Ellen West
I love sweets,—
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 Milan was that
Callas
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 noon she eats 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 heaviness 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 morning 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.
