Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (34 page)

by exciting emotional pity or by a flow of wit, fantastic and disassociated, so that only after the episode did he realize . . ." (188).

We are a far cry from the spiritual Yeshi Dhonden now: this doctor loves/examines his patient and cannot sort it out, lives on her money, experiences a helpless mix of diagnostic clarity and emotional intensity, is ultimately a contributing factor in his patient's disease. And in a way that no normative code on earth can measure, Dick Diver and this novel find Nicole's madness
interesting,
making me feel that her "performance" is the book's ultimate energy source, the reason Fitzgerald wrote the novel, the thing Fitzgerald knew. We have already noted some of Nicole's breakdowns. There are others: at one point she grabs the steering wheel, forces the car off the road, and jeers at Dick's cowardice for wanting to live; in a carnival she suddenly becomes altered, suspicious and then uncontrollable, shrieking that "the children's ashes are rotting in every box I open" (190). Can the doctor deal with this? Can anyone? The story is wise about psychosis. Madness, we learn, is protean: "But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it" (191-192).

I have said that Fitzgerald knew this story from the inside. And this unholy mix of the professional and the domestic captures a profound truth about medicine's inherent limits: that we (the sick) live with our diseases around the clock, whereas we see the doctor once a . . . year? Look again at this definition of madness: water that seeps through, over, and around a dike; this is the experiential round of life, the kind of thing one sees because one
lives
with it, but not the sort of specimen one can take to a lab or check out via blood work or easily disclose even through psychotherapy. One reason never to marry your patient is that the medical relation never achieves closure; it is a way of being on call permanently. Add love to the mix and you have something close to a bubbling cauldron. Fitzgerald's critics have alleged that Dick is not truly credible as a physician, but I'd argue that the book is frighteningly convincing as a rendition of what happens when doctors become involved, enmeshed,

and ultimately undone by their attachment to their patient. The cold distance that characterized the scientific gaze is lost forever when the diagnostician is wedded to the patient.

Tender Is the Night
is a diagnostic masterpiece in still other ways. I have already indicated that it discloses its secrets with narrative savvy, so that we encounter Nicole's outbreaks before knowing why, just as we do in life itself. But Fitzgerald seems obsessed with telling her nasty secret of incest, and he wants us to see how powerfully it still plays. We noted the bloodstained spread, and we gradually understand what Nicole meant when she cried, "I'll wear it for you—I'm not ashamed, though it was such a pity": she is
bloodstained
in such a way that the incest shows forever, not merely as the key thrown down the well but as her permanent self-image. It is possible to feel that Fitzgerald goes over the top to bruit her condition: the film Rosemary is making is called
Daddy's Girl;
one of Dick's patients, Senor Pardo y Cuidad Real (is there any writer who can match Fitzgerald's names?) has a notoriously fey son known as the "Queen of Chili," effectively becoming another version of Daddy's Girl; Dick, in pursuing Rosemary, realizes that "he wanted to sweep away her mother, remove the whole affair from the nursery footing upon which Rosemary persistency established it" (84-85). One comes to realize that the novel's presentation of Nicole is Freudian in its view that hysteria and dysfunction are the belated result of early (and repressed) sexual abuse in childhood. In this light, even Nicole's reference to children's ashes rotting in boxes bears out the same logic: children are despoiled, denied; that is the story she knows, and the whole novel wants to advertise it.

Why Dick, however? Why should his early interest in Rosemary be painted in these colors? It is here that the true virulence and pathos of
Tender Is the Night
comes into view. Dick Diver, the doctor who marries the rich, sick Nicole Warren, shades increasingly and horridly into a version of Devereux Warren, the incestuous father, the man who preys on little girls. We learn that he is accused of seducing a girl at the clinic, and even though the charge is inflated, Dick admits to having kissed her "in

an idle, almost indulgent way" (187). A few pages later, Nicole has the breakdown at the carnival, but its origin seems to be Dick's attentions to a young girl: "Don't you think I saw that girl look at you—that little dark girl. Oh, this is farcical—a child, not more than fifteen. Don't you think I saw?" (190). And then comes the explosive cry about children's ashes rotting in boxes. Whose fixation is this? Is this Nicole espying sexual abuse wherever she looks? Or is this another Dick Diver altogether? Fitzgerald leaves the question tantalizingly open, as he writes Dick's response to Nicole's accusation: "He had a sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but which upon waking we realize we have not committed" (190).

With a rigor that is almost sadistic, this motif of child molestation reaches its crescendo late in the novel, in Rome, where Dick is at his nadir, vulgar, drunk, beaten up, and suspected of something heinous: "A native of Frascati had raped and slain a five-year-old child and was to be brought in that morning—the crowd had assumed it was Dick." Grotesque irony? Dick, being pulled away by his friends, resists: " 'I want to make a speech,' Dick cried. 'I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did—" (235). Here is the story of the doctor marrying his sick patient rewritten as horror story, written as displaced repetition of the very abuses and sexual violation that made her psychotic in the first place. It is hard to imagine a more cutting indictment of the "loving doctor."

Fitzgerald has remained true to medical logic, but he has surprised us by reversing roles, pirouetting his people, midway in the book. The doctor marries his sick patient. Lo and behold, the patient gradually gets well, but the doctor becomes the novel's sick man, the novel's sexual abuser. Nicole finally starts to bloom, to shake off her illness, to come into her own: "The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already—the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its com-

ing" (280). That manner is dark indeed: Dick Diver will be replaced by the ever-hard Tommy Barban, as Nicole grows free of her doctor-husband. And he? The book codes him "black," as if his deterioration were some weird continuation of the bleeding black body found earlier on a bed: increasingly alcoholic, mean-tempered, shorn of his glamour, going to seed, Dick Diver becomes a man who now smashes things rather than creating them, a man who muses "I guess I'm the Black Death ... I don't seem to bring people happiness any more" (219), a man with a "black heart,
¹¹
a man given over to the "black drink."

Readers may feel uneasy at Fitzgerald's fierce story of sickness, loving, and doctoring, may feel unprepared to see the dashing Dick Diver become the "patient etherized upon a table," as T. S. Eliot characterized his figure of Prufrock. One gets well, the other gets sick: this is a diagnostic fable that is uncomfortable. At the end, Dick Diver, prince of the Riviera, the man who was to succeed Freud but married his patient instead, disappears into the American woodwork, at first in Batavia, New York, practicing general medicine, then in Lockport, a man still writing "an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion" (315), a man no longer in contact with his wife and children, a man snuffed out, extinguished in front of our eyes: "his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another" (315). I know of no more cruel closing lines in American literature. Moving his sights from Daddy's Girl, Fitzgerald has placed his own surrogate under the microscope, and he has delivered an autopsy of the American dream, a dream recast as nightmare for the loving doctor.

THE NARRATIVE OF EXPOSURE

I have been attempting to explore the range of issues and values that are packed into our mixed feelings about analysis and diagnosis. Seeing inside the other, whether it be body or mind, is both seductive and em-

powering; it is also the route toward knowledge. On a more intimate level, who does not experience a secret terror at every visit to the doctor? Surely, a modicum of horror surrounds society's great breakthroughs in the field of imaging, ranging from X rays to mammograms, CAT scans, and MRIs; yes, we understand the miracle at work here, making it possible to "read" the insides of the body without actually invading surgically, but do we really want to know what is going to be found? Even if we have the courage to live with the results, to survive the oracle's prophecy and await its enactment, do we have the fortitude to accept diagnostic findings that outpace any cures, diagnoses for which no therapies exist, a situation that is increasingly likely in our culture of ever more precise and predictive imaging and genetic research?

Exposure is, as I have tried to show, potentially violating and subjugating; but it is also liberating in its conversion of darkness into light, private into public. This can be true medically; this can be true morally. Those of us who see through the glass darkly do desire finally to be seen and to be known. The same Rousseau who, as a young man, exposed himself to passersby on the streets, also wrote
The Confessions,
the great autobiographical text of the eighteenth century, from which I would infer that the organ that is most flagrantly exhibited throughout civilization is the human tongue. We all know the proverbial story of the chance conversation on the park bench that could never happen in the bosom of the family, and we are beginning to see how the electronic highway exponentially expands the possibilities of desired exposure, of shared exposure among support groups and self-help groups that functions as a special therapy that neither doctor nor priest can provide. This same electronic revolution, however, has helped to produce a culture in which your personal medical records, your credit status, your every encounter with authority, is now stored and available, requiring neither God nor Sherlock Holmes to tap into it, retrievable to anyone with a modem and the right code.

How what is private and hidden becomes public and known, what claims to truth such information might have, what the stakes of such

"knowing" might be, how such processes are central to both literature and medicine, are the central questions of this chapter. They are explored in a remarkable way by Kathryn Harrison, in her novel
Exposure,
published in 1993. Here is Fitzgerald's fable of child abuse, of
Daddy's Girl,
written some sixty years later, so that the silver screen must now compete with the video camera, drugs stronger than alcohol are now on the scene, and psychotherapy must make its peace with other forms of analysis and treatment. We are no longer in Europe in the wake of the Great War, but in contemporary New York. Harrison writes the story of a young woman, Ann Rogers, whose father, Edgar Rogers, now dead, was a famous photographer whose work is scheduled for a major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. His work, however, can be thought of as somewhere between that of Mapplethorpe and Sally Mann, insofar as his central subject was the body of his daughter Ann, photographed from childhood to puberty in scenes ranging from sleep to insulin comas—Ann is a diabetic who brings on these comas to win her father's love by becoming as pliable and docile and helpless a body as he needs for his work—on to episodes of masturbation and sexual activity that Ann did not know were being photographed.

Now, Edgar Rogers is hardly the type of scientific diagnostician we've seen in other texts, yet he truly fits the bill, shows us, in a new key, just how much damage this prying, invasive figure can cause. Edgar represents the allure of possessing the secret life of others taken now to the level of art. His daughter (whom he cannot forgive for causing his wife's death during childbirth) is his artistic material, and although there is no hint of incest itself—unlike what we know from Harrison's other work, such as
The Kiss,
where it figures hugely in her actual life—the relationship between father and daughter is no less obscene and deforming than what transpired between Devereux Warren and his daughter Nicole.

In addition, Ann is a kleptomaniac—the novel opens with an un-commented upon description of Ann changing clothes in a taxi, putting on a skirt that she has just stolen from a posh New York store—and she has a serious drug habit consisting of crystal meth (speed) that wreaks

havoc with her insulin shots and skewed body chemistry. There can be little doubt that Ann steals as a frantic gesture for freedom, as a form of self-assertion that no one else scripts; and we see that the drug is there to ease the pain caused by the violations of the past. Like her father, Ann too is a professional photographer—she did graduate work at Yale—but she has no pretensions to high art, works instead with a video camera (employed by Visage Video), someone who records events like weddings and then touches them up to make glistening, harmonious renditions for her clients: "up to Ann to render what she has recorded into a happy if inexact memory."

Yet, the book is out to show that a career or a life of airbrushing is not sustainable. Ann is married to a granola type, Carl, "preserver of history" who restores old brownstones in the city, who senses his wife is coming apart but cannot stop it, and whose ever-positive view about dealing openly with problems is disastrously off base for his wife; in a moment of fury, she screams to him: "I am not a fucking renovation!" Carl later gets back by inveighing, "Isn't it enough that strangers have seen your cunt revealed under brighter lights than I have?" Hence, Harrison's plot comes to a boil because this forthcoming exhibit at the museum, which Ann has agreed to, will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Exposure
is the story of a breakdown, of someone whose private past is being turned into public exhibit, someone whose relation to her dead father is every bit as noxious and unprocessed as the Proustian memory of Montjouvain or Nicole Diver's memory of incest.