Michelle Bitting: Still Life With Family and the Case of Jekyll & Hyde

Nonfiction by Michelle Bitting
STILL LIFE WITH FAMILY AND THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

(with screen quotes from his bifurcated self)

My analysis of this soul, the human psyche, leads me to believe that man is not truly one, but two…

Lounging around the living room floor of our West Los Angeles home, my brother and I loved gazing up at shelves filled with old books, some first editions, that our father, an English major with nascent dreams of being a writer, loved. That dream didn’t last long. Engaged, and then married to our beautiful mother very young, and not long after, with a child on the way, he committed himself to studying law. The books, we assumed, were favorites: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Melville, and Robert Louis Stevenson. All white males, no one noted.

One of him strives for the nobilities of life, the other seeks an expression of impulses that bind him to some dim animal related to earth…

There were yellowed volumes with embroidered leather spines tracking back to the late 19th century. These had been the property of our actor great grandparents Holmes Herbert and Beryl Mercer and included venerable editions of Shakespeare and an array of plays by J.M. Barrie whom Beryl had known well, having acted numerous characters in his works on the Victorian London circuit, and later, here in the States. A muse to the playwright? Short and dumpling round, never the leading lady or ingenue, yet always an essential character, a standout. No one realized a role like her.

These two impulses carry out an eternal struggle in the nature of man. Yet they are chained together.

Often, the old tomes included elaborate etchings of dramatic scenes. I loved those image-embellished books. Also, the delicate tissue paper sheets that covered each one like pressed flower petals, and when gently lifted away, revealed visions—sometimes magical, sometimes terrifying—of the provocative plot moments chosen for artistic rendering.

And that chain spells repression to the evil, remorse to the good…

In addition to my personal favorite, an authentically gritty version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with its pictures of fire & coal-eating black poodles, eviscerated hearts, I was especially obsessed with the vintage edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No doubt, this had belonged to my great-grandfather Horace.

Now, if these two selves could be separated from each other, how much freer the good in us would be…

In particular, I recall the haunting illustration of a top-hatted Hyde savagely stomping a small girl underfoot, blood pooling beneath her as he hurries into the dead of night through fog and shadow-sotted London streets. At eight years old, my horror, my craving to investigate, along with a taste for the macabre, was whetted.

What heights the soul might scale. And the evil self, once liberated, would trouble us no more…

In the 1931 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Frederic March, who won the Oscar for his titular role, Holmes (nee Horace) Herbert, my great-grandfather, plays Harry Jekyll’s sensible and pragmatic colleague Dr. Lanyon. This confidante, Dr. Lanyon, attempts to divert his brilliant friend’s obsession with dangerous, unorthodox experiments that require swallowing toxic chemicals from bubbling alembics designed to allow one’s true feral and beastly nature, one’s darkest, repressed urges, to emerge. The marriage of monster and man.

Free! Deniers of life, if you could see me now…

A back door in his laboratory allows the transformed Mr. Hyde to slip into the night and wreak mayhem undetected—decorum and maintaining one’s masked “civilized” self being essential to upholding Victorian societal standards. Meanwhile, Jekyll’s fiancée Muriel is kept out of reach by her controlling father. Love and satisfaction are thwarted to the point of madness. So, why not drink the elixir and let his inner animal have at it with free-spirited Ivy, the “red-light” woman he’s got holed up in a seedier part of town?

Perhaps you prefer those hypocrites…

Once, when I came home from college for the summer, I had dyed my hair a vibrant henna red. My father’s immediate response…You look like a French whore. I was crushed. My self-esteem was desert-low already after several years of relationships with men that often ended badly, if not traumatically.

…those fine-mannered gentlemen, who like your lace, but talk about your garters…

My brother was my soul mate and my abuser. My father got involved with women other than my mother and yet was vehemently disapproving when I lost my virginity at 16. His father, Richard, got my grandmother Joan pregnant when he was seventeen. That was 1937. They eloped to Las Vegas in the dead of night, undetected. Horace fooled around on Beryl, and in 1925, left her to perform most of the child-rearing.

Forgive me, my dear. You see, I hurt you because I love you…

My brother could turn on a dime, especially as we grew into our twenties, and the unpredictable, often violent behaviors connected with his manic depression and schizoaffective disorder emerged, exacerbated by self-medication with drugs and alcohol. One minute we’d be laughing, and the next, he’d have a lamp perched above my head, threatening to smash my brains in.

…under this exterior…you’ll find the very flower of man…

My grandmother, Joan, loved to talk with me about her hardworking entertainment industry parents, but our conversations were often cut short under the critical eye of her husband, my grandfather Richard. The shadow of old age and her mental decline didn’t help. And then she died. Now I’m alone in the dark with ghosts, with Joan, with Beryl—survivor, star, silent matriarch of the family— and I try to make sense of voices, of images—all that shimmers, sinister and bright, like chemicals across screens before me. It’s a monstrous undertaking. Every day, I morph a bit more. When I disappear beyond myself, often for hours at a time, I become the proffered flower—its sweet pungency a real and potent bloom in my great grandmother’s imaginary hand.

Michelle Bitting has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange in September 2024. She was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and named a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in July 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Mythological Studies, emphasis Poetry and Psychology. She is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great-grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.