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By Root 422 0

and cruel to his wife. In later years he is said to have become very nervous and so fearful at night that he always slept with the lights on. He worked as an inspector for the city in which he lived. Joseph’s mother, who died while giving birth to a ninth child at the age of thirty-six, was described by Joseph and others as a good woman and mother. Joseph cannot easily be made to speak of his early life, although he did say once that his father had picked him up bodily in a rage and thrown him down. Joseph was afraid of his father as a boy, and he did not get over his fear even as a grown man. His father had remarried and was still living, now on a small farm.

All the children left home as soon as they could. Two of the brothers refused to let their father know their whereabouts for several years. The other children—four boys and two girls—are now married and doing well. None has any history of mental illness.

As a young man, Joseph immigrated to Detroit with high hopes of getting a better job. He wanted money for more education and for travel. He had always wanted to be a writer, and he read voraciously late into the night—novels, dramas, biographies, philosophy, history, and current events. He enjoyed sports and liked to attend the theater.

He showed little interest in women until he met Beatrice, whom he married when he was twenty-four. During the first year of their marriage Joseph was cold and undemonstrative. He said it was unhealthy to kiss and would not let his wife touch his face. He did not want children and tried to persuade Beatrice to share this view. Nevertheless, she remembers the early years of their marriage as happy. Joseph was sexually adequate as long as they were careful about “rituals”; that is, everything had to be clean—the sheets, the clothes, herself. Beatrice wanted children on religious grounds and because, she said, “you get married to have children.”

Joseph preferred his books to an active social life. At parties he would often retire to the bedroom to read. He was described as lacking a sense of humor and as taking things too seriously. He felt intellectually superior and was arrogant to his friends. Neither friends, relatives, nor wife shared his literary interests, and Joseph complained of his lack of companionship, and withdrew more and more into himself.

All his life he had worked as a clerk. Finally, he managed to be promoted to foreman on the night shift in the postal-delivery department of a railroad company. He left this job at Beatrice’s insistence; although she later regretted her choice, she had urged him to quit because she did not want him to work at night. Joseph got another job as a clerk in a department store and worked there for the ten years preceding his admission to a mental hospital. He did not enjoy this work; it made him feel like a servant, he said. And moreover, he was easily embarrassed, and did not like to talk to customers. During this period Beatrice gave birth to three daughters. Nevertheless, Joseph tried several times to get her to go out to work so that he could stay home and write. This was foolish, she told him. He would not know how to take care of the children. It was his job to go out and earn a living. Beatrice never knew anything about the book Joseph said he was working on late at night, and she did not see what good all this writing would do him anyway. She complained that he spent money on books when they did not have even enough to pay household bills.

When their second daughter was born, in 1935, Joseph asked: “Where did she come from?” and accused Beatrice of being intimate with other men. The child was a neighbor’s, he said, not his. Beatrice was deeply hurt, and when a third daughter was born two years later, she was ready for him. Joseph came in to look at the baby and repeated his earlier accusation. “It’s not yours,” Beatrice replied. “I had her with Dr. Jones.” “I was mad and had a temper,” she added.

Beatrice thinks Joseph’s illness had its onset after an automobile accident in the summer of 1938. When his car was about to crash into