Back Then (17 page)

I
finally signed up with an American-born psychoanalyst—Roman Catholic, I guessed, because he had gone to Georgetown, a Jesuit institution—who was either unwilling or unable to haggle Dostoevsky or Proust and so, supposedly, would make the most of our time together. Dr. Hughes appeared to be new to a then overbooked profession because he was able to fit me in, a sort of scholarship student, at a compassionate twenty-five dollars for each of my four weekly visits. After a year or so, prospering like other psychoanalysts in their professional heyday, he moved from a dismal apartment off Third Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street to one facing the Morgan Library on Thirty-sixth Street. Once, by accident, we ended up sitting next to each other at a drugstore lunch counter where we were both having coffee before our fifty-minute session. We had nothing to talk about, except the weather (it was raining) and a sports headline in the
Post
. We might as well have been total strangers, except that total strangers meeting on neutral ground were not likely to be so halting and uneasy with each other. Freud's talking cure made no allowances for extracurricular encounters.

Even after four years of analysis with Dr. Hughes I failed to get any message from his bland, inscrutable presence. He smoked his pipe and just listened. “Transference” was not in the cards, but neither this nor the notorious element of “resistance” seemed to bother him as we plowed my psyche and my shaky sense of identity. I rehearsed the trauma of orphanhood and the contrary responses left in its wake: resentment and anger at having been abandoned (as it seemed), a sense of unworthiness, as if I had done something to deserve being abandoned, fear of competition and success, guilt about money, guilt about almost everything else, including the freedom, unrestrained by parental authority, to do and live as I wished. Like the orthodox Freudian that he was, Dr. Hughes rarely said anything and was almost impossible to provoke. “Your wife must have been a student at Mount Holyoke when you married her,” I said for want of a more consequential opening for the day's session. I detected in his response a tiny tremor of distress at this violation of impersonality—“Why do you say that?” I explained, as if to say, You should be more careful in the future, that she had written her married name and college on the flyleaf of a copy of
Anna Karenina
I had found at the bottom of a bookshelf in his waiting room. There were few such tiny triumphs.

About
midway in my analysis, my brother made me the gift of a trip to France with him. A friend, the artist Anne Truitt, introduced me by letter to Barbara Herman, a Bryn Mawr classmate of hers living transiently in Paris on the Rue Vaneau. Barbara was beautiful, with glossy black hair and high cheekbones, but even more striking, as I recognized in an instant, was her unflinching glance of appraisal, probity, and intelligence that made me call myself to account. We had dinner together, went for a long walk along the Seine, and agreed to meet again in Villefranche, on the Côte d'Azur. One late afternoon, hiking the winding hillside roads to the high village of Éze, isolated like an eagle's nest on a peak over the Mediterranean, we were caught in a pelting rainstorm and found shelter for the night in a villager's house. We huddled like children. Barbara stayed abroad, I went back to New York, and through our letters during the fall, winter, and spring we arrived at an intellectual and emotional intimacy of a sort I hadn't known before—in my head I carried on daily conversations with her. As deeply as I loved her for herself alone, she remained inseparable in my mind from the romance of “Europe,” the great good place many of my generation had been reading about and longing for despite the fact it had only recently been a cauldron of previously unimaginable horrors. The next summer I went back to Europe to see Barbara again. She was then living in Ascona, a resort town at the Swiss end of Lake Maggiore.

In the aftermath of the Allied victory of World War II and of the Marshall Plan sent to rebuild Europe's devastated economy, Americans were welcomed, even admired. Liners of half a dozen and more nations sailed from slips along the Hudson, their departures and arrivals among the spectacular sights and sounds of New York.
Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Île-de-France, United States, Andrea Doria, Stockholm, Mauretania
—the largest of these were almost a fifth of a mile long and among the most majestic, luxurious, and visually impressive things ever made in this world. The speediest crossed the Atlantic in only four and a half days. Even so Europe by ship remained a far-off place, and going there like dying into a new life. Eastbound, a few days out of New York you might begin to notice an occasional land bird flown off course; then clumps of floating vegetation, bottles, bits of lumber; then the sound of distant church bells and the smell of grass and cows even before you passed the green flank of Ireland. Europe smelled different—Gauloises and Nazionales, beer, fresh bread, and diesel fumes; pulses ran faster; colors were more vivid.

The journey to Europe was loaded with literary associations and as a result was both exotic and familiar. I stayed for a night in a Paris hotel, the Ambassador, on the Boulevard Haussmann, not far from Marcel Proust's apartment and cork-lined bedroom at Number 102. On the platform at the Gare du Nord, bound for Switzerland via Bern, I felt like Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp starting his ascent to the Magic Mountain—he entered a “primitive, unattached state” of consciousness liberated by space and time. In a second-class compartment of the Paris–Istanbul night train (Somerset Maugham's
Ashenden
) I sat next to a gaunt woman dressed all in black (
The Lady Vanishes
); the swarthy man opposite belonged in Eric Ambler's
A Coffin for Dimitrios
—he pulled his fedora down over his eyes, smoked continually, and clutched a briefcase on his lap. No one smiled or exchanged a word. Domodossola, the name of the Italian frontier town where I got off, projected its own mystery. In two hours the little narrow-gauge train from Domodossola chugged over the mountains and around Lake Maggiore to Locarno (
A Farewell to Arms
). I took the bus to Ascona.

For almost a century this town had been a haven for artists, bohemians, composers, remittance men and women, and societal
resisters of all sorts: anarchists, pacifists, vegetarians, free-love advocates, and millenarians. Occasionally I'd see a band of Tolstoyan Christian-love disciples, the men bearded and dressed like muzhiks in long leather-belted white blouses and baggy trousers tucked into their boots. They had come down from the hills to replenish their stores of buckwheat flour, cabbage, and yogurt. The actress Paulette Goddard, née Marion Levy and once married to Charlie Chaplin, kept to herself in a lakeside villa left to her by her last husband, the novelist Erich Maria Remarque, author of
All Quiet on the Western Front
. Mysterious people, mainly Germans with mysterious sources of wealth, occupied other villas. Barbara and I had lunch with one of them, reputedly a
Baronin
, who took us on a tour of her house. She showed us a swastika banner on the wall above her bed and, on a side table, a silver-framed photograph of a uniformed Wehrmacht officer. “My father,” she said. “He lives in Rio de Janeiro.” Barbara and I left as soon as we could.

J.K. and Barbara Herman, Nice, 1948.

Ascona was also the summer capital and annual conference site of the Jungian psychological establishment, Carl Jung himself favoring it as a seasonal alternative to Zurich. Recently the lone Freudian analyst in town (and one of the few Jews) had taken a week off to go fishing; while he was away a patient of his went berserk, killed his wife and children and then himself. Among the Jungian professionals sipping coffee and aperitifs in the cafés one could sense a mildly compassionate gloat of
schadenfreude
as the poor man walked past.

Barbara was working on a translation of Lautréamont's surrealist poems,
Les Chants de Maldoror
. Her essay on the poet Hart Crane had recently been accepted for publication by
The Sewanee Review
, a distinguished literary quarterly founded before the turn of the century. Together we read Rilke, Proust, and Martin Buber's
Tales of the Hasidim
. Afternoons we bicycled along the lake, often to Brissago, the border town where Hemingway's Lieutenant Henry and Catherine landed after their long row up the lake from Italy. Evenings we had suppers of bread, cheese, sausage, and wine and listened to radio broadcasts of concerts from Zurich and Barbara's records of madrigals, the Fauré
Requiem
, Ravel and Debussy string quartets. (She managed to move around Europe hauling her records, record player, radio, typewriter, and books along with the usual baggage.) Everything between us had a sweetness touched with sadness, like the music we heard. Sooner or later we'd both have to go home to another sort of life altogether. Perhaps the bond between us was too fragile, ideal, and untested, too lacking in perspective and irony, to survive removal from the psychic climate of “Europe” to the cross-grained realities of life in New York—getting ahead, the right clothes, a good address, parties: shallow values, but they were mine, however great my shame, and not Barbara's.

I was only a casual visitor to the Jungian lair and had left Dr. Hughes behind for the summer, but I was soon caught again in the web of psychoanalysis. It was a struggle to get out. Barbara was seeing a Jungian analyst, Aline Valangin. She had a house high above the town in which, before I arrived, Barbara had arranged for me to rent a room. A year-round Ascona resident, a handsome woman in her sixties, Mme. Valangin rarely smiled or unbent when we were together. I was uneasy with her from the start, partly because she radiated a professional authority that made me feel I was being scrutinized and evaluated even when it was just a matter of saying good morning over a breakfast of buttered rolls and coffee. In conversation with her, my stumbling French made me feel like a mental defective. Given our daily proximity to each other, she could hardly help trying to convert me to the gospel of Zurich. For me the Jungian ethos was fatally tainted by its founder's association with Nazi science and by the Teutonic solemnity that greeted his published pronouncements. Still, I admired his brand of analytical psychology, with its rich conceptual baggage of archetype, myth, symbol, and collective unconscious. It liberated and spurred the literary imagination in a way that Freud's relentless pursuit of slips, dreams, and hang-ups did not.

Twenty-four hours a day, awake and asleep, indoors and outdoors, of Jungian ambience soon became stifling. I sometimes told Barbara my dreams and concerns, and she sometimes repeated these during her analytic sessions. As a result Mme. Valangin took to asking me why I persisted in my plan to go back to my Freudian doctor in New York and recite what she, with a polite grimace of distaste, called
votre petites histoires
. Stay with us, she urged, and do yourself some good. She hoped I would pursue my interest in Jungian psychology and recommended I make an appointment with a Doctor Ernst Blumhard in Rome who supposedly spoke English.

Late one night, having lost the front-door key (it had fallen out of my pocket when I was bicycling), I entered Mme. Valangin's house by crawling like one of the local lizards through a tiny first-floor bathroom window and landing in the tub on my front paws. Surely this thing with the key told us something, my landlady said the next morning, when I explained what all the rattling and thumping had been about; surely it said something about reluctance and conflict and could not be dismissed as an accident. Literal-minded analysts back in New York would have gone to town with this bathroom window episode: it was a classic “bungled action,” in Freud's terminology, furnished with all the symbols of womb, birth canal, and sexual entry one could ask for. But maybe this once, I argued haltingly, an accident was just an accident, to the same extent that a cigar, as Freud remarked, was sometimes only a cigar. She was certain, though, that I deep down wanted to enter Jung's enchanted forest and that inertia, stubbornness, and a closed mind were stopping me from facing up to the truth. Truth was, I felt pressured, tampered with, condescended to, and weary of being proselytized. I thought of Montaigne's image of marriage: a birdcage, with the birds on the outside wanting to get in and the birds on the inside wanting to get out. I wanted to stay out of this particular cage, and I did.

“Since
you don't talk,” I once challenged Dr. Hughes, “How do I know you're Dr. Hughes, the psychoanalyst, and not an uncle sitting in for him?” I should have known what the answer would be—“Why do you ask?” “Because you don't say anything,” I repeated, and this, of course, prompted the rejoinder, “Why is that so important to you?” And so on—it was like a dog chasing his tail. Occasionally I would nod off—at first “resistance” may have been the cause, but later it was plain boredom with talking about myself and reciting my dreams—Freud's royal road to the unconscious. Some of these dreams I improvised in order to fill up the fifty-minute hour, and probably they were as valuable as the real thing.