At the same time she set about having Freud’s largely unknown work translated into English. She searched around Harvard until she came upon a German-born graduate student in history who seemed amenable to the task, and in need of the money, and he agreed to work quickly on the project.
“This must be carried out in the greatest secrecy,” she said.
“I am German,” the young man said. “I have no trouble with secrecy.” Later she went to his small office and collected a thick typed manuscript.
“This is beautiful,” she said to the young graduate student.
“It is quite a work,” he said. “This Dr. Freud is a very profound thinker.”
She lifted this stack of papers. “And now, thanks to you, we have at least one copy of his words in English.”
“What are you going to do with it?” the young man said.
“It is intended for just one purpose,” Eleanor said, “to spread the discoveries of this remarkable man.”
6
MR. HONEYCUTT
The fact that she met Will Honeycutt because of discussions with William James about dreams was, she found later, one of the great ironies of this story. During her many visits with her godfather and confidant after her return from Vienna, she had mentioned a number of times her belief that one could actually engage productively in dialogue with characters from one’s own dreams. It was not a practice she had actually employed herself but one dear to the soul mate she met in Vienna and one referred to numerous times in the journal. She remembered Dr. James finding in the idea more fascination, she had to admit, than she found in it herself. “It seems a straight path to the unconscious mind,” he had said.
One day, as they were talking, the subject came up again, it seemed to her, quite spontaneously. “Remember your notion of conversations with dreams?” Dr. James said. “You told me of this a few months ago, and it made quite an impression. Now I have something I wish you to read,” he said to her, holding up a bound volume of what looked like handwritten pages. “This is a Harvard senior thesis from last year, sent over to me from the physics department. I would not expect you to read the whole thing, but the main idea is fascinating, and apropos of our previous discussions. A former student of mine, a quite eccentric fellow, claiming that he got the idea solely from my lectures, has written a dialogue about physics with a character in his dreams.” James handed her the volume, and when she opened it and saw for the first time the name of the Harvard student who had written it, she found herself shaken. There before her was the name T. Williams Honeycutt, the very name mentioned in the journal as someone who was to play a major role in her future; “the linchpin,” he would be called later.
It was shortly before the whole Cincinnati adventure began, and she was just putting together her approach to the assigned tasks, having just begun the rudiments of a search for someone of that prescribed name: T. Williams Honeycutt. A man with such a name was supposed to become the longtime director of the monetary fund she was to create, she knew, and someone in all likelihood it was her responsibility to find and recruit.
For all she knew this T. Williams Honeycutt might have been in Chicago or Omaha or anywhere. As with the rest of her assignments, she had not approached this important part lightly, but she had had little idea how to proceed. Initially, she had not thought to ask William James if he knew of anyone of such a name, and now, totally at random, here he was handing her a senior thesis with that very name inscribed.
“Do you know this T. Williams Honeycutt?” she asked, pointing to the first page of the document.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. James said. “I know Honeycutt, Ted as he is called. Sort of a strange fellow, rather bereft of social grace, but, like that document you hold in your hand, his is quite a story.”
“And you know how I can find him?”
“Oh, of course. He has a small office not far from here, in the physics department.” And he reached over to his own desk and wrote on a small slip of paper the office address at Harvard.
Before the visit to that office in the physics department, also through William James, she found a number of Harvard faculty to interview with regard to the young graduate student’s remarkable thesis, his character and performance. Each of his former teachers was cautious in describing the young man and his intelligence, but each referred to him with something like a wince and Dr. James’s “quite a story.”
Before Eleanor actually contacted this Mr. Honeycutt, William James told her with a smile, “When he was an undergraduate, he took two of my classes. He was immediately memorable for the look of rapt attention he brought to each lecture, and his intense questioning after it. A razor-sharp mind, but without much social moderation to accompany it, quite disarming actually, and he certainly stood out, this Mr. Honeycutt. He is now a graduate student in the physics department. Quite a famous one, or infamous, you might say. That thesis you have seen stirred up quite a commotion. I have found it intriguing, and most imaginative.”
The thesis had indeed drawn a great deal of attention within the department. It had been, everyone agreed, a stroke of originality the likes of which few in the department had ever seen. Ted Honeycutt had written an expansive dialogue between himself, called Theodore, and the fourth-century B.C. Greek sage Democritus, the discoverer of the atom. In this lengthy discourse this Honeycutt had summarized—quite brilliantly, it was admitted—the known and theorized world of the atom, including Newton and the newest discoveries, and allowed his Democritus to speculate upon all of it, and the future. The results, called “outrageous and without foundation” by one senior department member, had been heralded as “stunningly bold and prescient” by another.
Years later, it would be noted that Honeycutt’s Democritan speculations were a near-pitch-perfect description of what would become known as quantum physics, the theory of connectedness. At first, it was feared that he had plagiarized from some unknown source, and when asked how he, a humble undergraduate, had come up with the bold imaginings, the young physics student said, “I simply allowed a visitation from a historical character and let him do the talking. The method came out of my studies with William James,” he offered as some sort of validation. Apparently, it was said, Dr. James had mentioned once or twice in a lecture that dreams were part of the reality of the unconscious mind, and we could carry on revelatory conversation with characters from those dreams in our waking life. “So that’s what I did,” Honeycutt said. “Democritus came to me in a dream, and I started the next morning writing down my conversations with him. I told him about modern physics, and he took it from there. And it worked, I guess.”
When William James was at first shown the thesis, he said he did not remember making the observation in a lecture, but he considered Honeycutt’s a fitting application of the idea, if he had said it, “a brilliant piece of parapsychology.” Some agreed with Dr. James that the thesis was brilliant, and some thought it the work of a deranged mind. “The young man hears voices,” one professor said, and then added dismissively, “We have a Joan of Arc on our hands.”
“And what was it that so distinguished the thesis?” Eleanor asked.
“It was a brilliant idea,” William James said, “conversations with a character who had come to him in a dream. He got the idea from me. I got the idea from you when you were fresh back from Vienna. You got it from a wise man of your acquaintance there.”
“I do remember telling you that,” she said. “The idea had made quite an impression on me, and was helpful at the time.”
“Well, I don’t remember passing it along in a lecture to Harvard students,” he said. “Still, Honeycutt here wrote a rather astounding dialogue, and it made a powerful impression. The department asked him to defend himself, which is an uncommon practice for an undergraduate thesis.”
“And he did well, I assume.”
“It was quite a show,” William James said. “Mr. Honeycutt is not exactly normal; he is overly brusque, but brilliant, something of a savant, I am t
old. He is painfully inept at human interaction.”
“What is he like?”
“Well, he is definitely an original specimen. One of the skeptics asked young Honeycutt why he chose this man Democritus, and he answered imperiously, ‘I did not choose him, sir. Democritus chose me.’
“When another asked if he often heard voices, the young man answered in the affirmative, which did not help his case. The department has taken him on as a graduate student, some with great reluctance, and they are asking him to give proof to the many radical assertions made out of his extraordinary imaginings. The department is still split, I hear, as to the state of the young man’s mind, and whether this defense can be made. But they all are in agreement on one aspect: His is an exceptional mind.”
“And you know of no other of the same name?” she asked abruptly, realizing the complexity she was about to step into here by pursuing this young man.
“T. Williams Honeycutt?” William James said, and Eleanor nodded. The great man thought for a long moment. “No,” he said, with a kind of certainty. “Not in my ken.”
And all other research went nowhere. This controversial young graduate student about her age, in the department of physics, was her only possibility, it turned out, at least in the Boston area. And so, with no other options in front of her, and reasoning that T. Williams Honeycutt was an unusual and perhaps unique name, she made an appointment, which surprised the young man no doubt, since Ted Honeycutt, by his own admission, was not the type who made many outside appointments, certainly not with attractive young women.
They met on the Harvard campus, in the ancient hall that housed the physics department, in a small office cluttered with books and laboratory paraphernalia. As Eleanor engaged him in conversation, she could not help recalling some of the pejorative comments she had heard about him in her researches.
“He talks to himself,” a fellow graduate student assigned as his laboratory partner is reported to have complained to his advisor.
“Listen well,” the advisor is said to have quipped. “You might learn something.”
Even before his famous senior thesis, just as one faculty member was tearing his hair in exasperation another was reporting a conversation with him that showed great vision and clarity. In one famous faculty discussion, one teacher is reported to have said, “Honeycutt is the kind of mind that every university would like to have within its walls.”
“There is another institution down the road,” a colleague responded, “the state hospital, that specializes in having his kind within its walls.”
Whatever talents or future this young graduate student possessed were not immediately apparent to her as she sat with him in his cluttered little room. In fact, her immediate reaction was to wonder how someone this disorganized had earned his strong reputation. Later, she admitted to being suspicious, discouraged even, but she was looking for a T. Williams Honeycutt. What other choice was there?
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said after taking his hand. “I know this must be peculiar for you.”
“I don’t often have visitors in here,” he said, gesturing to the clutter in his office and offering a gentle smile that Eleanor, much to her surprise, found reassuring. He was of medium height, lean of build, and only slightly ill at ease having a visitor intrude into the confined space of his office. “I’m not the sort that people come to visit.” Almost as an afterthought, he cleared off a chair and offered it. “And just why are you here?” There was a kind of gracelessness to his question.
“I will be direct,” Eleanor said. “I have come on a mission, Mr. Honeycutt. I have heard of your brilliance.”
“Heavens, no,” he said. “Just an eternal predoctorate student, trying to get all of this organized”—again, he gestured around the room with his hand—“into something my betters will accept as a dissertation. The university is waiting for me to produce something of value. I wrote a controversial paper in my senior year that got everyone’s attention. Now they want me to prove it.”
“I have heard,” Eleanor said.
“I guess I stumbled onto some ideas no one else had thought of.”
“A dialogue with Democritus, was it not?”
He looked startled for a moment. “You have heard.”
“I have,” she said. “You caused quite a stir. And I have heard of your method: a dialogue with a character in your dreams. Some call it brilliant.”
Honeycutt laughed. “And some called it deranged. Schizophrenic, I believe they say, one who hears voices.”
“But everyone agrees what came out in this dialogue was brilliant.”
“Even if it came from derangement?” He paused, looking suddenly very nervous and distracted. “It is about the atom, you know. Those who believe my dialogue to be of value wish for me to read and research everything known so far and think perhaps that I have said—without knowing it—something new and revolutionary. They wish me to grow into it, I believe those who believe say.”
“And those who do not believe?”
“They wish to have me committed.”
“And what do you say?”
“Somewhere in between, I guess. Democritus really did appear in my dreams, and he spoke for himself within the dream. That is not so demented, is it? To have someone speak in a dream?”
“No,” she said. “I would say it is quite normal.”
“I was just the scribe. I did not try to explain anything on my own. I just wrote it down. I guess that is the disturbing part for some.”
“Disturbing for you?” she asked.
Ted Honeycutt looked away. “Oh, no, I have been living within my head for a long time. I am like the ancient alchemists, my professors say, always looking for the prima materia, but it comes with a problem.”
“And that is?”
“I seek this prima materia, they say, at the expense of my relations with people.”
“William James thinks you brilliant.”
Suddenly, the young man’s mood changed. “You don’t know that,” he snapped. “It is rumored, but you don’t know that.”
The words took her aback for an instant. “I do know it,” she said, not backing off. “In fact, I know it quite well.”
“How could you know such a thing?” There was what seemed like defiance now in his eyes.
“Dr. James told me.”
Honeycutt scrutinized her seriously for a moment, then softened. “You know Dr. James?”
“He is my godfather,” she said. “He was a great friend of my deceased mother. We confer with some regularity and with some intimacy. In the flesh,” she added, trying unsuccessfully for a note of levity. “He had you in class, I believe. I asked him about you, and he has mentioned a very high regard.”
Ted Honeycutt looked her over for a long moment, still skeptical. “You know that?” he said. “William James really told you that?”
“I know that. He really told me that. He read your thesis when a friend in the physics department gave it to him, and he gave it to me to read. He told me when I asked that he was very impressed.”
“Well, that is something,” Honeycutt said, still without humor. Then he stopped and looked suspicious for a long moment. “Why were you asking about me?”
“I told you that I am on a mission. I am looking for someone to come work with me.”
“Doing what?” he asked abruptly. “What could someone like me possibly do for someone like you?”
“Quite a bit, actually.”
“You are interested in working with atoms?”
“No, it is nothing to do with atoms. It is a business project. Investments, to be precise, stocks and bonds.”
The young physics student looked confused. Then he laughed dismissively. “You did not do your homework very carefully, madam. I am a scientist,” he said, “I’m not a businessman.”
“Actually, I did my homework, and quite thoroughly,” she said quickly, wishing not to lose ground or to be put off by his gracelessness, about w
hich she had been warned. “Scientific or not is no concern of mine. I am looking for someone bright and eager—brilliant even—to be my partner in a business venture, and from what I can gather, you are a perfect candidate.” She did not let on that it was his name alone that was the source of her present conviction.
“I am difficult,” he said, still without an ounce of humor.
“All the better,” she said. She was not being completely candid, certainly not where her own misgivings were involved. What she really wished to say was that she knew the name and that was all, and he was the only match she could find. In a way, she was desperate. “I am looking for someone smart, efficient, and discreet,” Eleanor said, “and someone named T. Williams Honeycutt. And from what I have been able to discover, you are all of those.”
The eccentric physics student looked uncomfortable and eyed his guest suspiciously. “You have investigated me,” he said.
“I have indeed. This is an important maneuver on my part. I need to make a series of investments, over the next few years. I am confident that I will know at the time exactly what those investments will be, and I know what returns they will bring. I need an assistant to carry them out.”
“And you think that I am that person?”
“I do. In fact, I am quite convinced. And I am willing to offer a year’s salary in the form of shares in a stock purchase I have just made. As they increase in value and as you pursue a parallel course to the one I will be tracking, you will become a very wealthy man.”
“Has it occurred to you that you have made a mistake in identity?”
“I am well past that uncertainty,” she said. “You are T. Williams Honeycutt, are you not?”
“Of course I am,” he said with something close to contempt.
“And are you aware of another such T. Williams Honeycutt?” She asked the question on the reasonable assumption that he, having had the name all his life, would know more about the possibility of duplication than anyone else.
The Lost Prince Page 5