When my brothers returned to school, I watched TV. Popeye received a number of bullets in his side that he spat rat-a-tat-tat out of his mouth. Captain Kangaroo fed a fake bunny a carrot the size of his pinky ring. The face of the woman who hosted Romper Room rose up through a cloud of bubbles blown from a pipe, and Schemp of The Three Stooges swallowed a harmonica. He played the instrument by pressing himself front and side. Curly threw mints up into the air and caught them in his mouth, but in with the mints was mixed a stolen diamond. A punch to the stomach—ooomp—and the object reemerged. The whole gaggle of Stooges put on a play requiring a scene in which they ate cake around a formal table, but a pillow had been accidentally substituted for a layer. They ate the pillow cake and spat out feathers as though their insides were being pumped through a bellows, until the entire stage was filled with coughed-up goose down floating on and falling through the air.
It’s no wonder that, with models such as these, I enjoyed throwing Alice in Wonderland faux lunches in which my brothers and I feasted on the idea of food, imbibing food facsimiles, because isn’t it wonderful to be able to feel the world, ever beyond our reach, reduced to bite-size? I marvel at the magic of a world that imitates the “real” world but in miniature. It might explain what draws me to Chevalier Jackson, his foreign bodies like a battlefield of trinkets, the scope of whose sojourns we can never see the end to. Playing at lunch supports an endless gullet: you fill yourself and never risk excretion or extraction. No one chokes around such a make-believe table because no one really eats, and everyone is sated by conjoined imaginings.
Chevalier Jackson’s Tears: The Case of the Boy Who Cried
Sobbing is a(n) —emotional expression manifested by no animal other than man. It is involuntary ordinarily. The physiologic function of the larynx in sobbing is intermittently to close the glottis during inspiration, cutting short the inspiriting crying and phase . . . crying and laughing are emotional expressions also but are chiefly phona . . .
—CHEVALIER JACKSON, incomplete handwritten notes, undated
“I didn’t know the body had so many tears.” I remembered those words from a woman with whom I shared a grief over the untimely death of another woman friend. Now a student in my poetry class had suddenly turned liquid while she sat across from me in the small anteroom that was my office at the State U, and I heard myself thinking those words again. The student wasn’t crying because of anything I had said, but because of something she had said to herself. Something she heard herself say unleashed this watery torrent, and I was simply invited to witness it. I wasn’t meant to staunch or cauterize these tears but to let her first shed them and then, as they rushed down her face, to watch her swallow them, thus demonstrating a perverse misassumption tucked inside the stoic postulations of that phrase, “to swallow one’s tears.” It seems a bare fact of being human, for tears, once unleashed, to have nowhere else to go but, by dint of gravity, drip down into the next available portal on the face.
William James would say the tears produced the feeling and not the other way around, so what feeling is produced by the taste of one’s own tears? An oceanic primalness. A sense of bitter regretfulness. Not earthy like the taste of your own sweat, the swallowing of tears might bring you into some dark hollow of a place, the place of ducts rather than glands. The thing the student had told herself was that she wouldn’t be able to go through with the critique of her writing by her peers that was scheduled to occur that afternoon. Did it matter that she was the best writer in the class? I didn’t tell her this but pushed a box of tissues toward her, and, reminding her that this was generally a fairly friendly group of people, asked her what was the worst thing that could happen. “I’ll start to cry,” she said, “and uncontrollably cry, and then will never be able to face them again.” Thus I understood that the student was using my office as a kind of backstage rehearsal space, performing before me the worst thing that could possibly unfold.
We sat in silence while she cried—my goodness, she could cry and cry—we waited it out together while I said a few things to embolden or encourage her, and every now and then, one of us would say something that had seemingly nothing at all to do with the display of her tears, something distracting, funny, or mundane. She perked up to tell me, paused between tears, that she had a special interest in the cognitive life of parrots and, moreover, that she was both fascinated by and terrified of, in fact truly preoccupied with, the precarious proximity of the windpipe and the esophagus in humans. She consequently considered each act of swallowing that didn’t result in choking a major feat.
Call it a neurosis, but was it merely neurotic to let oneself be aware of the wondrous and precariously weird dimensions of the human form? Maybe she wasn’t just a budding poet but a doctor in the making.
What’s the worst thing that could happen? What was the worst situation that the body could produce for the person who lived inside of it?
For this girl, it was that eating might make it impossible to breathe, and vice versa: that breathing might curtail the need to swallow. That the body’s baffling relay of valves and flaps, or a misstep in the interplay of the autonomic and the willed, might send a foreign body coursing down the wrong pipe.
What’s the worst thing that could happen? That the pain that is lodged inside of me might come out through my eyes for everyone to see. Or that my tears might produce more pain, a pain impossible to swallow.
What would Walt Disney do with The Life of Chevalier Jackson? There’s enough pathos around animals in Jackson’s book to recommend a tearjerker centered on a boy and his dog, or a boy and his horse, but it would be difficult to translate the degrees of ravishment, rage, and violence in the autobiography into popular pablum or to disguise the literal bloodshed with allegory. The animals aren’t anthropomorphized, they aren’t stand-ins for human relations by other means or other names—though, as I will show later, they do bare the traces of an unspoken, displaced history of slavery in the United States.
The Life of Chevalier Jackson gained a wide readership in 1938 because of the conventional features that could be found there—even if it was a strange, difficult, and disturbing book—and because the book brought together a number of elements that made it resemble other bestsellers of the time (see figure 19). Described in one review as a “medical romance suited to all medical students,” it responded to a then-popular appetite for biographies of men of medicine and for nonfiction that took the form of popular science. The year before, Victor Heiser’s An American Doctor’s Odyssey had earned a place on the bestseller lists, and in 1938 Arthur E. Hertzler’s The Horse and Buggy Doctor was published to wide acclaim. Jackson’s book shared a popular stage with Madame Curie by Eve Curie and The Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, while also enjoying the company of literary titles like The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham, Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, The Culture of Cities by Lewis Mumford, and I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Ogden Nash. Doctor-novelist A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel appeared near the top of the fiction list that year; it also featured life in coal-mining communities, but in Great Britain rather than the United States. Jackson’s book could be seen to share an interest in medical ethics with The Citadel, which is largely concerned with the question of a doctor’s willingness to treat patients who aren’t prepared to pay for his services.
Fig. 19. Brentano’s window display advertising the 1938 bestseller Life of Chevalier Jackson: An Autobiography. Chevalier Jackson Papers, 1890-1964, MS C 292, Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.
The novel that secured first place on the bestseller list for fiction, though, is the book that figures as the most striking analogue to Jackson’s nonfiction. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling, which would go on to win a Pulitzer (and had been edited by Maxwell Perkins, famous for his earlier work with Hemingway and Fitzgerald), told the story of a poor boy and his pet fawn. The deer is the offspring of an animal that t
he boy’s father decides to shoot in order to use its heart to save himself from a snakebite. The harrowing denouement of the tale shows the boy having to kill his beloved pet in order to save his family—they have almost nothing to eat, and the animal is eating what little they have. The Yearling was made into a movie in 1946 starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman as the boy’s struggling parents, and it would seem to anticipate the later 1957 Disney film Old Yeller, based on the young adult novel of that title in which, once again, a boy’s route to manhood requires that he murder the pet that he loves, though this time the animal is a dog. The dog contracts rabies, and the boy’s shooting of the animal is understood to be necessary if his family is to survive. An even starker version of this popular formula could be found in John Steinbeck’s 1933 novel The Red Pony, in which a boy repeatedly tries and fails to save the animal placed in his care when he falls asleep each time the animal is sick. What’s striking about Steinbeck’s tale as a foundational narrative in a tradition to which Jackson’s book belonged, at least in part, is that the horse in question requires a tracheotomy and the boy must tend the horse by cleaning out the contents of its breathing tube.
Dogs and horses take center stage in the emotional matrix of Jackson’s autobiography, but their deaths don’t serve the traditional narrative of rite of passage into proper masculinity. Other people carry out violence against animals in The Life of Chevalier Jackson, while Jackson fails to take his proper boy-place in such scenes: instead, he runs screaming from displays of the perverse forms that male heroism takes in his community, or cries himself into a frenzy or a stupor. The passages that picture cruelty to horses in Jackson’s book—which Jackson counts as the “greatest of all causes of sorrow of [his] tearful boyhood” (LCJ, 9)—are practically impossible to read, so detailed, so carefully calibrated is Jackson’s account of the severe mistreatment and exacting injury that he witnessed:
Apart from gross cruelties inflicted in so many instances, practically all work horses were jerked, beaten, and battered into doing what they would have done willingly if taught what was required of them.... They were herded like cattle on the range with no knowledge of halter, rein, or bridle until three years of age. They were then lassoed, thrown, bridled and saddled with the cinch-girth that, with its mechanism like a compound pulley, compressed the chest almost to the point of suffocation. Before an admiring crowd a heavy horseman, thrilled with delusions of heroism, leaped into the saddle. The animal was ridden until he fell in a heap, limp and exhausted. He was then called “broken”—a not inappropriate term. Thereafter there was usually a sullen obedience to rein, whip and spur, notwithstanding an ulcerated back from the misfit saddle. (LCJ, 11)
The typical teamster, according to Jackson, was almost always “an ignorant, high-tempered, brutal, drinking wielder of the black-snake whip.” All horses developed abscesses at the base of the skull between the ears as a result of their mistreatment, and many a day was marked by wagons and their horses entirely immobilized in mud, which would inspire a teamster to flog the animals with the blacksnake whip as a kind of exercise in masturbatory futility.
The horse might return as Jackson’s gentle companion on the paths that his early work as a country doctor takes, and he might come to pride himself for commanding the animals as a team via love rather than cruelty, but the dog, mistreated by others but entirely loved by him, comes back into his life in a peculiarly vexing way. Before testing his mechanical methods for the removal of foreign bodies on living creatures, Jackson practiced with a rubber tube and a cadaver. But before he dared to practice on the human body, he experimented with dogs. In Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery, he states the case in literal, numeric terms when he warns that “no one should think of attempting for the first time to remove a foreign body from a human being until he has at least 100 times removed a foreign body from a dog.”
No dog died from the procedures that Jackson and his assistants carried out on them; no dogs were even injured, he insists. What Jackson doesn’t make explicit in his autobiography, though, is that in order for the dog to help him with his work, the doctor needed actually to implant a foreign body in the dog’s esophagus or bronchus. He needed to force the dog to swallow things. Jackson doesn’t kill the thing he loves and thus secure a place on the bestselling grid of proper masculinity. No. He pictures himself instead rescuing the dog that other people have abused; he sees himself as making the dog into a compliant workmate. The dog is still, in this sense, “sacrificed” without its having to die.
In one of many tributes to Jackson following his death, the instrumentality of the dog is plainly stated:
Dr. Jackson used to have an intern at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital insert objects into the throats and lungs of dogs and he would retrieve them for practice. He did not want to be told what the objects were. One day, the intern, Dr. I. Hope Alexander, now health director for the city of Pittsburgh, put an open safety pin into the lung of an animal. “Dr. Alexander, putting an open safety pin into this dog’s lung will prove to be the most brilliant act of your career,” Dr. Jackson told him. “Neither this bronchoscope nor any instrument in existence can extract that open pin. So—we’ll invent one.”
Realizing he needs to, at worst, risk the life of that which he loves—the dog—and, at best, compromise the animal in order to save the lives of humans does seem to place Jackson squarely in the company of the boys in The Yearling and Old Yeller. Still, Jackson did not wish for identification with the mass of men or the mess of masculinity. Rather than shed blood, he wished to count himself among the people who shed tears. He even comes to distinguish himself this way: he is a boy who cries. And cries. From the outset, he’s a child with a body made of tears.
It is hardly evident from The Life of Chevalier Jackson that Jackson had two brothers, Stanford and Shirls; instead he paints a picture of profound solitude. “In my memory the tearfulness of my childhood and boyhood hangs like a pall over everything” (LCJ, 5), he writes. Fighting—treacherous, bloody, and atavistic; for sport, for pleasure, for money, or for no reason at all—is the order of the day in his hometown. “Other boys could look on, enjoy looking on, and seek opportunities to look on, at bloody cockfights, dog fights, man fights, and all similar contests. I always ran away crying and hid until it was over, in case such things came my way, unexpectedly; I never sought them” (LCJ, 6).
Jackson’s fellows are tearless, whereas he is uncommonly gentle. He’s the boy who recoils from the “crippling sports” of football and baseball with the effect of cultivating the “delicate manipulations” and “gentle touch” that will later be required by his work with the bronchoscope. Jackson is an unmanly boy and, by his own description, a female-identified boy, for he observes that, “in all the cruelties the sight of which made my childhood tearful, I never saw a woman or girl participate, either actively or as an onlooker” (LCJ, 18). He doesn’t conclude from this that women are differently socialized—because, as he points out, the women, like the men, were equally unrefined, uneducated, and coarse—but that they, like him, are a breed apart, a species unsuited for cruelty and uninterested in perpetuating it for sport. By his estimation, “women and girls are better than men and boys” (LCJ, 18). In the final chapter of his book, “Introspection,” he goes so far as to spell out his earliest conceptions—“that angels were women and all women more or less angelic. It seems to have been inconceivable that there could be such a thing as a man-angel. I always adored my father, whom I knew to be a good, honest, true, sympathetic, charitable man of good deeds, but the angelic conception was totally absent” (LCJ, 190).
Some reviews of the autobiography, from the Dallas Morning News to the Washington Sunday Star, picked up on Jackson’s portrayal of an identity that took shape against the grain of masculinity and foregrounded that detail in somewhat unflattering ways. “Chevalier Jackson, Who Couldn’t Be Tough,” one headline read, while another lists among the book’s subjects “Associations of Bachelor Femininity” (in spit
e of Jackson’s long marriage). A fellow doctor used the word “fussy” to describe his adult demeanor, which is hard not to hear as a euphemism for gay. If the world of men that called to him both as spectator and participant only succeeded in making Chevalier Jackson cry, we could understand him, in more contemporary terms, as a survivor (or not) of a queer boyhood. What’s interesting is that the autobiography as backward glance doesn’t recount the tribulations of a crybaby from the point of view of the now triumphant adult, because, in many ways, Jackson does not ever become part of a larger social body. But he does use the occasion of his looking back to investigate more carefully the nature of his tears, as if to ask for all of us: What kind of tears do you cry? What makes you cry? When do you cry? And his answer, in this book and in his life’s work, is as much a study of sympathetic forces and identificatory patterns, even ethics, as it is a physiology of fluids.
Mary Cappello Page 12
