimpse of himself meanwhile led Joseph to forget the full horror of his appearance. ‘He was amorous,’ said Treves. ‘He would like to have been a lover, to have walked with the beloved object in the languorous shades of some beautiful garden and to have poured into her ear all the glowing utterances that he had rehearsed in his heart.’ Treves sensed that behind Merrick’s speculative musings over finding a refuge in an asylum for the blind was the idea that he might raise a spark of affection in the heart of some blind girl who could not see the disfigurement of his flesh.