The Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  Gradually I realized that I was lurking. This is not precisely spying; it is a kind of meaningful loitering, in hopes. Lurking could only mean one thing, but I couldn't believe it of myself. In love with my analyst? Absurd. But why absurd? Was I too old for love? No, I was going on forty-one, and knew the world. She was mature. Youthful, really, for her probable age. I took her to be about thirty-eight, but I had no way of finding out. Except for the relationship in which we stood to one another, there was nothing in the world against it. And what was that, after all, but doctor and patient? Didn't doctors and patients fall in love? I have been involved in more than one case that made it clear they did.

  Everything in me that had kept its reason was dismayed. What could come of such a love? I didn't want to marry; I didn't want an affair. No, but I wanted to tell Johanna von Haller that I loved her. It had to be said. Love and a cough cannot be hid, as Netty told me when I was seventeen.

  I dressed with special care for my next appointment, and told Johanna that before we began, I had something of importance to say. I said it. She did not seem to be as dumbfounded as I had expected, but after all, she was not a girl.

  "So what is to be done?" I said.

  "I think we should continue as before," said she. But she smiled quite beautifully as she said it. "I am not ungrateful, or indifferent, you know; I am complimented. But you must trust me to be honest with you, so I must say at once that I am not surprised. No, no; you must not imagine you have been showing your feelings and I have been noticing. Better be completely frank: it is part of the course of the analysis, you understand. A very pleasant part. But still well within professional limits."

  "You mean I can't even ask you to dinner?"

  "You may certainly ask me, but I shall have to say no."

  "Do you sit there and tell me it is part of my treatment that I should fall in love with you?"

  "It is one of those things that happens now and then, because I am a woman. But suppose I were a wise old doctor, like our great Dr. Jung; you would hardly fall in love with me then, would you? Something quite other would happen; a strong sense of discipleship. But always there comes this period of special union with the doctor. This feeling you have – which I understand and respect, believe me – is because we have been talking a great deal about Judy Wolff."

  "You are not in the least like Judy Wolff."

  "Certainly not – in one way. In another way – let us see. Have you had any dreams since last time?"

  "Last night I dreamed of you."

  "Tell."

  "It was a dream in colour. I found myself in an underground passage, but some light was entering it, because I could see that it was decorated with wall-paintings, in the late Roman manner. The whole atmosphere of the dream was Roman, but the Rome of the decadence; I don't know how I knew that, but I felt it. I was in modern clothes. I was about to walk down the passage when my attention was taken by the first picture on the left-hand side. These pictures, you understand, were large, almost life-size, and in the warm but not reflective colours of Roman frescoes. The first picture – I couldn't see any others – was of you, dressed as a sibyl in a white robe with a blue mantle; you were smiling. On a chain you held a lion, which was staring out of the picture. The lion had a man's face. My face."

  "Any other details?"

  "The lion's tail ended in a kind of spike, or barb."

  "Ah, a manticore!"

  "A what?"

  "A manticore is a fabulous creature with a lion's body, a man's face, and a sting in his tail."

  "I never heard of it."

  "No, they are not common, even in myths."

  "How can I dream about something I've never heard of?"

  "That is a very involved matter, which really belongs to the second part of your analysis. But it is a good sign that this sort of material is making its way into your dreams already. People very often dream of things they don't know. They dream of minotaurs without ever having heard of a minotaur. Thoroughly respectable women who have never heard of Pasiphae dream that they are a queen who is enjoying sexual congress with a bull. It is because great myths are not invented stories but objectivizations of images and situations that lie very deep in the human spirit; a poet may make a great embodiment of a myth, but it is the mass of humanity that knows the myth to be a spiritual truth, and that is why they cherish his poem. These myths, you know, are very widespread; we may hear them as children, dressed in pretty Greek guises, but they are African, Oriental, Red Indian – all sorts of things."

  "I should like to argue that point."

  "Yes, I know, but let us take a short cut. What do you suppose this dream means?"

  "That I am your creature, under your subjection, kept on a short string."

  "Why are you so sure that I am the woman in the sibyl's robe?"

  "How can it be anyone else? It looked like you. You are a sibyl. I love you. You have me under your control."

  "You m ust believe me when I tell you that the only person you can be certain of recognizing in a dream is yourself. The woman might be me. Because of what you feel about me – please excuse me if I say what you at present suppose you feel about me – the woman could be me, but if so why do I not appear as myself, in this modern coat and skirt with which I am sure you are becoming wearily familiar."

  "Because dreams are fanciful. They go in for fancy dress."

  "I assure you that dreams are not fanciful. They always mean exactly what they say, but they do not speak the language of every day. So they need interpretation, and we cannot always be sure we have interpreted all, or interpreted correctly. But we can try. You appear in this dream; you are in two forms, yourself and this creature with your face. What do you make of that?"

  "I suppose I am observing my situation. You see, I have learned something about dream interpretation from you. And my situation is that I am under your dominance; willingly so."

  "Women have not appeared in your dreams very prominently, or in a flattering light, until recently. But this sibyl has the face of someone you love. Did you think it was the face of someone who loved you?"

  "Yes. Or at any rate someone who cared about me. Who was guiding me, obviously. The smile had extraordinary calm beauty. So who could it be but you?"

  "But why are you a manticore?"

  "I haven't any idea. And as I never heard of a manticore till now, I have no association with it."

  "But we have met a few animals in your dreams before now. What was Felix?"

  "We agreed that Felix was a figure who meant some rather kind impulses and some bewilderment that I was not quite willing to accept as my own. We called him the Friend."

  "Yes. The Animal-Friend, and because an animal, related to the rather undeveloped instinctual side of your nature. He was one of the characters in your inner life. Like the Shadow. Now, as your sister Caroline used to say, you know my methods, Watson. You know that when the Shadow and the Friend appeared, they had a special vividness. I felt the vividness and I bore the character of Shadow and Friend. That was quite usual; part of my professional task. I told you I should play many roles. This latest dream of yours is vivid, and apparently simple, and clearly important. What about the manticore?"

  "Well, as he is an animal, I suppose he is some baser aspect of me. But as he is a lion, he can't be wholly base. And he has a human face, my face, so he can't be wholly animal. Though I must say the expression on the face was fierce and untrustworthy. And there I run out of ideas."

  "What side of your nature have we considered as not being so fully developed as it could be?"

  "Oh, my feeling. Though I must say once more that I have plenty of feeling, even if I don't understand and use it well."

  "So might not your undeveloped feeling turn up in a dream as a noble creature, but possibly dangerous and only human in part?"

  "This is the fanciful side of this work that always rouses my resistance."

  "We have agreed, have we not, that everything that makes man a great,
as opposed to a merely sentient creature, is fanciful when tested by what people call common sense? That common sense often means no more than yesterday's opinions? That every great advance began in the realm of the fanciful? That fantasy is the mother not merely of art, but of science as well? I am sure that when the very first primitives began to think that they were individuals and not creatures of a herd and wholly bound by the ways of the herd, they seemed fanciful to their hairy, low-browed brothers – even though those hairy lowbrows had no concept of fantasy."

  "I know. You think the law has eaten me up. But I have lived by reason, and this is unreason."

  "I think nothing of the kind. I think you do not understand the law. So far as we can discover, anything like a man that has inhabited this earth lived by some kind of law, however crude. Primitives have law of extraordinary complexity. How did they get it? If they worked it out as a way of living tribally, it must once have been fantasy. If they simply knew what to do from the beginning, it must have been instinct, like the nest-building instinct of birds."

  "Very well; if I accept that the lion represents my somewhat undeveloped feeling, what about it?"

  "Not a lion; a manticore. Do not forget that stinging tail. The undeveloped feelings are touchy – very defensive. The manticore can be extremely dangerous. Sometimes he is even described as hurling darts from his tail, as people once thought the porcupine did. Not a bad picture of you in court, would you say? Head of a man, brave and dangerous as a lion, capable of wounding with barbs? But not a whole man, or a whole lion, or a merely barbed opponent. A manticore. The Unconscious chooses its symbolism with breath-taking artistic virtuosity."

  "All right. Suppose I am the manticore. Why shouldn't you be the sibyl?"

  "Because we have come to a part of our work together where a woman, or a variety of women, are very likely to appear in your dreams in just some such special relationship to you as this. Did you notice the chain?"

  "I noticed everything, and I can call it up now. It was a handsome gold chain."

  "Good. That is much better than if it had been an iron chain, or a chain with spikes. Now, what have we: an image that appears on the left-hand side, which means that it comes from the Unconscious -"

  "I haven't completely swallowed the idea of the Unconscious, you know."

  "Indeed I do know. 'Fanciful… fancy dress…' all these scornful words come up whenever we discuss it. But we are at a point where you are going to have to face it, because that is where that blue-mantled sibyl resides. She has emerged from the Unconscious and can be of great help to you, but if you banish her you might as well stop this work now and go home."

  "I have never heard you so threatening before."

  "There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge."

  "Little, provincial world… I see. Well, what is the name of this lady I am compelled to meet?"

  "Oho – irony! How well that must sound in court? The lady's name is Anima."

  "Latin for Soul. I gave up the idea of a soul many years ago. Well?"

  "She is one of the figures in your psychological make-up, like the Shadow and the Friend, whom you have met and about whom you entertain few doubts. She is not a soul as Christianity conceives it. She is the feminine part of your nature: she is all that you are able to see, and experience, in woman: she is not your mother, or any single one of the women you have loved, but you have seen all of them – at least in part – in terms of her. If you love a woman you project this image upon her, at least at the beginning, and if you hate a woman it is again the Anima at work, because she has a very disagreeable side which is not at all like the smiling sibyl in the blue mantle. She has given rise to some of the world's greatest art and poetry. She is Cleopatra, the enchantress, and she is Faithful Griselda, the patient, enduring woman; she is Beatrice, who glorifies the life of Dante, and she is Nimue, who imprisons Merlin in a thorn-bush. She is the Maiden who is wooed, the Wife who bears the sons, and she is the Hag who lays out her man for his last rest. She is an angel, and she may also be a witch. She is Woman as she appears to every man, and to every man she appears somewhat differently, though essentially the same."

  "Quite a nicely practised speech. But what do women do about this fabulous creature?"

  "Oh, women have their own deep-lying image of Man, the Lover, the Warrior, the Wizard, and the Child – which may be either the child of a few months who is utterly dependent, or the child of ninety years who is utterly dependent. Men often find it very hard to carry the projection of the Warrior or the Wizard that is put upon them by some woman they may not greatly like. And of course women have to bear the projection of the Anima, and although all women like it to some degree, only rather immature women like that and nothing else."

  "Very well. If the Anima is my essential image, or pattern of woman, why does she look like you? Isn't this proof that I love you?"

  "No indeed; the Anima must look like somebody. You spoke of dreadful hags who assailed you in sexual dreams when you were a boy. They were the Anima, too. Because your sister and Netty could see you were in love, which I expect was pretty obvious, you projected witchlike aspects of the Anima on their perfectly ordinary heads. But you can never see the Anima pure and simple, because she has no such existence; you will always see her in terms of something or somebody else. Just at present, you see her as me."

  "I am not convinced."

  "Then think about it. You are good at thinking. Didn't you dislike me when the Shadow was being slowly brought to your notice; do you suppose I didn't see your considering looks as you eyed my rather perfunctory attempts at fashionable dress; do you suppose I was unaware of the criticism and often the contempt in your voice? Don't look alarmed or ashamed. It is part of my professional duty to assume these roles; the treatment would be ineffective without these projections, and I am the one who is nearest and best equipped to carry them. And then when we changed to the Friend, I know very well that my features began to have a look, in your eyes, of Felix's charming bear-expression of puzzled goodwill. And now we have reached the Anima, and I am she; I am as satisfactory casting for the role as I was for the Shadow or the Friend. But I must assure you that there is nothing personal about it.

  "And now our hour is finished. We shall go on next day talking more about Judy Wolff. I trust it will be delightful."

  "Well. Dr. von Haller, I am sorry to inform you, sibyl though you seem to be, that you are about to be disappointed."

  9

  The autumn that followed the war was wonderful. The world seemed to breathe again, and all sorts of things that had been taut were unfolding. Women's clothes, which had been so skimped during the war, changed to an altogether more pleasing style. When Judy was not in the Bishop Cairncross uniform she was marvellous in pretty blouses and flaring skirts; it was almost the last time that women were allowed by their epicene masters of fashion to wear anything that was unashamedly flattering. I was happy, for I was on top of my world: I had Judy, I was in my last year at Colborne College, and I was a prefect.

  How can I describe my relationship with Judy without looking a fool or a child? Things have changed so startlingly in recent years that the idealism with which I surrounded everything about her would seem absurd to a boy and girl of seventeen now. Or would it? I can't tell. But now, when I see girls who have not yet attained their full growth storming the legislatures for abortion on demand, and adolescents pressing their right to freedom to have intercourse whenever and however they please, and read books advising women that anal intercourse is a jolly lark (provided both partners are "squeaky clean"), I wonder what has happened to the Davids and Judys and if the type is extinct? I think not; it is merely waiting for another age, different from our supernal
autumn but also different from this one. And, as I look back, I do not really wish we had greater freedom than was ours; greater freedom is only another kind of servitude. Physical fulfilment satisfies appetite, but does it sharpen perception? What we had of sex was limited; what we had of love seems, in my recollection, to have been illimitable. Judy was certainly kept on a short string, but the free-ranging creature is not always the best of the breed.

  That autumn Bishop Cairncross's was shaken by unreasonable ambition; the success of Crossings had been so great that the music staff and all the musical girls like Caroline and Judy were mad to do a real opera. Miss Gostling, after the usual Headmistress's doubts about the effect on schoolwork, gave her consent, and it was rumoured that unheard-of sums of money had been set aside for the project – something in the neighbourhood of five hundred dollars, which was a Metropolitan budget for the school.

  What opera? Some of the girls were shrieking for Mozart; a rival band, hateful to Caroline, thought Puccini would be more like it, and with five hundred dollars they could not see why Turandot would not be the obvious choice. Of course the mistresses made the decision, and the music mistress resurrected, from somewhere, Mendelssohn's Son and Stranger. It was not the greatest opera ever written; it contained dialogue, which to purists made it no opera at all; nevertheless, it was just within the range of what schoolgirls could manage. So Son and Stranger it was to be, and quite hard enough, when they got down to it.

  I heard all about it. Judy told me of its charms because its gemiitlich, nineteenth-century naivete appealed strongly to her; either she was innocent in her tastes or else sophisticated in seeing in this humble little work delights and possibilities the other girls missed; I rather think her feeling was a combination of both these elements. Caroline was a bore about its difficulties. She and another girl were to play the overture and accompaniments at two pianos, which is trickier than it seems. In full view, too; no hiding behind the scenes this time. Of course, as always with Caroline, nobody but herself knew just how it ought to be done, and the music mistress, and the mistress who directed the production, and the art mistress who arranged the setting, were all idiots, without a notion of how to manage anything. I even had my own area of agitation and knowing-best; if Miss Gostling were not such a lunatic, insisting that everything about the production be kept within the school, I could have mustered a crew of carpenters and scene-shifters and painters and electricians among the boys at Colborne who would have done all the technical work at lightning speed, with masculine thoroughness and craftsmanship, and guaranteed wondrous result. Both Judy and Carol and most of their friends agreed that this was undoubtedly so, but none of them quite saw her way to suggesting it to Miss Gostling, who was, as we all agreed, the last surviving dinosaur.