A Tale of Two Doomed Young Men

Expanding Precedent & Revisiting "The Big Art Project"

Look What I Got for Valentine’s Day!

A Tale of Two Doomed Young Men

In 1923 the British surgeon Sir Frederick Treves published a book, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences.¹ Each of its twelve chapters described an unusual medical case, with the first being that of Joseph Merrick, a 20-year-old suffering from congenital neurofibromatosis, a fairly common disorder that occurs in 1 out of 3,000 persons. In most cases, the condition presents as light or dark spots on the skin. In Merrick’s case enormous nerve cell tumors developed in his skin and bones, creating pendulous masses of flesh which Treves described as resembling “brown cauliflower.”

As a very young man, in 1923, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu read Treves’s book. Montagu became obsessed with telling Joseph Merrick’s story, but the Treves book had fallen out of print by 1940, and it took decades to find a copy. Not until 1971 did Montagu publish his own book, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. At its core is the original Treves chapter, but that consisted of only some two dozen pages. Little was known about Merrick’s childhood, and he died at the age of twenty-seven.²

How to turn such a short, obscure life into a 150-page book? And not just a book, but a wave of stage plays and movie scripts culminating in Tony Awards and Oscar nominations. As Variety reported, “A herd of ‘Elephant Men’ is proliferating on U.S. stages.”

The Second Doomed Young Man

In January 1993 Outside magazine carried the story “Lost in the Wild” about how 24-year-old Chris McCandless trekked to Alaska where he lost his life. Jon Krakauer wrote the article, and his telling generated more mail — both praising and ridiculing McCandless — than any piece the magazine had ever published.

Krakauer wanted to turn the magazine piece into a book, but, again… how to expand the relatively short story while also sustaining reader interest? Merrick died at 27. McCandless at 24. As we’ve already explored here, Krakauer created his book by expanding the precedent from McCandless as one person, to several historical cases where similar young men had walked into the wilderness and died, then ultimately to Krakauer himself who acted on a similar impulse at a young age, climbed a peak known as the Devil’s Thumb, alone, and almost died.

The Krakauer book follows McCandless until he arrives in Alaska on what should be the biggest adventure of his life. At that point the story shows how he’s not alone in history, men at the same age have often sought a challenge and found death, and those young men almost included the book’s author. Only after this digression does Krakauer revisit McCandless and his sad, slow starvation.

By expanding the precedent, the magazine article became a book.

Montagu Follows the Same Strategy

To expand upon the limited life of Joseph Merrick, Montagu digresses to the poet Alexander Pope, a gifted writer, well educated and from a wealthy family, but as British historian J.H. Plumb put it:

“All understanding of Pope must begin with his deformity, an ugly, terrible sight which he, as much as his friends, wished to ignore but could not. Like an ineradicable dye it stained all thought, all feeling. Deformity is commonly hideous in its effects. It corrodes character, leading to deceit, treachery, malignity and false living; and as often as not vitiates those entangled in the sufferer’s life as much as the sufferer himself. So it was with Pope.”

In focusing on Pope’s deformity and bitter anger, Montagu highlights Merrick’s overall jolly good nature. More importantly, the author expands the page count and places Merrick in a larger context of deformed individuals.

Beyond Pope, Montagu introduces another actual deformed young man who so fascinated the author Victor Hugo that…

“Victor’s father, Joseph Sigisbert Hugo, a general in the army of Joseph Bonaparte (Napoleon’s brother), summoned his family to Spain in 1811. Victor was 9 years old at he time and very impressionable. At the College des Nobles, a school which young Victor was attending in Madrid, there was a deaf-mute, misshapen dwarf who served as a porter. This unfortunate creature, called Corcovito (the little humped one), apparently haunted the author’s memory for years. Later the twisted dwarf was to appear as the wild Han in Han d’islande (1820), as Habibrah, the wicked jester in the melodramatic novel, Bug Jargal (1826), as the pitiful hunchbacked court jester, Triboulet, in Le roi s’amuse (the basis for the libretto of Giuseppi Verdi’s opera Rigoletto), and later as Gwynplaine, in L’Homme qui rit (1869). The character of the hunchback thus evolved in several works and reached its maturity in Quasimodo, the twisted bell ringer of Notre Dame.”

With this redirection, Montagu shows us how 19th century literature was just as obsessed with an obscure hunchback (Corcovito) as 70s America had become about an 1880s sideshow attraction forgotten by all but Montagu for almost a century.

Ashley Montagu is Victor Hugo is Jon Krakauer. The Elephant Man is Quasimodo is Christopher McCandless. The Joy Luck Club is an ever-expanding series of anecdotes about Chinese-American mothers and daughters. Minimalism is showing the reader the same thing a thousand different ways.

If you have something small, too small for a book, expand the precedent. Look at how it occurs as part of a larger pattern in history.

The Bonus

We’ve touched on this device before. I call it The Big Art Project. It’s the mural that Tod Hackett is painting on his apartment wall in The Day of the Locust. It’s the scale-model of The Devil’s Tower that Richard Dreyfuss builds in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s the mural being painted in the movie made from my book Choke. And until reading the Montagu book I’d forgotten… The Big Art Project includes Joseph Merrick building his model church. See below.

A Big Art Project shows time passing. It demonstrates a character’s thoughts. It keeps the past present in ever-accumulating images. As another example you might also include The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the painting itself accumulates the plot’s repercussions.

So, if you’ve learned nothing else today, expand on precedent — and consider the Big Art Project — in whatever story you’re telling.

1. Very much like Oliver Sacks’s ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.’

2. In most accounts, Joseph “John” Merrick died at 26, but Montagu digs deeper and proves Merrick was a member of the infamous 27 Club.