He takes up the idea again, but who knows why or how? Laced inside winter months, behind windows no bigger than the portholes of a boat, he conceives of a light canoe. Penny by penny by penny, he counts, “one, one, one,” Christmas to Christmas his mother and father collect material for a sail, for a skiff, and the paint for careful lettering, his mother’s name, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. The boat is “light, frail, beautiful, but ill-fated.” In no time at all, it is reduced to wreckage by a local drunk (LCJ, 24; see figure 15).
Still, gliding is a concourse to his imagination—and a means of getting to school in winter months. He’s small, so when he chooses the wood for fashioning a sled, it must be elegant, it must be light enough for him to make the uphill climbs easy and the downhill turns a coast. The sled is striking once he’s varnished it; gleaming against the coal shed at the Greentree School, it stands out among the “cumbrous sleds built of unsuitable materials, with poor tools, by overgrown boys from farms and coal mines” (LCJ, 31). At the end of the school day, having avoided recess, he searches: the sled is gone. And so are all of the boys and their clamor. He rummages, and loses his breath looking. The rope his mother had supplied to pull the sled is wrapped around a bundle of broken pieces. On a dirty piece of paper, two words are smudged: “Kindlin Wud.”
Fig. 15. Jackson’s pen-and-ink drawing of the boat he had built when a boy, “reduced to wreckage by a local drunk.” Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History.
On a sheet of dusty blue notepaper bearing the header “Doyle and Bowers Opticians, 113 So 18th Street, Phila, PA” and the none-too-catchy slogan “The Fitting Makes the Difference,” Chevalier Jackson expressed himself, in a rare instance, impulsively. Traversing ninety-three years’ worth of correspondence, lecture notes, and the occasional personal diary, one rarely encounters out-and-out anger as a Jacksonian tone, except in this note that appears to have been addressed to an editor and that has his life story in mind, but who knows if he ever sent it?
You have no soul. This is all history to me, the history of my life—an incident in the history of my life but if you are not interested, the public would not be either. No man can edit his own writings effectively anymore than a professor can examine his own pupils properly—Legends need revision for what they say as well as for solecisms. Wood—One of life’s interests. If public not interested in me, cut out, you know best.
One can feel here the reluctance to hand over his life-in-words to a kind of fellow surgeon; one can gather that he tried to restrain feelings of violation, misunderstanding, ignorance, or lack of sympathy with the wonderful double entendre regarding the impossibility of examining one’s own “pupils.” It’s entirely possible that Jackson as an irreproachable leader in his field wasn’t used to receiving suggestions for how to improve his work. An extant, anonymous reader’s report makes clear that the editorial quarrel hinged on two significant aspects of Jackson’s approach in crafting his autobiography: his resistance to chronology and his erratic use of the third person (“he,” “the young doctor,” etc.) in describing himself. The editor, whose task it was to anticipate “the general reader’s point of view,” seems exasperated with Jackson’s retention of what he considers a “pretentious” use of the third person even after a first round of revision, and his reliance on a confusing “disregard of chronology,” or what he calls a “logical” arrangement over and against a chrono-logical arrangement of parts.
It’s fascinating to learn that Jackson originally oriented his book around the categories “Physique,” “Hobbies,” and “Episodes,” an approach that may be closer to the truth of being—and whimsical too, because isn’t it the case that what life boils down to is a body, a set of interests, and, if we’re lucky, things that happen to us or because of us, and that these three categories contain a life at the same time that they are strangely unrelated to one another, even generically distinct?
Before the days of what we now call memoir, Jackson’s attempt to orient his life-writing thematically rather than adhere to a linear tale shows him to be writing exactly that. Would Jackson be able to construct a narrative that was happily assimilative rather than fragmented? This wasn’t exactly the issue at stake: from where Jackson stood, the temporal gaps and reliance on the third person were both symptomatic of unresolved trauma and a technique he was trying out, even self-consciously exploring, and were emblematic of an epistemological struggle around cause and effect. At a poignant early moment, Jackson arrives at the insight that “looking backward on this [traumatic] period of my childhood, I always naturally drift into abstract analysis and an outside viewpoint calling for the third person” (LCJ, 41). The fractured relationship to time in the book can also be understood as a thwarting of memory by a stunned and damaged ego. But there are enough places in the book where Jackson explicitly, rather than accidentally, introduces gaps or invites a chronological deficit to suggest that he was using his play with form to pursue a problem: he was interested in the question it enabled him to perform.
From where the editor sat, what needed to be foregrounded, with or without Jackson’s annoying allegiance to an antichronicle and an impersonal pronoun, was the idea of his life as the all-too-familiar, ever-popular “success story.” The book had to have a yield, in many senses of the word, and Jackson knew this too—it led him to hide behind the flag of didacticism in much the same way that he had with his collection of foreign bodies: “I have hopes that the book itself will be a powerful factor in the campaign for public welfare,” he wrote to his son, Chevalier L., soon after the book was set to appear. “As you know, it was sponsored by the Medical- Public Health Department of the MacMillan Company. It is not a mere autobiography but has a purpose.”
The book that emerged from this mix of motives and demands doesn’t labor under a need for purposiveness, instructiveness, self-help, success story, or moral example, thank goodness. Instead, it contributes to American letters an aesthetic of impersonality, a barely readable (because extreme) horror story with traces of conventions drawn from African American slave narratives and a scenic, poetically rendered architectonic of time and memory. Time does not yield a clear measure of our days, and Jackson did not force it to; he opted instead to give his remembered experience over to unchronological sliding and overlap. The chapter “A Prophet Honored in His Own Country,” for example, is identified as covering the period from 1900 to 1916, but this is followed by the chapter “Building an International Reputation,” whose designated time span begins earlier and ends later, 1895-1925. Time and experience enjoy an impressionistic relationship with one another, and chapter titles often fail to identify what a passage in Jackson’s life is really about.
As early as the third page of the book (and the second chapter), Jackson addressed his editor’s objections via an explanation and a (somewhat defensive) apology rather than revision. “Many phases of my boyhood days seem very different from those of the average boy,” he wrote,
and it seems certain that most of these phases had important bearings on after life. The phases referred to extended over a number of years, and the various yearly groups overlapped in such a way that any attempt at sequential chronology would be confusing, inadequate, space-wasting, and at best inevitably inaccurate. These phases will be considered under a topical arrangement, and the overlapping chronological periods will be indicated as accurately as maybe possible.
I like to fancy Jackson choosing the word “phase” to describe the ruling unit of his prose because it comes after “pharynx” in the dictionary. “Phase” is wonderfully ambiguous as a marker of motion and change inside any life. It has the advantage of referring simultaneously to a cyclical recurrence and a temporary stage or pattern that one moves on from: it’s the perfect word for Jackson’s circumspect treatment of the idea of a self or a personality, a life or a career choice as something that develops (if we are prone to repetition, in what sense can we be said to have moved on?). As if in arch response to his editor’s critique, Jackson
explained that he couldn’t really be said to have developed; he hasn’t ever grown out of one habit or interest and into another, and if he hasn’t developed, then he can’t rely on chronology to represent his life.
The uneasy alliance of cause and effect, the out-of-sync character of events and traits manifests in mutually contradictory ways as the book advances. The circumstances of his life hardly poised him for future prestige, nor did they supply a direct route to a life in medicine. He became successful, yes, but he’s the first to admit the numerous compelling ways in which he never entirely succeeded: he failed to access feelings of “bitterness, resentment, or revenge” (LCJ, 170) for his mistreatment in early childhood. These were cut off from him. He never succeeded in feeling at home with others.
He determines that his aloofness and social reticence—“you are too darned stingy with your personality,” a colleague complained—are in part the result of the tortures and torments of early life. That seems to fit. He doesn’t understand how he didn’t become entirely misanthropic as a result of that early treatment, though. Here the fit fails.
I myself have wondered how he didn’t grow up to be a sociopath when the conditions of his early childhood seemed entirely right for such an outcome. He did become a serial bronchoscopist. He did become a slitter of throats and inserter of cold rods—each time he cuts into a throat sans anesthesia, I imagine he’s cutting the throat of his onetime aggressors. He controls you now as he first asphyxiates you and then brings you back to life.
“Now we’ll show the great Barnum sword swallower”: he becomes a victim of a metaphorical force-feeding, as a “long icicle was passed inside collar and undershirt,” and he is held until the icicle broke up or melted (LCJ, 32). Now he’ll make everyone into a sword swallower, with the condition that he controls and inserts the sword.
One day a man came into one of Jackson’s clinics threatening to kill “that Doctor Jackson who stole my quarter” (LCJ, 100). Jackson claims to have subdued the man with a gentle voice and persuaded him to leave. He never returned the quarter even though the backstory was harsh. A boy had arrived in the clinic having swallowed a quarter. The boy was covered in bruises that smarted to Jackson’s touch. The father “ungratefully demanded that the coin be returned to him.” Jackson explained that “all foreign bodies removed from the air and food passages were put into a scientific collection where they would be available to physicians working on the problems of relieving little children” (LCJ, 100). But surely a quarter is a quarter is a quarter. Do future physicians really need umpteen quarter prototypes in order to get a handle on what they might be dealing with? And didn’t Jackson understand that by not returning the quarter, he might be putting the child at further risk? The father “left in a rage,” Jackson writes, “taking the child with him.” The next day, the boy returned with a broken arm and a bloody lip: the first set of bruises, the boy’s sister who now accompanied him explained, were “from a beating by the father as punishment for swallowing the coin”; the second beating was for “refusing to come back and beg for the removed coin” (LCJ, 100).
Jackson won’t give the angry father the coin even though he knows, firsthand, the kind of violence adults are capable of carrying out against children. He sends the sister home with a fifty-cent piece—as if to show he is magnanimous and not simply overcompensating (the half-dollar was to serve “as reimbursement for the retained scientific specimen and carfare home,” LCJ, 101). It is at this point that the father returns, “drunk, abusive, and threatening to kill” the thief, Jackson, and reclaim the original coin, which he perhaps understands to be imbued with special value, however perverse. Jackson gives the man his voice, momentarily soothing him. But—astonishingly—the swallowed quarter, the fbdy, must remain his.
Chevalier Jackson was so often ambushed, attacked, and throttled by other boys on his way to school that he sometimes wished that he could willfully drift into the unconsciousness his attackers would inevitably bring on. If he pretended to be dead, his attackers, he supposed, would, frightened, run away. Reticence as a form of self-protection seems obvious enough, but in Jackson’s life a more complicated relationship to speech and silence emerged, because it’s one thing to fail to speak and another to find oneself unable to speak; it’s yet another thing to refuse to speak, and another still to drift toward silence, longingly.
According to the autobiography, the problem of a lifetime for Chevalier Jackson was the one question he was unable to answer: why had he remained silent before his torturers? Why did he not make his mother his confidante? This yields another harder, more unnerving question: why did people with more power than he—the “teachers, directors, parents, neighbors”(and then he adds desperately, “or someone”)—not do anything to intervene in the bullying (LCJ, 38)? Why did no one notice? Why did everyone, including his beloved mother, appear to be deaf, dumb, and blind to what he was experiencing?
Jackson has three regrets that form a constellation, all of them having to do with silence: silence before his captors and oppressors; silence around the proper use of the esophagoscope; and silence around the need to be paid for his work as a physician. In each case, he admits a kind of paralysis of the vocal cords, usually with the effect of his own further suffering, but in the case of the esophagoscope, with the result of death to others. Jackson initially exhibited the esophagoscope at medical meetings in the late nineteenth century without giving detailed instructions and guidance for its use. In unskilled, unpracticed, untutored hands, the instrument was an extremely dangerous tool, and Jackson dealt with his remorse thereafter by developing elaborate protocols for the use of all of his instruments. Though he does not supply details of the injuries and deaths that were the result of his silence, he explains that, initially, other practitioners’ disastrous outcomes with his instrument led to its being condemned. Consequently, “the consensus of opinion was that the instrument was the hobby of an enthusiast, and that others had better let it alone” (LCJ, 106). Thereafter, a student in Jackson’s charge needed first to demonstrate his ability to use the instrument on cadavers and with rubber tubes that simulated the esophagus. Then he had to remove foreign bodies from the esophagus of an anesthetized dog. Only afterward was he allowed to work on humans, starting with adults. Jackson himself never went right to work on a human subject; he almost always, following location, position, and type of object by X-ray, practiced removing the item from a dummy. In this sense, rarely was a foreign-body case treated as an emergency.
Jackson’s operating room was a uniquely silent theater. Most people talked too much for Chevalier Jackson’s taste; he came to think of the larynx as an instrument too beautiful and too delicate to be used for the mere creation of chatter. In an era when the taking of an X-ray was referred to as a “séance,” rife with the sense of traffic with other worlds beyond the human sensorium, Jackson created capsules of silence in which he carried out his work. Emily van Loon remembered how “Dr. Jackson’s strong sense of theater showed in the conduct of his Clinic”:
Nothing was ever casual and nothing was allowed to divert attention from the main issue, which was the patient. A sign over the scrub basins, “No talking except in the interest of scheduled patients,” meant exactly that. The patient was brought into the darkened operating room only when everything was ready, the tubes lit, the staff waiting. A sign “Silence” was turned on and only directions to the patient broke that silence. Requests for instruments were made by hand signals and seldom was a word needed. This restraint was carried out also in examining and conference rooms. No words were wasted.
Turn back now as if a dream once dreamt could be entered again, reassembled, however fitfully. He had called it the happiest day of his life, the day of deliverance, the last day of school, but for the boy it was the deliverance from others, not from knowledge, that he longed for. A “Goodbye Session” was arranged at the school in which short, original speeches were to be delivered (the word isn’t lost on him) by the graduating class. What would
the boy choose to speak about? What topic would urge him to rise above a whisper and deliver his certain sense of what he saw? He hit upon it instantly: “Snow.” The glass slides of his father’s microscope kept the flakes from melting instantly, so he could observe and then depict them. The walk to school was jubilant because he was talking—not to anyone, he didn’t talk to someone, but he rehearsed, anticipating an audience for his memorized speech. The schoolhouse was far in the distance—he saw it there—and there the dream stops, and with it the memory, because he never arrived at the schoolroom but instead hallucinated an angel. He never arrived. “It was never known what had happened” (LCJ, 40), but the faces, doctors, neighbors, and nurses who tried to understand his words noticed a lump that had risen on the back of his neck, and remarked how, in his delirium, he visualized angels. He doesn’t tell them what he knows, he daren’t: that he had often seen “Big Bill Drake stun, then kill, trapped rabbits by hitting them on the back of the neck close to the skull with the edge of his massive hand” (LCJ, 40).
Fig. 16. Chevalier Jackson as a pupil at Greentree School, about ten years of age. Chevalier Jackson Papers, 1890-1964, MS C 292, Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.
He does not speak. He does not get to give his speech. But years later, in a letter to his mother, he begs her to remember the roads filled up with Pennsylvanian snow, how deep it always was en route to school, “snow deep, deep white snow—too deep for Chevie’s short legs” (see figure 16).
Mary Cappello Page 10
