A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  In the daytime and till about five in the evening, Hawelka was a staid café like many others, presided over by Herr Hawelka, and frequented by retirees who ordered their kleine Mocca or kleine Braune—‘small mocca’ or ‘small brown one’. The coffee came with a glass of water and the elderly Pensionaere would sit for hours, slowly working their way through the day’s newspapers. In the Viennese café tradition, after the first order was fulfilled, a waiter would not thereafter dream of disturbing a patron by asking whether the gentleman or the lady wished to have something else, contenting himself with occasionally emptying the ash tray of cigarette butts.

  The café came alive in the evenings and remained so till well past midnight. Its regulars wandered in and out the whole evening. Those who worked on steady jobs left by nine and there was a short lull till the café filled up again later when theatre- and opera-goers came in after the evening performance for a cup of coffee or a glass of French cognac before going home. For many, Hawelka was a home away from home. One made and received one’s telephone calls in the phone booth next to the entrance and the voice of one of the waiters ‘Telephon fuer Herr——, bitte, often boomed above the buzz of conversation. The two waiters, Herr Heinz and Herr Franz, impeccably dressed in black suits, white shirts and black bow ties, knew all the regulars and one had to only catch their eye and nod for the ‘usual’—a 0.2 litre glass of red wine in my case, brought to the table with a cheerful smile and a polite enquiry on whether one was well. Frau Hawelka made it a point to greet every regular guest with a title that was always one notch above his station. An office clerk became a Herr Direktor, a minor municipal functionary was a Regierungsrat, and so on. I was a Herr Doktor while studying for my doctorate, and after I had my PhD she addressed me as Herr Professor long before I became one.

  The regulars at our table was an Indian friend from my Mannheim days who had now moved to Vienna, a gay Irish actor, a French musician struck by a mysterious ailment in his right hand that prevented him from playing the violin, his stunning girlfriend who glowed in the lust she inspired in men at the neighbouring tables, and a talented Turkish painter, Errol, who had been taken under their wing by artists of the then fashionable Viennese school of ‘Fantastic Realism’. Errol’s Austrian girlfriend was an irregular member of the group till they got married. On the second day after the marriage vows were exchanged, Errol moved out of the apartment the two had lived in for two years. ‘Something changed after the marriage ceremony, Sudhir. Suddenly, I could no longer bear to be with her,’ was Errol’s only comment.

  It was in Hawelka that I met both my landlords who offered me accommodation during my two different periods of stay in Vienna. The first was Dr Artner who I met in Hawelka a week after my arrival. He had a large apartment in Silbergasse in Vienna’s 19th district, at the foothills of the Vienna woods. Dr Artner lived in one room of this apartment. The living room and another bedroom, both furnished with heavy, turn-of-the-century furniture, were empty and I was welcome to take them at a very reasonable rent. We shared the kitchen and the bathroom.

  Dr Artner was a plump, balding man in his late forties, with a gold-plated pince-nez and an unhealthy pasty skin. He was always dressed in one of the two suits he possessed, one brown and the other grey, when he went to the Hawelka in the evening. I rarely came across him in our apartment since he stayed closeted in his room, sleeping and reading. He generally woke up around two in the afternoon, his presence announcing itself during the weekends when I was also at home by a strong and distinctive odour spreading out from the toilet even after he flushed it more than once. The smell was due to his singular diet; day in and day out, Dr Artner cooked himself the same lunch and dinner of two fried eggs and a large quantity of boiled spinach. He was always effusively grateful for my invitation to rice and keema mattar but doubted that his delicate stomach, a consequence of the war, could tolerate the spiced fare.

  Dr Artner had been a reluctant warrior, an infantry soldier in France during the Allied invasion. In the general retreat of the German Wehrmacht, he was always one of the last ones to leave his post since his dearest wish was to be captured by the advancing American troops. Unfortunately for him, the sergeant of his company mistook his lingering behind after the rest of the company had quit the battlefield as a sign of his courage and dedication to the Fatherland. He recommended Dr Artner for a bravery medal. ‘Ah, Herr Kakar,’ Dr Artner said, ‘you cannot imagine my joy when I could finally surrender to the Americans!’

  Dr Artner spent a couple of contented years in an Allied prisoner of war camp before he was released and returned to Vienna. An aunt had left him the apartment and some money in her will and Dr Artner enrolled himself at the university for a doctorate in literature, which he completed at leisure during the next fifteen years. After his war experiences, he did not want to make any demands on life, he told me. All he wanted was to be left alone to read in his room during the day and go to the café for a glass of wine in the evening.

  I invited him a couple of times to my part of the apartment when I had friends over for a party. He was always exaggeratedly polite in accepting the invitation. He would sit at the edge of the sofa, nursing a glass of wine, and courteously converse with whoever came and sat next to him. Only once, when he had drunk more wine than was his wont, did I discover that Dr Artner had not reached an evolved Buddhist spiritual state where he was free of all desires. After the guests had left, my Viennese girlfriend of the time, a fellow student at the university, told me that Dr Artner had asked her, very politely and with much bobbing of the head, whether she would mind accompanying him to his room and whipping him with a leather instrument he kept for the purpose. Equally politely, she said, she declined the offer.

  My second landlord—I met him, too, in Hawelka when I returned to Vienna for a few months the next year—also lived in the 19th District. He had a cottage in a small garden and was pleased to offer me a room at whatever rent I could afford to pay. ‘Cappy’, as my friends called him, was Jewish, a man of culture and breeding who had spent the war years in South Africa and returned to Vienna in the 1950s. He was a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a successful nineteenth-century writer, who is today remembered for the sexual pathology to which he gave his name, masochism. Cappy, who lived on his own, was also an avid reader, but unlike Dr Artner he went out often during the day though he never had visitors himself. On the very first morning, after I woke up late, Cappy knocked on the door of my room—he must have been waiting outside to hear sounds of my awakening—and entered with a Georgian silver tea tray covered with a fine white linen cloth edged with lace. The tray carried a silver tea service, a cup and saucer of Meissen china and two biscuits on a small plate. He poured me a cup, asked how many spoons of sugar I took and watched me with a fond expression as I drank my tea. When I returned late in the evening, I found my bed made, the edge of the duvet neatly turned up.

  The serving of morning tea, the cleaning of my room and the making of my bed in my absence continued for a few days, but my suspicion turned to certainty one day when my girlfriend came over and stayed for the night. Cappy’s dejected mien and the look of reproach he gave us when we left in the morning prepared me for the conversation we were to have that night after I returned from Hawelka. He had fallen in love with me, Cappy said, and realized that I did not return his feelings. He was disappointed in me that I preferred the grosser, worldly love of women and not the love between two men that could aspire for undreamt spiritual heights. He, however, wished that in order to spare him further distress, I would not have female visitors as long I was under his roof. I did not have an alternative accommodation and so agreed. The morning tea ceremony stopped and our relationship took on the distant politeness of one between a landlord and tenant. Except for an occasional doleful look thrown in my direction, Cappy was too cultivated to push his attentions further.

  I had not heard from Erikson ever since he left India. I was too scared to write to him myself lest I learn that the u
nderstanding we had reached in Delhi on that April evening when I knocked on his door at IIC was a passing whim on his part and a fantasy on mine. After all, he was a famous man and by this time I was fully aware of his stature within the psychoanalytic and academic worlds. After our last meeting in Delhi, I had walked out into the sprawling Lodi Gardens next to the IIC. The gardens, with their imposing 800-year-old tombs of grandees of a bygone Islamic empire, were quiet except for the rustle of a gentle breeze. The strong perfume of the white narcissus that flowers at night hung low in the air. I had walked on the gravel path meandering between the mausoleums with lightness in my step, feeling intensely alive. The confusion was over; the future stretched before me full of promise. I had hummed to myself and whistled while I walked. Now, I was fearful that perhaps my whistling had been in the dark, that the feeling of hope I carried within me since that night would collapse into despair if he did not reply to my letter or if he replied as if to a stranger. Finally, six months after my arrival in Vienna, I wrote to him. Erikson wrote back almost immediately.

  Dear Sudhir,

  I have no excuse to offer for not writing to you earlier. I could say I was not well some of the time; that I had to give a ‘big’ paper in New York in May and another one in June in London; had to meet a deadline for an encyclopaedic chapter in July and that we then returned here. So I had to put aside resolutely my Indian work and preoccupations; but this in no way excuses my not writing. I can only hope that you realize and can accept the fact that not writing means for me that time simply stood still in one section of my life and that my feelings have remained what they were before . . .

  Please write soon: how you are, what you are doing, and how you see the future. I may not be able to respond to any Harvard plans before ‘school’ starts again in the Fall. I told you that I have no department, so that you would have to consider a course of graduate in some department which would be willing to let you work with me. I would be glad to find out for you what would be most advantageous. At any rate, let me know what you are thinking these days.

  Cordially

  Erik

  But the course of true vocation does not run smooth. To admit an engineer/economist to the doctoral programme in psychology was complicated enough but to also give him a scholarship to finance his studies was to expect too much, even from Harvard. Erikson kept on trying but the problem of how I would finance my stay in the US seemed insoluble. All he could offer me was a fee for a teaching assignment in his course, which would fall far short of what I needed for my living expenses. It was already June of 1966. I had fulfilled all the requirements for my doctorate in Vienna and submitted my thesis. What remained was the oral defence of the doctoral dissertation. The Fall semester at Harvard began at the end of September and I still had no money to finance my stay there.

  ‘I wish I had the funds to help you out, but Joan and I live close to our income, and taxes and other matters leave little extra,’ Erikson wrote.

  ‘I feel very grateful to you for trying so hard for me and though I feel like Eklavya, you were completely the opposite of Dronacharya,’ I replied, sending him the Mahabharata story. Unbeknownst to Dronacharya, the great archer and teacher of the Pandava and Kaurava princes, the forest-dwelling outcaste Eklavya had adopted him as his guru. When Dronacharya discovered that Eklavya had surpassed his official charges in the art of archery, he wanted to know from the boy the name of his teacher. ‘You are my teacher,’ Eklavya said. The boy had been practising archery on his own in the forest with a mud idol of Dronacharya next to him as his guru. Since an outcaste could not be allowed to excel the high-born princes, Dronacharya asked for his gurudakshina, the present a student makes to his teacher at the end of his studies. ‘Whatever you wish, sire,’ Eklavya said, his head bowed, his hands folded in deference. ‘Then give me the thumb of your right hand,’ Dronacharya replied. Eklavya did so, thus never again being able to draw a bowstring with his hand. And though he became quite proficient by learning to do so with his toes, he would never be the great archer of his early promise.

  Erikson was too good a psychoanalyst not to register my less-than-conscious communication in sending him the story: my identification with the dark outcaste vis-à-vis his white Harvard student princes and my equally unconscious attempt to make him feel both guilty and responsible for my fate. He was also wise enough to remain silent and refrain from comment.

  The solution to my financial problem came from Kamla who had come to visit me in Vienna for a couple of days and where Vikram joined her. IIM, Ahmedabad, was deputing its freshly recruited faculty to Harvard Business School for an academic year of training in its International Teachers Program. Although I would not be a part of this program, there was no reason why the IIM could not give me the extra funds I needed to pursue my studies with Erikson. The grant was conditional on my agreeing to return to India after the year in the US and serve in the IIM’s faculty for a minimum period of three years.

  My appointment in Harvard, initially for a semester, was as a lecturer in general education in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences where I was expected to assist Erikson in teaching his course ‘The Human Life Cycle’. Erikson’s guru-like status among Harvard students ensured that his classes were hugely popular. The Carr-Saunders lecture theatre, with a seating capacity of around four hundred, was filled to the last seat for Erikson’s biweekly lectures. The students who took the course for credit were in their final year of undergraduate studies, almost the whole of Harvard’s graduating class of 1967. I was one of the six assistants or ‘section men’ as we were called, who accompanied a group of students throughout the course, meeting the group after Erikson’s lectures to discuss what he had said and go over the prescribed and recommended readings for that day. Since I was as unfamiliar with the readings, from psychoanalysis, developmental and cognitive psychology, as were my students, I needed to ensure that I remained one step ahead of those very bright young men and women. This I did by immersing myself not only in the prescribed texts but also going through the recommended readings, which most of the students tended to ignore. Pamela Daniels, Erikson’s long-time assistant and head section person, who became a lifelong friend, was immensely supportive with further recommendations on what I should be reading and advising me on the students’ expectations. I was thus learning psychology by teaching it, unaware at the time that I was following the example of a giant in the profession, William James, who once said that the first lecture in psychology he ever heard was the first one he gave. Erikson himself admitted that the first course in psychology he ever took was also the first (and the last) that he failed.

  I believe it was my enthusiastic idolization of Erikson’s person that made me assimilate his—and psychoanalytic—thought much more rapidly than I would have done in a normal academic setting. It reinforced my ‘innate’ Indian conviction that a student learns more from a teacher by identification with him than by critical engagement. I see much merit in the tradition of ancient Indian scholarship, wherein scholars sought to maintain this idealization and identification intact by not taking credit for their own innovations but presenting them as mere elaborations of their teachers’ ideas. The value of psychic openness fostered by these two great constructs of human imagination—identification and idealization—which not only heighten aesthetic sensibility but also augment intellectual verve, is grossly underestimated by modern rationality’s insistence on a critical engagement that banishes emotions and believes that a successful scholarly career must begin with the ‘killing’ of the teacher(s). This is of a piece with the dominant mythos of Western imagination (think of Oedipus) that parricide is the route to the generational ascendancy and release of creativity of the young. The resolution of the generational complex in the Indian imagination, on the other hand—the god-king Rama is a compelling exemplar—demands the self-sacrifice of the young to keep the father-son bond intact. In the case of other mythical heroes like Bhishma and Puru, the sacrifice of the self to the wishes of the fat
her extends to a renunciation of procreativity, a symbolic self-castration which is also the denouement of the Eklavya story.

  As a product of formal German and a more casual but equally hierarchical Indian university system, the easy informality of the American academia captivated me as it continues to enthral thousands of Indian students who proceed to the US for higher studies. To be on first-name basis with famous professors, to sit in Erikson’s office in Widener Library after his lecture with the other section persons and talk as ostensible equals while sharing a sandwich lunch from Elsie’s was an exhilarating experience. It puffed me up with a pleasant feeling of self-importance. Harvard, of course, gives an additional gloss to borrowed chest feathers. For although it is beyond doubt that the university is home to some of the most brilliant minds in the world, it is equally true that not all or even most of Harvard’s faculty and students are geniuses. Or as the Germans would say, ‘Die kochen auch mit Wasser—They also cook with water.’ Yet, as I have often observed on my many visits to that great university, just being a part of Harvard is often an invitation to pretentiousness, to the adoption of a supercilious attitude that does not exist in some of the other great American universities, such as Chicago or Princeton.