On Blanche

‘She was famous, too, as a sort of glamorous defective. Violet said it made her mad as hell, the way Violet got painted: blouse glossy and voluminous, like a gorgeous thing, but that she’d set this to rights, so we could hear her voice too. And I remembered: somewhere in Paris I saw a little copy of this painting of a fine woman. Blanche, on display – and even then, I understood the anger in myself that would be nursed by Violet. There she was, so pretty, buxom and velveteen, not all skew-eyed and jutting jaw like me. But she was not free: she was a subject and she was an object.’ (From Saving Lucia, chapter four, as all quotations.)

There is a painting of a woman called Blanche Wittmann by Brouillet. It’s called ‘A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière’ (1887) and represents an imaginary scene of a contemporary scientific demonstration, based on real life, depicting the eminent French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) delivering a clinical lecture and demonstration at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Blanche, the hysteric in question, is a woman alone in a room full of men and she is both subject and object. I am very uncomfortable looking at this painting and draw on this in Saving Lucia. 

Charcot was the foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France and has been called, the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses.’ His work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology; modern psychiatry owes much to the work of Charcot and his direct followers. He was in charge of the Salpêtrière, then an asylum for those who were considered mentally ill; for hysterics. For most of Blanche’s adult life, the hospital was her home. It seems that she died there too, but we do not know where she is buried. She is at once entirely known and unknown. In the late nineteenth century, there were over eight thousand women at the Salpêtrière, and many remained there for life; post-mortem, Monsieur Charcot dissected their brains looking for discernible organic causes such as lesions. He found none. He had initially believed that hysteria was a neurological disorder for which patients were predisposed by hereditary features of their nervous system, but near the end of his life he concluded that hysteria was a psychological disease and the dissections stopped. 

Monsieur Brouillet came to paint me; I was quite the thing against the stygian black of the doctors, don’t you think? The tendrils of my hair escaping down my neck. I had poise and gravitas in the pictures: he did not paint the days I crawled and slavered like a dog from la grande hystérie

Let me tell you a little more about what we know. Marie ‘Blanche’ Wittmann lived between 1859 (possibly) and 1903 (possibly). I have written Marie as her birth name, but in going over what records there are, there appears to have been some doubt about her name and its spelling. Blanche was, however, the name she held during the famous sessions at the Salpêtrière, Paris. Blanche was known as the ‘Queen of the Hysterics’ and, while being treated at the hospital, Charcot used her as one of his ‘hysterics’ to demonstrate the effects of hypnosis. He would also apply magnets to her body and ovarian compression, both of which he believed would work on hysteria, operative upon the nerves. Freud was much influenced by the work of Charcot and observed his work, although he came earlier to different conclusions about the causes of hysteria, attributing them instead to psychiatric causes. 

Hysteria grew and grew under his hands. Do you suppose that he had created it? I worry that I helped. Made madness into a show and circus or made hysteria more, forgive me, more hysterical. When he died, it stopped. I did not think of it anymore and, obviously, neither did he.

It is my understanding that Blanche never left the Salpêtrière, but it appears that she went on to work in a radiology laboratory there while, not far away, Marie Curie carried out her pioneering work. As I researched Saving Lucia, I saw that fictional elements invented by Per Olov Enquist in The Story of Blanche and Marie were assumed to be true, by reviewers and in factual pieces upon her. Enquist makes Blanche Charcot’s lover but also turns her into Curie’s assistant and later her confidant when Curie’s husband, Pierre, is killed; he shows Blanche as having lost both legs and an arm during their work on pitchblende, continuing her work, moving about as a torso on a purpose-made trolley and gives us Blanche’s notebooks: yellow, black and red and all three encased in a brown envelope marked ‘Book of Questions,’ fascinating insight into her life and work, with Curie and Charcot. But these are fictional things. He tells you it is fiction and going through records, articles—even a more recent riposte published by a neurologist in ‘The Lancet’—gives us a clearer picture. That a gripping fiction would so readily be assumed as fact is interesting. Some might argue shaming. Was she not already fascinating enough? This much is alluded to in Saving Lucia. But please, although I include much that is real, do not assume my historical fiction all to be true, because that desecrates the memory of a real person: a person I found captivating and sought to know and respect. 

 I wonder if, in years to come, ideas and imaginings will be written down as facts and what I did not intend or become will be transfigured into untruth. 

At the Salpêtrière, Charcot had kept a vast number of photographs of patients; he also had a lasting visual record of Blanche, in Brouillet’s painting, with Blanche providing an arresting, even glamorous figure, under the mesmerism of Charcot. She is quite the spectacle, isn’t she? But so are the myriad other women captured in photographs (Blanche was also photographed.). When I first saw those photographs and when I think of the huge asylums of times past, it makes me tremble. Ah, I have been mad, not known what time of day it was or where my feet were; whose hands I was looking at or where my fingers ended. I have felt, again, tremors at night, flashbacks of shimmering visceral beauty that were death and horror to me. I have been a case; I have been treated abruptly and called indulgent; reduced to a cipher, a composite of only other people’s opinions of me, instilled in childhood when I was aberrant, an eldritch child. I have been picked up from the floor by brilliant and diligent hands and I have been cured as best I can be by a brilliant psychologist in our NHS, helped by an attentive and determined GP. But I will never be entirely free of the results of trauma, so it is that when I see, really try to see, the women in Saving Lucia; when I see the painting of Blanche and the photographs of her and the other hysterics in Charcot’s great collection, I do not see a case or even an oddity. I just meet the eyes of another woman and I want to sit with her and say, ‘Tell me about you. May I tell you about me?’ And, as for Blanche, Queen of the Hysterics (after Hippolyte, who escaped and that is another story and a point of delicious queer interest in the book), I would want to do the same, to ask her if she were complicit in what Charcot put on, once a week, and which is depicted  in the Brouillet painting; if she said yes, I would have said, ‘Well of course. You are a survivor.’ If no, we would perhaps have talked; thought how to disapprove or abrogate her hysterical responsibilities. How I might be accomplice…

Either way, I would have cleared the room of all those men.

I was a spectacle, a fine thing, under hypnosis. I convulsed, I calmed, rattled and shook at each cue…In years to come, what will they think of this? Am I a gimcrack show; a performer? What then, will they know about the workings of our minds and bodies?

***

…Everything else is the narrative you made for me and not my own legend. The one you accepted for me, not I.

Summer twenty three years ago, the man asked me for directions on a flooded street. I was living and working in Kolkata at the time. November twenty three years ago, I said goodbye to the man. It seemed like, whatever we thought, it could not work. I was too broken, we lived in different countries and many other things. Twenty two years ago I married the man. He is Dixie Delicious here (he is from Georgia), Santa Maria is my late mother who, in my psychological experience was, in death, as in life, a peril to me. I am Alison. It was all broken – you can see. But it didn’t matter then and it does not now. This is an extract from my first book, now out of print, but which I will be bringing back in a different form.

The Man

There was a man on the other side of the street, wading through water happily and going in the opposite direction and he called across to her, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me the way I could get to the Blue Sky Café?’

  Alison was startled because he had chosen a sentence with  pleasing internal rhymes (though its tetrameter was imperfect) and momentarily thought she might have imagined the man. She said, ‘Go straight ahead to the corner and you’ll see it there.’ To have attempted the beckoning symmetry of meter really would have been a shade too far. Anyway, what she should have said was, ‘Turn round and go straight ahead and you’ll see it there’ because the man whirled, lost in the watery street. Thus the ability to give inaccurate directions for the simplest of journeys was a point he raised with her later that day when they met on the same side of the street. And still he followed her (with his own directions), alter ego, embolus, itch and all to Albion and the funny old house and came to visit a while and then never left. 

And she told the man, ‘I forgive you for the broken tetrameter.’ 

And he said, ‘Your directions suck and why didn’t you just point to the signpost?’ 

And she said, ‘Signposts and I have a difficult history.’ 

His name was Dixie Delicious. 

Alison met him, as if in a story, stumbling across a book by a familiar author in an unfamiliar place―and this was, truly, how it was, after the day in the flooded street in Kolkata, Eric Newby, and the very wrong directions which turned out, in a funny sort of way, to be the right ones. Dixie Delicious had a calm eye; he didn’t wake in the night, sitting bolt upright, like Alison did. He had faith: he had it in the palm of his hand and the heel of his shoe and she looked at it and saw possibility and she followed him, just as he followed her.  Sometimes, they fell over one another and laughed as they travelled on. And in another city, Alison watched him go out and imagined what he saw, single and indivisible: this was how it went. 

Benares, Varanasi, one of the world’s oldest inhabited cities. It was not his city, but she sensed he felt at home there. He sat by the river at dawn and a multitude was there, bathing and praying and offering up what they could. Look at him. Look at how still he is. How does he do that? The sun hit the water and he watched them quietly, not able to offer a libation, yet content to watch and bless vicariously. He bought tea and set it by her bed. Then, later, mangoes, limes, tomatoes, onions and some olive oil from an ayurvedic medicine shop so that he could make a dressing of sorts. He begged a small hillock of salt; his eyes said he hoped she would be proud of what he had done. On the balcony of the room, the light was dazzling. There, he assembled the breakfast for her, and called her out from her room. With his call, though, she sat at ease; he smoothed her hair, put on her hat for her and gave her what he had made. They said little as they ate and watched the sun, still in its ascent. The colour of the Ganges changed from white and gold to the more familiar muddy brown. Now, he stood up and told her that, from now on, he would stop running, stop travelling away from and start travelling to a destination. Whenever he put one foot in front of the other, it would be with her. She understood and that was that. There were smiles of complicity.

 ‘Stay with me.’ 

‘I don’t know if I can. I am broken; was never made properly—and there is more than one of me.’ 

‘And you think any of that bothers me?’ 

In the lanes below, the monkeys chattered. They could smell the food he had prepared and were ready to steal. He spoke a prayer. The heat of the day was becoming pressing already and the yoghurt sellers a little further along the street were doing a good trade from their trestles full of clay cups, filled with the cool, sour yoghurt.

‘And again and again, I don’t care who you are and if you are more than one,’ he said. 

‘What about my dead mother? Dead Santa Maria?’

 ‘We’ll ignore her.’ 

‘And Brother who Might as Well have been Dead?’

 ‘If he Might as Well have been Dead, does it matter? He’s nixed anyway, isn’t he?’

 ‘I hurt myself.’

 ‘I’ll stanch the blood or maybe just tie you up to stop you doing it.’

‘That sounds alluring,’ said Alison. Then, ‘What about God who was―or should I say is Dead if He ever Existed?’ 

And Dixie Delicious said, ‘He is alive. He was down by the river.’ 

When he was ten, Dixie Delicious happened to be in an elevator in a hotel in Dallas, Texas. In walked a tall man; the boy looked at the man’s shoes. From there, it was a long way up, but look he did. The boy saw that it was Johnny Cash. No, he must be wrong. But hang on; Johnny Cash must have had to ride in an elevator some time, so the boy looked again. He nudged his little brother, ‘Curtis: I think it’s Johnny Cash.’ Maybe the man heard him, maybe not. But he bent low and smiled a warm, wide smile and said, ‘Helllllllo boys.’

The child was star-struck and cannot remember if he said hello back; little brother was possibly unmoved, being too young and green to comprehend that Johnny Cash was not to be seen riding in an elevator with you any day of the week. Cash was, like him, a Southern man. Little links kind of went in deep: faith and difficulty and broken things and joy. And riding in that elevator. Alison noticed that Dixie Delicious would listen and feel at home; saw that Cash was flawed, powerful and weak. He had struggled with addiction and the darkest of insecurities; had gone on a journey from the Arkansas mud to a meeting with a luminary or a President. Cash had faith that was angry and brave and music that haunted even when it jangled. So our boy shared and, for a quiet moment, he picked ‘Down there by the train’ with its invocation to meet him if you had travelled the low road; if, broken and sinning, you had passed the same way. 

‘Could that be so? That my friends and I don’t have to do this alone?’ 

There are some times when the puzzles and the headaches just drift away: the meeting of the man, the thought of the young Dixie Delicious and the notion that now the man who was THE ONE—who could not be otherwise—had a faith that was flawed and wanting and made sense, now that was like moisture on Alison’s parched and callow soul and for a while it washed away her feeling of the absurdity and booted those who created it out of the door. It was temporary, but it was beautiful while it lasted: it was utterly beautiful, and she had the tiniest of notions that one day it would come back. One fine day when golden light breaks through the mist and, as in the song, Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus, carries John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln; when rifts are healed and the person who hated you forgives you. 

Tear-drops fell like summer tempests and Alison, glimpsing the world through another’s eyes, (sometime while listening to Johnny Cash) sensed possibility and found it both gorgeous and painful. But we must carry on, hankie applied, and tell you that when Dixie Delicious followed Alison there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from both families once everyone began to understand that he might be staying. For issuing from tomorrow, come today and other people, when time is no longer away. 

Dead Santa Maria was there, inviting them all out, smilingly, winningly, ‘Come and see my bitch daughter. Look what she’s done now.’ 

One of the neighbours came out from her house with Dead Santa Maria and shrieked, ‘What the fuck are you doing marrying your holiday romance?’ and there was stony silence from all members of both families, probably for the same reason. The words shotgun wedding hung heavy in the air and over in Georgia the furiously Anglophile family of Dixie Delicious went off ‘yonder’ a bit. Alison dutifully tried to win over them, despite her not being a good church-going girl from below the Mason-Dixon Line. She might by now have been Oxbridge and able to read Greek and Latin, but she was still a liability of big emotions, with a tendency to curse, an untidy Anglo-Cymric background, two dead parents and a Brother who Might as Well have been Dead. In normal families, older siblings didn’t usually leave the younger ones out in a dark and shadowy wood to be eaten by wolves, and normal people didn’t discuss violent and splashing death over tea. Did they? 

‘It’s okay,’ laughed Dixie Delicious. ‘My family is entirely dysfunctional, too.’

‘What about the way the dead are present all the time? That there’s little distinction between who’s dead and who’s not? In my case, who’s real and who’s not? Santa Maria is now Dead Santa Maria, but it hasn’t made any difference!’ 

‘Ah, maybe not that bit, although my mother insists that being dead is no excuse, but that’s because she’s a steel magnolia.’