Frank Bidart
Ellen West heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream . . . But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT . . . cannot. Only to my husband I'm not simply a "case." But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife. * * * Why am I a girl? I ask my doctors, and they tell me they don't know, that it is just "given." But it has such implications—; and sometimes, I even feel like a girl. * * * Now, at the beginning of Ellen's thirty-second year, her physical condition has deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton, and weighs only 92 pounds. * * * About five years ago, I was in a restaurant, eating alone with a book. I was not married, and often did that . . . —I'd turn down dinner invitations, so I could eat alone; I'd allow myself two pieces of bread, with butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of vanilla ice cream, at the end,— sitting there alone with a book, both in the book and out of it, waited on, idly watching people,— when an attractive young man and woman, both elegantly dressed, sat next to me. She was beautiful—; with sharp, clear features, a good bone structure—; if she took her make-up off in front of you, rubbing cold cream again and again across her skin, she still would be beautiful— more beautiful. And he,— I couldn't remember when I had seen a man so attractive. I didn't know why. He was almost a male version of her,— I had the sudden, mad notion that I wanted to be his lover . . . —Were they married? were they lovers? They didn't wear wedding rings. Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed politics. They didn't touch . . . —How could I discover? Then, when the first course arrived, I noticed the way each held his fork out for the other to taste what he had ordered . . . They did this again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent smiles, for each course, more than once for each dish—; much too much for just friends . . . —Their behavior somehow sickened me; the way each gladly put the food the other had offered into his mouth—; I knew what they were. I knew they slept together. An immense depression came over me . . . —I knew I could never with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth: happily myself put food into another's mouth—; I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal. * * * Even as a child, I saw that the "natural" process of aging is for one's middle to thicken— one's skin to blotch; as happened to my mother. And her mother. I loathed "Nature." At twelve, pancakes became the most terrible thought there is. . . I shall defeat "Nature." In the hospital, when they weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt. * * * January 16. The patient is allowed to eat in her room, but comes readily with her husband to afternoon coffee. Previously she had stoutly resisted this on the ground that she did not really eat but devoured like a wild animal. This she demonstrated with utmost realism . . . . Her physical examination showed nothing striking. Salivary-glands are markedly enlarged on both sides. January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the "mutual permeation" of the "world of the body" and the "world of the spirit." Says that her own poems are "hospital poems . . . weak—without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly." February 8. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached herself to an elegant, very thin female patient. Homo- erotic component strikingly evident. February 15. Vexation, and torment. Says that her mind forces her always to think of eating. Feels herself degraded by this. Has entirely, for the first time in years, stopped writing poetry. * * * Callas is my favorite singer, but I've only seen her once—; I've never forgotten that night. . . —It was in Tosca, she had long before lost weight, her voice had been, for years, deteriorating, half itself. . . When her career began, of course, she was fat, enormous—; in the early photographs, sometimes I almost don't recognize her. . . The voice too then was enormous— healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of crude effects, even vulgar, almost out of high spirits, too much health. . . But soon she felt that she must lose weight,— that all she was trying to express was obliterated by her body, buried in flesh—; abruptly, within four months, she lost at least sixty pounds. . . —The gossip in had swallowed a tapeworm. But of course she hadn't. The tapeworm was her soul. . . —How her soul, uncompromising, insatiable, must have loved eating the flesh from her bones, revealing this extraordinarily mercurial; fragile; masterly creature. . . —But irresistibly, nothing stopped there; the huge voice also began to change: at first, it simply diminished in volume, in size, then the top notes became shrill, unreliable—at last, usually not there at all. . . —No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make her artistry subtler, more refined, more capable of expressing humiliation, rage, betrayal. . . —Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit loathed the unending struggle to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose mechanics, and suffocating customs, seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit. . . —I know that in Tosca, in the second act, when, humiliated, hounded by Scarpia, she sang Vissi d'arte —"I lived for art"— and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks, with a voice reaching harrowingly for the notes, "Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?" I felt I was watching autobiography— an art; skill; virtuosity miles distant from the usual soprano's athleticism,— the usual musician's dream of virtuosity without content. . . —I wonder what she feels, now, listening to her recordings. For they have already, within a few years, begun to date. . . Whatever they express they express through the style of a decade and a half—; a style she helped create. . . —She must know that now she probably would not do a trill in exactly that way,— that the whole sound, atmosphere, dramaturgy of her recordings have just slightly become those of the past. . . —Is it bitter? Does her soul tell her that she was an idiot ever to think anything material wholly could satisfy?. . . —Perhaps it says: The only way to escape the History of Styles is not to have a body. * * * When I open my eyes in the morning, my great mystery stands before me . . . —I know that I am intelligent; therefore the inability not to fear food day-and-night; this unending hunger ten minutes after I have eaten . . . a childish dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause,— half my mind says that all this is demeaning . . . Bread for days on end drives all real thought from my brain . . . —Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin conceals the ideal not to have a body—; which is NOT trivial . . . This wish seems now as much a "given" of my existence as the intolerable fact that I am dark-complexioned; big-boned; and once weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds . . . —But then I think, No. That's too simple,— without a body, who can know himself at all? Only by acting; choosing; rejecting; have I made myself— discovered who and what Ellen can be . . . —But then again I think, NO. This I is anterior to name; gender; action; fashion; MATTER ITSELF,— . . . trying to stop my hunger with FOOD is like trying to appease thirst with ink. * * * March 30. Result of the consultation: Both gentlemen agree completely with my prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of commitment even more emphatically than I. All three of us are agreed that it is not a case of obsessional neurosis and not one of manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient's demand for discharge. * * * The train-ride yesterday was far worse than I expected . . . In our compartment were ordinary people: a student; a woman; her child;— they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces; but I thought I was surrounded by creatures with the pathetic, desperate desire to be not what they were:— the student was short, and carried his body as if forcing it to be taller—; the woman showed her gums when she smiled, and often held her hand up to hide them—; the child seemed to cry simply because it was small; a dwarf, and helpless . . . —I was hungry. I had insisted that my husband not bring food . . . After about thirty minutes, the woman peeled an orange to quiet the child. She put a section into its mouth—; immediately it spit it out. The piece fell to the floor. —She pushed it with her foot through the dirt toward me several inches. My husband saw me staring down at the piece . . . —I didn't move; how I wanted to reach out, and as if invisible shove it in my mouth—; my body became rigid. As I stared at him, I could see him staring at me,— then he looked at the student—; at the woman—; then back to me . . . I didn't move. —At last, he bent down, and casually threw it out the window. He looked away. —I got up to leave the compartment, then saw his face,— his eyes were red; and I saw —I'm sure I saw— disappointment. * * * On the third day of being home she is as if transformed. At breakfast she eats butter and sugar, at so much that—for the first time in thirteen years!—she is satisfied by her food and gets really full. At afternoon coffee she eats chocolate creams and Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads poems, listens to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and all heavi- ness seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one a letter to the fellow patient here to whom she had become so attached. In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morn- ing she is dead. "She looked as she had never looked in life—calm and happy and peaceful." * * * Dearest.—I remember how at eighteen, on hikes with friends, when they rested, sitting down to joke or talk, I circled around them, afraid to hike ahead alone, yet afraid to rest when I was not yet truly thin. You and, yes, my husband,— you and he have by degrees drawn me within the circle; forced me to sit down at last on the ground. I am grateful. But something in me refuses it. —How eager I have been to compromise, to kill this refuser,— but each compromise, each attempt to poison an ideal which often seemed to me sterile and unreal, heightens my hunger. I am crippled. I disappoint you. Will you greet with anger, or happiness, the news which might well reach you before this letter? Your Ellen.
Note: This poem is based on Ludwig Binswanger's "Der Fall Ellen West," translated by Werner M. Mendel and Joseph Lyons (Existence, Basic Books).
Herbert White "When I hit her on the head, it was good, |