by Erica Jong
Through fame, too, the artist sought to compensate himself for the sense of early deprivation. But it never quite worked. Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small, and besides the world is a lousy lover. So fame too was a disappointment. Many artists turned in despair to opium, alcohol, homosexual lechery, heterosexual lechery, religious fervor, political moralizing, suicide, and other palliatives. But these never quite worked either. Except suicide-which always worked, in a way. At that point I remembered an epigram by Antonio Porchia which the analyst had not wit enough to quote:
I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings
for the soul that cures its sufferings dies.
So too with artists. Only more so.
Throughout the whole description of the artist’s weakness, dependency, naiveté, etc., Bennett squeezed my hand and shot me knowing glances. Come back home to Daddy. All is understood. How I longed to come back home to Daddy! But how I also longed to be free!
“Freedom is an illusion,” Bennett would have said (agreeing for once with B. F. Skinner) and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability… I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up?
Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my “hunger-thump.” It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it-with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men and poems shaped like men and men shaped like poems-it refused to be still. Unfillable-that’s what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.
What was this pounding thing inside of me? A drum? Or a whole percussion section? Was it all air in a stretched skin?
Was it an auditory hallucination? Was it maybe a frog? Wasn’t he thumping about a prince? Wasn’t he thinking he was a prince? Was I doomed to be hungry for life?
At the end of the paper about artists, we all applauded from our rickety gold-backed chairs and politely stood and yawned.
“I must have a copy of that paper,” I said to Bennett.
“You don’t need it,” he said. “It’s the story of your life.”
I may have neglected to report another aspect of the paper on artists (whose author, as I recall, was a certain Dr. Koenigsberger). This concerned the love life of the artist, particularly the tendency of artists to latch on (with considerable ferocity) to quite unsuitable “love objects” and idealize them wildly like the idealized parents they thought they never had. This unsuitable “love object” was mostly a projection on the part of the artist-lover. In fact, the object of passion was often quite ordinary in the eyes of others. But to the artist-lover, the beloved became mother, father, muse, the epitome of perfection. Sometimes the epitome of bitchy perfection or evil perfection, but always a deity of sorts, always omnipotent.
What was the creative purpose of these infatuations, Dr. Koenigsberger wanted to know. We bent our heads forward in eager anticipation. By recreating the quality of the Oedipal infatuation, the artist could recreate his “family romance” and thus recreate his idealized childhood world. The numerous and often rapidly changing infatuations of artists were designed to keep the illusion alive. A new, strong sexual infatuation was the closest approximation one had in adult life to the passion of the small child for the parent of the opposite sex.
Bennett grinned throughout this part of the paper. I sulked.
Dante and Beatrice. Scott and Zelda. Humbert and Lolita. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. King Kong and Faye Wray. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Shakespeare and the Dark Lady. Shakespeare and Mr. W.H. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Sylvia Plath and the Grim Reaper. Keats and Fanny Brawne. Byron and Augusta. Dodgson and Alice. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Aschenbach and Tadzio. Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Schumann and Clara. Chopin and George Sand. Auden and Kallmann. Hopkins and the Holy Ghost. Borges and his mother. Me and Adrian?
At four o’clock that afternoon, my idealized object reappeared to chair a meeting in another one of the baroque meeting rooms. This was to the the final event before the end. The next morning Anna Freud and her Band of Renown would have another go at the lecture podium to sum it all up for the press, the participants, the weak, the halt, and the blind. Then the Congress would be over and we’d leave. But who would leave with whom? Bennett with me? Adrian with me? Or all three together? Rub-a-dub-dub-Three analysands in a tub?
Adrian’s meeting concerned proposals for the next Congress and it was mainly a bore. But I wasn’t even trying to listen. I was looking at Bennett and looking at Adrian and trying to choose. I was in such a state of agitation that after ten minutes I had to get up and leave to pace the halls by myself. Fate of fates, I ran into my German analyst, Dr. Happe. He was embracing Erik Erikson after what appeared to be a friendly chat. He greeted me and asked me if I wanted to talk for a little while.
I did.
Professor Dr. med. Gunther Happe is a tall, slim, beaked-nosed man with masses of wavy white hair. He is something of a celebrity in Germany where he appears on television frequently, writes articles for popular magazines, and is known as a fierce enemy of neo-Nazism. He is one of those radical, guilt-ridden Germans who spent the Nazi period in exile in London but returned later to try to salvage Germany from total bestiality. He is the sort of German you never hear about: humorous, modest, critical of Germany. He reads The New Yorker and sends money to the Viet Cong. He pronounces think “sink” and business “busyness,” but still, he is not a comic-book German.
When I started going to his high-ceilinged, badly heated office in Heidelberg and lying on the couch four times a week, I was twenty-four and totally panicked. I was afraid of riding on streetcars, afraid of writing letters, afraid of putting words on paper. I could scarcely believe that I had published some poems and gotten a B.A. and M.A. with all sorts of honors. Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. I used to search all the closets before I stayed alone at night. And even then couldn’t sleep. I used to lie awake nights wondering if I was driving my second husband crazy too-or if it just seemed that way.
One of my most ingenious little self-tortures was the way I wrote letters. Or rather, failed to write them, especially letters concerning my work. If (as happened once or twice) some editor or agent wrote me asking to see some of my poems, my response was utter despair. What would I say? How could I answer such a difficult request? How could I phrase the letter?
One of these requests sat in a drawer for two years while I deliberated. I tried writing various drafts. “Dear Mrs. Jones,” I began. But was that too presumptuous? Perhaps I should say “Mrs. Jones”; the “Dear” might be seen to be currying favor. How about no heading? Just launch into the letter? No. That was too stern.
If I had this much trouble with the greeting, you can imagine what agonies I went through with the text.
Thank you for your kind letter asking me to submit material. However…
All wrong! It was too servile. Her letter wasn’t “kind” and why should I toady to her by thanking her? Better be self-confident and assertive:
I have just received your letter asking me to submit poems for consideration…
Too egotistical! (I crumpled up another sheet of paper.) Never, I once read, begin a letter with the personal pronoun. Besides, how could I say I had “just received” her letter when I had been holding it for a year? Try again.
Your letter of November 12, 1967, has been on my mind for a long time. I am sorry to be such a poor correspondent, but…
Too personal.
Does she want you to cry on her shoulder about your neurotic letter-writing problems? Does she care?
Finally, two years later, after many more attempts, I drafted a disgustingly submissive, meek, and apologetic letter to the editor in question, tore it up ten times before mailing, retyped it eleven times, retyped my poems fifteen times (they had to be letter perfect, one typo and I threw away the page-and I had never learned to type) and sent the damned manila envelope off to New York. By return mail, I received a really warm letter (which even my paranoia couldn’t misinterpret), a notice of acceptance, and a check. How long do you suppose it would have taken me to get the next letter out if I had received a rejection slip?
This was the dazzlingly self-confident creature who began treatment with Dr. Happe in Heidelberg. Gradually I learned how to sit still at my desk long enough to work. Gradually I learned how to send off manuscripts and write letters. I felt like a stroke victim learning penmanship all over again, and Dr. Happe was my guide. He was mild and patient and funny. He taught me to stop hating myself. He was as rare a psychoanalyst as he was a German. It was I who kept saying dumb things like: “Oh well, I might as well give up this nonsense of writing and just have a baby.” And it was he who was always pointing out the falseness of such a “solution.”
I hadn’t seen him for two and a half years, but I had sent him my first book of poems and he had written me about it.
“Zo,” he said, like the comic-book German he wasn’t, “I see you no longer have trouble writing letters…”
“No, but I certainly have lots of other trouble…” and I spilled out my whole confused story of what had happened since we arrived in Vienna. He wasn’t going to interpret it for me, he said. He was only going to remind me of what he’d said many times before:
“You’re not a secretary; you’re a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion? There’s something to be said for passion. Can’t you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?”
“Apparently not. The trouble is I’m really a puritan at heart. All pornographers are puritans.”
“You are certainly not a pornographer,” he said.
“No, but it sounded good. I liked those two p’s. The alliteration.”
Dr. Happe smiled. Did he know the word “alliteration,” I wondered? I remembered how I always used to ask him if he understood my English. Perhaps for two and a half years he’d understood nothing.
“You are a puritan,” he said, “and of the worst sort. You do what you like but you feel so guilty that you don’t enjoy it. What, actually, is the point?” During his London exile, Happe had picked up some Englishisms. I remembered that he loved the word “actually.”
“That’s what I want to know,” I said.
“But the worst thing is how you always insist on normalizing your life. Even if you’re analyzed, your life may not be simple. Why do you expect it to be? Maybe this man is part of it. But why do you have to throw everything away before you give yourself time to decide? Can’t you wait and see what happens later?”
“I could wait if I were cautious-but I’m afraid I always have trouble being cautious.”
“Except with writing letters,” he said. “There you were very cautious.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
Then the meetings began letting out and we got up, shook hands, and said goodbye. I was left to sort out my dilemma by myself. No good Daddy to rescue me this time.
Bennett and I spent a long night of mutual recrimination, wondered whether to attempt a trial separation or a double suicide, declared our love for each other, our hatred for each other, our ambivalence for each other. We made love, screamed, cried, made love again. There is no use going into detail about all this. At one time I may have aspired to a marriage as witty as an Oscar Wilde farce with brittle, cleverly arranged adulteries out of Iris Murdoch, but I had to admit that the quality of our fights was more like Sartre’s No Exit-or still worse, As the World Turns.
In the morning, we haggardly made our way to the Congress, and listened to the closing remarks on aggression by Anna Freud and the other dignitaries (among whom Adrian was included, reading a paper I had written for him a few days earlier).
After the meeting, while Bennett talked to some friends from New York, I went into a huddle with Adrian.
“Come with me,” he said, “we’ll have a great time-an odyssey.”
“You tempt me, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s not go into it again-please.”
“I’ll be around after lunch, ducks, if you change your mind. I have to speak to some people now and then get back to the pension and pack. I’ll look for you after lunch at about two. If you’re not there, I’ll wait an hour or so. Try to make up your mind, love. Don’t be scared. Bennett’s welcome to come too, of course.” He smiled his antic smile and blew me a kiss. “Bye, love,” and he hurried off. The thought of never seeing him again made me weak in the knees.
Now it was up to me. He’d wait. I had three and a half hours to decide my fate. And his. And Bennett’s.
I wish I could say that I did it charmingly or insouciantly or even bitchily. Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style. It can have élan in its own right. But I’m a failure even as a bitch. I sniveled. I groveled. I deliberated. I analyzed. I was a bore even to myself.
I agonized over lunch in the Volksgarten with Bennett. I agonized over my agonizing. I agonized in the American Express office where, at 2 p.m., we stood trying to decide whether to get two tickets for New York or two for London or one or none.
It was all so dismal. Then I thought of Adrian’s smile and the possibility of never seeing him again and the sunny afternoons we’d spent swimming and the jokes and the dreamy drunken rides through Vienna and I raced out of American Express like a mad woman (leaving Bennett standing there) and ran through the streets. I clattered over the cobblestones in my high-heeled sandals, twisting my ankle a couple of times, sobbing out loud, my face contorted and streaked with make-up. All I knew was that I had to see him again. I thought of how he had teased me about always playing it safe. I thought of what he had said about courage, about going to the bottom of yourself and seeing what you found. I thought of all the cautious good-girl rules I had lived by-the good student, the dutiful daughter, the guilty faithful wife who committed adultery only in her own head-and I decided that for once I was going to be brave and follow my feelings no matter what the consequences. I thought of Dr. Happe saying: “You’re not a secretary, you’re a poet-why do you expect your life to be uncomplicated?” I thought of D. H. Lawrence running off with his tutor’s wife, of Romeo and Juliet dying for love, of Aschenbach pursuing Tadzio through plaguey Venice, of all the real and imaginary people who had picked up and burned their bridges and taken off into the wild blue yonder. I was one of them! No scared housewife, I. I was flying.
My fear was that Adrian had already left without me. I ran harder, getting lost in back streets, going around in circles, dodging traffic. I had been in such a daze during all the time in Vienna that I scarcely knew the way from one landmark to another though I’d been back and forth on these streets dozens of times. In my panic I saw no street signs, but raced forward looking for buildings I recognized. All those damned rococo palaces looked alike! Finally I spotted an equestrian statue which looked familiar. Then there was a courtyard and a passageway (I was gasping for breath) and then another courtyard and another passageway (I was dripping with sweat) until finally I came into a courtyard filled with cars and spotted Adrian leaning coolly on his Triumph and leafing through a magazine.
“Here I am!” I said, gasping. “I was afraid you’d leave without me.”
“Would I do a thing like that, love?”
(He would! He would!)
“We’ll have a lovely time,” he said.
We drove directly to the hotel without getting lost fo
r once. Upstairs, I threw my clothes into my bag (the sequined dress from the ball, the damp swimsuits, shorts, nightgowns, raincoat, jersey dresses for traveling-everything creased and jumbled and thrown together). Then I sat down to write a note to Bennett. What could I say? The sweat was pouring down with the tears. The letter sounded more like a love letter than a dear John. I said I loved him (I did). I said I didn’t know why I had to get away (I didn’t) but only that I felt desperately that I had to (I did). I hoped he’d forgive me. I hoped we could think about our life and try again. I left him the address of the hotel in London where we had originally planned to stay together. I didn’t know where I was going, but I’d probably surface in London. I left him dozens of phone numbers of people I planned to look up in London. I loved him. I hoped he’d forgive me. (The letter was by now more than two pages long.) Perhaps I went on writing so as not to have to leave. I wrote that I didn’t know what I was doing (I didn’t). I wrote that I felt like hell (I did). And as I was writing “I love you” for the tenth time Bennett walked in.
