The Mad Sculptor (15 page)

Bob’s job at United Pressed Products ended in the usual way, after he beat up the factory foreman because (as Bob explained) “he wanted to boss me around and butt into my business.” He then found similar work at a place called Silvestri Art Manufacturing but lasted only three weeks before being fired for starting a fight with a coworker. By the summer of 1930, the only job he could find that related even remotely to sculpting was carving tombstones for a Jewish stonecutter. (Bob, who prided himself on his open-mindedness, believed that “the Jews have some objectionable traits but they have some good traits, too, and if I were a Jew I would hold my head up as high as anybody.”)
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Desperate for a way to put his artistic talents to better and more lucrative use, he decided that his prospects were much brighter in New York City. Telling Alice that he would write to her as soon as he was settled, he headed east by train, arriving in Manhattan in August 1930, just as the economy was slipping into chaos.

Part III

The Shadow of Madness

9

Depression

C
ONTRARY TO POPULAR MYTH
, the sidewalks around Wall Street were not littered with the bodies of suicidal stockbrokers who had flung themselves from the rooftops following the catastrophic events of late October 1929. In truth, though the market continued to fall until the second week in November, concerted efforts by the titans of finance put a halt to the slide. In the early months of 1930, the stock market turned upward again. Optimism was in the air. President Hoover pronounced the economy “fundamentally sound,” while John D. Rockefeller proclaimed that the crisis was a strictly temporary state of affairs. “In the ninety-three years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again.”

In the end, however, it was the recovery that proved fleeting. By April 1930, it had fizzled out. In June, the stock market plunged again. By the time Robert Irwin arrived in New York City on August 8, the country was headed inexorably toward a decade of hardship and suffering. Before the year was out, the unemployment rate—though still nowhere near the staggering 25 percent it would hit
at the depth of the Depression—had nearly tripled from its 1929 low of roughly 3 percent. Breadlines were growing throughout the country.
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At first, however, Bob had little trouble finding well-paying work. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had been hired as an assistant at the Ettl Studios on West 13th Street, a sculpture-casting firm that specialized in enlarging small-scale plaster models into full-size bronze statues. He managed to hold onto the job until mid-January 1931, when he was discharged after a string of fights with other employees.

That same month, he was arrested for disorderly conduct after assaulting a cabbie. As Bob later told the story:

There was a taxi driver and he was bigger than me and he was just a big pile of crap. We had an argument about the fare and he said to me, “You goddamned little pansy, I’ll smack your face if you don’t come across with the money.” So I said, “Why the hell don’t you try to?” We got out the cab and he hit me in the face and I only hit him once in the face and I was never so astonished in my life because he was so big and he just turned around and ran like holy Moses, all the time yelling, “Help!” Finally I caught him by the coat tails and he started yelling like hell. A cop came and he had me arrested.

After a night in jail, Bob was taken to Magistrate’s Court, where the charge was dismissed.
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Soon afterward, he got a job at the venerable taxidermy shop of Thomas Rowland, a world-renowned figure in his field who had mounted many of the specimens in the American Museum of Natural History. By the time Bob went to work there, the business—now run by the founder’s son, Elmer—dealt mostly in hunters’ and fishermen’s trophies, though it also did a steady business in deceased domestic pets.
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Bob remained there for eight months, stuffing everything from parrots and pug dogs to moose heads and marlins.

It was during this period, sometime in April 1931, that Bob came across a book that had a decisive—and deeply unfortunate—impact
on his life: Will Durant’s 1926 best seller
The Story of Philosophy
. A highly readable survey aimed at a lay audience, the book devotes each of its nine main chapters to one of the giants of Western philosophy beginning with Plato and ending with Nietzsche. It was the section on Arthur Schopenhauer, however, that proved disastrous for Bob.

As Durant explains in his direct, clear-spoken way, the famously pessimistic Schopenhauer saw the world and everything in it as the product of a ceaseless, striving force he called
will
, whose primary manifestation in human behavior is the sexual impulse. Though we think of ourselves as rational beings, we are dominated, like every other living thing, by the blind, unconscious drive to perpetuate the species, at the inevitable cost of our own individual existence. “Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for only so can the will conquer death,” writes Durant. “From the spider who is eaten up by the female he has just fertilized, or the wasp that devotes itself to gathering food for offspring it will never see, to the man who wears himself to ruin in an effort to feed and clothe and educate his children, every organism hastens, at maturity, to sacrifice itself to the task of reproduction.”
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Schopenhauer’s bleak view of existence—his insistence that we are the slaves of desires that can never achieve more than fleeting satisfaction, that suffering is the essence of life, that we inhabit the worst of all possible worlds, and that death is the only cure for the sickness of being alive—had a profound effect on artists and thinkers from Tolstoy and Turgenev to Wagner and Wittgenstein to Nietzsche and Freud. For Bob Irwin, the whole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy boiled down to a single revelation. Since the will, the all-powerful life force, “uses every living organism for its purpose of prolonging the race,” we would have enormous reserves of energy at our disposal if we managed to free ourselves from the compulsion to reproduce. In short, if the sex drive could only be “bottled up,” it could be “utilized for higher purposes”—namely, the attainment of the “inconceivable power” of visualization.
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His first step was to break up with Alice. Though their relationship
had remained platonic, it would certainly turn sexual once they were wed. He felt bad about giving her up, but the sacrifice was small relative to the ultimate reward—like “foregoing five dollars to get a million,” as he put it. With all the energy of his pent-up sex drive devoted to visualization, he would finally break through the barrier of material reality and merge with the Universal Mind. When that happened, he would achieve powers that were nothing less than godlike: communication through mental telepathy; senses so acute that he could “detect odors on Mars”; the ability to transform himself into “anything in the universe—a jackrabbit, a dragon, a thunderstorm.”
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That June, less than two months after he devoured Durant’s book, he sent Alice a brusque letter calling off their engagement. A few weeks later, in early August, he lost his job at the taxidermy shop. The problem, for once, wasn’t his violent temper but the economy. In the short time since he had gone to work there, business had fallen off so dramatically that the owner had no choice but to let him go.
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At first, Bob wasn’t entirely unhappy about losing his job. Though it paid a decent salary, he had always regarded the work—arranging dead creatures into lifelike poses—as a poor use of his sculptural talents. It quickly became clear, however, that—with the Depression in fill swing—even taxidermy was a more creative occupation than any job he was likely to find.

Since coming to New York City, he had lived in a succession of Manhattan boardinghouses. Now, to husband his meager savings, he moved out to Brooklyn and found a cheap room in a flat owned by an elderly woman.
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Abandoning his hopeless search for fulfilling work, he spent days at a time in his darkened room, practicing visualization. With the shades drawn and his eyes shut tight, he strained to transform mental images into material objects. The abject failure of these attempts plunged him into a severe depression, made worse by some news that had recently reached him from the West. Both his brothers had been arrested and sentenced to long terms in the Oregon
State Penitentiary, Vidalin for car theft, Pember for armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon.

His deteriorating mental state was manifested by a host of physical symptoms. On September 5, 1931, he was treated for chronic abdominal pains in the outpatient department of Kings County Hospital in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. Three days later, he was back at the hospital, complaining of “headaches, disturbed vision, and a queer taste in throat.” The examining physician noted that Bob had Hutchinson’s teeth—notched, narrow-edged incisors, a common sign of congenital syphilis. Bob acknowledged that he had been diagnosed with the condition as far back as 1919. A Wassermann test, administered on September 9, came back positive. Informed of the result the following week, he was urged to undergo a regimen of salvarsan injections, the preferred pre-penicillin treatment for the disease. He ignored the advice.
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Back in his room, he began contemplating suicide. “I was living with a nice old lady in Brooklyn and she was just like a mother to me,” he later explained to a psychiatric interviewer, Dr. Samuel Feigin. “I was so miserable and so sick that I thought I would commit suicide. But I wasn’t going to kill myself. I thought I would kill her and go to the electric chair.”
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On October 5, alarmed by his increasingly violent fantasies, he presented himself at the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital. Complaining that “his nerves were shot, that he could not concentrate, and that he had ‘figured on suicide’ by killing someone so that he would be hung,” he was admitted to the ward, where his condition was described as “psychoneurosis, psychasthenic type” (a now-obsolete diagnosis referring to a disorder “characterized by phobias, obsessions, compulsions, or excessive anxiety”). Exactly three weeks later, on Monday, October 26, 1931, he was discharged as “improved” and sent to the Burke Foundation in White Plains, New York.
¹¹

Named after the mother of its benefactor, the Winifred Masterson Burke Relief Foundation (as it was officially known) was created
with a $4 million endowment by the New York City merchant John Masterson Burke, a lifelong bachelor who made his fortune in the South America trade and—except for some piddling bequests to long-serving domestics and a handful of cousins—left it all to charity. Situated on sixty acres of rolling lawns and wooded groves, it was established as a convalescent care facility, its stated purpose to provide for “the relief of worthy men and women who, notwithstanding their willingness to support themselves, have become wholly or partly unable to do so by reason of sickness and misfortune.” Work on the complex—twelve neoclassical buildings designed by the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White—began in 1912. Three years later, the first patients were admitted. By the time of Bob’s arrival, it had treated nearly 100,000 men and women recuperating from various disorders, primarily heart attacks, pneumonia, ulcers, thyroid disease, and “borderline nervous, mental and other psychoneurotic conditions.” During their stays, patients were offered “fresh air, sunlight, good food, quietness, mild recreational opportunities, and occupational therapy.” Those who remained for extended periods were generally put to work for three to six hours a day at modest wages.
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During his nearly nine-month residence at Burke’s, Bob was assigned a part-time job as a dining hall waiter. Working alongside him was his best friend at the institution, a fellow convalescent named Charles Smith. In later interviews with investigators seeking insight into Irwin’s psychology, Chuck (as everyone called him) would recall his former friend’s more notable peculiarities. “It seemed like he had a lot of nervous energy,” Smith reported. “He would overdo anything that he undertook. He would talk about the benefit of deep breathing and in cold weather would run around without a coat. On two or three mornings I heard him singing loudly at 5 o’clock in the morning. He explained that he did it to develop his lungs.”

These eccentricities, however, paled in comparison to his friend’s “fanatical” theorizing. “He has ideas that are more abstruse than Einstein’s,” said Smith, who was subjected to endless harangues on Bob’s latest obsession, his determination to funnel every ounce of
his libido into visualization. For all his talk about “bottling up” his sexual energy, however, Bob seemed incapable of chastity. “He was always admiring women’s breasts” and carrying on various flirtations, Smith recalled. “He used to sneak out with the girl patients all the time. One night, I came in rather late and I happened to see him having intercourse with one of the girls.”
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Bob himself would later describe this episode to a psychiatric interviewer:

There was a woman at the Burke Foundation. She said she was 32 but she looked older because her hair was gray. She was a waitress. She got to monkeying around with me one night down in the basement. She just began to act kittenish and I grabbed a hold of her breast and she started giggling. I took her out one night and we saw Greta Garbo in
Mata Hari
and then we had a chicken sandwich and coffee and after we had a milkshake and she paid for everything. When we got back I had intercourse with her right in the dining room.
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