Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  Archie trudged back to his corner of the field, muttering and kicking at the turf as he went. This display of remorse did not express his disappointment, but concealed it: he was playing the part of the passionately engaged and ordinarily competent athlete cursing himself, unfairly, for the sort of mistake that anyone might make. But this pantomime could no more evoke the true depth and complexity of his anguish than a tin whistle could perform a symphony of Rubbra’s. To truly give vent to his feelings, he would have had, at the very least, to die.

  No one chided him; no one even tried to cheer him. It was as if he did not exist.

  He hated Parcliffe at first. Then he met Clayton Fishpool.

  Fishpool was, in Archie’s scheme of classification, perhaps the most stuck-up boy at the school. He wore an ascot and socks with sandals—either of which in isolation would have qualified him as the most eccentric character Archie had ever laid eyes on. He was idiotically handsome, with just the kind of soft lank hair that Archie believed, on his own head, would have made him look rakish, carefree, and sensitive, yet with a capacity for beautiful cruelty—but which, on Clayton Fishpool, only looked foppish. Aside from his physical appearance, Fishpool had about him an aura of self-sufficiency and complacent grandeur. He was sixteen, and he carried himself as though he had arrived at this sublimely remote age through his own foresight and diligence. For The Lyre, the school’s snobbish literary newspaper, he wrote poems and editorials which he signed “C.S. Fishpool.”

  (He was known, in the gold and green groves of Yllisee, as Dartagnan the Disreputable, Dartagnan the Demi-Mage.)

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  Archie held the book at arm’s length and eyed it indifferently.

  Fishpool emitted a high-pitched squeak. “Oh, Strachey’s all right, but if you go in for that whole Bloomsbury thing you should really read Firbank.”

  Archie told his face to take on the expression of a man who had long ago resolved to look into Firbank and was now grateful for this reminder. In fact, he was appalled: He had chosen this book, as he chose all his books for public consumption, for its obscurity. He would not read “classics”: to do so was, first, to admit unfamiliarity with them, and, second, to reveal a prosaic and unoriginal soul. In the dining hall he therefore read Two Noble Kinsmen instead of Hamlet, The Holy Sinner instead of The Magic Mountain, The Eternal Moment instead of Howards End, George Meredith instead of George Eliot, Edward FitzGerald instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William James instead of Henry James, and someone like Lytton Strachey instead of someone whose work he actually enjoyed, like John Buchan or Aldous Huxley. He believed, or anyway sometimes imagined himself saying he believed, that the duty of the serious student of literature was not to tread the same old well-worn paths, but to blaze new trails, to seek out the unknown and unsung masterpieces. (Or was he simply afraid to read any book that someone might know better than he did?) He had thought Strachey safe; but now here was C.S. Fishpool, not only wearily familiar with Strachey, but able to name an even more obscure author whom Archie should have been reading instead.

  “Well yes, Strachey’s all right all right,” Archie began his prepared statement with heavy if undirected irony, “though I do find at times that his prose can be a bit what you might call flowery in spots.” (Twelve hours later, lying in bed and replaying this conversation in his head, he was wracked by remorse that he had not said “florid.”)

  Clayton Fishpool pushed his chair back and narrowed his eyes at Archie. “You say that like it’s a bad thing, Archer old cock.”

  “Well, I suppose,” Archie drawled, becoming defensively more languorous the more fretful he felt, “it’s just that I feel sometimes that he’s a bit, well, pleonastic.” He fairly vibrated with tension as he waited for this bomb to drop; he had never said or heard the word spoken aloud and had no idea if he was pronouncing it correctly.

  Fishpool threw back his shoulders. Archie would soon come to recognize this gesture as characteristic: it always preceded a diatribe. As Fishpool spoke, his shoulders would slowly roll forward again; periodically he would throw them back again, as if winding a clock.

  Archie listened to him talk, his attention cutting in and out at random, as if by some mysterious physiological process. On a conscious level, he found Fishpool’s apparently impromptu speech on the role of language in literature clever and thought-provoking. But on an unconscious level? Perhaps he was only flattered to have someone talking to him at all—and someone who knew his name, no less.

  A week later, Fishpool found Archie in the dining hall dutifully reading Valmouth (and holding it up rather conspicuously, for by this time he had also read, but without being discovered doing so, two other Firbanks—working his way chronologically backwards on the assumption that, like wine, writers improved with age).

  “Tell me what you think,” said Fishpool expansively, as if Archie’s opinion of the book were only one of many things he wished to know.

  “I find it to be,” he said, taking care to make this sound not like a criticism but a dispassionate appraisal, “a bit, shall we say, thin on the ground insofar as plot is concerned.”

  “That is of course the point, cock. What makes Firbank so brilliant is that he has tossed out plot, story, action, chronological progression—all that dreadful muck. Plot is dead—and Firbank, before even the Moderns, helped kill it.” Fishpool threw back his shoulders. “Literature,” he said, “is not about story but about character—and by character one means the intricate machinations of the individual psychology. Say what you will about the sins and excesses of Joyce”—and here he paused gallantly, as if to allow Archie to say what he would about the sins and excesses of Joyce—“he did at least do one important thing for literature: he moved the stage into the mind where it belongs; he brought thought into his characters’ heads …”

  Several minutes later, Archie’s face felt like it had cramped permanently into an expression of engaged receptivity, like that of a wise judge listening with a painstaking suppression of bias to a sympathetic witness.

  Fishpool was saying, “Firbank of course works the same ground but from the opposite direction. His characters, or quote characters unquote, are all surface, all gorgeous glittering sound and light—‘The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag.’ We enter not at all into their thoughts. That is the clue, of course, the key: they are but the thoughts, the psyche incarnate, of Firbank himself. You see, Archer, you have to read Firbank’s characters as an expression of Firbank’s character. And that is just what literature must aim to be, if it is to be literature at all: an expression of, a monument to, its creator’s individuality. Or don’t you agree?”

  Archie, furrowing his brow and jutting out his jaw, said: “Well, yes, but …”

  A black panic seized him by the throat. He had no idea what he was going to say next.

  That evening, Archie had the room to himself; Rodney, Hollingsward, and Caulkins were out on some mission to waylay a group of Downsfield girls who were rumored to be making a foray into town. Archie went to his bedside locker and removed the latest five or six hundred pages of the manuscript of The Adventures of Freykynd The Elvin Warrior from its hiding place beneath his retired tennis shoes. His gaze hovered above the page for a moment, circling vulture-like, before swooping down to tear apart that which something else had already killed.

  “Elf!” cried Snodlock thickly in his gruff troll’s voice. “I must have parley with you!”

  Freykynd looked over his shoulder, slowed, and finally stopped. Still he held aloft Cawlwyn his dagger, which he wielded with two hands like a sword. “You will have parley from that remove, troll!” snarled Freykynd softly.

  Snodlock halted suddenly and began nervously to wipe his fat hirsute troll’s hands on his filthy apothecary’s apron.

  “Speak, troll!” snapped Freykynd impatiently. “Speak! I am in haste to Lawdimor, where the elder demi-mages convene this midnight!”

  “It is precisely th
at,” gasped Snodlock resolutely, “I mean to speak of.”

  “Well?” shouted Freykynd.

  “Dartagnan the demi-mage,” hissed the troll malevolently. “He is not what he has seemed heretofore.”

  Freykynd tightened his grip on Cawlwyn.

  Archie, in desperation, picked up his pen, changed the final period to a comma, and added: thinking that …

  But he did not know what Freykynd was thinking.

  He did not tell Dr. Pringle about his nightmares.

  Nor did he think of them as nightmares. Nothing really nightmarish ever happened in them. He dreamt that he was called on in class and didn’t know the answer. He dreamt that he was writing an A-levels but had forgotten to study. He dreamt that he was rowing but his paddle would not pierce the water. He dreamt that someone was watching him. He dreamt that something important was happening but he could not open his eyes. He dreamt that he was searching for a book that he could not find. He dreamt that he was late. He dreamt that he was lost in a dark forest. He dreamt that he was being followed.

  It was not the content of the dreams that made them terrible, but the feelings that accompanied them. He felt hunted; he felt that time was running out; he felt that he was making an irrevocable mistake; he felt that all his sins were about to be made public—that he would be exposed to all the ridicule and contempt that in his weakness and ineptitude he deserved.

  Archie did not tell Pringle about his dreams because it was the doctor’s opinion that dreams were only clumsily disguised sexual fantasies. The (always disguised) object of Archie’s sexual desire was usually, according to Pringle, Archie’s mother. When Archie dared to deny an Oedipal fixation, the doctor only added homosexual longings (also disguised) to his diagnosis. So, instead of arguing, Archie took preemptive measures, concocting false dreams to bring to the sessions: drab, sterile dreams that could not possibly betray the slightest whiff of submerged longings or unconscious urges, or indeed the existence of longings or an unconscious at all.

  This week, however, his hands full with Firbank and a self-guided crash course in Latin, he had forgotten to prepare a dream. He had no choice but to improvise.

  He felt frozen and aphasic; he felt as if he had never in all his life dreamed and would not know a dream were he in one; so he began by saying how incredibly vivid his dream had been, how forcefully it had impressed itself on him, how really just amazingly dreamlike it had been. He paused dramatically, as if mustering the strength to spill his fertile secret. What did people dream about? What did normal people dream about?

  He closed his eyes and saw himself (or someone) … standing. Around him was … nothing.

  “I am in a large room,” he said recklessly. “A very large room …”

  The doctor, behind him, was silent.

  “Or perhaps it’s outdoors. I don’t see walls or a ceiling …”

  The doctor, behind him, grunted.

  “Yes, it’s outdoors. There is someone there with me …”

  Two or three minutes later, when the doctor’s grunts had become almost continuous, Archie drew to a close: “That’s all I remember.”

  “Very revealing,” Pringle said. “Yes, very revealing indeed. To begin with the room, which is at the same time not a room but the as you put it ‘outdoors,’ by which can only be meant the world, the universe, all of existence. A room is an enclosure, but what kind of enclosure is it that you cannot see the walls of? An enclosure, of course, that you do not know is an enclosure. A fish, it is said, does not see the water in which it swims. Likewise, the unborn child does not see the walls of the womb as walls. It does not know its little room is a little room, but takes it for the world.”

  Dr. Pringle, having crested this first foothill of interpretation, paused for a moment before continuing in a lower, steadier tone, like one conserving oxygen for the peak.

  “That explains the appearance of the ‘woman,’ as you called her, who is at once your mother and not your mother. Her identity is indistinct and spectral because in this place she is both present and not present; that is, she is omnipresent—she is all around you. She is, like the walls and the ceiling of your womb-room, everywhere and nowhere …”

  Half an hour later, the doctor began summing up his findings in the ringing tone of a mountaineer driving home his flag: “And the significance of the breadbox—which we have seen to be an instrument of concealment, a symbol of shame—outside the expected or prescribed setting of a kitchen or pantry—which I need hardly tell you is richly associated in your unconscious mind with the mother-figure, the wife, the housewife, the feminine, the female—but instead displaced to a highly irregular context, that of the lawn—which you will recall we identified without trouble as a symbol of growth, of fecundity, of fertility, that is to say, of procreation or, quite simply, heterosexual intercourse—the significance of this displacement is that it reveals a deep-seated anxiety about being discovered in the classically feminine domain, that is, in the sexually passive role of the woman; and the shifting of the urge for concealment onto the lawn is obviously a feeble attempt to convince yourself of your own masculinity, your own virility, your own heterosexuality. But the breadbox, alas, is empty.”

  Archie had seized on a breadbox as the dullest, most commonplace object he could think of. He did not know why he had placed it on a lawn (he should have known better), except that a breadbox in a kitchen had not seemed sufficiently dreamlike. Now he objected: “But I didn’t say it was empty.”

  “Exactly as one would expect. Any empty breadbox would have been too revealing, too disturbing. Even through the dream-veils of condensation, displacement, and distortion, the realization of your homosexuality would have been too distressing to face. We have discussed the function of the reaction-formation before. When you want something that you are at the same time ashamed to want, you push it out of your mind. Though there is no ‘out of your mind’—there is only the unconscious, which receives and stores everything, like a landfill. Out of sight, perhaps, but never out of mind—there, in a rather clever inversion of the famous proverb, is perhaps the most succinct expression of Freud’s theoretical framework. Out of sight, but never out of mind. Yes. ‘Inversion,’ incidentally, is another word, which Freud and Havelock Ellis among others used, for homosexuality. This is to the point, for homosexuality is a kind of inverting, a turning upside-down—a reaction-formation, to use the technical term. I know you have no aversion to technical terms.” The doctor grunted several times, like a hunter practicing a birdcall. “When you push something, some disgusting desire, out of your mind, you are left with a puzzling absence to explain. ‘Why is it I do not care for such-and-such?’ The most effective explanation, the one that will provide the greatest defense against a rebirth of the desire, is that you hate such-and-such. Take for example the anal retentive person who, frozen at the anal stage of psychosexual development, does not forthrightly display his enthusiasm for, as Freud puts it, ‘what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body,’ but rather pushes these things away and becomes fixated, through the mechanism of the reaction-formation, on cleanliness, orderliness, and trustworthiness. By the same token, one of the surest indicators that someone has homosexual inclinations is the fact that he finds persons of the same sex—and, a fortiori, acts of homosexual intercourse—disgusting and repulsive. The clearest proof that the breadbox is empty—that your heterosexual libido is absent—is the fact that, in the dream, it is not. And now I’m afraid we’ve gone past time.”

  The problem with this explanation, thought Archie on the cab ride to the bus that would take him back to school, was that he did not find men, or other boys, especially repulsive. Did he? Well, some he did (he thought of Master Perkins’s big greasy head, or the prefect Jelroy’s cleft palate, or Fatty Roberts’s fat)—but that didn’t prove anything, since he also found many girls and women repulsive (the Matron came to mind). It was true that he wasn’t especially attracted to men or boys—but wasn’t that also true, by
definition, of any heterosexual male?

  He realized that, to refute the doctor’s theory, he would have to prove that the idea of homosexuality and homosexuals did not especially bother him. If he was disgusted by the sight of, say, even two men kissing, then perhaps the doctor was right—perhaps he was resisting something.

  “Here all right, sir?”

  They had arrived at the bus stop. Archie, embarrassed by his thoughts, overtipped the cabbie and climbed out.

  Having established the necessity of the thought experiment, and realizing that further delay would only be incriminating, he quickly, but nonchalantly, closed his eyes and pictured two men kissing.

  He didn’t like it.

  Oh God—then it was true.

  But hold on. He’d made the men especially manly: stout and muscular and hairy—he could almost hear their day-old stubble rasping like sandpaper when they touched …

  So he made them younger. (This was, he assured himself, fair play: he was not especially attracted to older women either—or, without begging the question, no one was especially attracted to a much older person.)

  This was, at first, an improvement. Yes, he could almost believe that he felt nothing, not the slightest twinge of any sexiness or (what would have been even more damning) any disgust. He was just a heterosexual watching two homosexuals express their affection; what of it? He felt no more nor less than he would have felt at the zoo watching a couple of birds feed each other or a couple of monkeys groom each other.

  But his relief was short-lived. Try as he might, he could not prevent the kissers from assuming identities. His slim, blond, featureless statuary kept slipping into sudden focus, becoming one person after another like the amorphous characters in a dream; and despite himself—yes, despite himself!—he saw Rodney kissing Hollingsward, then Hollingsward kissing the Man-Bear, then Jelroy kissing Caulkins, then McMichaels kissing Fatty Roberts, Fatty Roberts kissing Lyle, Lyle kissing the Headmaster, the Headmaster kissing Master Perkins (oh Jesus wept!), Perkins kissing Clayton Fishpool …