by Morris West
The wind fills the mainsail. I push off from the jetty and we head out on a broad reach across the lake. The children squeal with delight as the boat heels; Emma takes the tiller while I cleat down the jib and main-sheets and coil the mooring lines. Emma’s cheeks are flushed, her eyes are bright with pleasure. As I scramble past her, I deliberately brush her breast with my hand and try to plant a kiss on her lips. She does not refuse the caress, but there is still that first hurried glance at the children, the first instinctive withdrawal, as if I have done something indecent. To mask my irritation, I make a broader gesture and nuzzle at her neck like a bumpkin lover. Now she thrusts me away, and the boat luffs up as she pushes too violently on the tiller. The children are frightened. Emma is irritated. The small sweetness of the moment is lost for ever. Emma is aware of it; but she makes no gesture to me. She turns her attention to the children. I feel guilty again because I am jealous of my own offspring. I am reminded of Freud’s remark: “I have paid off the mortgage on my marriage!” At the time, I did not understand what he meant, but I have begun to see how unrequited gestures can mount up like entries in a ledger until the whole equity of a marriage is consumed.
Just at this moment, a neighbour’s boat, much faster than mine, draws abeam and robs us of our wind. It is a common prank among sailors. Our neighbour laughs and we exchange friendly insults. His boat is called Pegasus and carries, stencilled on the sail, the image of a winged horse. The horse reminds me of the dream sequence which I recorded in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. A horse in a harness of straps is hauled in the air. The straps break. The horse falls; but then gallops off, dragging behind it a huge log. The horse is myself, elevated in my profession, but constrained by family and professional ties. I break out of the harness – but I am still hampered by the log, which is, like the tree phallus, an image of my own burdensome sexuality. Freud wrote to me about this dream and said that it had to refer to the failure of a wealthy matrimony. That was a long time ago. My marriage to Emma is still intact; though sometimes, God knows, I wish I were free of its miscellany of obligations – and I wish that my sexual needs were assuaged by corresponding sexual satisfactions!
The wind freshens a little and I am forced to concentrate on my sailing, rather than on the analysis of old dreams and situations already too rigid for change. Emma passes cake and cordial to the children and pours a glass of beer for me. We clink our mugs and shout together: old rhymes in dialect, student songs my father taught me, snatches of lieder that Emma sings in her clear sweet voice. The countryman in me delights in this simple open-air fun. The other daimon-haunted self rejects such rustic simplicity and burrows deeper and deeper into the who and the whence and the dark why of things.
I have to confess – at least to myself – that this new discipline of analysis puts its practitioners greatly at risk. When I was working at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich, I dealt with hundreds and hundreds of patients. Bleuler ran the place with almost monastic efficiency. We weren’t allowed to drink. We rose at six-thirty in the morning and had to be ready for a staff meeting at eight-thirty. We typed our own case histories and junior residents had to be in at 10 p.m.; after that the gates were locked and we juniors had no key. It was rough discipline, and there were many gaps in our knowledge – but our attention was directed outside ourselves, focused on the patient.
In my present state, all my attention is on myself. I am the patient. I am the clinic. I wonder if this is why our group of pioneers – Freud, Adler, myself, Ferenczi, all the rest – is as inbred as a hill tribe in the Atlas Mountains. We bitch like women. We nurse grudges. We read slights into every random word.
At our conference in Bremen, we were talking about the bog men, whose mummified corpses, some of them clearly the victims of ritual execution, are often discovered in the peat lands of Germany and Denmark. Freud got furious. It was almost as though he felt himself to be a possible victim – and he literally fainted away! My point is that it was impossible for him to be objective even about a matter of local archaeology.
“You’re miles away, Carl!” Emma cuts across my musings with the old trite question. “What are you thinking about?”
“Bremen. How Freud fainted away while we were talking about the bog men. What was it he said?”
“I remember very well. He was quite snappish. He said, ‘Why do you always have to talk about corpses?’ You made a joke of it and said, ‘Not always, dear friend; quite often I talk about pretty women.’”
She reminds me of something else, too. After the incident, my dreaming did become obsessed with the dead. I dreamed, for example, that I was in Alyscamps, near the French town of Arles, walking down an avenue of sarcophagi. They are there in actuality. They date back to the Merovingians. In the dream, as I passed by each coffin, the mummified body inside it stirred and came to life.
I put the grim fantasy out of my mind and concentrate on tacking into a little cove where we shall drop anchor and have lunch. The children want to go swimming. Emma says the water is too cold. I will not contradict her orders. So, I get out a box of tackle and a jar of bait and set them fishing from the boat. Emma and I drink white wine and munch on chicken legs and young celery and crisp homebaked bread. I make a toast to her and tell her she is the best wife in the canton. She gives me an odd sidelong smile and tells me:
“That’s nice to hear, Carl; but my talents aren’t limited to the kitchen and the nursery.”
I pat her belly and tell her that her other talents have never been in dispute. She is mollified, but only a little. She has sometimes remarked that although Europeans do not practise female circumcision, they do everything else to discourage women from pleasurable pursuits outside of marriage. It is a thorny subject and I have no intention of discussing it while we are bobbing at anchor in a windy lake. I unbutton my trousers and pee over the stern. Behind me, I hear young Franz announcing in his piping voice:
“See! I told you! Daddy’s is enormous.”
Emma and the girls burst into giggles. I laugh, too; but inside my head it is as if a fire has flared up. I remember another inlet on another lake and a deep, friendly voice urging me:
“You see how big it gets and hard. Take it in your hands, feel it. In the old days every Roman garden had its priapic Pan and young and old touched him for good luck.”
This memory always recurs when I think about Freud and the difficulty of escaping from his influence and authority. One of the lessons I must teach my son is that you can never piss against the wind, especially when it blows out of the deep, dark caverns of memory.
MAGDA
Paris
Tonight, with all the casual cruelty of a caliph, Basil Zaharoff violated me. He debased me, stripped off every shred of self-respect and then offered to buy me like a brood mare at auction.
He did more. He barbarised something that was beautiful to me. He marched through my private Eden, trampling down the illusion of my childhood, the cherished images of Papa and Lily. He heaped mockery on us all. I wish to God I could have given him the lie; but I could not. So, from now to eternity, he can blackmail me with what he knows about my origins, suspects about my marriage, its prelude and its aftermath – and what every madam in the business will be happy to report to him on my sexual needs and aberrations.
On the way back to the Crillon, I felt physically sick. I wanted to stop the car and vomit in the gutter; but I would not make Zaharoff’s chauffeur the witness of my humiliation. I fought down the nausea until I was locked in my room; then I voided Basil Zaharoff’s fine food and classic vintages into the toilet. Afterwards, still in my evening clothes I flung myself on the bed and stared unseeing at the painted pastoral on the ceiling.
Whoever had contrived the pattern of my life, the life of Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld, was a master of all the ironies. I, who had ridden so high, was tumbled in the dust. I, the lion tamer, was subdued by a single flick of the whip. I, who knew every trick of the tart’s trade, was more bruised th
an any country virgin at her first encounter with the brothel-master.
The strange thing was that I couldn’t blame Zahar off. I could even envy the cool genius of his contrivance. He knew that I would not be shocked by anything he might ask of me. I had done it all before – often in less than the Zaharoff style. I was, in a sense, the perfect partner for him. We were King and Queen from the same suit of cards. So long as I served the King’s interest, he would maintain me in my proper status.
If we lasted together – no estrangement, no divorce, no treachery of rivals – we might even become friends of a sort. There is a kind of comfort in low-life society, where everyone knows how to spell the same dirty words! But – this was the fear I gagged on! – from the moment I made a pact with Basil Zaharoff, I would never again own any part of myself. The terms would be non-negotiable and eternal: no rebate of interest, no remission of the final debt. When Mephis-topheles came to collect payment, Faust – or Fausta now! – must surrender her soul.
But why worry? Papa had assured me I had no soul. I, too, had probed for one in vain in the dissecting rooms of a dozen hospitals. So why hesitate? The money was good, the working conditions first rate, the insurance total. What was this precious self that I was, suddenly, so unwilling to surrender?
The room began to spin and I was sick again. After the spasm and the vomiting I stripped off my soiled clothes, soaked a long time in a hot bath, then curled up in bed with the companion of my solitary nights: a rag doll called Humpty Dumpty. Lily had made him for me – God, how many years ago! She had sewed black threads across his face to make him look like a cracked egg. She had taught me the nursery rhyme that English children sang about him.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I felt myself sliding into darkness. I heard myself whispering in a child’s voice: “Lily, where are you? Lily!” Then I heard the baying of hounds and the thunder of galloping hooves, and once again I was back in the nightmare.
I am riding to hounds with the old crowd. It is spring; the whole countryside is in flower. We have flushed a fox, he is heading for the hills. The hounds are after him in full cry. I am leading the hunt, just behind the pack. The fox leads us into a defile between high black cliffs. I gallop ahead; but when I come out on the other side I am alone. There are no hounds, no huntsmen, only the small bloodied carcass of the fox. The land has changed. All around me is a flat wilderness of red sand, above which the sun glows like a great crimson eye. My horse rears and throws me. When I look up he has disappeared. I am alone in the wilderness. I am naked and my head is shaven like a nun’s. I am imprisoned in a big ball of glass which rolls over and over displaying all my private parts, while the red eye stares at me and a terrible silence mocks me.
When I woke, I was curled up in the foetal position, clutching my Humpty Dumpty between my legs as if I, still unborn, had just given birth to him. I had to force myself to straighten out in the bed and look at my watch. It was still only three in the morning; but I felt an urge to write down the dream, its prelude and its aftermath.
It was almost as if Papa were talking to me, repeating his old refrain: “Write every case history, girl! Get the symptoms clear. Make sure you’ve set down the whole clinical sequence, or if you haven’t, that you know at least where the gaps are. Then you can look at the logic. That’s what diagnosis is: logic and probabilities. But if your first record is unorganised, you confuse yourself and put your patient at risk. Write it down; write it.”
So, still obedient to the first man I ever loved, I propped Humpty Dumpty in front of me and began, disjointedly at first, then with greater fluency, to write my own case history, thus:
My earliest memories are of woman smell and milk taste and the big smooth breasts of my wet nurse. I recall kitchen things: roasting meat, baked parsnips, nutmeg, cinnamon, stewed apples, floury hands pounding the dough for country bread.
I hear women’s voices, singing, laughter, chattering; men’s voices greeting and growling. Heavy boots clomp on stone tiles. Friendly fellows who smell of cows and cut grass and sour beer and tobacco snatch me up and toss me towards the ceiling. Afterwards they hold me in their laps and feed me warm strudel with whipped cream.
There is a whole kaleidoscope of other images: rooks cawing in the elm trees along the drive, cattle with heavy udders ambling slowly home at milking time, Lily and I dancing through a meadow golden with dandelions and buttercups. There is a geography to all this, but it makes small matter beside the fact that these were happy times and places. For the first two years of my childhood we lived, Lily and I, on a farming estate just south of Stuttgart. Papa was working at the Klinik in Tubingen and doing two days a week private practice in Stuttgart. Sometimes he joined us at weekends; sometimes he didn’t. When he did come, his pockets were full of gifts and he laughed a lot and smelt of lavender water.
Later, when I was four or five, we moved to Silbersee in Land Salzburg. Papa had sold his estates in Hungary and bought a small baroque castle with a dependency of tenant farmers who raised dairy cattle and pigs and bred farm horses and cut timber on the upland slopes. The castle also drew revenue from the lease of a guest house and a Stüberl in the local village.
At this time Papa was senior surgeon at the charity hospital in Salzburg and had as well a large private practice in that city. He took what he called his “social diversions” in Vienna, where also he was occasionally asked to operate. Zaharoff’s portrait of him as a wealthy womaniser with small interest in his profession is a patent falsehood. His visits to Schloss Silbersee tended to be sporadic. Sometimes we did not see him for three or four weeks at a stretch. His factor ran the estate. Lily ran my life: traditional governess, little mother, big sister to a child who could have been intolerably lonely but was, for those few years at least, blissfully happy.
How can I describe this Lily Mostyn whom I loved so much? By contrast with the peasant women of our household, blonde, big busted, broad of back and buttocks, Lily looked like a Dresden doll. But under all the sober trimmings, the modest blouse, the bombazine and the petticoats, there was the body of an athlete.
She could run, skip, stand on her head, do hand springs and cartwheels, swim like a seal. When I asked her how she had learned all these things she cocked her head like a quizzical parrot and told me in a broad Lancashire accent:
“When you get bigger, luv, and your bones firm up, I’ll show you. We’ll do exercises in our room and find a quiet meadow where these Salzburg bum-slappers can’t see us. That’s another secret we’ll have.”
Everything was a secret with Lily. She taught me English “so we can say what we like in front of the servants”. She made Papa teach us both Hungarian “because, lassie, when he’s in bed, he prefers to talk in his native tongue. Every man does; but he can’t talk to the wall, can he? Besides, if I can talk the bloody language, maybe folk will take me for the Countess Kardoss – which I wouldn’t mind being; but I’ll never get the offer.”
I asked her why not. She squatted in front of me and explained with a cheerful grin:
“Because your Papa’s never going to marry anyone. I don’t blame him after his experience with your mother. Besides, you know the old saying, the more women you’ve known, the less you want to settle for one. As for me, even if I did marry, how could I get a better bargain than this one? Me, daughter of a country parson in Lancashire! I live in a castle. I’m paid three times as much as I could earn in England. I’ve got a baby to love – which is you, my sweet lassie. I’ve got a man to love me – which your Papa doesn’t do often enough because he’s off chasing expensive tarts and wealthy widows in Vienna. But when he’s here it’s wonderful and he makes sure I don’t get pregnant – and he doesn’t bring home the clap. At home, I’d be sighing my heart out to marry a bank clerk or a schoolmaster. Now, let’s get undressed and we’ll have a
hot bath together and then take supper in our dressing gowns.”
Of course I didn’t understand half the things she said to me; but then, I didn’t have to; it was enough that she talked, touched, kissed and cherished me. This is my tenderest memory of Lily and my father. They were wholly sensuous. They embraced the world through every sense. They touched it, tasted it, heard it like music, inhaled it like a perfume. When Lily brushed my hair, and plaited it, she communicated pleasure. It was as if she were handling filaments of gold. When she offered me a flower to smell, she cupped her hands round it so that no whiff of the perfume would escape. When she taught me a song, she would say, “Listen to this, it’s beautiful!” Or, “It’s so dancy!” When she bathed me, every touch in every place was a caress and an awakening.
This was, I think, what made my father such a good surgeon – and so desirable a lover! He handled human skin as if it were the most precious fabric in the world. His constant complaint about his colleagues was: “They hack into tissue like pork butchers. They stitch it like cobblers, leaving traumas everywhere.” To see him cleansing and binding a cut in a farmboy’s hand was a lesson in fastidious care and a quite gratuitous gentleness. Every time he came home, he would examine me with clinical care from top to toe and the experience was like being kissed by butterflies. He liked food, he liked drink; but he never guzzled. He savoured every mouthful. To watch Lily and Papa, curled up on the big ottoman in front of the fire, was like watching a pair of beautiful sleek cats and being proud to be the kitten of such a pair.