Genoa (26 page)

the cells reverting to simplest, undifferentiated forms, breaking down so rapidly as to lose all trace of roots, of origin . . .

SEVEN

I lost track of Carl once again. Letters to both the shop and the room were returned by the post office.

When word came, after many weeks, it was not from Carl, but from doctors at the mental hospital, where he had again been committed. He had finally told them about me, had given them my address, and they wanted me to come: he was violent, and they thought I might help . . .

I boarded the train after midnight, as before. I was no longer interested in motion, in adventure . . . the journey was repetition, return over old ground . . . the fact of direction, of heading west, was not exciting: I was moving from one city to another, a simple act of travel, without meaning . . .

I thought of Carl, as my older brother—and I thought of Herman’s older brother, Gansevoort, who failed in business, then in politics, and, heavily in debt, died, age 30, of “nervous derangement . . .”

          
Herman, writing to Gansevoort—unaware that the latter had already died: “Remember that composure of mind is every thing.”

          
and later, writing of another: “This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him,—which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains.”

Tearing apart the paper cup from which I had finished my coffee, I scribbled a few lines on it:

          
In Memoriam: Gansevoort Melville

                      
who fails in business

                                        
goes to politics;

                      
who fails in politics

                                        
goes to heaven.

                                                
(who fails in all

                                                        
goes to whale . . .

          
and I thought of the contemporary review of
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“. . . so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature . . .”

Arrived in St. Louis, I went straight to the hospital, and the doctor in charge of Carl admitted me to his office.

I asked about Carl. He said that he was periodically violent, and for this reason was kept in restraint. He was at present in isolation, in a straight jacket. I stood up, paced nervously across the floor—exploiting in my own body the motion denied to Carl. I suggested that whatever else was the matter with him, whatever therapy they might be planning for him, it should be oriented in his having the simplest of personal freedom—that what he needed, first and foremost, was
space .
. .

The doctor looked at me candidly for a moment, and then begged me to follow him—we went out of the office, down a corridor, by elevator to another floor, around several corners, and into a room where masons and carpenters were at work. Motioning the workers aside, he showed me where Carl had terrorized a group of inmates: with nothing but his bare hands, he had ripped the paneling from a window frame, removed the window, and, unable to bend the iron bars, had dug with his finger ends into the stonework and masonry itself . . .

                                        
(
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

I asked to see Carl, and the doctor readily assented. We passed through various other parts of the hospital, catching glimpses of patients, in private and public rooms, in varying states . . .

          
Melville: “I have been in mad-houses full of tragic mopers, and seen there the end of suspicion: the cynic, in the moody madness mustering in the corner; for years a barren fixture there; head lopped over, gnawing his own lip, vulture to himself; while, by fits and starts, from the corner opposite came the grimace of the idiot at him.”

We found Carl standing, spread-legged, defiant, in the middle of his barren room. The jacket made him appear armless. He began at once to speak, to declaim:

          
“But this notion, that science can play farmer to the flesh, making there what living soil it pleases . . .”

          
“Try to rid my mind of it as I may, yet still these chemical practitioners with their tinctures, and fumes, and braziers, and occult incantations, seem to me like Pharaoh’s vain sorcerers, trying to beat down the will of heaven.”

The words were familiar, though I wasn’t sure of the source . . .

          
“Please,” I said, turning to the doctor, “take off the jacket . . .”

He hesitated a moment, and then complied.

Carl, standing rigid while the doctor untied the tapes, declaimed again.

          
“Begone! You are all alike. The name of doctor, the dream of helper, condemns you. For years I have been but a gallipot for your experimentisers to rinse your experiments into, and now in this livid skin, partake of the nature of my contents.

          
Begone! I hate ye.”

He held his arms to his body for some time after they were free. Slowly then, he unlimbered, heaving his shoulders . . .

The doctor warned that he would be outside if he were needed—and he left us alone. Carl turned to me—and I recalled what it was he was quoting: T
HE
C
ONFIDENCE
-M
AN
. . .

          
“A sick philosopher,” he continued ominously, “is incurable.”

His body shifted, the defiance went out of it, and a warmth came in, clumsy and affectionate. Raising an arm, he clasped my shoulder, drew me toward him.

          
“Mike, boy,” he said—this was the first indication that he recognized me—“Mike, boy, there’s something I want to tell you . . .”

Bowing his head, he screwed his brow, punched it with thumb and forefinger. He looked up suddenly, declaimed again, vaguely, in fright rather than defiance:

“He tried to think—to recollect,

But the blur is on his brain.”

I began to wonder when in his career he had read so much Melville—read him so well that he had memorized whole passages. Or perhaps he had never actually read him . . . maybe Melville, as history, had impressed himself into the fiber and cells of which Carl was made, had become part of his makeup . . .

He was sad now, unable to remember what he wanted to tell me, still clutching my shoulder.

          
“The Indians. . .” he began—this time he was not quoting—and he breathed hard, letting the sentence hang for some moments . . .

          
“The Indians shrank the heads of their enemies. . .”—again he breathed hard—“. . . and we . . .”

          
“we shrink the hearts of our friends.” He gripped my shoulder, released it, and turned away . . .

Again, his mood changed, became matter-of-fact. He went to the bed, lifted the mattress, took out some papers—scribblings, drawings of one sort or another. We sat down together, and he passed tbem to me, one at a time.

There was a flower picture, rich and luxuriant, the paper covered all over with blossoms. Showing it to me, he waved his hand in free, abstract motions, to suggest the manner of drawing it. There was a title in the corner: “Herbage, not verbiage.”

The next drawing was a vague impression, in good anatomy, of a woman’s womb, drawn as a transparent membrane: inside it, occupying the entire space, was the head of an aged man, with a straight, gray beard . . .

He shoved another paper into my lap, became suddenly angry. It was a tortured, twisted figure, nailed to a cross.

          
thrusting his finger at the face, shouting: “There’s the first sonofabitch! The first coward!” and then, sardonically: “the first bastard that couldn’t control his imagination . . .”

He stood up, still angry, and stalked about the room, as I read another paper:

ST. LOUIS MOTEL

1953

CARL AND BONNIE

Carl:

          
bonnie bonnie bonnie bonnie bonnie baw

          
buh buh buh

Bonnie:

          
Bog the corg

Carl:

          
Anny wen hog,

                                                        
Ug.

          
waaaaaaaa!
    
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

                
Aw, the wa!

                            
Daw, the long wa!

                                                        
Wa!

          
hih!

Bonnie:

Bonnie:

          
flamble
    
flamble

I looked up, found him angry, posed.

                                        
“Go mad I can not: I maintain

                                        
The perilous outpost of the sane.”

and he laughed, roared, at the quote from C
LAREL
—the book of chains.

                                        
(Lizzie, when Herman was writing it: “If ever this dreadful
incubus
of a
book (I
call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman’s shoulders I do hope he may be in better mental health—but at present I have reason to feel the gravest concern & anxiety about it—to put it in mild phrase . . .”

and Herman, in a footnote to a letter: “N. B.
I ain’t
crazy.”

The doctor came in, with an attendant. Carl, as one of the violent, was scheduled for hydrotherapy, which consisted of stripping the patients, herding them together at the end of a tiled room, and playing streams of water on them, at firehose pressure, in an effort to quiet them.

I protested that Carl was already quiet, that there was no need for it, but it made no difference—his name was on the list. He was cowed, his shoulders caving, as they led him away.

A news item from Honolulu—1854:

          
“Our readers will doubtless recollect the narrative published in the year 1851, respecting the whale ship ‘Ann Alexander,’ Capt. Dublois, being stove by a sperm whale in the Pacific ocean. Recently Capt. D. visited Honolulu . . . We learned from him many striking and remarkable circumstances respecting the attack . . . Without repeating the story we would state, that about five months subsequently, the same whale was taken by the ‘Rebecca Sims,’ Capt. Jernegan. Two harpoons were discovered in the whale, marked ‘Ann Alexander.’ The whale’s head was found seriously injured, and contained pieces of the ship’s timbers. He had lost his wildness and ferocity, being very much diseased . . .”