The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [73]
Frankly, I would have expected Carter to keep this turmoil to himself, for fear not only of burdening his frail mother but also of disappointing her. But the reality is, he felt he had no one else to turn to. Lily, Joe, and their father were nowhere near as devout as he, and, even after eight years in London, he still had not a single friend in whom he could confide. “Where shall I look for a Christian friend?” he laments again and again in his diary, most recently in February 1856. Sadly, the person with whom he spends the most time, Henry Gray, does not qualify, though Carter can see God in their relationship. “It does seem the act of a kind Providence to have brought me so much into contact with such a character,” he notes in June of the same year. Still, he yearns for “inter-communion” with like-minded others, he adds in the same entry. “I have literally none.” Even his longtime pastor does not seem very sympathetic. On two separate occasions, Reverend Martin had advised him not to write down his religious struggles—advice that, needless to say, Carter did not heed.
He poured out his troubled soul to his mother, and his letters are undeniably moving. Yet it is also hard not to see the two as tragic kindred spirits, she as her health is failing, he as his faith is failing. Just as he hoped to save her, she now wishes to save him. So close is their bond that mother and son create a private ritual. On appointed nights starting at 11:00 P.M., H.V. (in London) and his mother (in Scarborough) engage in an hour of “mutual prayer.” By joining together, they are amplifying their appeal to God and reinforcing “the spiritual state dear to us both,” as he describes it. But on an earthly level, they are also communing with each other in an intensely intimate way.
For all his candor, Carter is surprisingly silent on certain topics, which frustrates my inner eavesdropper. I want to hear about experiences he does not record in his daily diary. Two of the twelve letters, for instance, were written while Carter worked on Gray’s Anatomy, and I would have loved a bit of news on his progress, or even just a quick postscript about his artistic life. Unfortunately, he didn’t write a word; fortunately, there was a firsthand witness.
“Henry and I have a very (too) quiet life at present. He is at home drawing, etc., a good deal, and I am out ‘studying’ pictures a good deal,” Joe Carter reports in one of a handful of letters to Lily Carter from this period. “We generally are both home in the evening: reading, smoking (not I, yet), drawing, retiring (and reappearing next morning) rather late.”
The Carter brothers had moved here to 33 Ebury Street, their second London apartment together, in mid-August 1855. Joe had failed to get accepted into the Royal Academy—much to both brothers’ disappointment—so he was schooling himself, spending his days among the old masters at art museums. But he was not anywhere near the student H.V. had been. I get the feeling, in fact, that going out and “studying pictures” was a euphemism for roaming the galleries and eyeing the young ladies. What’s more, the anatomy lessons H.V. had given his brother apparently had not stuck. “Joe diligent,” Carter told his diary, “but progress very slow. Cannot draw figure.” Nevertheless, Joe, a watercolorist who, like his father, favored landscapes, certainly knew how to set a scene with just a few bold strokes, as demonstrated in a letter to Lily written not long after the boys had finished unpacking.
“We are becoming used to our new quarters,” Joe writes, adding, “of course H. is the principle [sic] decider.” Fortunately, this apartment has