The Sunday Gentleman (23 page)

Several years before his death in California, someone asked him if he had ever really cared for Frank Merriwell. He thought a moment, then replied, “Did I love Merriwell? Not at first. Those early stories were more of a joke to me than anything else. But when it got so that a half million kids were reading him every week, I began to realize that I had about the biggest chance to influence the youth of this country that any man ever had. Yes, I loved him. And I loved him most because no boy, if he followed in his tracks, ever did anything that he need be ashamed of.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

When I was a boy growing up in Wisconsin, the Frank Merriwell stories were still available, but had declined sharply in popularity. In those days, I recall, I was devoted to a more scientifically oriented hero named Tom Swift. I was also reading
The Red-Headed Outfield
by Zane Grey,
Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Pitching in a Pinch
by Christy Mathewson—until, still in preadolescence, I graduated to
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by A. Conan Doyle,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne, and
Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham.

Yet, somewhere in between I had finally gone over to Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell. The dime novels, as I have said, were still around. Patten had ceased writing them three years before I was born, but his stories could be bought on Main Street in my hometown at Becker’s Tobacco Store, and I bought them and read them voraciously. The invincible Merriwell was an idol of my grammar school period, and idols of one’s formative years die hard. But as I grew older, matured, I saw, in retrospect, that he was quite impossible. Yet, I could never satirize or dismiss him, any more than I could derogate the best moments of my youth—and it was with difficulty, when I finally wrote about him, that I found the objectivity to chide his purity and perfection.

I always knew that I would write about him, and about the unappreciated literary giant who created him, but for many years I could not find the time. I did set up one file folder, among the many others, labeled “Merriwell-Patten,” and from time to time I deposited appropriate clippings or notes in it.

One day in 1952, I learned that an acquaintance of mine, a film agent named Ira Ure, had gone into partnership with a film producer named Tony London, and they had acquired the rights to turn the Frank Merriwell stories into a television series. I spoke to the partners, told them of my interest, and learned that they had a considerable amount of factual information on Patten and Merriwell, obtained from the author’s family. I told them I would like to add this material to my own and write a story about Patten for a major periodical. From their point of view, this was a wonderful idea. Merriwell had receded into obscurity, and any published story would advertise their projected television series. From my point of view, the possibility of a television show gave me the excuse to write a story I had always wanted to write.

I asked
Reader’s Digest
magazine if they were interested. They were very much interested. And so, enjoying every minute of it, I wrote “Paragon of the Paperbacks,” and it appeared in the January, 1953, issue of
Reader’s Digest
. Its appearance flushed out the fact that there were numerous ardent collectors of the Gilbert Patten dime novels throughout the land. Even one friend of mine, the late Horace McCoy, author of
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
, telephoned me in a fever of ecstasy. “My God, Irving, that was a wonderful article about Patten,” he said, “and about time someone did it. Here we’ve known each other all these years, and I didn’t know you were interested, and you didn’t know I have a complete collection of every Frank Merriwell story ever published!”

While the publication of my story endeared me to Merriwell devotees, and was apparently read by millions who enjoy the curiosities of Americana and literature, it made no impression on the executive pioneers of television. The Merriwell series never developed, and the producers moved on to other projects.

However, one of the disappointed producers, Tony London, remained friendly with the widow of Patten’s only son. Her name was Mrs. Harvan Barr Patten, and she dwelt in Vista, California, and her basement was an unexplored repository for what was left of her father-in-law’s literary estate. Since London’s interest in Patten and Merriwell did not diminish in the ensuing six years, it was to him that Mrs. Patten turned in 1959. She was about to move and had to determine how to dispose of her father-in-law’s old manuscripts, which were still stored in several boxes in her basement. London agreed to review this material, which had remained unopened for eighteen years.

Not long after he had explored Mrs. Patten’s basement, I received a telephone call from Tony London. I had not spoken to him more than a few times since the publication of my Patten article six or seven years earlier, and I was surprised to hear from him. There was repressed excitement in his voice. At last, he blurted out the reason for his call. By a fantastic stroke of luck, he said, he had uncovered a minor literary treasure.

What he had found, while poking through the manuscripts in Mrs. Patten’s basement, was an autobiography that the creator of Frank Merriwell had written but never published. The manuscript was filled with fresh and little-known, or heretofore unknown, information about Gilbert Patten, and was written with a good deal of candor, even when treating with his personal life. Patten revealed that he was forced into his first marriage, which lasted twelve years and produced his only son; that his impulsive second marriage to a lively Southern girl ended because, among other things, she was flirtatious; that his third wife, Carol, daughter of a Union officer and educated abroad, gave him his happiest times. Interestingly, although he lived until 1945, Patten brought his autobiography up to only 1918. However, he had added a section on his third wife, which ended all he would ever write of his life: “Our honeymoon lasted more than twenty years. Carol died the twenty-first of August, 1938.”

There was much more detail about the dime novel era and the saga of Merriwell, but I had heard enough to know it was a valuable find. When London finally posed his question—“Could this be published as a book today?”—I replied without reservation, “Yes.” Of course, it would require an editor, as well as a writer who could bring the story along from the time the autobiography ended, when Patten was fifty-two, until the time his life ended, when he was seventy-eight.

Because of my own interest in Patten and Merriwell, because I had already published five books (three of them biography), because one of my books,
The Chapman Report
, was enjoying a popular success at the time, Tony London inquired if I would be interested in preparing Patten’s autobiography for publication. I told him that at another time I would have undertaken it, but my mind had turned to the creation of fiction, and that I would have to pass up this opportunity. But, I added, I was still interested enough to see if I could help get the autobiography into print.

After numerous inquiries among my author friends, I was able to direct London to a writers’ organization, and through this organization the Patten story fell into the able hands of Harriet Hinsdale, a Los Angeles playwright and novelist. In 1964,
Frank Merriwell’s “Father”
, as edited by Harriet Hinsdale, assisted by Tony London, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press. In its pages, I learned that, according to the American Bible Society, the Holy Book had sold 545,214,000 copies in the United States in 143 years. “Yet in the short span of less than 20 years, it has been estimated by the publishers, that of the Merriwell books alone, about 500,000,000 were printed.”

The literati may make what they wish of those figures (now being increased by the appearance of a new series of juvenile paperbacks featuring Frank Merriwell, Jr.). As for myself, I am gratified to have contributed, in however small a way, to a brief revival of the noble, intrepid, and flawless Frank Merriwell in the dark age of the anti-hero.

7

They Cut Away His

Conscience

Periods of mental depression—“the blues,” as most people like to call them—are as much a part of every human being’s heritage as death and taxes. Normal persons, however, are able to snap out of these spells readily and regularly. Usually, a stiff drink, a fresh experience, a bit of good news, a short trip, or even a new day, will turn the trick.

But these simple cures, unfortunately, do not work for everyone. Often, the causes of depression are too deep-rooted, and the results too acute, for the victim to function normally. When this happens, the family doctor is prescribed, or a psychiatrist, and possibly insulin or electric shock treatments. Sometimes, however, even these measures do not help, and the patient becomes too morbidly depressed and psychopathic to perform the most ordinary workaday tasks of living.

The illness can take many forms. The patient may become obsessed with worries, agitated by countless fears, haunted by agonizing anxieties. He may reach a purgatory of the mind: he cannot live, and he cannot die. He may become sufficiently psychotic to require confinement, or become insane, or, wishing he were dead, attempt suicide.

When a human being reaches this stage, and all obvious cures seem to have failed, there still remains a treatment of the last resort. This is a drastic operation which, though relatively safe and painless, has been performed about 20,000 times throughout the world, on poor and prominent alike. It is a form of psychosurgery known as prefrontal lobotomy.

During the operation, a thin knife is used to sever the tissue of the frontal lobes of the brain, which govern a person’s social behavior, from the thalamus, at the lower rear of the brain, an area considered to be the center of a person’s emotions. The frontal lobes, the gray matter behind the forehead, are generally conceded to be the storehouse of a human’s foresight and insight, his imagination, self-consciousness, anticipation, which when tinged by painful emotion, become the seat of his apprehension and anxiety. By disconnecting these frontal lobes from the rest of the brain centers, the pressure of worry and mental pain is permanently removed.

Prefrontal lobotomy, first tried in 1936 in Lisbon by an elderly Portuguese neurologist, who won a Nobel Prize for his accomplishment, is probably the most radical method so far invented in modem times to relieve mental distress. The operation is no mere opening of flesh and bone to remove some tangible malignancy. Actually, the operation seems to make an incision into the very stuff of Life.

The fact is, the man who submits to a prefrontal lobotomy comes out of the anesthetic a different person. He may appear the same physically, but his personality is changed, often totally. There are those who feel this is a good thing, since he couldn’t live with his old self, anyway. There are others who insist this is a bad thing, an unpredictable infringement on the Creator’s work.

Thus, in the years since its inception, prefrontal lobotomy has been the center of a heated, worldwide controversy. The neuropsychiatrists who favor the operation can back up their stand with the fact that prefrontal lobotomy prevents insanity and suicide and alleviates pain by reducing anxiety and removing worry. Thus, they can show that it usually makes men happier. Two of the foremost exponents of this school, physicians connected with an eastern university, strongly favor the operation. “Prefrontal lobotomy is an operation of last resort,” they write. “It should be performed only on those patients who no longer have a reasonable hope of spontaneous recovery. It should be done only in cases of threatened disability or suicide, and only after conservative measures have failed. It should be done with the full appreciation of the changes in personality that will inevitably be brought about…” Once the operation is performed, say these advocates of lobotomy, and the patients find themselves freed of their old tensions, they learn the surgery has made “life particularly agreeable to them and they enjoy it to the fullest.”

On the other hand, there is the school of thought that can prove, also from factual evidence, that prefrontal lobotomy converts patients into docile, inert, often useless drones, stripping them of their old powers, giving them convulsive seizures, making them indifferent to social amenities, filling them with aggressive misbehavior, and impairing their foresight and insight. Then, there are those who feel the operation tampers with the God substance, who feel that if it cuts out a man’s cares, it also cuts out his soul and his conscience. But the greatest number of critics are less opposed to the operation itself than to its indiscriminate use. Dr, Nolan D. C. Lewis, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, says, “In recent years, early cases are being subjected to the operation in ever increasing numbers, often without adequate psychiatric examination. Such widespread application of a radical surgical method should be limited, until there is more proof of what the actual results involve.”

Neither side, in the disagreement, is able to marshal adequately decisive statistics as evidence—although, currently, the Veterans Administration Psychiatric Division, which has performed 1,200 of these lobotomies, is in the process of making a survey of the results. Their findings may, one day, help evaluate the operation’s merits and settle the controversy. But, while surveys may seem to show whether or not the results justify the attendant changes in personality, it is doubtful if statistics will ever actually be able to solve the human equation involved. For, in trying to determine if an operation has been good or bad, what absolute measuring stick or standard can be used to judge? And from whose point of view can judgment be made? From the point of view of the patient? Or from the point of view of those around him? Or from the point of view of the doctor in the case?

Out of the 2,000 to 3,000 prefrontal lobotomies performed in the United States since 1936, I have had the opportunity, in the last few years, to come in particularly close contact with one case. From the details of this single case, perhaps, the reader may be able to judge for himself the moral and medical rights and wrongs involved in psychosurgery. But before setting down the events in the life of Larry Cassidy, as I shall call him, I must remind the reader that these things happened, that the incidents here put down are fact, not fiction.