by Larry Kramer
BY AND ABOUT KORAH LUDENS
The Manhattan Society for Freudian Analysis was founded shortly after Freud himself came for the first and only time to America, in 1909, to Worcester, of all places, plain then as now. There is a picture in the society’s headquarters on Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street of Freud standing amid his children, what looks like hundreds of them, all solemn, unsmiling men and several women. The implication is that he is standing in front of their building. Of course he is not. The building wasn’t ever a building but suites of offices, and then not until the early thirties, and it would be a long time before the number of his American “children” was this large. In fact, he is standing in Berlin among his German, Austrian, and Swiss (a few from other countries too, such as Italy) associates, indeed many dozens of them, in 1934, after a long and uncomfortable secret meeting during which no consensus can be reached on “Is There an Oncoming Storm?” Hitler had already had Freud’s books burned publicly, and still their owner stayed there. Freud is the only one who is smiling, as if to say we are here despite the world. If you look closely, you will see the faces of all the biggies. Globule. Mestrict. Fehshreif (Mr. and Mrs.). Drehdul. Arramomoniker. Tilsit. Krebs. Ogonquit. Nehrdewehl. O’Fannah. Rinahldie. Jones. Smith. Hopkins. Gillespie (who will analyze YHR in London), Ferenczi, Adler. Brill. Korah Ludens. Yes, I am one of the women (along with Nesta Nehrdewehl Trout and Polly Smith). I am already in practice in New York and I travel safely between the countries to see my own family, not so endangered because I am not Jewish. My hair is cut in a Dutch-boy style even then. I was Ogunquit’s analysand in Vienna. Rivtov (who will also analyze Fred at Yaddah) was always jealous of this. Look how Harvey Ogunquit stands beside me so protectively. My theories of Female Child Abandonment, Mother Responsibility, Therapeutic Distancing, and Idealized Imagination will one day be considered seminal; today they are, as they say, “in the literature.”
My banishment occurs shortly after this photograph is taken. In December 1934, Dr. Korah Ludens and her acolytes are expelled from the Manhattan Society for Freudian Analysis by a vote of 200–2. There is a photograph of me and a few followers marching down the middle of Fifth Avenue from 103rd Street, in the snow, in the late evening, after this traumatic meeting, singing and celebrating at the top of our lungs, with arms up and legs Rockette-kicking (the Rockettes have recently been introduced at Radio City Music Hall), faces confident (too confident, it will become evident), eyes shining and mouths open wide saying “cheese” for the photographer.
What has little me done to so anger her elders that an expulsion is in order? It is difficult even today to get surviving society members to talk. Indeed, “the literature” has been pretty well expunged of any mention of my once-upon-a-time membership. As with any nonkosher information on the Master himself—for instance, his passionate, consummated homosexual love for his good friend Wilhelm Fleiss, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who believed in a strong connection between the nose, the genitals, and sex (which will be borne out in the next century with the arrival of the Dridge Ampule); his introduction to Freud of the notion of man’s innate bisexuality, which Freud incorporated into his theories (Freud ordered their correspondence destroyed); and of course his own beloved daughter’s lesbianism (which he knew about)—the Freudian annals still continue to be under constant microscopic nitpicking. “Disputatious information would only confuse the issue,” Ernest Jones, the annointed “biographer,” has written. I knew otherwise. I knew that Freud had no trouble with homosexuality and even harbored homosexual fantasies about Jung, big strong tall gentile handsome Jung, who towers above him in height, in prominence (his theories have taken off far more successfully), in authority and fame. Jung confided in me about Freud peeing in his pants on that 1909 visit to America when he and Jung were visiting Columbia and looking across toward the Palisades in New Jersey. They had spent several days and nights in deep discussion about many things, and then, on this afternoon, Freud suddenly had the insight that he could not control this younger man, he could not control America, he could not control psychoanalysis (had not the very meetings in Worcester with dozens of American and European doctors verified this: the Americans particularly were not going to go along with Freud’s beliefs whole-hog). He then peed in his pants, like the little boy who has been chastised by his powerful father lest he get out of line. Jung had talked about it and he had predicted that “all his and my children will come to hate homosexuality as an awful illness. They will not allow themselves these feelings of brotherly warmth for each other.”
I had put all these pieces together. Freud and Jung both kept notebooks and long analyses of their dreams and their meetings with each other. Oh, those dreams! Filled with either Teutonic visions or, in Freud’s case, dreams of Austrian soldiers and of Prometheus. He often woke up having wet his bed. He denied no truth to his diaries. Jung said he had helped Freud out in this situation at Columbia. I always wondered how. Did they both go into a toilet (Freud had complained constantly how difficult it was to locate them in America) where Jung helped clean him off? Both of them had frequent out-of-body experiences in the presence of each other over the years, if you can include, along with the enuresis, which is what peeing in your pants is called, fainting while together discussing theory. Once at lunch in Germany, Freud fainted in the restaurant and woke up in Jung’s arms, and Freud said, “How sweet if this were death.” Jung, still in awe of Freud at that time, likewise realized on this trip to America that Freud was not all that Jung had made him into, or needed him made into, hence freeing himself up to march on alone. He was a vicious ladies’ man anyway.
One wonders if being so in touch with your inner being makes your outer being more fragile and difficult to control.
These two great men carved up my world. I will just have to rise above it and say what I have to say with even more fervor and volume.
* * *
Your Roving Historian is particularly interested in all things Freudian. This is what Korah Ludens said that all these men would come to find so upsetting: that women are the same as men. That women’s hates and fears and loves and experiences are as men’s. Women are not subject to the envy of penises, or to reverse Oedipus complexes, or to the Rivtov Scale, which says that homosexuality can be changed into heterosexuality (Rivtov will later reverse course, but not until after he has done much damage to Fred). Women can be as ambitious as men. They can be as greedy for power and success and fame. They possess qualities that can take them to the moon as well as to the kitchen. They experience hungers and sexual needs. For writing all this in her book The Female in Her Time, Korah Ludens is cast out. For writing about loving your parents, for writing her book The Patient as the Lover (and the Analyst as one, too), she is cast out.
At that same meeting which expels her, it is decided by unanimous vote that homosexuality is to be officially considered an illness and that no homosexual can be considered for membership. The preceding year, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness, which it remains until 1974 (when there are coincidentally now 4 billion people in the world). The Hollywood Production Code fashions its fullest flowering sniffing out all things “distasteful and immoral and averse to the sensibilities of the general public,” under the leadership of Peter Ruester, the powerful president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Korah sits in the back of the society’s main meeting room, called too cutely Sigmund Haus, while the voice vote is taken.
“Concerning the expulsion of our member and colleague Dr. Korah Ludens, please vote aye in favor or nay against.” The voice is that of Dr. Abraham Abraham (the first name is pronounced like Lincoln’s, the second is pronounced starting with Aaahb), her orginal Manhattan Society “trainer,” the man who was analyzed by Freud himself, the man to whom she has told her dreams.
She smiles, as she will smile in the photograph marching down Fifth Avenue, as she listens to the man who has been, along with Rivtov, who supervised her at Yaddah, an
d of course Freud himself, the most important man in her life, including Barnett Ludens, Lessie’s brother, whom she has just married, who will prove an even bigger disappointment, tallying the votes against her. “I have unfortunately married unwisely for a second time,” she had said only last week at their Yaddah student seminar, to Dr. Abraham Abraham, then, softly, asking him: “Why did you not warn me? You saw it coming. You know me. There is a story that one of your trainees is homosexual, though married, and you have met with him every day for seven years and neither one of you has ever mentioned homosexuality. That is a travesty of what we are meant to do, no?” He did not answer her.
“Dr. Tilsit?”
“Nay.”
“One hundred and eighty-seven Aye. One Nay.”
“Dr. Krebs?”
“Aye.”
“One hundred and eighty-eight. One Nay.”
“Dr. Rivtov?”
“Aye.”
She sits listening, smiling, in the back of that room in 1934, asking herself why she has to endure this, like some complete and total masochist—yes, smiling, though each Aye enters her flesh like a bullet. How can I come out of this and not hate? she asks her journal. Each of these great men has said he loves me. Each has done important work. I must not discount this, just because I think differently about some things. I am ahead of my time. It is always difficult to be smarter than others. I must remember that new thoughts take time to digest. Women are not only the same as men, they are better than men. This she will never be able to say or write, only think in her heart. It is Supreme Blasphemy even to think that the sexes are equal. The last time she saw Freud he still had not left Vienna. What is the man waiting for? How smart can that man be?
“We shall start our own institute,” Korah tells her followers at two o’clock in the morning when their march reaches Washington Square.
There will be a large practice, and fame, and her home with Barnett, who will go off to war and go crazy, but there will be no institute. Korah will be sent overseas to work with Dr. Spencer Lure, at first in London, then in North Africa, then in Haiti, then in the Everglades, studying the emotional problems encountered by soldiers engaged in germ warfare. When she returns to civilian life, in 1945, she is no longer interested in institutes. She has seen too many men kill each other and she is tired of men. She does not want to help them. After the war, and for the rest of her life, she will believe, again in her heart, she will not say it out loud, or write about it, or teach it, she will never be able to summon that kind of courage, that man is too far gone to help. She will only witness it every day, day after day, as she does try to help. But gone are the days when she thought she could make any difference.
She is exceptional. She is a woman who wants to change the world. She almost will. She will certainly be on her way. She is actually too wonderful, which means that awful things will happen to her, especially as a woman. But she is just starting out now, seeing patients, trying to locate the ones worth saving.
YOUR ROVING HISTORIAN TELLS US ABOUT THE STADTDOTTERS
“What are these spots?”
Israel knows he’s looking at something peculiar and rare and something inside him is saying that, as with the Iwacky, as with Mesirow titers, he has seen this before and no one is going to believe him. Recently some doctor even asked him about his degree. “I never heard of your Misch Fehl University. Why should I believe you?”
“It is a fine school in Palestine. My teachers were from Russia and Poland and Germany, places of great discoveries. I have been well educated. Better than you.” He hates himself for even bothering to answer.
Israel is holding once again the hands of Evvilleena Stadtdotter. She is no doubt thinking, once again, What are huge hands meant to indicate? Doesn’t that mean something? It is nice to be touched by Israel’s hands. The huge soft hands of Israel Jerusalem are inspecting the skin of Evvilleena Stadtdotter, on December 15, 1933, in the Mount Thymun Pavilion of the Isidore Schmuck Medical Center in Northwest Washington, D.C. Her skin is aging, shriveling, drying up, and it is covered with tiny purple spots. What has happened to this woman since last he saw her?
She is Danish or Austrian or German or “something sort of Baltic,” he was told by someone or other. In Washington there is always information available about anybody from someone or other. She says she is concerned about the purple spots. They can be seen, she says, through the thickest powders from the Haus of Destinee, a Belgian firm of which she’s fond. “Deshtinee hassh failed.” Is he incorrect in discerning that her schlurpings have improved a tiny bit? He seems to comprehend her better.
Evvilleena Stadtdotter is rich and lonely, and no one understands why she doesn’t buy herself another husband after the first one disppears. Where the Stadtdotters arrived from, no one knows. Washington is like that. People just appear, and if they have money to pay their way they are accepted. No doubt other major world capitals often require additional, more substantial, credentials. Mr. Stadtdotter was thought to have been a Baltic diplomat (because of the new movies being made, the very word Baltic conjures up dark streets and mysterious shenanigans in port cities where strangers are clobbered on foggy docks) from some country or other. And Baltic embassies are notorious for requiring little in the way of representation beyond a body-in-place. Poor governments can’t afford to be fussy. So desks are situated in rooms or houses, occasionally mansions, all over the Northwest, and heavy-stock stationery is embossed with eagles or something in Latin, maybe both. Mr. Stadtdotter disappeared a few years ago when the stock market disappeared.
Mr. Stadtdotter, when he was around, was one of the German Germans who oppose assimilation into American life. When he disappears he’s been writing a learned philosophical tome entitled Extermination of the Worthless Life (he is much under the influence of both Kant and Heidegger). He is mistakenly believed to be a eugenicist. He had written and submitted to his neighbors on Massachusetts Avenue questionnaires with such queries as “Would you agree to ending your child’s life if he was incurably ill or an imbecile or possessed of unchangeable qualities that others considered abnormal and abhorrent?” The answers that came in, anonymity guaranteed, were 90 percent in the affirmative. His book poses this question: “Given half a chance, will more people start hating people the minute they have the freedom to do so? Will this obsession with eugenics actually accomplish that?” Hadn’t Nietzsche posed similar questions? No one in America knows all the names he’s reading. “This country is not interested in philosophy,” he writes. “Who and where are the American philosophers?”
Yes, they are a strange couple and are about to become even stranger. Like Germany itself, no one can figure them out. In any event, he was unable to obtain a publisher and had asked his wife for money to do this himself and she had refused.
Between 1929 and 1930 the population of Washington diminished by 13 percent. That is not a piddling amount in such a short time. A further 8 percent disappeared between 1931 and 1932. It was scary seeing so many “for rent” signs. You could even see there were fewer people on the streets. People just went somewhere else. We weren’t, it seemed, all going to be millionaires or prominent … well, anythings. Foreigners—individuals and governments—came and went. Mr. Stadtdotter just went. No one can remember the Stadtdotters ever arriving. No one can remember Mr. Stadtdotter’s first name. What kind of last name is Stadtdotter? One day he just wasn’t here. Evvilleena doesn’t seem to care, though she doesn’t take down from over the front door the plaque with the crest of whatever country he came from (presumably she’s from there, too) and was meant to represent. No one questions her. Washington is like that. People come and go. All the time. What was his name? What was her name? What was their name? I can’t remember. No one’s giving any info away. When they go, they go. The police can’t keep up. Since diplomats are exempt from American laws, there isn’t much point. These are days before blood types and medical and dental records exist to track down the absentees. Hermia mentioned that her husban
d is a spy. Sir Geoffrey will have a hard time with all this no-real-name business. Everyone in Britain has a name. He finds himself going after all sorts of people who aren’t worth going after. Someone should have started with Evilleena. No one knows who she is either. “She was one fucking snot of snatch,” Grace says when Israel tells her about her.
Evvilleena throws lavish parties in her mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, where she’s ridiculed behind her back for making passes. She gets drunk and gropes crotches. Even before whatever-his-name-was disappeared. Whash wrong with that? They’re my parteez. I do vat I vish. Her crotch-groping was all over town. Men, diplomats, State Department, went there to get groped by Evilleena, so they could tell they’d been groped on Mass. Ave. in a great big mansion. Whether her gropes led to their gropes is unknown.
Mr. Stadtdotter did have one hobby while he was here: black women, Negroes, the darker-skinned the better. He spent a great deal of time in those sections of black Washington where he might locate them. In those days it was relatively safe to go there and safe to purchase a woman at one of the Negro whorehouses or just right off the street. These proclivities are also known around and about. It’s hard to keep secrets in this town when they’re so … specific as this one.
We don’t know if he procured one of those women for someone else. There’s always someone or other to say that’s what he did. For someone high up. It’s usually someone high up. Or else why would someone or other say anything at all?