Lydia Millet - Love in Infant Monkeys

As Golakov presents them, the conversations are of course one-sided, with lengthy pauses into which Golakov believed the burning elephant’s rebuttals and queries would have been interposed. A typical excerpt from these enigmatic “exchanges,” on the subject of Edison’s fear of oral copulation/death, is set forth below.

“I won’t do it. Filthy. Anyway, she. . No, I tell you. No. You women are all the same. Selfish, and can’t invent worth a damn. Harlots all. . That, that wet thing. . ugh. Like old cow’s tongue, or pigs’ feet. Disgusting. . Makes her a slut, Topsy. Wantonness! Nothing less. A wife’s duty lies in. . Do not interrupt me. . I should have killed you three times if I killed you at all. . Yes. . yes. . I know. I know. I am very sorry. . I said I was sorry!. . Is it green? Are there fields? Oh: and is the sun bright?”

Yet Golakov’s letters reflect nothing so much as a longing on Edison’s part for the approval of the boiling elephant. It is not clear to what degree this imputation is a fiction originating with the domestic, whose mind was almost surely affected by his daily use of the diacetyl-morphine cough remedies then sold widely by Bayer; certainly there have been no corroborating reports of any mental infirmity on Edison’s part. But Golakov’s documentation of Edison’s most intimate personal habits, relationships and opinions bears up well under close scrutiny and does reflect a credible familiarity with the businessman-inventor. Since the inventor had suffered a partial loss of hearing, it is not impossible that he may have welcomed the silence of a celluloid companion. And while almost certainly not accurate in all regards, Golakov’s notations clearly have a documentary value in elucidating aspects of the event.

On occasion Edison appears to have conducted philosophical debates with the moving image, defending a rational humanism for which the roasting elephant berated him.

“I am Man. Man has his own destiny!. . Impractical, I’m afraid. Exhumation and shipping alone. . I have no time for messing about with your bones, my stubborn pachyderm. . Commonality? With every breath each of us on this earth inhales a molecule from Caesar’s final respiration. And likewise a molecule from Brutus’s breath, as the traitor raised a hand to stab his noble emperor. Does that make us Caesar? Does it make us Brutus?. . Children, oh, hmm. . I have several myself; barely remember their names. What? You had none! You trudged under a yoke all the days of your. . what? False pachyderm! How you lie! Animals do not dream of that which has not transpired. A pachyderm cannot dream of her unborn children. . Observation, clearly. I am Man; I can see. I have seen for myself how insensate you are. A pachyderm is not given to flights of fancy. . There is no God in the Church, no: not there. But I begin to see Him. I see Him nonetheless. . Contradiction? Leave me be. I have work before me.”

In the months leading up to the incident that brought about Golakov’s dismissal, the conversations he records become increasingly agitated and hyperbolic. Indeed a sort of rageful ecstasy is manifest:

“How you shame me! You torment me with your humility!. . Murdering pachyderm! I know well what you did. You are no saint!. . Do not play the victim, my crafty friend. Do not play the innocent!. . Together, you say? Together! Yes we will!”

At some point, writes Golakov, the elephant evidently became a sort of priestly figure or godhead, despite this antagonistic dynamic. Before her ghostly image, the businessman-inventor would kneel to pray, meditate and ask for absolution.

Edison was still a freethinker then; it was only circa 1920 that the inventor would begin to speak publicly of building machines to communicate with the dead. In his early life the brash businessman openly ridiculed religion and notions of a soul and an afterlife; yet even at the time he had a chronic weakness for magicians and occultists and was an admirer of both Madame Blavatsky and well-known billet reader Bert Reese.

In fact, it was not long at all after his dismissal of Golakov that the businessman would execute an abrupt about-face in terms of his religious leanings — and in the final decade of his life, far from being the out-spoken atheist of his youth, he would ridicule those “fool skeptic[s]” who dared to doubt the existence of God.

Certainly it is true that his second wife Mina, eighteen years his junior, was a staunch Methodist sometimes said to have believed the doctrine of evolution to be the work of Satan the deceiver. But Edison did not always hold the female intellect in high esteem, and he is unlikely to have been swayed by the young woman’s pious fundamentalism. It is probable that his newfound faith had its genesis elsewhere.

In any case, it is Golakov’s intrusion upon his employer’s devotions that seems to have precipitated the termination of his employment. The valet had for some time been pilfering from Edison’s personal supply of cocaine toothache drops, which he then used in combination with his heroin cough medicine to produce effects of euphoria and allay anxiety. (He recommended both popular tonics to his sister.) On the occasion in question, a quiet evening in late September, he had ingested both remedies in some quantity, alternating quite neatly between them. As he sat quaffing a nightcap in Edison’s closet (the closet featured a slatted door), he had a good view of the scene in the study.

“The giant’s stately presence,” writes Golakov, “had Mr. Edison transfixed.”

He laid himself out on the floor in joyful submission to the flickering vision, and he spoke to her as he always did, but with more emotion. “How you glow, noble beast, in the infinite moment before your own death!” He rested his forehead on the rug and trembled. “How many times have you died? A thousand times you have died, a thousand and a thousand. I have seen it, like the millions of stars in the sky. And still you speak to me: You hold me in your dead eyes. I know your terrible power.” Rising to his feet, hands clasped in supplication, he choked back a sob as he said this, and I began fearing for his sanity. “Yes: yes: yes. You are the Savior. But I see now that you do not forgive me. . what did you say to me?. . I hear you. You say: I do not forgive. You say: This is my gift to you: I will never forgive: Now and forever, you are not forgiven.”

At this moment, according to the valet, Edison began weeping piteously. In his own state of artificially enhanced excitation, the valet apparently felt compelled to leap out of his hiding place, and, shocked by the sight, the businessman-inventor fell flat on his face, only to recover when his burly valet lifted him off the floor.

What passed between the two thereafter is not indicated in Golakov’s reporting. Likely Edison recognized that the valet’s volatile disposition and rampant exploitation of substances had become a liability. What is known for certain, from the household accounting records, is that I. Vasil Golakov left the mansion the next day and was never admitted through the Edisonian doors again.

Little is known of the valet after he left the inventor’s employ save that his abuse of narcotics continued unabated, for a scullery maid complained to Mrs. Edison twice in the ensuing months that the former assistant was begging for tonics at the servants’ entrance to the kitchen.

Golakov’s final words on the subject of Edison and his elephant, from the last surviving letter to his sister, clearly suggest it was the drug-addled Balkan, not his employer, who was spiraling into dementia. For after he “leapt out” of the closet to “rescue Edison” from himself, Golakov alleges, the inventor launched into a spirited homily:

He said: “Don’t you understand, Golakov? I have seen the future. I have seen in the paradox of her suffering the last end of man. . yes, she was a murderer, but so are we. And I saw in her eyes the longing of all men for a far better place, for a place where man was no longer cruel and no longer wanted retribution for cruelty; for a place, indeed, where man was not man at all . Yes, Golakov, that was what I beheld: the true and final emancipation of man. For at the end of history man will shed his humanity. Man will be man no more. And this alone will allow him the grace for which he has always longed.”