The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Other results of the lightening of the atmosphere are small but numerous; it is now permitted to take photographs of the Kremlin, tourists are once more allowed into Russia, a vast shop selling every description of consumer goods, from toys to televisions, has opened in Red Square—the biggest store in the world, say the Russians, who, like the Americans, admire hugeness for its own sake; and, they could truthfully add, the most expensive.

  Mr Harrison Salisbury was Moscow correspondent of The New York Times for several years until September 1954. He travelled all over the country, including Siberia. Both he and Dr Starlinger point out that life there is just about as disagreeable whether you are a prisoner or not. The slave workers very often have more to eat and warmer bedding than their ‘free’ counterparts.

  In the vast areas of permafrost everybody is miserable, the only consolation is the evening drunkenness, which brings brief oblivion. The cold light of June ushers in a thaw which is quickly followed by another long winter. Drains and water mains are an impossibility at those latitudes, where the soil is permanently frozen six inches beneath the surface. Mr Salisbury gives a nightmarish description of Siberian towns; again, so much worse than the country, as readers of Mme Krupskaya’s life of Lenin will agree. When she and Lenin were living in a Siberian penal settlement, before the first war, they had a hut to themselves and Lenin went out duck-shooting.

  Dr Starlinger, looking into the future, sees China occupying the position that Russia at present occupies vis à vis the West. He tells the following ancedote. When, in 1949, Mao won his war against Chiang Kai Shek, the most intelligent and well-informed prisoners were discussing the matter, and they agreed that it was the greatest victory for Russia and Communism to date. In the circle was an old Russian General whose views carried great weight among them. He sat silent. They urged him repeatedly to give his opinion about the triumph in China, and finally he got up saying: ‘Yes, yes; six hundred million men, and soon there’ll be more still—and then what?’ and went out of the room. This was followed by a long silence: nobody had anything more to say. The General had served for many years in the Far East.

  This is where Mr Gale’s amusing little book comes in. He accompanied the Labour Party delegation to Russia and China last August as correspondent to the Guardian. They stayed a few days in Moscow, where (not having known it under the Stalin terror) Mr Gale duly noted the drab drear, and M. Malenkov’s bunch of flowers for Dr Edith, and then they all flew on to China.

  The delegation, Mr Attlee, Mr Bevan, Mr Morgan Phillips and genossen, may have been the knock-about turn he describes, but it remains in the background, for the press representatives seem to have been kept at arm’s length by everyone. Although he was only in China a month, Mr Gale looked about him, and what he saw was a well-organised, unimaginably large country, most of whose six hundred million inhabitants are better off than they have ever been before, with more to eat, more to wear, and less disease. If one per cent or so happen to be worse off, there are plenty of prisons and firing squads to take care of them, even though one per cent in this case means six million souls. The remaining five hundred and ninety four million men and women are working hard for their country and Chairman Mao, and rapidly developing their industries, and having millions of healthy babies; and it is not surprising that thoughtful Russians look at them with a certain apprehension.

  Dr Starlinger says: Russia is a Raum ohne Volk [room without people]. China is rapidly becoming, despite its vastness, a Volk ohne Raum [people without room]. He foresees the day when the West will have to protect Russia’s western frontier while she defends her eastern frontier against expanding China. This may be in the distant future, but he believes that it accounts in part for the détente in Russian relations with the rest of Europe in recent months.

  Of the three authors, he sees furthest and his book is the most important. Mr Salisbury’s book is excellent journalism. If English readers feel inclined to put it down in disgust because of its tiresome style, I suggest they should read it (as an English poet once told me one should read Longfellow) with an American accent. This enables one to imagine that an American is telling a number of interesting things, and the infelicities of language cease to irritate.

  Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, Starlinger, W; American in Russia, Salisbury, H.E.; No Flies in China G.S. Gale (1955)

  The Chairman Trap

  Dr Li was an enthusiastic young communist when he left Australia for his homeland, hoping to help build the new China and study in hospital to be a neuro-surgeon. But his destiny was to become Mao’s personal doctor, a position of considerable danger. He started off with tremendous admiration for the Chairman, and only gradually the atmosphere around him of intense suspicion, jealousy and ambition brought disillusion.

  Dr Li often tried to get away from the Chairman’s court, but with no success. Mao liked him, partly because he had done his studies with Americans and Australians in the magic capitalist West, supposedly the great enemy, but deeply admired by Mao. The Chairman was a strong, healthy 61, his only problem insomnia. He was often awake for as much as thirty hours on end, and never hesitated to ring for Dr Li in the middle of the night, to come and teach him English, or just to chat.

  Twenty two years passed, and Dr Li was at Mao’s deathbed; although suffering from several serious diseases his doctors had every reason to fear they would be blamed and punished for killing him, even though he was eight-three, when his tired old heart stopped beating. Instead, Dr Li was told to arrange that the body should be preserved ‘for ever’.

  Mao loved, and half believed, the fulsome flattery of his courtiers. He liked pretty young women, gave dances for them and took any he fancied to his room. Not much harm in that; the girls were overjoyed, he was their god. The enigma is the Great Leap Forward.

  Mao was absolute master of China. He realized the huge country was very backward and he feared the Soviet Union. Convinced that what made countries strong and powerful was linked to steel production, he set hundreds of millions of people to the task of melting iron and forging steel. Every village had its little furnace, using fuel in the most wasteful way imaginable, melting down old nails, pots and pans, even agricultural implements, all destroyed in the hope of reaching some impossible target. Failure meant imprisonment in a cruel labour camp. At the end of the process there were innumerable lumps of useless iron all over the countryside, and the peasants had no ploughs or even spades to work with. A bumper harvest was left to rot in the fields while able bodied men fed the back-yard furnaces. Mao in his luxurious train journeyed around China and pointed out to Dr Li the glow of little furnaces everywhere, fondly imagining his steel production would soon pass that of the powerful West. What happened was famine; millions of people starved to death. It was a disaster of the first magnitude.

  Was the cultural Revolution, with its nationwide destruction of everything from irreplaceable works of art to the contents of any bourgeois house by Red Guards and students, allowed by Mao as a distraction to ‘save face’ after the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward? Why did Mao behave as he did? Can he have been as stupid as he seems?

  This book is far better than most translations, probably because Dr Li knows English. It is a relief to learn that he got away at last, and lives in America with his sons. He closely observed the relation between success and health. When things went badly, Mao became ill, when they picked up health returned. His wife, the witch-like leader of the Gang of Four, was a hypochondriac, but when Mao allowed her to wield political power her ills vanished overnight. It was what Churchill called ‘the royal jelly of success’—if naked power to produce disasters can be reckoned ‘success.’

  The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li, Z. Evening Standard (1994)

  Faustian Knowledge

  C.G. Jung’s father was a Swiss clergyman of German origins, a rather sad person who lost his faith, and died when Jung was still a student. The vicarage where Jung lived as a little child was perched above the Rheinfall, an amazing, drama
tic waterfall. At the age of three he had a dream which haunted him for the rest of his life. He dreamt he descended into a dimly lit chamber underground; a red carpet led to a platform upon which there was a golden throne. A sort of tree-trunk made of skin and naked flesh was standing on the throne; it had an aura of brightness. On the very top of it there was a single eye, gazing upward. He heard his mother’s voice: ‘Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater’. The little boy was terrified. He knew even then that he had dreamed of a subterranean God; later he considered that this dream anticipated his life and work, impregnated as it was by the creative principle striving toward the light of consciousness.

  At a very early age, too, he realised that God has a dark side. The vicarage was near the churchyard and, when village people died and were buried there, he was told that ‘Jesus had taken them unto himself.’ This laid the foundation of his life-long preoccupation with the ‘dark side’ of God. When at 16 he first read Faust it ‘poured into his soul like miraculous balm’. Goethe’s vision of God not only allowing but positively encouraging ‘evil’, because without it man slumbers in inactivity, exactly corresponded to the boy Jung’s own conception of God. ‘The figure of Mephistopheles made the deepest impression on me. I vaguely sensed [he] had a relationship to the mystery of the Mothers’. When Eckermann tried to induce Goethe to elucidate ‘the Mothers’ he only got the reply: ‘Die Mütter! Mütter! Es klingt so wunderlich!’ (so strangely wonderful) but Jung was determined to try to shed light in the dark and hidden world where the Mothers dwell.

  He became a doctor and psychiatrist and worked for nine years at a mental hospital in Zürich. While he was there he read Freud’s books. The two men became friends, but there was a rupture when Jung found himself unable to agree with Freud’s exclusively sexual explanation for every neurosis. He did not accept that the unconscious was as simple as Freud made out, and he determined to search deeper down. Hence the quarrel which divided these two eminent men.

  Jung set himself to explore his own unconscious. He devised a diagram which showed the conscious mind as a peak and beneath it ever deeper layers of the unconscious—individual, family, nation, continent, race, the primeval ancestors in an area common to the whole of the animal kingdom; and beneath, the ‘central fire’ from which a spark or current ascends ‘through all the layers to every living creature.’ His discovery of the collective unconscious was Jung’s contribution to understanding mankind. In his diagram it is easy to see, for example, that the deeper you get the harder it is to achieve unity between different groups. The nations find it difficult to understand each other, the continents and races well-nigh impossible.

  Jung’s attempt ‘to probe the depths of my own psyche’ led him along perilous paths. He said the only parallel journey that he knew of was in Faust II, where the poet had ‘an alchemical encounter with the unconscious’. It would probably not be too much to say that having Goethe as forerunner and Faust as companion kept Jung sane. He writes: ‘I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies—and as a psychiatrist I realised only too well what that meant’. Elsewhere he refers to men who did in fact go mad in pursuit of fantasies, who were ‘shattered by them—Nietszche, and Hölderlin and many others’.

  In the depths Jung met with archetypal figures, and, says Miss Hannah, ‘He told me that at this time he made it a rule never to let a figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why they had appeared to him’. In an attempt to throw light on this seeming impossibility she tells the story from the Odyssey of Menelaus and Proteus. Because ‘he knows the sea in all its depths’ Proteus could tell Menelaus all he wanted to know about what had happened since he left Troy. But how to seize him? Proteus turned himself into a snake, a lion, a giant boar, even into running water. Finally he grew tired of his magic repertory and told Menelaus all he knew. ‘This story shows us… how to deal with the figures we meet on our confrontation with the unconscious’, writes Miss Hannah. Does it? Doubtless what she says Jung told her is what he did tell her, but he himself constantly refers to the archetypes with whom he talked in the unconscious as ‘my fantasies’. What he does stress is that his fantasies produced ideas which he could not recognise as ‘his’.

  Jung’s archetypal figures included an old man and a girl, who told him they were Elijah and Salome. They were accompanied by a large black snake, but Elijah seemed to Jung the most reasonable and intelligent of the three. The figure of Elijah gradually developed into that of Philemon, who was to be the most important figure in Jung’s exploration. Philemon is familiar to readers of Faust as the last victim of Mephistopheles’ guile and cruelty. This pair—Philemon and Salome—had a far-reaching effect on Jung, because at the very time of his encounter with them in the unconscious he was consciously falling in love with a young girl who turned out to be the only person ‘able to follow his extraordinary experiences and to accompany him intrepidly into the underworld.’ This was Toni Wolff, whose mother had taken her to Jung to be analysed on account of deep depression. Miss Hannah says ‘it seems hard, just at the time he was tried to the uttermost by his confrontation with the unconscious’ that Jung had to deal with the most difficult problem that can face a married man: that of convincing his wife that his love affair was necessary. He hit upon a splendid idea: ‘he had seen all too often (in analysis) the untold damage that fathers can do to their daughters by not living the whole of their erotic life… the father’s unlived life is then unconsciously displaced onto the daughters’. Fear that this might happen (for he had several daughters) kept Jung awake a whole night. He realised that if he refused to ‘live the outside attraction’ he would ruin his daughters’ eros. Therefore it was his plain duty to go ahead with his love affair. I commend this thought to other husbands requiring an excuse for their infidelities.

  Jung felt a need to ‘see the white man from outside’; he went to New Mexico where he made friends with a chief of the Taos Pueblo Indians called Mountain Lake. They had long talks. One day Mountain Lake told Jung: ‘The Americans want to stamp out our religion. But what we do, we do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone benefits from it.’ This observation produced great emotional excitement in Jung; he felt he was approaching the central mysteries of Mountain Lake’s religion. He asked in what way the whole world benefited, and was told that the Pueblo Indians live on the roof of the world, nearest to God. ‘We are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to cross the sky. If we were to cease practising our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night for ever’. Mountain Lake had a poor opinion of white men. He said they look so cruel, and their eyes have a staring expression; ‘the whites always want something. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them’, an observation which confirmed Jung in his opinion that different races have the utmost difficulty in understanding each other. It is interesting that the Indians and the Americans each accuse the other of cruelty. The Indian with his scalping knife is an image familiar to every Anglo-Saxon child, an image sedulously fostered by the Americans while they wiped out whole tribes of redskins.

  Jung found another noble savage in Africa, where he made a journey from Uganda to Egypt. He loved Africa. He said that the same conditions prevail in very primitive countries as in the collective unconscious. He was disappointed to discover that the tribes were no longer guided by the dreams of their medicine men. This was because the medicine men themselves laboured under the delusion that their dreams were no longer necessary, since the English district commissioner knew everything.

  Jung lived for most of his life near the Zürich lake, where he built himself a house. Some distance along the shore he built a tower where he could escape from his family and the demands of his patients, and contemplate the water in peace. He was a very strong personality, loved and revered by his disciples. In this somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere, surrounded by adoring women
, grateful patients and rich American benefactors, he strove to achieve Ganzheit. The English word ‘wholeness’ does not quite convey the meaning of this typically German conception. The disciples accepted not only the idea of the collective unconscious (an idea which has thrown light on many things previously not understood) but also his claim to have explored it, and to have forced the archetypes he met there to disclose to him their secrets. Miss Hannah knew him well for thirty years, but she has perforce relied to a great extent on the only autobiographical writing he left: Memories, Dreams, Reflections. There he says he had to try to understand his own fantasies in order to help his patients with theirs, but in her book the whole question hovers on the frontier between medicine and religion, or magic.

  One thing is certain: Jung never achieved Ganzheit in the Goethean sense. Art completely passed him by. His own carvings, hands stretching out to the udder of a mare, for example had little to do with art, whatever his anima may have told him. He kept his lively interest in odd phenomena into old age; he was delighted by the flying saucers and similar UFOs. He was pleased that people wanted them to be real, and that all over the world they were seeing round objects in the sky. ‘Roundness is the symbol for the self, the totality, and this fact in our sceptical, rational modern world is of overwhelming interest in and for itself,’ says Miss Hannah. She often seems to be thinking in German.

  I wish she could have told a few facts, such as the percentage of cures among the patients Jung analysed. Perhaps this is not possible, for what is a ‘cure’? Her book is gossipy but interesting, and she herself emerges as a clever and agreeably quirky old lady. If Jung is slightly diminished, that is not her fault. Hagiography always diminishes its victim, and Jung was Miss Hannah’s infallible idol.