Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. - Sir Thomas Brown, 1658
One day in 1884 a lecturer in anatomy crossed the street from his place of work at London University Hospital. Dr. William Treves noticed a gaudily painted sign above a recently-vacated greengrocer shop, announcing a showing of “The Elephant Man” inside.
I’m referring of course to the 19th century figure immortalized in the 1982 Hollywood film of the same name, starring John Hurt in the title role with Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Treves.
Intrigued by the sign, Treves entered and gave a few pence to the showman at the desk, who rose and casually swept aside a curtain in the back of the room. In the faint blue glow of the gaslight Treves witnessed something crouching on a stool, covered by a worn brown blanket. It sat before a brick warmed by a Bunsen burner, huddled close for warmth. The showman yelled "stand up!" as if commanding a dog. The figure slowly stood up, dropping the blanket to his feet.
The anatomist was horrified by the sight. A few lank hairs were draped over the man's massive skull. A mass of bone projected from his mouth, turning the upper lip inside out and making of the mouth a "mere slobbering aperture." (In the painting outside of The Elephant Man in the storefront, this growth had been portrayed to appear to be a rudimentary tusk.)
“The nose was merely a lump of flesh only recognizable as a nose from its position,” Treves wrote 20 years later of his first meeting with John Merrick. “The face was no more capable of expression than a block of gnarled wood.” The body was even more appalling, with huge sacks of cauliflower-like flesh hanging off Merrick's trunk and appendages.
Merrick‘s right arm was a disfigured stump, with the tuberous, root-like fingers giving his hand the appearance of a “radish.” The other arm was a remarkable contrast in its normalcy. Treves remarked on its delicacy and fine skin, and Merrick's “refined hand.” It was the one outward sign of his fundamental humanity. Yet his speech was almost unintelligible, and Treves imagined him devoid of reason or any deep emotion.
From the showman he learned that The Elephant Man was English, aged 20, and went by the name John Merrick. As a doctor, Treves recognized the monstrosity represented some acute medical condition, what today we call neurofibromatosis. He arranged with the showman to interview the “strange exhibit” in his examining room at London University Hospital.
Merrick showed up a few days later at the hospital, a shambling figure with a walking cane, disguised in a cloak and an enormous peaked hat with a curtain draping his face. The Elephant Man was “shy, confused, not a little frightened and evidently much cowed,” wrote Treves. The doctor determined through careful listening to his garbled speech some of the details of Merrick's life.
“Here was a man in the heyday of youth who was so vilely deformed that everyone he met confronted him with a look of horror and disgust.” Shunned like a leper and housed like a wild beast, the young man “was taken about the country to be exhibited as a monstrosity and an object of loathing.”
At the age of 20, Merrick had no plans to look back upon or a future to look forward to. “There was nothing in front of him but a vista of caravans creeping along a road, of rows of glowing show tents and of circles with staring eyes, with, at the end, the spectacle of a broken man in an…infirmary,” wrote Treves.
So why am I writing about The Elephant Man, a story told many times before in print and film? In part for its timelessness, and in part for its relevance to the present times.
A Romantic at Heart
After the examination, Merrick returned to his abode across the street. The next time the doctor returned for a visit, the display, the showman, and Merrick were gone, shunted along by authorities who identified the the show offensive to public order and decency.
That might have been the doctor's final encounter with The Elephant Man, had not Merrick and his promoter experienced a similar fate with police in Belgium. The promoter, tiring of the constant harassment from officials, gave his former meal ticket just enough money to get back to London. There police picked him up off the streets, and delivered him to London Hospital. Merrick, fortuitously, still had the business card of Dr. Treves, who was immediately contacted.
Treves, arriving to rescue the frightened Merrick, realized he couldn't turn this pathetic creature out into the world again. By publicizing his case in the local papers, the doctor gathered enough funding for permanent lodging at the hospital, in two unoccupied rooms overlooking a courtyard. Merrick, who had been on the move for much of his life, couldn't believe his great good luck. For weeks after he asked the doctor repeatedly when he would be relocated to less agreeable quarters. (His fondest wish was that it be an asylum for the blind, so no other resident could see him.)
As he got to know his new friend better, Treves came to understand that Merrick was an eager conversationalist. He described his young friend as “a being with the brain of a man, the fancies of a youth and the imagination of a child.” A surprisingly good artist, he was also a voluminous reader who wrote with flair. The permanent resident of London Hospital “possessed an acute sensibility and – worse than all – a romantic imagination, that I realized was the overwhelming tragedy of his life.”
One day the doctor asked a personal friend, a young and pretty widow, to visit Merrick, wish him good morning and shake his hand. She agreed, but the effect on the young man was not quite what the doctor expected. “As she let go of his hand he bent his head to his knees and sobbed until I thought he would never cease.” The interview was over. John later told him that this was the first woman other than his mother who had ever smiled at him, and the first woman to ever shake his hand. “From this the transformation of Merrick commenced and he began to change, little by little, from a hunted thing into a man.”
In a land of wonders
Mid-Victorian London was without the glut of public relations, advertising and media of today. Instead of smart phones and televisions, there were circuses, sideshows and freak shows. In this sense, The Elephant Man in London's Mile End was a predecessor of some our contemporary diversions and scare schemes: he was a fright without a tabloid, a congenital monster without a pharma campaign, a reality without the television.
More than anything else, Merrick was a template for the paying voyeur's shadow. Given his years on display, and the cruelty visited upon him, Treves was amazed the man didn't end up a "spiteful and malignant misanthrope, swollen with venom and filled with venom for his fellow-men." The doctor never heard his patient speak badly of his captors or express regret over his circumstance.
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who brought Treves and Merrick back to life in his 1971 book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, puts it succinctly. “The truth seems to be that in most ways he achieved the kind of mental health that defies most human beings, the ability to love, to work and to play.”
In Montagu's reexamination of Treves' account, he counters the doctor's implicit belief that Merrick was taken from his mother in infancy. Citing his ability to read and write, including his fond reminiscence of his mother, Montagu argued that he had been on display only from the age of 12 to 20. During that time, the anthropologist reasoned, Merrick's recollection of his mother's love had sustained him throughout his years of isolation and indignity.
Merrick received many well-bred visitors in his apartment, who gave him books and gifts. He had portraits of many of his well-dressed, attractive callers upon his settee, including Queen Alexandra, Princess of Wales. Enlisting the aid of the wife of a famous actor, the doctor once arranged for Merrick to visit the theatre, by having him carefully concealed from the rest of the crowd by a curtained proscenium. The spectacle on stage left the young romantic speechless; Treves heard his companion gasping and panting in excitement, at “a vision almost beyond his comprehension.”
Perhaps the greatest day in Merrick’s life came when wealthy visitors arranged for him to spend a weekend on their large country estate, free from prying eyes. For a good portion of his life, Merrick's view of the world was through a peephole in a showman's cart. Now he was “alone in a land of wonders,” wrote Treves, with “the breath of the country passing over him like a healing wind.”
“The Merrick who had once crouched terrified in the filthy shadows of a Mile End shop was now sitting in the sun, in a clearing among the trees, arranging a bunch of violets he had gathered.”
The doctor noted that his friend now appeared to be one of the most contented beings he had ever been fortunate enough to meet. “More than once he said to me, ‘I am happy every hour of the day.’”Certainly Merrick's ecstatic feeling was in no small part due to his incredible reversal of fortune; but it also seems that this boundless happiness drew upon something already deep within him. All it required was someone like Treves to bring this ember, previously tended by his mother, back into flame.
Even though he was now treated as a human being, John Merrick still keenly sensed the great gap between himself and others. More than once he had expressed his wish to sleep like normal people. The Elephant Man never slept recumbent but had always tucked himself into a fetal position and dozed sitting up, with the weight of the head supported by his knees. One night, Treves later surmised, he must have decided to attempt the experiment. Nurses found the young man dead the next morning. His neck had apparently snapped from the enormous weight of his head, as he attempted to lay back on his pillow. He was 26 years old.
Elephant Folk
Shuttered up in darkness for much of his life, his human encounters limited to the gasps and jeers of horrified spectators, John Merrick likely didn’t imagine much in the way of salvation, at least not in this life or on this Earth (he told Treves what he looked forward to most during his time on display was crawling away and hiding). He didn't have the luxury of grasping for, or holding onto, attachments. He didn't have the option of what we now call “status anxiety,” or any other urbane remalady of the soul. There was no direction for Merrick to go other than inward.
So how does his story relate to now? In today’s world, for most people the opportunities for love, for personal and professional reward, for inner transformation, are much closer at hand than anything Merrick could have ever hoped for. Yet depression and anxiety are at record levels, especially among the young.
This is likely largely due to a system that profitably thrives on individual dysfunction and chronic sickness. Every day, in innumerable, carefully researched ways, the system tries to convince us of our limitations and drawbacks - too fat, too short, too old, too unattractive - and inflates the smallest risks into terrifying threats.
Above all, monopoly capitalism in its cancer stage relies on atomization, with community and family displaced by market relations. The ideal consumer is the one alone in the dark, clicking, swiping watching, paying, ordering, suspended in a purgatory of passing sensations and vague unease.
You might say the final dream of the high-surveillance, database-driven world of monopoly capitalism is to turn us all into distorted, isolated specimens. Elephant folk.
Yet the wonder isn't that so many have been lost to this programming; the wonder is that so many haven’t. It seems there’s a rubbery resilience to the human spirit that runs counter to media messaging that a constant sense of insufficiency and anxiety isn’t just normal, but necessary.
An incredible disguise
John Merrick looks out at us from old daguerreotypes and medical etchings, his face a gnarled mass in which we see no recognizable emotion. But that face whispers something to us about the nature of the human spirit. In his time spent alone, he had no formal education, no media, and no clever arts of distraction. Cast out of human society and made into an object of entertaining revulsion, he existed for years without any touchstones of self-definition or self esteem.
Montagu believed that Merrick's suffering, “like a cleansing fire, seems to have brought him nearer to that human condition in which all that are essentials of life having fallen away, only the essential goodness of man remained.”
Merrick's friend and saviour, William Treves, summed it up best in the final words in his monograph. "As a specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of Merrick, if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth browed and clean of limb, with eyes that flashed of undaunted courage." It was an incredible disguise.
Merrick’s story was an extreme case study in the human condition. We’re born into best-before bodies subject to all sorts of disorders and diseases, with minds and hearts that can imagine and experience all manner of hells. Meditating on this, we may grow to wonder what purpose all the struggling serves, when it's all over in the blink of an eye. But something keeps most of us going on regardless – whether we’re happy by nature or otherwise – and pushes us to seek something deeper within. I suspect this is something more than the brute will to live, or Richard Dawkins’ “selfish genes.”
Beneath the places we've been hurt, beyond all the youthful adaptations that shaded into maladaptations, past the memories of failure and disappointment, all the lies we’ve told and been told, including the exaggerated fears trafficked by politicians, pundits and pill-pushers, down at the very foundations of our being, there isn’t darkness, but a light - the healing force that burns up illusions and unites us with our fellow beings, human and nonhuman. It lives in a silent place beyond the clickbait terrors of our twilight times, and far from the din of the market, that land of shadows that once displayed - as a supposed freak - the beautiful John Merrick.
(Revised version of an article originally published in Common Ground)
Beautiful. Thank you!