Bedlam (26 page)

C
ORNWALL

W
ESTMORELAND
, J
AMAICA

N
OVEMBER I6TH
, 1811

Dearest Jamie,

Ever since Jim and I left England, my letters to you have been scribbled in what at this hour looks to have been an unrelieved condition of one or more of sea-sickness, disorientation, heat, exhaustion, and despair. This hour being the first in almost a year I find myself cool and becalmed, I intend to celebrate by starting over. So make believe this is the first letter you receive from me. It’s the first I’ll address to you c/o Mr. Poynder—who has always seemed a friend, don’t you think?—and who knows? it may just be the first you do receive, if you receive any at all.

After nearly three months’ travel, two and a half to reach Black River Bay, a fortnight awaiting the wind to let up sufficiently for the thirty-mile trip west along the coast to Savannah la Mar, whence by wagon the five miles here, Jim and I arrived safe and sound on February 25th of this year. ‘Here’ is Cornwall, the westerly of two sugar plantations owned by Mr. Lewis of the London War Office. Though born in Jamaica, he no longer resides here; his connexion to the island at this late stage of his life is entirely commercial. (Our war with France has meant there’s good
money to be made in Jamaica sugar.) The estate—a fine one of near 1,700 acres worked by 250 slaves—is managed by an overseer, an agent, a book-keeper, and me, whose domain is the kitchen-garden and main house, a pleasant, mahogany-floored, teak-shuttered, deep-verandahed (here called piazzaed), tamarind-shaded villa situated in a clearing of the forest with a distant view of lilac-coloured hills.

As I write, Jim translates Pliny aloud in the next room, with prompting from his tutor, Mr. Pullen. I sit at a small orangewood desk before a window of the parlour, a cool dark room scented by occasional breezes through the log-wood (like the hawthorn but more fragrant) that overhangs the west side of the house. I am squinting out through the shutters into blinding sunshine where a hedge called “penguin,” resembling a row of giant pine-apples, marks the perimeter of the yard. Sleeping against it, like tossed dunnage, is a six-foot serpent with the girth to swallow a kitten. If I lean forward, tilt the shutters, and look upward, I can see, huddled in a corner of the piazza ceiling, a land crab—a rat in armour—poised to drop down and scuttle indoors the first chance it gets. It’s a strange Eden Jim and I have come to, Jamie, yet all in all benign enough, for those who don’t falter. The serpents are big but somnolent, incapable of serious mischief. Worse are the mosquitoes, the humid heat in summer, the human settlement, and our distance from you.

Of the mosquitoes I’ll say only I’ve seen two Negroes walking in the dusk through a swarm of them. The man behind placing his hand against the white shirt of the other, when he drew it away he left a palm-print of blood.

The heat is like being cocooned in a wool blanket and steamed. Every object the desperate eye fixes on inspires a queasy loathing. Because of the heat—though the weather has been cooler lately—I now wear my hair close-cropt, under something like a habit. You wouldn’t recognize me.

By human settlement I don’t mean our countrymen, who by and
large are rough, amiable sorts caught up in the race between a quick fortune and a quick death, or our Negroes, who live peaceable, boisterous lives in their neat rows of thatched huts like English cottages (only better, with mahogany furniture and each having its own garden and fruit trees), I mean the low, mean, stinking, fly-blown, dusty, gloomy, plaguy, huckster-ridden, ramshackle towns. But out here four miles from Savannah la Mar, one can forget—until market day—that such desecrations of nature exist.

The only other human torment here is the Methodists, both white and brown, who by their preaching cause the poor Negroes to tremble at the name of who but Jesus Christ. Mercifully, at Cornwall we have a tradition of no forced church attendance of any denomination. Life for the Cornwall Negroes is hardly perfect, but at least for them Sunday is truly a day of rest and recreation.

All seven days here are filled with Negro song and Negro laughter. It’s like Bedlam, except with everybody mostly sane and mostly happy. As for the nights, when darkness falls it’s a black stage curtain. If it’s cloudy, all goes in three strides to pitch, but as often the moon or a panoply of stars or pale blue sheets of lightning fill the sky and illuminate everything outside and in as bright as day. But dark or light, the night here is more raucous than any Negro fun: screeches and screams of wild parrots and clucking hens and who knows what else. When I ask the English what it is makes such-and-such hair-raising sound, they have no idea, tell me merely I’ll get used to it, while the Negroes know only their own names for the creatures and their descriptions are tailored to keep children inside at night, not to calm adult fears. So now I’m part nocturnal myself, but while the beasts are only going about their blood-curdling lives, I’m lying stiff and mute, clutching at my sheets, imagination working away.

But the big fellow against the penguin-hedge begins to stir, our crab grows impatient in its nook and needs to be unseated with a broom before it essays a window, and by Jim’s more frequent and audible yawns I would say the lesson next door is winding down. And so must I—

Your close-cropt loving

Margaret

The first time the Tuke-inspired Edward Wakefield and his Tuke-inspired committee gained access to Bethlem, no one bothered to tell me. Somehow their visit was arranged direct through one of the governors, an alderman named Cox, who accompanied them, as the rules said he must. This was two years ago this month, which would make it April 1814. Unfortunately for everybody, Alderman Cox, though a governor with two years’ experience, had never once walked through the place. Unprepared as he was, the first few sights Alavoine showed them on the men’s side so distressed him he collapsed in tears and had to be helped back to the steward’s office.

There, with Cox sobbing into his hands, Alavoine (interpreting the rules a little severely) informed Wakefield that their guide being out of commission, he and his colleagues must depart the premises immediately. When Wakefield asked if there was another governor in the building who could accompany them, Alavoine, expressing amazement at the question, assured him there was not, and added (patting his pocket) that though he happened to have on his person a printed list of every single governor and his private address, it would take exceptional circumstances for him to reveal a single name on it. When Wakefield only looked at him uncomprehending,
Alavoine tried again, using different words. It was no use. According to every means of reckoning known to our steward, the Quaker was a senseless blockhead.

Alavoine next intimated that if a list of governors was wanted, it must be got from our clerk Mr. Poynder. Accordingly, Wakefield (who was too busy himself comforting the hysterical Cox) sent his assistant with Alavoine to Poynder’s office to fetch the list. But when they got there, Poynder’s own assistant regretted he could provide nothing without permission from his superior, who was just then, he said, detained in another part of the building.
Sotto voce
(not thinking Alavoine stood right there) he indicated the fee was a guinea, payable in advance to himself, so he could enter it on the books.

Wakefield’s assistant was still marvelling at this extortion when Poynder walked in and, being apprised of the request for the list, outright denied it, refusing to supply any explanation or defence for doing so. This left Wakefield’s assistant no choice but to return empty-handed to Alavoine’s office, where the steward repeated his demand they all leave the building at once. As you can imagine, it was an unhappy posse of reformers our steward accompanied to the front gate, with Wakefield and his assistant each supporting an arm of the incontinently blubbering Cox.

Now, Alavoine had not got very far with this grisly tale before a schoolboy could have told us we weren’t off to a dazzling start with our latest band of Christian scrutineers. As soon as I heard out Alavoine, I quick-stepped to Poynder’s office to tell him I understood perfectly why he’d acted as he did and assured him at a time like this, when we were dependent on private and government funds for the building of our new hospital, I welcomed adverse publicity no more than he did, and that’s why he must
immediately deliver, by his own hand, to Wakefield at his private residence, a complete and up-to-date list of our governors,
gratis,
and make sure it was
gratis,
because if I ever heard money was paid for it I’d have double the amount out of his wages.

Then we all braced for the next assault, which was not long coming. On May 2nd, Wakefield was back with a seven-member party including the revolutionist David Williams, who had once visited here with Tuke; Charles Western, M.P. for Essex; and Mr. Arnald, the artist. Their guide this time was a governor with a tougher hide than Cox’s, Robert Calvert, who I’ve never spoke to in my life and now never will. Though I myself had every intention of being there, for insertion of the occasional prophylactic word, a previous engagement at Bridewell ran long, and by the time I rushed back to Bethlem, our inspectors had been and gone. These Quakers rise early, dash about like farts in a glove, and vanish in a shimmer of silence.

On this their second visit, by a mistaken policy perhaps of easy-in, they instructed Alavoine to take them first to the female gallery, where, in one of the side rooms, they found ten mainly naked women, each chained to the wall by one arm. All were barefoot and some missing toes owing to frostbite. As the visitors stood gaping, one of the women, Arabella Fenwick, lifted her head and to their amazement addressed them in a polite and coherent manner. She told them her maiden and married names and said she’d been a teacher of languages, a circumstance Alavoine corroborated with a nod after they turned to him as one man when she said it. To all appearances, Mrs. Fenwick was perfectly sensible of her brutalized condition. In answer to a question as to what she and those chained alongside her did all day, she replied with a smile, “Why, sir, we do nothing. Like the immortals.”

The stench in that space being pretty bad, the interview drew to a rapid close, but first, taking a cue from Mr. Arnald, who’d been sketching away, Mrs. Fenwick begged her guests to leave her with pencil and paper, so that with her free hand she might draw a little, and so pass the time.

But no one except Mr. Arnald carrying such instruments, and he needing his, Mr. Western, the M.P., made a little ceremony of slipping some money to Alavoine, to see the lady got what she asked for.

I’ve since released Mrs. Fenwick from her chains and given her pencil and paper, for I can see too clearly the leer on the old steward’s face as he pockets the cash.
Hhay hahshuhr yho, s-hayhr, shee-huhl gheht whahts c-hoomhing t-hoh hayhr.

In the cells on that same side though they found (as they reported) women “in as clean and wholesome state as it is possible to preserve them,” they discovered others (all wet or dirty patients) naked and chained on trough beds of straw. More than one of these latter patients complained very bitterly, though not about her nakedness, her dirtiness, the stink, the vermin, the cold, or being chained to the wall, but about the plot among the female servants to embezzle her tea and sugar.

By the time the tour was done on the women’s side, more than one member of the party was honking in a handkerchief or dabbing at tears. But nobody was doing a Cox.

In the men’s gallery they chanced upon five patients handcuffed on a bench along the wall of a side room and one very noisy patient chained tight by both his right arm and right leg. All being barefoot, one of them, described by Wakefield as a mere lad-Arthur Jackman I think it must have been—complained bitterly of his cold feet. (When David Williams reached out and felt them,
yes, they were very cold, black and cold.) All except Arthur and the noisy patient were, in Wakefield’s opinion (as he murmured), “dreadful idiots.” Their mode of confinement combining with their nakedness (except for the blanket-gown or in some cases a small rug laid across the shoulders) gave this room, as the reformer would memorably express it at the Inquiry, the appearance of a dog kennel.

You can see what’s happening. The disciple by uncovering dreadful evil enacts his master’s example, only outdoing him by “discovering” abuses at respected, world-famous Bethlem Hospital and not mere York Asylum that nobody cares about.

In an interesting irony, our republican visitors—being of the school that madness is a neat and classifiable affliction and it’s inconceivable your soft-spoken madman today will be throwing furniture tomorrow—took particular offence at our democratic distribution of the furious and violent patients amongst the mild and convalescent. What especially disturbed them was witnessing a quiet, civil man, a soldier and native of Poland, brutally attacked by another patient, also a soldier, who (as Alavoine explained to the company) always singled out the Pole for particular resentment, calling him a “lousy Spaniard.”

You can be sure at Wakefield’s London Asylum those two will be strictly segregated. The Pole in his uniform in the window with a teapot, the other who-knows-where. This is if cannon fodder can be assumed to have private sponsors with deep pockets.

Later, as the party stood gazing at a group of bed-lying patients, one man rose naked and walked quietly a few paces down the inside wall of the gallery before he was set upon by two keepers. Without inquiry or observation, not a syllable spoken, they threw
him forcibly back down on his bed, leg-locked him, and walked away.

Among those patients granted licence to move at will through the galleries, the chief source of amusement that morning was a louse race enlivened by ha’penny wagers.

Well, you have only to compare conditions at Bethlem to those at The Retreat—where not only do the patients dwell in vales of loving kindness but no one has lost a toe in twenty years, all are issued decent clothes so they can feel themselves on a level with their keepers, and everybody is provided with recreative occupations that assure a pitch of worthy endeavour appropriate to the halcyon spirit of this restorative interlude in an industrious life—to notice we weren’t doing very well.

And that was before Wakefield’s party came upon our American sailor James Norris, decked out a dozen years now in his contraption of iron harnesses and bars and riveted collars.

The reason Norris was kept this way was the murderousness of his rages combined with his wrists being thicker than his hands, rendering handcuffs useless. Still, none of this hardware would have been necessary had not my own more humane suggestion, that he be kept in two cages and simply driven into the other when one needed cleaning, been overruled by a majority of the subcommittee. (To be fair, their decision was principally owing to a lack of space, the Government requiring us in those years to take in dozens of our soldiers and sailors whom the war with Bonaparte was spitting back out as lunatics when not in a spray of gore.) The result was, by the time Wakefield
et al.
laid eyes on Norris, for nine years he’d been unable to do more than half-recline on his bed, and then only on his back, though sometimes with difficulty he
could achieve a standing position against the iron pole his neck-ring was chained to. But whichever of these two attitudes he assumed, a keeper on the other side of the wall could use the neck-ring to pull him close against it any time he wanted.

Even when Norris was still powerful and raging (and let me emphasize this was the most determined, ferocious, and malignant maniac I ever encountered in my life), the restraints decided upon seemed too elaborately severe, and now that he was fifty-six or -seven years of age and consumptive, with muscles atrophied from lack of use, and no longer verging at every moment on the utmost pitch of violence, those restraints appeared ten times more elaborately severe than they needed to be. And a thousand times more if you happened to believe that no restraint at all is ever necessary, on anybody.

On the May 2nd visit—while Arnald, thankful I should think to have a sitter so accustomed to keeping still, set to work at his sketch—Norris, when he wasn’t coughing, discussed with his visitors a variety of topics, especially those touching on the war, in which he displayed a lively interest. By all evidence he was fully aware of his situation, as he was of his lifelong proclivity to violence, freely admitting he wasn’t fit to be trusted without some sort of restraint, since no one was less able to answer for his actions than himself.

It’s interesting how the more lucidly a patient expresses his understanding of his condition, the more likely others are to doubt its reality. In being never actually believed, or believed only so far as the preconceptions of his self-appointed saviours allow, an honest articulate lunatic such as a Norris or a Matthews must ever be a poor advertisement for those charged with his care. Meanwhile, his would-be saviours, who have no such responsibility, will always
find it easy, before they move on to their next self-gratifying act of public virtue, to make a great deal of noise about how much more concern they feel for him than his caretakers ever did.

Still conversing with Wakefield’s party, Norris proceeded to enumerate his social enjoyments, boasting what a voracious reader he’d become in his confinement and how generous his fellow inmates, the keepers, and I (though he didn’t mention me) had been in supplying him with newspapers and books. Histories and lives, he said, were his favourite, and he would read them cover to cover, always more than once. His visitors were still making noises of admiration at this when he inquired their opinion of the historian Gibbon’s assertion that a man need only read something over twice to avoid the inconvenience of notes. After everybody looked at each other wondering what to answer, a Mr. Bevans cleared his throat and suggested that Mr. Gibbon as a man of genius might perhaps be a special case, though for himself he’d never tried it.

Norris’s eyes narrowed at this. They then went to his dog, Philadelphia, which had been busy sniffing at ankles. Besides his books, Norris declared, he had a sincerer friend in Philadelphia than most people can boast in a lifetime.

No one said anything; most just looked at the dog and smiled. The only sound was Arnald’s pencil. David Williams bent down to give a scratch to the head of Philadelphia, who received it luxuriously.

“And who, then, Mr. Norris,” Charles Western, M.P., called into the silence, from the other side of the room—for he had crossed to the window and was looking down on London Wall—“would it be you know in Philadelphia?”

“A sincere friend,” Norris answered, calmly enough, though as
the politician turned back round to the room, his eyes were on him pretty sharp. “The best on this earth.”

“Yes, but would you be willing to tell us his name?”

“Certainly,” replied Norris, still calm. “I just did. His name is Philadelphia.”

“Ah yes, of course—” Western darting waggish glances at the party. “Mr. Philadelphia…of…Philadelphia!”

“If you like, sir.” This was spoke in a whisper, owing to chronic shortness of breath. Yet feeble as he was, had not Norris at that moment been shackled head to foot, he’d be hurtling through the air like a flying monkey to grip Western’s fat head and smash it against the wall until its contents spilt like a rotten gourd’s. Instead, the breathing slowed, the eyes dulled. That’s the look you see in Arnald’s broadside image of Norris, a blank gaze off into empty space. After that, the eyes returned to the newspaper in his lap, which, for some reason, perhaps because it was too difficult to render or might over-complicate his meaning, Arnald neglected to include.