The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  The review did manage to give a capsule synopsis of the story that, like all plot synopses, was absurdly unreadable and demeaning. But the review itself, coming as it did and where it did on the heels of rhapsodic notices from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, was inexplicable, damaging, and so unfair it turned me into a lifetime enemy of the New York Times Book Review, not even changed by their favorable, indeed fawning reviews of my later novels. (Wölfflin tried to console me by pointing out that we were able to salvage that one adjective, stunning, for use in advertising.)

  The April issues of two influential monthlies, the Atlantic and Harper’s, both contained reviews that could be classified as “raves,” albeit both of them succumbed to gender confusion. V. Kelian is a new star in our literary galaxy, the Atlantic said, but added, His choice of a name for himself in the novel, and for the novel itself, Georgie Boy, brings to mind both Erskine Caldwell’s 1943 best-seller, Georgia Boy (also narrated by a twelve-year-old boy, although not one who becomes involved in sexual intrigues with an older woman), and the 1966 film with Lynn Redgrave and James Mason, Georgy Girl. Of course there is no evidence that V. Kelian was familiar with either of these, or, if he was, that he wanted, for example, to convert his girl into a boy.

  The Harper’s review, written by a woman, gave the first good and accurate plot synopsis, then digressed into a little essay on gender. V. Kelian understands the sufferings of the female heart so admirably that I cannot help but wonder if he might not be a woman. The choice of George as a name reverberates with associations: Both George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and George Sand (Amandine Dupin) were women writers hiding behind that husbandman’s name, and then of course we are today witnessing the pop phenomenon and androgyne known as Boy George, whose very name is almost an inversion of this great novel’s title. This blather was redeemed by a concluding paragraph: No one who reads this totally original novel will ever be able to forget it. No one who reads it will remain unchanged by the experience. No novel in recent memory succeeds on every level as brilliantly as Georgie Boy.

  Congratulations on those splendid notices in Atlantic and Harper’s, Wölfflin wrote, but we are still waiting for a “biggie,” in Time or Newsweek.

  But the biggie, when it came, was from a totally unexpected source: the New York Review of Books. Wölfflin phoned the joyous news, quoting at length from the lengthy review and promising to send me the issue by express mail. This periodical, Wölfflin explained, was not to be confused with the New York Times Book Review; it had been founded originally to counteract that powerful review medium. It was considered the “chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic,” and if it had a flaw, it was that it was inclined to print long-winded discussions of obscure books that were in no danger of becoming popular. It rarely reviewed fiction, and Georgie Boy was the first first novel it had reviewed in a long time.

  When I received my copy of the issue, I was amused to see that the review was accompanied by one of those striking pen-and-ink cross-hatched caricatures, by “D. Levine,” based obviously upon the publicity photos of me that did not reveal my sex. The creature in the caricature manages to be very handsome despite what Levine does to him/her. I was told that Mr. Levine always did his caricatures of famous people or recognizable people, and that I was the first “unknown” he had ever attempted.

  I would like to reprint the entire review, all 4,200 words of it.

  IV

  Evil Shrinks

  Georgie Boy

  by V. Kelian

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 348 pp., $15.95

  Clive Henry

  TEN YEARS AGO I.F. Stone observed in these pages, in his article “Betrayal by Psychiatry,” that “socialism without freedom, whatever its declared intentions, turns into a suffocating nightmare.” The literature of that nightmare has burgeoned apace; within the past few years these pages have carried reviews of important new indictments of the Soviet order by Eugenia Ginzburg (Within the Whirlwind), Vladimir Bukovsky (To Build a Castle), Lev Kopelev (To Be Preserved Forever), Zhores and Roy Medvedev (A Question of Madness), and Andrei Sakharov (Alarm and Hope), to mention only those that I have read myself.

  But all of these, and the several others that I have not read, have in common that they are nonfiction, first-person eyewitness accounts of the merciless punishment that the Communist regime metes out to those citizens who dare to question its ideology. Without wishing to denigrate the very real worth of any of these accounts, I have the unmistakable impression that the voices of these victims become merged into a single, pathetic lament that seems to lose some of its strength or effectiveness because it is first-person and because it is eyewitness and because, after a while, it loses whatever novelty it possesses.

  Now comes a voice that is unforgettably remarkable for at least three reasons: First, it is that not of the victim but of a child, literally, of the victim’s oppressors; second, although it is clearly based upon, as I shall show, actual experiences in a Soviet psychiatric hospital and a Soviet politicals’ prison, it never once identifies its locales, thus rendering them universal; and third, perhaps most important in terms of literature, although it must have come out of a profound personal experience, it is clearly a work of fiction.

  That alone, its novelistic complexion, sets it apart from the entire body of Soviet protest writing, with the exceptions of Solzhenitsyn and Voinovich, with both of whom the mysteriously named newcomer, V. Kelian, must now be compared. The novels in English of both Solzhenitsyn and Voinovich have been translated from the Russian; Georgie Boy was apparently written in English by a Russian emigre (Keliansky? Kelianko? Kelianovich? One guesses, at least, that the V is for Vladimir).

  Georgie Boy is not a political novel. It is not even, despite its surface, a novel about the political abuse of psychiatry. Nor can it, by any extension, be called a psychological novel, as such. Certainly it concerns corruption in the practice of psychology, but it has no “mission” in that direction. If by some miracle it reaches an audience in the general book-buying public, it may even come to be denounced as a pornographic novel about the intense affair between the victim, a beautiful woman in her twenties, and the narrator, her savior and lover, a boy of only twelve named George.

  Inevitably, because of this “twist” of the story, comparisons may be made with the most celebrated novel by another Russian, Nabokov, but really the only similarity between the two books is the precocious sexuality, in the one, of a girl, and in the other, of a boy, vis-à-vis a “mature” lover. There is hardly a single point of resemblance between Monsieur Humbert and “Princess” Kathy, other than their awareness that their fondness for pubescent lovers is considered wrong by society. If the sometimes graphic scenes of lovemaking, as seen and told through the fresh eyes of the boy himself, serve to attract readers who otherwise would overlook this wonderful novel, then they will have accomplished one of their two purposes—the other being to examine the whole question of what is real, if the same “reality” is experienced by a woman of twenty-four, a boy of twelve, and an unscrupulous psychiatrist whose grasp of reality is entirely egocentric.

  ALL OF US have endured those mildly inquisitive moments, sometimes stretching into hours, waiting in a doctor’s or dentist’s (or psychotherapist’s) office with nothing to do but examine the room, the tiles on the floor, the pictures and diplomas on the wall, the familiar and unfamiliar instruments, the furniture of boredom. Georgie Boy introduces us to the subject, and to our friendly narrator in the title role, with a brilliant opening chapter in which there are no people at all, and yet the major personae of the novel are not only presented but depicted clearly, as seen innocently by George (there are no last names in this novel, except that of the villain, Bolshakov), an eager, intelligent, kindhearted (for annealing reasons of his own) boy of twelve, the son not of the doctor whose room this is but of one of the doctor’s professional colleagues, a woman psychiatrist in the same hospital—for this is clearly, as Georgie lets us know, an office not in a pro
fessional building or clinic but in a psychiatric hospital—and these documents and pictures and dolls that the boy describes and imaginatively analyzes in the room are clearly those of a senior staff psychiatrist in an institution whose purpose is ostensibly the treatment of mental illness but in “reality” is the punishment, through Pavlovian conditioning, of nonconformists, dissenters, the heterodox misfits in the social or political order.

  Here, and throughout the book, Georgie refers to the hospital only as “the Laboratory,” which is no part of its name but only the name his doctor mother calls an unused part of the hospital in which she “parks” her son, leaving him to play or somehow amuse himself while she works. Thus by imaginative synecdoche he applies to the whole institution the two “purposes” of a small part of it: the consumption and management of his idle hours, and radical experimentation with the mechanisms of the human psyche.

  It may be argued—and the reader is certainly wary of this throughout the first chapters of the book—that young George is simply too perceptive for his age, in what he observes and illustrates around him in the Laboratory, and this wariness is encouraged by his lovely use of language. But the truth is that, as the reader abruptly realizes along about the end of the second chapter, George is not “interpreting” anything; he makes no value judgments, no appreciations or denunciations, of the world around him. He simply describes his world with the candor and innocence of his youth, the awkward age, and permits the reader to do all of the thinking. This is, of course, the highest condition of literature as opposed to the “entertainment” arts.

  The closest George ever comes to voicing an opinion is when he betrays his real feelings for his (and our) heroine, whom he has chosen to call “Princess,” thereby endowing his narrative with some of the charm of a fairy tale. We learn eventually that her first name may be Kathy, but we learn also that it could conceivably just as well be Kofryna or Catalina or Aikaterine or Caron or Katerina or Karena, “the pure” in any language. She might very well be from a royal family and thus actually a princess, or that may simply be a title George has bestowed upon her. She is not Russian—or, if she is, she is also Portuguese and Swedish and Scottish and American. In some unnamed city that could be any large city anywhere, she has been arrested, during a demonstration, for civil disobedience or for passive resistance or for her political or religious beliefs. An agency of the government (it is never identified as the KGB or the CIA, but it behaves suspiciously like an amalgam of both) arranges to have her incarcerated without a trial, which would attract unfavorable publicity, by sending her for psychiatric “evaluation” to the Laboratory.

  Those of us who know Moscow’s infamous Serbsky Institute, by reading Bukovsky or the Medvedevs or the more recent Victor Nekipelov in his brilliant Institute of Fools, will recognize at once that the Laboratory closely resembles the Serbsky. But, lest we think we are actually there, the Laboratory also closely resembles Saint Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., and indeed one of the permanent inmates (there are several) of the Laboratory is an aged poet who writes deliberately obscure verses remarkably similar to Ezra Pound’s. The fact that Pound was released from the psychiatric hospital in 1958 should not deter us from making the assumption that this poet is Pound and the hospital is Saint Elizabeth’s. It may actually be not Pound in person but his ghost, of whom there are several in the spectral imaginations of Princess as well as George.

  Out of curiosity, I referred to my copy of Russia’s Political Hospitals: The Abuses of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union (published in America in 1977 as Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress Dissent), in which authors Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway identify some of the personnel working at the Serbsky. Several of the actual doctors are recognizable here, as George sees them or depicts them from his “neutral” stance as the son of their colleague: Daniil Romanovich Lunts, the chief of Section Four (Political) of the Serbsky, is clearly identifiable, as are Dr. Yakov Lazarevich Landau, his deputy, and Dr. Margarita Felixovna Taltse, another senior psychiatrist. Most remarkable is that George’s mother in the novel, whom he refers to simply as Doctor Mom, is distinguishable as the actual Dr. Svetlana Iosifovna Rudenko, a blonde beauty who actually had, and doted upon, a young son, Dzhordzhi, or Georgy (named fawningly after the Serbsky’s longtime powerful director, Georgy Morozov). Are we to assume that “V. Kelian” is possibly Dzhordzhi Rudenko, grown now into his twenties? Or did Dzhordzhi actually rescue a woman like his Princess and get himself killed in the act?…But I hesitate to give away the tragic ending of this novel.

  If these various disguises and pseudonyms were necessary to protect or conceal, however thinly, actual persons, why then did V. Kelian (or George, or Dzhordzhi) choose to identify Dr. Vasily Timofeyevich Bolshakov by his actual name?

  For a number of years Dr. Bolshakov has been in the forefront of the elite Serbsky psychiatrists who, by their Party loyalty and their willingness to abuse their profession for political ends, have enjoyed special privileges, inflated salaries, and the right to travel, including to the United States, where Bolshakov has been several times.

  V.T. BOLSHAKOV IS THE MOST disagreeable person I have ever encountered between the covers of a book, fiction or nonfiction. In a word, he stinks. But again, George never passes judgment upon him…until the very end, and then the judgment is final, severe, and eternally damning. If George even resents Dr. Bolshakov because the man once seduced and debauched George’s own mother with George as a covert witness, he does not reveal his repugnance. Throughout the book, he is content, if that is the word, merely to chronicle Bolshakov’s long, demonic, crafty campaign to deprive Princess of her sanity.

  It is Bolshakov, of course, who “evaluates” Princess for the government agency and writes a report, which George finds in the doctor’s files at the conclusion of the opening chapter discussed above, discovering that Bolshakov has classified her as schizophrenic. (The Serbsky, following the diagnostic system of the notorious Dr. Andrei V. Snezhnevsky, actually does classify all political prisoners as having “sluggish” or “creeping” schizophrenia.) Bolshakov’s own pet diagnosis of his “patients,” especially Princess, is a form of paranoid or delusional schizophrenia in which the patient is incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction.

  How many of Bolshakov’s sessions with Princess her Georgie actually eavesdropped upon, or how many he reconstructed from spying in Bolshakov’s files or by simply being told about them by Princess herself, may only be surmised; we do not question his modus operandi, so fascinated are we by his modus vivendi. He captures the intonations and inflections of Bolshakov’s speech, as the doctor talks to Princess, without making Bolshakov sound Russian or American. “How am I to believe you tell the truth?” becomes almost a litany in Bolshakov’s questioning of his victim, Princess. There are endless variations: “Did you actually do that?” and “How can you be sure that it happened the way you think it did?” and “Aren’t you simply trying to get me to see something that never existed?” and, always, the falling back on that one word: “Is this really true?”

  For a man obsessed with truth, or pretending to be, Bolshakov has almost no awareness of the hideousness of the truth of his own existence. He has abjured his own mother, caused the death of his own sister, and dishonored some of his best professors during graduate school. He is a compulsive chronic masturbator, even after “normal” satisfaction from the great variety of women he seduces or coerces with threats, punishments, drugs. To Princess and his other patients, he freely administers sulfazine and atropine, two drugs whose effectiveness in psychiatry has long been disproved, but two drugs that cause considerable chemical discomfort and even derangement. (Sulfazine in particular, a form of sulphur suspended in peach oil, does nothing for the “patient” other than create disorientation and severe headaches.) When Princess’s spirit continues to hold up under the regimen of abusive drug treatment, Bolshakov permits her to be subjected to tortures that are not chemical but physical, wracking her with st
retchings and bruisings and even a form of Chinese water torture. And then of course there is his most diabolical torture: under pretext of “talk therapy” that he persuades her is for the benefit of “helping” whatever imperfections in her psyche have resulted in her predilection for youths, he submits her to what is essentially a “conveyor belt” of nonstop interrogation, an insidious campaign of questioning designed to invalidate her trust in “reality.”

  In his observation and description of the grotesque punishments that Princess must endure, George himself breaks, becoming, in his choice of words and images, a surrealist.

  SURREALISM AS A MODE OF representation—or misrepresentation—in literature as well as in the visual arts has as its fundamental limitation its being private, personal, even hermetic. One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare. Or, to put it differently, one man’s worst nightmare becomes a ludicrous farce to another man. Jung to the contrary, there is no collective unconscious that can interpret or even appreciate the illogical, anachronistic, asyntactical phenomena that well up from the depths of the soul and are consciously rearranged to form a “truth” or “reality” that can be communicated to another person.

  V. Kelian knows this and has wisely chosen not to become cutely Kafkaesque when there are so many easy temptations for doing so, in a work of this nature, this setting, this cast of characters, and this exploration of themes. Young George’s slow and subtle descent—or ascent—into a kind of madness of his own is not, we realize with a shock of recognition, a flight into inaccessibility but rather a voyage into the familiar if puzzling terrors and suspicions we all of us have known at the passage from childhood into adulthood. George’s “loss of innocence” (concurrent with his loss of virginity) takes the form of his realization that the scenes of horror he is witnessing in the Laboratory are for him a symbolic albeit brutal indoctrination into puberty. The “rites” are of observation, not participation, and the only way he can communicate that observation to the reader is with language verging on the irrational, even poetic, with images that are magnificent in their strangeness and extravagance. One almost regrets the coming of the inevitable time when George, through the love of Princess, regains his prosaic rationality.