Back Then Page 12
Over pink gin and Ritz crackers, disaffected graduate students like me weighed one another’s need for “treatment.” We recited the traumas of childhood and adolescence, the roles—neglectful, villainous, or smothering—of our parents, and so forth, the whole psychic megillah, but, despite our shallow immersion in Freud, we never talked about sex. The homosexuals were silent on the subject—the closet door was only slightly ajar—and the rest of us were too demure or too repressed to bring it up, although no one’s orientation or pattern of pairing off was a secret. Sex aside, an unspoken challenge—Can you top this?—drove our confessional marathons. We heard sad tales about heartless fathers, possessive mothers, the stigma of bastardy, the narrowness of adolescent life in a Nebraska parsonage. My best turn in these performances was to say that by the age of thirteen, having by then lost both parents, I was a double orphan. I felt guilty about the modest inheritance my parents had left me. “It’s a goddam shame,” one of my friends said. “People like me have the brains, and people like you have the money.” I should have been angry, but I let this pass and went on to tell about how the still perceptible shock of being orphaned could be rendered in a cry of five words—“What’s to become of me?”
We scarified our psychic topsoil and hoped someday to dig deeper. Meanwhile, just as the intellectual generation of the 1930s joined Marxist study groups and read Das Kapital, we read Freud’s General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, his Civilization and Its Discontents, and other books with alluring titles like Karen Horney’s Self-Analysis and The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. We assumed that neurosis was so bound up with creativity that it was virtually a prerequisite. If you weren’t neurotic—that is, if you were “normal”—you were probably cut out to be a worker ant, moderately well adjusted but dull. On the other hand, if the goal of psychoanalysis was to help adjust patients to middle-class behavior norms, wouldn’t it undermine “creativity” and turn a potential Dylan Thomas or Marc Chagall into a worker ant? There was a contradiction here that we weren’t able to resolve. The adjective “sensitive” was a mild palliative—it fell considerably short of suggesting you needed “help,” while “normal” had even more dismissive voltage than “nice,” a euphemism for “harmless.” My friends called me both “normal” and “nice.” One, an editor at Little, Brown on Beacon and Joy Streets, a few blocks away from my apartment, gave me a copy of E. B. White’s story about a mouse born to human parents, Stuart Little. She inscribed it, “Two delightful people: Justin, meet Stuart.” I bore the stigmas of alleged niceness and normality in a resigned way.
Nevertheless, once back in New York I went into psychoanalysis, driven by career anxiety and what romantic novelists used to call a broken heart. Beatrice and I had been going together for over a year. She wanted to be married, to someone, for stability and direction, she said, while I, an unformed ex-graduate student wandering around the edges of New York book publishing, wasn’t remotely ready even to begin thinking about marriage. On her wedding night she phoned me from the bridal suite at the Plaza to say that she was thinking of me, a gesture that combined tenderness and cruelty. There was little comfort in the notion she meant to hold me in reserve against (what proved to be) an uncertain future with the man she married. I felt orphaned once again—“What’s to become of me?”—and spent a terrible summer racked with dermatitis and flaying my skin practically down to the raw flesh. I read Proust for the first time, thought of moving to France, and even packed a trunk, although I had no idea of what I would do when I got there. One day Lena Levine, a psychiatrist I met at a weekend party on Long Island, took me aside and said, “I think you’re letting yourself go to waste. You ought to get some help.” This was depressing but also reassuring: at least I had something worth saving and nurturing. My gratitude for her instant recognition of my deep-down misery swept away inhibitions. In the gentlest way possible Lena, who was more than twice my age, fended off my clumsy attempts to get her to go to bed with me—I had never before wanted to be so close to another person. My behavior was probably an extreme, and not to be anytime near equaled, case of instant “transference.”
Lena arranged for an eminence in the New York psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishment, Dr. Carl Binger, to have me “evaluated” with Rorschach, IQ, and other such tests. If it turned out that I needed and could make good use of “help,” he was to recommend a therapist who was compatible as well as affordable. Personality aside, I wondered, could a European-born analyst recognize shades of idiom and American style, instances of non-Viennese “joke-work,” and those famous slips of the tongue—parapraxes, in the jargon of the profession—Freud found so revealing of turmoil in everyday life?
Dr. Gustav Bychowski, number one on Binger’s referral list, instructed me, in heavily accented English, to take a position on whether Fyodor Dostoevsky had been a lunatic or an idiot as well as an epileptic and a compulsive gambler. I foresaw hundreds of hours of such idle gassing, on my nickel, to indulge his hobby, which was psychoanalyzing dead writers in order to reduce them to the obligatory one- or two-sentence abstract printed at the head of professional articles. Bychowski, as I learned a few years later, was the author of “Walt Whitman—A Study in Sublimation,” an article that disposed of Leaves of Grass as a product of narcissistic isolation, gnawing loneliness, and homoerotic libido. For clinical material Bychowski plumbed Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a masterpiece in world literature, as if it were a free-associational, artless monologue from the couch, raw meat for the analytic grinder. Poor Walt! Anyone following this line of interpretation could not have guessed he was a poet, only a remarkably voluble sort of wacko with sex on his mind.
My search took me to the consulting rooms of several other bigwigs on Binger’s referral list. When I arrived a few minutes late to see one of them, Dr. William Silverberg, he decided not to lose time on preliminaries and plunged into Topic A. “Young man, to begin with, let me ask you this: When did you last have sex with a woman?” I answered, quite truthfully, “About half an hour ago—that’s why I’m late. She lives around the corner from you.” He acted as if I had vomited on his shoes and practically threw me out of his office. His bill for this consultation—fifty dollars—arrived in the mail a few days later.
Finding the right dermatologist, although there were hundreds of skin doctors in New York, was even harder than finding the right analyst. According to the standard joke, what passed for a diagnosis in the skin trades consisted of one question, “Have you had this before?” and one answer, “Well, you’ve got it again.” The “it,” variously called eczema, atopic dermatitis, and psoriasis, consisted of unremitting hostilities between my skin and its occupant. In early adolescence I had been under the care of a medical autocrat in the Squibb Building off Fifth Avenue. Several times a years Dr. Lapidus examined my flayed and abraded skin, the result of uncontrollable bouts of scratching, and invariably said, “I see you’ve been having a good time.” His remark had the instant effect of sending me into a fresh paroxysm of scratching. In addition to the pungent tar ointments and mineral oil preparations that constituted the entire armamentarium of the profession, Dr. Lapidus prescribed daily home treatments with a carbon-arc sunlamp. A medical equipment outfit delivered to our apartment an immense apparatus (when not in use it occupied its own closet) with a reflecting bowl the size of a locomotive headlight. Naked and goggled, I lay in the glare, splutter, and fumes of this satanic machine. Another skin guru dispensed a private brand of tar ointment that he formulated in a back room and gave me five minutes of his attention; his receptionist demanded payment in cash. Yet another put me on a diet of rice and canned peaches. A third sent me uptown to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for sessions of X-ray therapy—he was concerned only with immediate but short-lived relief from itching and scaling: long-term radiation effects were not his department. Dr. Clarence Greenwood, a benign Harvard Medical School dermatologist—his distressing academic title was “Professor of Syphilology”—was honest enough to say that whatever
it was I had, it was something I’d have to learn to live with, preferably in a gentler climate. We talked mostly about his cat, who ate coffee beans while the doctor had his breakfast. Finally, the same year I went into analysis, cortisone and topical steroid therapy came to the rescue. At a time when almost any ailment was construed as “psychosomatic” or “psychogenic,” dermatology and analysis were symbiotic.
I finally signed up with an American-born psychoanalyst—Roman Catholic, I guessed, because he had gone to Georgetown, a Jesuit institution—who was either unwilling or unable to haggle Dostoevsky or Proust and so, supposedly, would make the most of our time together. Dr. Hughes appeared to be new to a then overbooked profession because he was able to fit me in, a sort of scholarship student, at a compassionate twenty-five dollars for each of my four weekly visits. After a year or so, prospering like other psychoanalysts in their professional heyday, he moved from a dismal apartment off Third Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street to one facing the Morgan Library on Thirty-sixth Street. Once, by accident, we ended up sitting next to each other at a drugstore lunch counter where we were both having coffee before our fifty-minute session. We had nothing to talk about, except the weather (it was raining) and a sports headline in the Post. We might as well have been total strangers, except that total strangers meeting on neutral ground were not likely to be so halting and uneasy with each other. Freud’s talking cure made no allowances for extracurricular encounters.
Even after four years of analysis with Dr. Hughes I failed to get any message from his bland, inscrutable presence. He smoked his pipe and just listened. “Transference” was not in the cards, but neither this nor the notorious element of “resistance” seemed to bother him as we plowed my psyche and my shaky sense of identity. I rehearsed the trauma of orphanhood and the contrary responses left in its wake: resentment and anger at having been abandoned (as it seemed), a sense of unworthiness, as if I had done something to deserve being abandoned, fear of competition and success, guilt about money, guilt about almost everything else, including the freedom, unrestrained by parental authority, to do and live as I wished. Like the orthodox Freudian that he was, Dr. Hughes rarely said anything and was almost impossible to provoke. “Your wife must have been a student at Mount Holyoke when you married her,” I said for want of a more consequential opening for the day’s session. I detected in his response a tiny tremor of distress at this violation of impersonality—“Why do you say that?” I explained, as if to say, You should be more careful in the future, that she had written her married name and college on the flyleaf of a copy of Anna Karenina I had found at the bottom of a bookshelf in his waiting room. There were few such tiny triumphs.
About midway in my analysis, my brother made me the gift of a trip to France with him. A friend, the artist Anne Truitt, introduced me by letter to Barbara Herman, a Bryn Mawr classmate of hers living transiently in Paris on the Rue Vaneau. Barbara was beautiful, with glossy black hair and high cheekbones, but even more striking, as I recognized in an instant, was her unflinching glance of appraisal, probity, and intelligence that made me call myself to account. We had dinner together, went for a long walk along the Seine, and agreed to meet again in Villefranche, on the Côte d’Azur. One late afternoon, hiking the winding hillside roads to the high village of Éze, isolated like an eagle’s nest on a peak over the Mediterranean, we were caught in a pelting rainstorm and found shelter for the night in a villager’s house. We huddled like children. Barbara stayed abroad, I went back to New York, and through our letters during the fall, winter, and spring we arrived at an intellectual and emotional intimacy of a sort I hadn’t known before—in my head I carried on daily conversations with her. As deeply as I loved her for herself alone, she remained inseparable in my mind from the romance of “Europe,” the great good place many of my generation had been reading about and longing for despite the fact it had only recently been a cauldron of previously unimaginable horrors. The next summer I went back to Europe to see Barbara again. She was then living in Ascona, a resort town at the Swiss end of Lake Maggiore.
In the aftermath of the Allied victory of World War II and of the Marshall Plan sent to rebuild Europe’s devastated economy, Americans were welcomed, even admired. Liners of half a dozen and more nations sailed from slips along the Hudson, their departures and arrivals among the spectacular sights and sounds of New York. Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Île-de-France, United States, Andrea Doria, Stockholm, Mauretania—the largest of these were almost a fifth of a mile long and among the most majestic, luxurious, and visually impressive things ever made in this world. The speediest crossed the Atlantic in only four and a half days. Even so Europe by ship remained a far-off place, and going there like dying into a new life. Eastbound, a few days out of New York you might begin to notice an occasional land bird flown off course; then clumps of floating vegetation, bottles, bits of lumber; then the sound of distant church bells and the smell of grass and cows even before you passed the green flank of Ireland. Europe smelled different—Gauloises and Nazionales, beer, fresh bread, and diesel fumes; pulses ran faster; colors were more vivid.
The journey to Europe was loaded with literary associations and as a result was both exotic and familiar. I stayed for a night in a Paris hotel, the Ambassador, on the Boulevard Haussmann, not far from Marcel Proust’s apartment and cork-lined bedroom at Number 102. On the platform at the Gare du Nord, bound for Switzerland via Bern, I felt like Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp starting his ascent to the Magic Mountain—he entered a “primitive, unattached state” of consciousness liberated by space and time. In a second-class compartment of the Paris–Istanbul night train (Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden) I sat next to a gaunt woman dressed all in black (The Lady Vanishes); the swarthy man opposite belonged in Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios—he pulled his fedora down over his eyes, smoked continually, and clutched a briefcase on his lap. No one smiled or exchanged a word. Domodossola, the name of the Italian frontier town where I got off, projected its own mystery. In two hours the little narrow-gauge train from Domodossola chugged over the mountains and around Lake Maggiore to Locarno (A Farewell to Arms). I took the bus to Ascona.
For almost a century this town had been a haven for artists, bohemians, composers, remittance men and women, and societal resisters of all sorts: anarchists, pacifists, vegetarians, free-love advocates, and millenarians. Occasionally I’d see a band of Tolstoyan Christian-love disciples, the men bearded and dressed like muzhiks in long leather-belted white blouses and baggy trousers tucked into their boots. They had come down from the hills to replenish their stores of buckwheat flour, cabbage, and yogurt. The actress Paulette Goddard, née Marion Levy and once married to Charlie Chaplin, kept to herself in a lakeside villa left to her by her last husband, the novelist Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. Mysterious people, mainly Germans with mysterious sources of wealth, occupied other villas. Barbara and I had lunch with one of them, reputedly a Baronin, who took us on a tour of her house. She showed us a swastika banner on the wall above her bed and, on a side table, a silver-framed photograph of a uniformed Wehrmacht officer. “My father,” she said. “He lives in Rio de Janeiro.” Barbara and I left as soon as we could.
J.K. and Barbara Herman, Nice, 1948.
Ascona was also the summer capital and annual conference site of the Jungian psychological establishment, Carl Jung himself favoring it as a seasonal alternative to Zurich. Recently the lone Freudian analyst in town (and one of the few Jews) had taken a week off to go fishing; while he was away a patient of his went berserk, killed his wife and children and then himself. Among the Jungian professionals sipping coffee and aperitifs in the cafés one could sense a mildly compassionate gloat of schadenfreude as the poor man walked past.
Barbara was working on a translation of Lautréamont’s surrealist poems, Les Chants de Maldoror. Her essay on the poet Hart Crane had recently been accepted for publication by The Sewanee Review, a distinguished literary quarterly founded before
the turn of the century. Together we read Rilke, Proust, and Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim. Afternoons we bicycled along the lake, often to Brissago, the border town where Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry and Catherine landed after their long row up the lake from Italy. Evenings we had suppers of bread, cheese, sausage, and wine and listened to radio broadcasts of concerts from Zurich and Barbara’s records of madrigals, the Fauré Requiem, Ravel and Debussy string quartets. (She managed to move around Europe hauling her records, record player, radio, typewriter, and books along with the usual baggage.) Everything between us had a sweetness touched with sadness, like the music we heard. Sooner or later we’d both have to go home to another sort of life altogether. Perhaps the bond between us was too fragile, ideal, and untested, too lacking in perspective and irony, to survive removal from the psychic climate of “Europe” to the cross-grained realities of life in New York—getting ahead, the right clothes, a good address, parties: shallow values, but they were mine, however great my shame, and not Barbara’s.