Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (10 page)

CHAPTER SIX

WALTER AND THE BOYS

B
y age five, Sickert had undergone three horrific surgeries for a fistula.

In every Sickert biography I have read, there is no more than a brief mention of these surgeries, and I am not aware that anyone has ever gone on record to say what this fistula was or why three life-threatening operations were required to repair it. Furthermore, there is to date no scholarly, objective book that sets forth in detail his eighty-one years on this earth.

While much is to be learned from Denys Sutton’s 1976 biography of Sickert because the author was a thorough researcher and relied on conversations with people who had known the “old master,” Sutton was somewhat compromised since he had to obtain permission from the Sickert Trust in order to use copyrighted materials such as letters. The legal restrictions on the reproduction of Sickert materials, including his art, are the foreboding mountains one must scale to view the entire panorama of the man’s intensely conflicted and complicated personality. In a research note in Sutton’s archives at the University of Glasgow, there appears to be a reference to a “Ripper” painting Sickert may have done in the 1930s. If there is such a painting, I have found no mention of it anywhere else.

There are other references to Sickert’s peculiar behavior that should have aroused at least a bit of curiosity in anyone who studied him carefully. In a letter from Paris, November 16, 1968, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury group, wrote Sutton that he had known Walter Sickert around 1930 and had very clear memories of Sickert claiming to have “lived” in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him “spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin.”

Art historian and Sickert scholar Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins of the University of Reading says that she does not see how it is possible for one to study Sickert extensively and not begin to suspect that he was Jack the Ripper. Some of her published studies on his art have included observations that are a bit too insightful for the proper Sickert palate. It seems that truths about him are as cloaked in fog as the Ripper was, and bringing to light any detail that might portend anything ignoble about the man is blasphemous.

In early 2002, Howard Smith, the curator of the Manchester City Art Gallery, contacted me to ask if I was aware that in 1908 Walter Sickert painted a very dark, gloomy painting titled
Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom
. The work was donated in 1980, and the curator at the time notified Dr. Wendy Baron—who did her doctoral dissertation on Sickert and has written more on the artist than anyone else—to let her know of this remarkable find. “We have just received a bequest of two oil paintings by Sickert,” curator Julian Treuherz wrote to Dr. Baron on September 2, 1980. One of them, he said, was “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, oil on canvas, 20 × 16”.”

Dr. Baron replied to Mr. Treuherz on October 12th and verified that the bedroom in the painting was indeed the bedroom in a Camden Town residence (at 6 Mornington Crescent) where Sickert rented the top two floors when he moved back to London from France in 1906. Dr. Baron further observed that this Camden Town residence was where “Sickert believed Jack the Ripper had lodged” in the 1880s. Although I have not found any references to the Mornington Crescent address as the place where Sickert thought the Ripper once lived, Sickert could have had a secret room there during the 1888 serial murders. And in letters the Ripper wrote, he said he was moving into a lodging house, which could have been the one at 6 Mornington Crescent—where Sickert was living in 1907 when yet another prostitute’s throat was slashed barely a mile from his rooming house.

Sickert used to tell friends the story that he once had stayed in a house whose landlady claimed that Jack the Ripper had lived there during the crimes and that she knew his identity: The Ripper was a sickly veterinary student who was eventually whisked off to an asylum. She told Sickert the sickly serial killer’s name, which Sickert said he wrote down in a copy of Casanova’s memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, despite Sickert’s photographic memory, he could not recall the name, and his copy of the book was destroyed in World War II.

The painting
Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom
was ignored and remained in storage for twenty-two years. It seems the painting is one of the few Dr. Baron has left out of her writings. Certainly I had never heard of it. Nor had Dr. Robins or the Tate Gallery or anyone else I met during my research. Apparently, not everyone is eager to publicize this painting. The idea of Sickert being Jack the Ripper is “rubbish,” said Sickert’s nephew John Lessore, who is not related to Sickert by blood but through Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore.

While writing this book, I had no contact with the Sickert Trust. Neither the people who control it nor anyone else has dissuaded me from publishing what I believe to be the naked truth. I have drawn upon the recollections of people who were Walter Sickert’s contemporaries—such as Whistler and Sickert’s first two wives—who were under no legal obligation to a Sickert Trust.

I have avoided the recycled inaccuracies that have metastasized from one book to another. I have concluded that information cited since Sickert’s death consistently says nothing intentionally damning or humiliating about his life or character. The fistula was not considered important because apparently those who have mentioned it did not fully realize what it was or that it could have caused devastating repercussions in Sickert’s psyche. I must admit I was shocked when I asked John Lessore about his uncle’s fistula and he told me—as if it were common knowledge—that the fistula was a “hole in [Sickert’s] penis.”

I don’t think Lessore had a clue as to the significance of what he was saying, and I would be surprised if Denys Sutton knew much about Sickert’s fistula, either. Sutton’s reference to the problem says no more than that Sickert underwent two failed surgeries “for fistula in Munich,” and in 1865, while the Sickert family was in Dieppe, his great-aunt Anne Sheepshanks suggested a third attempt by a prominent London surgeon.

Helena does not mention her elder brother’s medical problem in her memoirs, but one wonders how much she knew. It’s unlikely that her eldest brother’s genitalia were a topic of family conversation. Helena was an infant when Sickert suffered through his surgeries, and chances are that by the time she was old enough to give much thought to the organs of reproduction, Sickert was not inclined to run around naked in front of her—or anyone else. He obliquely alluded to his fistula when he used to joke that he came to London to be “circumcised.”

In the nineteenth century, fistulas of the anus, rectum, and vagina were so common that St. Mark’s Hospital in London was dedicated to treating them. There are no references to fistulas of the penis in the medical literature I consulted, but the term may have been loosely used to describe penile anomalies such as the one Sickert suffered from. The word
fistula
—Latin for reed or pipe—is generally used to describe an abnormal opening or sinus that can cause such atrocities as a rectum connected to the bladder or to the urethra or to the vagina.

A fistula can be congenital but is often caused by an abscess that takes the path of least resistance, and burrows through tissue or the skin surface, forming a new opening for urine, feces, and pus to escape. Fistulas could be extremely uncomfortable, embarrassing, and even fatal. Early medical journals cite harrowing cases such as miserably painful ulcers, bowels emptying into bladders, bowels or bladders emptying into vaginas or uteri, and menstruation through the rectum.

During the mid-1800s, doctors attributed the cause of fistulas to all sorts of things: sitting on damp seats, sitting outside on omnibuses after physical exertion, swallowing small bones or pins, the “wrong” food, alcohol, improper clothing, the “luxurious” use of cushions, or sedentary habits associated with certain professions. Dr. Frederick Salmon, the founder of St. Mark’s Hospital, treated Charles Dickens for a fistula caused by, he said, the great writer’s sitting at his desk too much.

St. Mark’s was established in 1835 to relieve the poor of rectal diseases and their “baneful varieties” and in 1864 moved to City Road in Islington. In 1865, it suffered financial devastation when the hospital secretary fled from London after embezzling £400, or one-quarter of the hospital’s annual income. A fund-raising dinner to be hosted by the fistula-free Dickens was proposed, but he declined the honor. In the same year, Walter Sickert arrived at St. Mark’s in the fall to be “cured” by its recently appointed surgeon, Dr. Alfred Duff Cooper, who later married the daughter of the Duke of Fife and was knighted by King Edward VII.

Dr. Cooper was a twenty-seven-year-old medical star rapidly on the rise in his profession. His specialties were the treatment of rectal and venereal diseases, but no search of his published writings or other literature unearthed any mention of his treating so-called fistulas of the penis. Explanations of Sickert’s fistula range from fair to awful. Nature may have slighted him with a genetically inherited malformation of the genitals called hypospadias, in which the urethra terminates just below the tip of the penis. German medical literature published at the time of Sickert’s birth indicates that a case of simple hypospadias was “trifling” and more common than generally known. A “trifling” case meant the fistula would not interfere with procreation and was not worth the risk of a surgical procedure that could cause infection and death.

Since Sickert’s malformation required three surgeries, his problem must not have been “trifling.” In 1864, Dr. Johann Ludwig Casper, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Berlin, published a description of a more serious form of hypospadias: In this malformation, there is an opening in the urethra at the “root” or base of the penis. Even worse is epispadias, which occurs when the urethra is divided and runs like a “shallow gutter” along the back of a rudimentary or incompletely developed penis. In mid-nineteenth century Germany, such cases were considered a type of hermaphroditism or “doubtful sex.”

When Sickert was born, his gender may have been ambiguous, meaning his penis was small, possibly misshapen, and imperforate (lacking a urethra). The bladder would have been connected to a canal that opened at the base of the penis—or near the anus—and there may have been a cleft in the scrotum that resembled the female clitoris, vagina, and labia. It is possible that Sickert’s gender wasn’t clearly established until his testicles were discovered in the folds of the so-called labia and it was determined that he had no uterus. In cases of ambiguous genitalia, if the afflicted child’s gender turns out to be male, he is usually masculine and healthy in all respects as he matures except for his penis, which may be acceptably functional but is certainly not normal. In the early days of surgery, attempts to repair seriously deformed genitalia generally resulted in mutilation.

Without medical records, I can’t say exactly what Sickert’s penile anomaly was, but if his problem was only “trifling” hypospadias, why did his parents resort to risky surgery? Why did his mother and father wait so long before attempting to correct what must have been a very unpleasant affliction? Sickert was five when he underwent surgery the third time, and one wonders how soon this occurred following the first two operations. We know that his great-aunt interceded to bring him to London, suggesting that his disability was acute and that possibly the two previous operations had been recent and may have resulted in complications. If indeed he was three or four when this nightmarish medical ordeal began, it could be that his parents delayed corrective procedures until they were certain of his gender. I do not know when Sickert was named Walter Richard. To date, no birth certificate or record of a christening has turned up.

In Helena’s memoirs she writes that when she was a child “we” always referred to Walter and his brothers as “Walter and the boys.” Who are
we?
I doubt his brothers referred to themselves as
Walter and the boys,
nor would I imagine that little Helena came up with the phrase on her own. I am inclined to suspect that the reference to
Walter and the boys
came from one or both parents.

Given Helena’s picture of a young Walter who was precocious and dominant, such a law unto himself that he wasn’t placed in the same category as the other sons, it may be that the phrase
Walter and the boys
was a way of acknowledging his precocity. It may also be that he was physically different from his brothers—or maybe from all boys. If the latter is the explanation, the repeated use of the phrase could have been humiliating and emasculating for the young Walter.

Sickert’s early boyhood was traumatized by medical violence. When corrective surgery for hypospadias occurs after the age of eighteen months, it can create fears of castration. Sickert’s operations would have resulted in strictures and scarring that could have made erections painful or impossible. He may have suffered partial amputation. His art does not include nude males, with the exception of two sketches I found that appear to have been done when he was in his teens or in art school. In each, the nude male figure has a vague stub of a penis that looks anything but normal. It is clear from Sickert’s letters that throughout his life he was prone to urinary tract infections, which would have been consistent with strictures caused by repeated surgeries. In fact, when Sickert died on January 22, 1942, his cause of death was recorded as uremia (kidney failure) due to chronic nephritis (recurring urinary tract infections), with a contributing factor of myocardial degeneration, or heart disease that can accompany kidney disease.

There is no indication that Sickert ever suffered from infections or other complications of his bowels, rectum, or anus, and in a letter he wrote to artist Sir William Eden (circa 1901), Sickert mentions how much he wanted “a sound cock again . . .” In a preface written to an exhibition catalog of Eden’s pictures (not dated but probably 1890s), Sickert is discussing art and states that it is not possible to change an “organic living thing,” and uses the example of the impossibility of improving the “shape of a baby’s nose once it is born.” Typically, Sickert is enigmatic, his literary transitions opaque and his explanations few. I cannot say with certainty whether, when mentioning his unsound penis, he was referring to a temporary disability due to another urinary tract infection or to a permanent deformity. Nor can I say with certainty that his allusion to the inability of one to change a physical feature after birth is a veiled reference to his own birth defect.