Elephant Man (35 page)
Authors: Christine Sparks
The beginning of Treves’ fame can be dated from his championship of the Elephant Man, and there were always voices raised to accuse him of exploitation. But
those who knew Treves never doubted the sincerity of his affection for Merrick. If he gained much, he also gave much, and Merrick himself would have been overjoyed to know that his friend had benefited from their association.
To the end of his life, Treves never forgot Merrick, and in his very last book he tried to tell the world the truth about the good man he had discovered trapped inside the body of a monster.
“The spirit of Merrick,” he said, “if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth-browed and clean of limb, and with eyes that flashed undaunted courage.”
Of the Elephant Man’s death, he said this:
“His tortured journey had come to an end. All the way he, like another, had borne on his back a burden almost too grievous to bear. He had been plunged into the Slough of Despond, but with manly steps had gained the farther shore. He had been made ‘a spectacle to all men’ in the heartless streets of Vanity Fair. He had been ill-treated and reviled and bespattered with the mud of Disdain. He had escaped the clutches of the Giant Despair, and at last had reached the ‘Place of Deliverance’ where ‘his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell from his back, so that he saw it no more.’ ”
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Quotations from
Pilgrim’s Progress
by John Bunyan.
To Roberto
A BROOKSFILMS PRODUCTION FOR
PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION
JOHN HURT
ANTHONY HOPKINS
THE ELEPHANT MAN
with
JOHN
GIELGUD
WENDY
HILLER
and
ANNE BANCROFT
as Mrs. Kendal
Screenplay by Christopher DeVore, Eric Bergren, & David Lynch
Executive Producer Stuart Cornfeld
Director of Photography
Music by John Morris
Produced by Jonathan Sanger
Directed by David Lynch
Based on the life of John Merrick, the Elephant Man, and not upon the Broadway play or any other fictional account.
