Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  The Dovecote boxes unleash a host of romantic associations (remember Proust? “Just as she would sooner have rented an estate on which there was a Gothic dovecote or another of those old things that exercise such a happy influence on the mind by filling it with longing for impossible voyages through time”), and their origin is a kind of cabinet of curiosity in which the specimens are alive. Call them pigeon chambers. Cornell’s Dovecote boxes enabled him to arrive at some of his most gorgeous forms, as in the famous all-white dovecote in which small wooden balls stand in for birds, their placement both still and verging, about to roll, casting a kind of magnetic glow across the box, creating the idea of the bird not quite arrived, the bird not quite departed.

  Fig. 33 (left: see caption on page 201).Fig. 43 (right). Joseph Cornell, Untitled (For gotten Game), c. 1949, box construction, 21⅛ × 15 × 3⅞ inches, Lindy and Edwin Bergman Joseph Cornell Collection, 1982. The Art Institute of Chicago, catalog no. 1852.

  What Jackson’s medical illustrations and Cornell’s boxes have in common is a preoccupation with portals, leaving us to wonder what either man’s work asks us to see through its holes. From the outside, the body has but a few sets of openings, but there are openings inside as well, openings within openings, and Chevalier Jackson’s illustrations almost always begin at the inside portal, the mouth of a cave that is the back of the throat, just as Cornell, going inside the Dovecote, proves that it’s not just a beautiful building from without.

  You stand in line and wait your turn to discover why everyone is gasping, laughing, or awestruck before an aperture inside a Piranesian square atop a hillside in Rome. The hole is small, but it gives way to a resplendent view of the Vatican with long rows of cypress trees on either side. The tunneling effect is part of the gasp-making pleasure of the view because a tunnel masks off everything else in the world—but that only tells half the story, because the tunnel that is an aperture limits and opens up vision simultaneously, just as pigeonholes aren’t narrowing biases but concurrent worlds, white forms and their shadows, part of a complex geometry, each distinct.

  Among Cornell’s earliest boxes were pillboxes, remade. In place of pills in a bottle labeled “Sure Cure for That Tired Feeling,” Cornell supplied his own idea of a cure-all, according to Solomon: “tiny shells, sequins, red ground glass, rhinestones, beads, black thread, scraps of blue paper—a mix of natural and theatrical ephemera that hint at a very personal prescription for well-being.” Chevalier Jackson, we will recall, was not a medicine-giving doctor but one who gave his art to cure. “Sure Cure for That Tired Feeling?” Try that collection of Chevalier Jackson’s swallowed Things. While Cornell was seeking access to a glorious metaphysic, Jackson always held the human body in view. The “physick,” the body preeminent : in one case, the audacity of repeating compasses, numerous rows of the same thing arranged inside a box; in the other, the audacity of getting to draw vaginas and call them larynxes again and again and again.

  IV.

  MYSTERY BONES AND THE UNRECOVERED BOY

  Microscopical mounts and lantern slides also sent were unfortunately not received through some failure in the mail.

  —Footnote to Chevalier Q. Jackson, “The Bacillus of Leprosy: A Microscopical Study of Its Morphological Characteristics”

  The hand must have been beautiful and was certainly exacting that dipped a pen into India ink and addressed Chevalier Jackson as “My dear Doctor.” The ink was fine, the sentiments heartfelt and unfading in the letter sent on December 9, 1923. But words tell only part of the tale of their author’s affection for Chevalier Jackson, because, in the corner of each missive that he sends, this writer gifts to Jackson a watercolor illustration. In grades of red and blue and brown, of black, chartreuse, and whitening inside a shade, the artist performs a sketch that feels like magic: who is this boyish figure that he draws, and what is this pose reclining? (See figure 44.)

  His head is given body with the paintbrush, as if to say you’ll know him by his dark and curly locks. His legs are crossed as he leans both back and forward, bent intensely toward an instrument he seems to play. The boy’s right arm outstretched reaches further into space than any real arm could command, and his bow, a mythic bronchoscope, is alarmingly sleek and long. It passes through the figure’s other arm and rests beneath no hand but a form more nearly resembling the tail of a sea creature. Or perhaps it is a hand, limp-wristed. Into the upper torso, the painter has seen fit to pencil in the prospect of an inner anatomy not exactly X-rayed but conceived. “You are a Greek god,” the image would say if it could, “and you play the bronchoscope for me, playing it upon your own body.”

  The same line that urges the bronchoscope into space marks the field of a pregnant pause inside the letter, a long-drawn blank or gasp, and later crosses the first letter of the writer’s last name, F, with a flourish, as well as, in other notes, the bar atop the J in Jackson. Alongside the image, the writer pens a caption that gives the gift the feel of an illuminated manuscript. It reads: “For the sweet Song you fluted to me on your wonderful pipe, dear Jackson, I am warmly appreciative————”

  Fig. 44. Letter from fellow laryngologist Thomas R. French to Chevalier Jackson with illustration and the caption “For the sweet Song you fluted to me on your wonderful pipe, dear Jackson, I am warmly appreciative.” Chevalier Jackson Papers, 1890-1964, MS C 292, Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

  What is the nature of this gold among the dross, so marvelous? For how many years have these exquisite letters, rendered by a fellow doctor/ artist, been lodged inside the archive’s endless gullet, lost inside interstices of mail we might call junk? In the National Library of Medicine, I put in a thumb, and pulled out a plum, in the corner of which I found another watercolor view of wizard Jackson from the side and from behind. It’s nearly cubist. His diaphanous outfit is a dazzle of wings, a conductor’s tuxedo tails, a cape, as he poises the instrument to enter no body but amorphous space, the pool of light that is the origin of color. From the corner of another piece of stationery, a polar bear looks back toward a world outside the edges of the alphabet, having emerged from an inkblot of ice to which he might return. The caption in red ink to offset the letter’s black, dated April 9, 1926, is full of whimsy: “Going far North? / Very fashionable just now! / If you head that way early in June / Don’t forget to stop off in Montreal where your presence would be welcomed and inspiring.” The letter itself then begins in the writer’s voice: “My dear Doctor Jackson, The blot-of-a-bear having had his say I’ll take the floor for a minute or two to say to you that we are grateful for you because you are developing a new and better form of medicine, in physiology, in anatomy and in therapeutics.”

  The letters from this admirer almost always begin with words of praise beneath illustrations rendered ever more elaborate, as in “My dear Doctor Jackson, A man who can perform such magic in the passages of humans as your good self must possess other gifts which express themselves in artistic form.” At this crossroads of art transmuting into doctoring transmuting into art, the writer inscribes a biblical-seeming figure, barefoot and sandaled in shepherd’s garb who wrestles an unidentifiable creature, part dog. The caption explains, “As our modern Cyclops / Strangles disease in the / lower airways of Man.” But the pièce de résistance inside these letters comes in the form of a drama wrought in lovingly crafted miniature, a world within a world upon the page (see figure 45).

  The paintbrush must have been hewn to a point fine as any embroidery needle that enabled Jackson’s friend to tease open the imagined cabin of a boat, sagittally, and bring to life an entire narrative therein. An American and Frenchman, he explains, are en route to France “to see and hear the seemingly recently-made Chevalier at the Ecole de Medicine”—his point being that Jackson, about to receive the Legion of Honor, and thus to be dubbed Chevalier, is already a Chevalier, both literally and figuratively. He doesn’t need an award for us to know his worth—“wa
shtheuse painting the lily,” the fictional American “half seas over” asks, while the writer gifts to Jackson the vivid wheel by which one steers the ship, a flag upon a mast, even other boats upon the horizon tucked into the corner of a letter. The white blue froth of ocean water meets the shore of these words in red: “My dear, new-born CHEVALIER Jackson.” The figures in his painting evince a drama that can keep Jackson company on his trip to receive his medal, and to thank him for the image he had sent through the mail, a reproduction of a painting of the Mill titled Afterglow.

  Fig. 45. Illustrated letter of congratulations from Thomas R. French to Chevalier Jackson upon his receipt of the French Legion of Honor. Chevalier Jackson Papers, 1890-1964, MS C 292, Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

  One wonders if Jackson appreciated the humor here—if imagining the American’s being drunk (“half seas over” and beset by slurring words) betrays how much or how little the writer knew his addressee—but whereas Jackson sent him copies of his work (as he did to many people around the new year and holidays), this doctor/artist sent originals: the painting was a letter, a correspondence meant for Jackson, and him alone.

  The man who writes these letters and paints these pictures is a fellow laryngologist named Thomas R. French. He is seventy-eight years old when he writes this particular letter to Jackson, who is sixty-three, but he addresses Jackson as a “boy” in a correspondence that doesn’t shy away from being amorous. “When you told me of the two supreme honors I felt that I too had been decorated, for the swords touched the shoulders of my friend,” he writes, and then, relying on the power of a pause, he adds: “For, dear boy, I have learned to love you.”

  French’s New York Times obituary, which appears exactly one year following this letter, describes him as a “noted Physician,” a specialist of the throat and nose and a professor of laryngology at the Long Island Hospital who was still practicing up until the moment of his death from pneumonia at age eighty. No children from his marriage to Helen M. Wilson (a cousin of Woodrow Wilson) appear among his survivors. French was at one time the president of the American Laryngological Association and had recently completed a study on the pathology and diagnosis of disease of the tonsils; he was a prolific physician/researcher whose articles from the 1890s focused on methods of photographing the larynx—“Laryngeal and Postnasal Photography with the Aid of the Arc Light” and “On a Perfected Method of Photographing the Larynx”—and other subjects reflective of the then-burgeoning medical specialty. Among my favorites are “Action of the Glottis in Singing,” “Lymphoid Growths in the Vault of the Pharynx,” “Mouth Breathing: Its Cause, Effects and Treatment,” and “Two Voices and a Double Epiglottis,” about a singer and contortionist who was able to command two entirely distinct voices: one a high falsetto, and the other low. “He uses either according to habit or association, and asserts that many of his friends are not aware that he has two voices,” though he was apt to use the high voice with his family and reserve the low voice for business. High and low come together in performance when he, starting out low, suddenly breaks into falsetto “to produce a sensation.” According to one of Jackson’s textbooks, Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery, French had designed an operating table that bore his name and that Jackson preferred at the time to all others. In a discussion of the endoscopic tables then available, Jackson notes that “in an emergency any sort of table can be used, but where a special table is to be provided, the best one to be obtained is that of Dr. T.R. French designed especially for nasal and throat operations.”

  Dr. French’s letters, things of beauty in themselves, discuss the status of a patient in common, new forms of laryngeal illuminations, French’s progress on a chapter in a forthcoming textbook edited by Jackson—professional matters all, but marked by an exquisite intimacy in every way, and one can’t help but notice how French, even in the shortest letter, even if he must go in through the back door of his narrative’s logic, never misses an opportunity to tell Chevalier Jackson how much he loves him.

  Their patient in common, a Miss King, is evidently special—“one of the loveliest human beings it has been [French’s] good fortune to know,” leaving him “distressed not only because of her condition but also because [French is] not privileged to serve her in any way.” But this is just a prelude to the tones he wishes to play upon his pipe for Jackson:

  A world whose inhabitants were all of Miss King’s type would look so delectable that we would all want to go there. If such a world should exist then my good friend I should expect that you would be picked for one of its inhabitants. This world is however much richer because of the use you have made of your life and brilliant powers.

  “There’s a Place for Us” might be Dr. French’s theme song, and even when he’s seeming paternal, there’s a touch of Greek-derived eros to be found, as in these lines from his letter of congratulations to the newly born “Chevalier”:

  The Athenian fathers in the time of Pericles advised their sons to live in such a way that the world would be the better for their having lived in it. Strife for such a mark is to me the essence of greatness. You have always aimed high and have hit the mark. I am not a Chauvinist. Napoleon never appealed to me. A cause is never lost if the aim is for something higher than oneself. The Creator made a fine man when he made you, and in your work you are a class by yourself.

  French uses language lushly and caringly, telling Jackson how impressed he is with “the splendor of his laryngostasis and laryngostat which marks a brilliant advance in work about the vocal bands.” He refers to Jackson’s articles animatedly as “wonderful stories,” for which he thanks him, and compares his scholarly presentations to “chapters from the Arabian nights.” He sends Jackson a “laryngeal photograph” which, he tells him, “looked worthy enough to live in your den,” but he’s convinced it must have “missed” Jackson because he’s sent it to his Philadelphia office rather than to Old Sunrise Mills. Did the photo sent by American Express get lost in the mail, or did Chevalier Jackson not acknowledge it swiftly enough for Thomas French’s taste?

  Is it possible to find the contours of a personality etched inside the sentences that cluster inside a thin layering of leaves called “letters”? French uses language robustly and with kindness (“with best wishes for a gladsome year”); he appears a generous and buoyant personality; and he continuously exerts a desire to be closer to Chevalier Jackson: if he will send Jackson a work “to live” in his den, he describes the reproduction of one of Jackson’s paintings, in turn, as “beautiful ... it will be good to live with.” These things you send me, he seems to say, I don’t just acquire them and then throw them in a drawer. What you give me lives with me, and what I send you, I expect will fuel the fire of your living too.

  A letter describing the death of Mrs. French is the only one among this slender ream of correspondence that is, understandably, without an illustration. French’s description of Helen Wilson’s passing is heartbreakingly loving, but this does not preclude his taking the opportunity offered by thanking Jackson for his sympathy to tell Jackson once again the extent to which he has, in a sense, pierced him:

  August 8, 1924

  My dear Jackson,

  It was good to get your [illegible: word? hand?] of sympathy. It shows the man and expresses real feeling with great simplicity of language. It would serve as a key to your success in writing. And yet, bless you, you say: “words are useless anyway.” That’s too true for many but not for you, for these from your hand are like meat to me.

  I tried hard to keep Mrs. French longer—she so wished to live—but her call had come; a call which could not be deferred, and so in her unconscious state, and it may be from the far away hazy shore, she saluted with a smile and took wing. Somehow your personality has worked itself into me and I hold you dear,

  Your friend————

  And the line pierces through the name, French.

  Book review
s, obituaries, and presumed “tributes” to Chevalier Jackson picture him as a friendless loner. “He never had an intimate friend, never a confidante,” one colleague, Dr. John W. Boyce, bluntly declared. Another, the Scottish laryngologist James McCrae, remarking on Jackson’s unfailing generosity and helpfulness but personal detachment said, “He is the warmest-hearted cold-blooded man I ever met” (LCJ, 169). In a posthumous tribute, Louis Clerf described him as having “no intimate friends or confidante,” as never accepting a social invitation, “feeling that life was too short to waste the time.” At the meetings of the various professional societies at which he spoke, we’re told he appeared only at the scientific session and never at the social hour or banquet. Leave it to some sifting in the archives, an accidental bobbing to the surface of a many-paneled wave, to prove the myth untrue—for, in the letters of Thomas R. French to Chevalier Jackson, we find the presence both of confidante and friend. Which is not to say that the relationship does not remain in some essential way mysterious, or that Jackson’s reticence was a cover for a deeply social man. Jackson may have encouraged a perception of himself as friendless, but it seems more likely that what he truly was was quiet, private. He kept his friends to himself. Friends and admirers abound in the documents that shape the archive, as do, in equal measure, mysterious relations, missing parts, and unsolvable riddles.