Therapy

by David Lodge

  Miss Wu asked me about the family. I was slightly abashed to discover that I had nothing new to report since my last visit. I have a vague memory that Sally spoke to Jane on the phone a few days ago, and relayed some news to me, but I didn’t take it in at the time, and I was too embarrassed to ask Sally later what it was, because she’s still pissed off with me for letting her down over the Websters. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately. I’ve been reading a lot of Kierkegaard, and a biography of him by Walter Lowrie. Writing this journal takes up a lot of time, too. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it going at this rate – I’m amazed by how much printout I’ve got already. Kierkegaard’s journals in their complete, unedited form run to 10,000 pages apparently. I picked up a paperback selection of them in Charing Cross Road. There’s a passage early on about him going to see his doctor which made me sit up. Kierkegaard asked the doctor if he thought his melancholy could be overcome by willpower. The doctor said he doubted it, and that it might be dangerous even to try. Kierkegaard resigned himself to living with his depression:

  From that instant my choice was made. That grievous malformation with its attendant sufferings (which undoubtedly would have caused most others to commit suicide, if they had enough spirit left to grasp the utter misery of that torture) is what I have regarded as the thorn in the flesh, my limitation, my cross …

  The thorn in the flesh! How about that?

  Søren Kierkegaard. Just the name on the title page has a peculiar, arresting effect. It’s so strange, so extravagantly foreign-looking to an English eye – almost extra-terrestrial. That weird o with the slash through it, like the zero sign on a computer screen – it might belong to some synthetic language invented by a sci-fi writer. And the double aa in the surname is almost as exotic. There are no native English words with two consecutive a’s, I think, and not many loan-words either. I’ve always been irritated by the nerds who put small ads in newspapers beginning with a meaningless row of A’s, just to be sure of getting pole position in the column, like: “AAAA Escort for sale, D Reg., 50,000 miles, £ 3000 o.n.o.” It’s cheating. There ought to be a rule against it, then people would have to use a bit of ingenuity. I just looked at the first page in the dictionary: aa, aardvark, Aarhus, … Aa is a Hawaiian word for a certain kind of volcanic rock, and an aardvark is a nocturnal mammal that eats termites – the name comes from obsolete Afrikaans, it says. “Aardvark-grey Escort for sale” would make an eye-catching ad. (I presume by night all aardvarks are grey.)

  Once you start browsing in dictionaries, you never know where it will lead you. I noticed that Aarhus, the name of a port in Denmark, was given the alternative spelling of Århus. Further research revealed that this is the usual way the double aa is written in modern Danish, a single a with a little circle on top. So if Kierkegaard were alive today he would write his name as Kierkegård. More unsettling still was the discovery that all this time I’ve been pronouncing his name incorrectly. I thought it was something like Sor’n Key-erk-er-guard. Not at all. Apparently the o is pronounced like eu in the French deux, the Kierk is pronounced as Kirg with a hard g, the aa sounds like awe in English, and the d is mute. So the name sounds something like Seuren Kirgegor. I think I’ll stick with the English pronunciation.

  The a with the little circle on top reminds me of something, but I can’t for the life of me remember what. Frustrating. It’ll come back to me one day, when I’m not trying.

  I’ve also been reading Repetition, subtitled An Essay in Experimental Psychology. A rum book. Well, they’re all rum books. Each one is different, but the same themes and obsessions keep cropping up: courtship, seduction, indecision, guilt, depression, despair. Repetition has another pretend-author, Constantine Constantius, who is the friend and confidant of a nameless young man, and he’s a bit like A in Either/Or. The young man falls in love with a girl who reciprocates his feelings and they become engaged. But instead of being made happy by this situation, the guy is immediately plunged into the deepest depression (Constantius calls it “melancholy”, like Kierkegaard in his Journals). What triggers this reaction is a fragment of verse (the young man has ambitions to be a poet himself) which he finds himself repeating again and again:

  To my arm-chair there comes a dream

  From the springtime of youth

  A longing intense

  For thee, thou sun amongst women.

  The young man is a classic case of the unhappiest man. Instead of living in the present, enjoying engagement, he remembers the future; that is to say, he imagines himself looking back on his youthful love from the vantage point of disillusioned old age, like the speaker of the poem, and then there seems to be no point in getting married. “He was in love, deeply and sincerely in love, that was evident – and yet all at once, in one of the first days of his engagement, he was capable of recollecting his love. Substantially he was through with the whole relationship. Before he begins he has taken such a terrible stride that he has leapt over the whole of life.” It’s a wonderfully barmy and yet entirely plausible way of cheating yourself of happiness. Constantius sums it up: “He longs for the girl, he has to restrain himself by force from hanging around her the whole day, and yet at the very first instant he has become an old man with respect to the whole relationship … That he would become unhappy was clear enough, and that the girl would become unhappy was no less clear.” He decides that for the girl’s own good he must break off the engagement. But how can he do this without making her feel rejected?

  Constantius advises him to pretend to have a mistress – to set up a shop-girl in an apartment and go through the motions of visiting her – so that his fiancée will despise him and break off the engagement herself. The young man accepts this advice, but at the last moment lacks the nerve to carry it out, and simply disappears from Copenhagen. After an interval he starts writing letters to Constantius, analysing his conduct and his feelings in relation to the girl. He’s still completely obsessed with her, of course. He’s become an unhappy rememberer. “What am I doing now? I begin all over again from the beginning, and from the wrong end. I shun every outward reminder of the whole thing, yet my soul, day and night, waking and sleeping, is incessantly employed with it.” He identifies himself with Job. (I looked up Job in the Bible. I’d never actually read the Book of Job before. It’s surprisingly readable – bloody brilliant, actually.) Like Job, the young man bewails his miserable condition (“My life has been brought to an impasse, I loathe existence, it is without savour, lacking salt and sense”), but whereas Job blames God, the young man doesn’t believe in God, so he isn’t sure whose fault it is: “How did I obtain an interest in this enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director?” The young man longs for some sudden transforming event or revelation, a “tempest” like the one that comes at the end of the Book of Job, when God really sticks it to Job and says in effect, “Can you do what I can do? If not, belt up,” and Job submits and God rewards him by giving him twice as many sheep and camels and she-asses as he had before. “Job is blessed and has received everything double,” says the young man. “This is what is called a repetition.” Then he reads in a newspaper that the girl has married somebody else, and he writes to Constantius that the news has liberated him from his obsession: “I am again myself … The discord in my nature is resolved, I am again unified … is this not then a repetition? Did I not get everything doubly restored? Did I not get myself again, precisely in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance?” His last letter ends with a rapturous thankyou to the girl, and an ecstatic dedication of himself to the life of the mind:

  … first a libation to her who saved a soul which sat in the solitude of despair. Hail to feminine magnanimity! Long life to the high flight of thought, to moral danger in the service of the idea! Hail to the danger of battle! Hail to the solemn exultation of victory! Hail to the dance in the vortex of the infinit
e! Hail to the breaking wave which covers me in the abyss! Hail to the breaking wave which hurls me up above the stars!

  Now if you know anything about Kierkegaard’s life, and I know a bit by now, you don’t need to be told that this story was very close to his own experience. Soon after he got engaged to Regine he started to have doubts about whether they could ever be happy together, because of his own temperament. So he broke off the engagement, even though he was still in love with the girl, and she was still in love with him and begged him not to break it off, as did her father. Kierkegaard went away to live in Berlin for a while, where he wrote Either/Or, which was a long, roundabout apology and explanation for his conduct towards Regine. He said later that it was written for her and that the “Seducer’s Diary” in particular was meant to “help her push her boat from the shore”, i.e., to sever her emotional attachment to him, by making her think that anyone capable of creating the character of Johannes must be something of a cold-blooded selfish bastard himself. You could say that Kierkegaard’s writing “The Seducer’s Diary” was like the young man in Repetition pretending to have a mistress. In fact, when he finished Either/Or, Kierkegaard immediately started work on Repetition, going over the same ground in a story that was much closer to his own experience. But when he came back to Copenhagen and discovered that Regine was already engaged to somebody else, was he overjoyed? Did he feel liberated and unified like the hero of Repetition? Did he hell. He was devastated. There’s an entry in the Journals at this time which obviously describes his feelings:

  The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of essential importance, to discover, for example, that the sum and substance of his sentiment is rubbish.

  Obviously he’d been secretly hoping that his decision to break off the engagement would be miraculously reversed without his own volition, and that he would marry Regine after all. Even when he was sailing to Germany, on his way to Berlin, he noted in his journal: “Notwithstanding it is imprudent for my peace of mind, I cannot leave off thinking of the indescribable moment when I might return to her.” That was the repetition he had in mind: he would get Regine twice. Like Job he would be blessed and receive everything double. He actually heard about her new engagement when he was working on Repetition, and scrapped the original ending of the story, in which the hero commits suicide because he cannot bear to think of the suffering he has caused his beloved.

  So all that high-falutin’ stuff about feminine magnanimity and the vortex of the infinite was an attempt to get over his disappointment at Regine’s transference of her affections to someone else, an effort to see this as a triumph and vindication of his conduct, not an exposure of his folly. It didn’t work. He never ceased to love her, or think of her, or write about her (directly or indirectly) for the rest of his life; and he left everything he owned to her in his will (there wasn’t much left when he died, but it’s the thought that counts, and in this case reveals). What a fool! But what an endearing, entirely human fool.

  Repetition is a typically teasing, haunting Kierkegaard title. We normally think of repetition as inherently boring, something to be avoided if possible, as in “repetitive job”. But in this book it’s seen as something fantastically precious and desirable. One meaning of it is the restoration of what seems to be lost (e.g. Job’s prosperity, the young man’s faith in himself). But another sense is the enjoyment of what you have. It’s the same as living-in-the-present, “it has the blessed certainty of the instant.” It means being set free from the curse of unhappy hoping and unhappy remembering. “Hope is a charming maiden that slips through the fingers, recollection is a beautiful old woman but of no use at the instant, repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires.”

  It occurs to me that you could turn that last metaphor around: not repetition is a beloved wife, but a beloved wife (or beloved husband) is repetition. To appreciate the real value of marriage you have to discard the superficial idea of repetition as something boring and negative, and see it as, on the contrary, something liberating and positive – the secret of happiness, no less. That’s why B, in Either/Or, begins his attack on A’s aesthetic philosophy of life (and the melancholia which goes with it) by defending marriage, and urging A to marry. (This is getting quite exciting: I haven’t thought as hard as this for years, if ever.)

  Take sex, for instance. Married sex is the repetition of an act. The element of repetition outweighs any variation there may be between one occasion and another. However many postures you experiment with, however many erotic techniques and sex-toys and games and visual aids you might employ, the fact that you have the same partner means that every act is essentially (or do I mean existentially?) the same. And if our experience is anything to go by (mine and Sally’s, I mean) most couples eventually settle on a certain pattern of love-making which suits them both, and repeat it over and over. How many sex acts are there in a long-lasting marriage? Thousands. Some will be more satisfying than others, but does anybody remember them all distinctly? No, they merge and blend in the memory. That’s why philanderers like Jake think married sex is inherently boring. They insist upon variety in sex, and after a while the means of obtaining variety become more important than the act itself. For them the essence of sex is in the anticipation, the plotting, the planning, the desiring, the wooing, the secrecy, the deceptions, the assignations. You don’t make assignations with your spouse. There’s no need. Sex is just there, to enjoy when you want it; and if your partner doesn’t feel like it for some reason, because they’re tired or have a cold or want to stop up and watch something on the telly, well, that’s no big deal, because there will be plenty of other opportunities. What’s so wonderful about married sex (and especially middle-aged, post-menopausal sex, when the birth-control business is over and done with) is that you don’t have to be thinking about it all the time. I suspect that Jake is thinking about it even while he’s phoning clients and drawing up contracts; probably the only time he isn’t thinking about sex is when he’s actually having it (because orgasm is a kind of slipped second, it empties the mind of thought for an instant) but I bet as soon as he comes he’s thinking about it again.

  What applies to sex applies to everything else in marriage: work, recreation, meals, whatever. It’s all repetition. The longer you live together, the less you change, and the more repetition there is in daily life. You know each other’s minds, thoughts, habits: who sleeps on which side of the bed, who gets up first in the morning, who takes coffee and who takes tea at breakfast, who likes to read the news section of the paper first and who the review section, and so on. You need to speak to each other less and less. To an outsider it looks like boredom and alienation. It’s a commonplace that you can always tell which couples in a restaurant are married to each other because they’re eating in silence. But does this mean that they’re unhappy with each other’s company? Not at all. They’re merely behaving as they do at home, as they do all the time. It’s not that they have nothing to say to each other, but that it doesn’t have to be said. Being happily married means that you don’t have to perform marriage, you just live in it, like a fish lives in the sea. It’s remarkable Kierkegaard intuitively understood that, even though he was never married himself, and threw away his best chance of having the experience.

  … Sally just came into my study to tell me she wants a separation. She says she told me earlier this evening, over supper, but I wasn’t listening. I listened this time, but I still can’t take it in.

  This statement, consisting of 5 pages, each signed by me, is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.

  Dated the: 21st March 1993.

  I FIRST NOTICED Mr Passmore behaving strangely towards me about two weeks ago. I’ve been coaching his wife for some months, but I know him only slightly, as someone I would say
hello to if we passed each other at the Club, nothing more. I’ve never coached him. Mrs Passmore told me he had a chronic knee injury which hadn’t responded to surgery, and it handicaps him considerably as regards tennis. I’ve seen him playing occasionally, wearing a rigid brace, and I thought he managed pretty well, considering, but I imagine he finds it very frustrating not being able to move around the court properly. I think perhaps that’s why he got this crazy idea into his head. If you’re keen on sport, there’s nothing worse than long-term injury. I know – I’ve been through it myself: cartilage problems, tendinitis, I’ve had them all. It really gets you down. The whole world looks grey, everything seems against you. You only have to get some crisis in your personal life and you flip. Mr Passmore doesn’t look the athletic type, but I gather sport matters to him. Mrs Passmore told me that before his injury they used to play each other a lot, but now she doesn’t like to because he can’t bear her to win, but he complains if she doesn’t try to. Actually I think she could beat him now even if he was fully fit: she’s come on a lot, lately. I’ve been coaching her twice a week all through this winter.