by Olivia Laing
In the same interview in which she described a world without objects, Martin also talked about how she wanted the viewer to be able to enter her paintings. ‘Nature’, she said, ‘is like parting a curtain. You go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this . . . that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind.’ There are so many ways to read her work, but one of them is surely as a permanent opening of that closed door. All of her canvases stand ajar. Anyone can pass in. Anyone can experience what it feels like to let go of the things they carry, to be incorporated, just for a moment, into a world of love.
*
Martin found a way of keeping herself afloat, but not everyone is so lucky or determined. In Jacobson’s experience a retreat from the object world suggested two things: substantial damage or neglect in the earliest stages of infancy, or a traumatic experience that plunged the psyche back to its most primitive phase. She also thought that if supported by constitutional factors – what we would now call genetic predisposition – this neglect could predispose a child to psychosis. ‘Reality may be denied, and magic, infantile convictions sustained forever.’
The extent to which these forces can capsize a life was not quite evident to me until the first autumn of the Trump administration, when I went to Washington to look at Reich’s papers, a cache of which were housed at the National Library of Medicine. They’d been assembled by his last girlfriend, Aurora Karrer. She met Reich in 1954, just after Ilse left him, and always described herself as his wife, though they were never actually married.
It was strange being in Washington. The library was part of a compound of buildings belonging to the National Institute of Health. There was hardly anyone around, and in my hotel I read newspaper stories about gutted government departments, the deserted offices filled with empty desks. The network was humming with paranoia. It was the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and Trump was on Twitter giving favourable reports on his own progress. At 5:25am he’d tweeted: ‘A great day in Puerto Rico yesterday. While some of the news coverage is Fake, most showed great warmth and friendship.’ An hour and four minutes later, he’d added: ‘Wow, so many Fake News stories today. No matter what I do or say, they will not write or speak truth. The Fake News Media is out of control!’
The library too was almost empty. By the door a screen was playing a black-and-white film loop of a man being dragged away by two policemen. I sat alone in the panelled reading room and worked my way through the Karrer archive. Though the folders were neatly catalogued – Correspondence, Notes & Miscellany, Litigation – the impression was of startling confusion. Many of the papers, which included legal documents, news-paper articles and letters from Reich’s family, had been annotated by Karrer in looping red biro. ‘Wilhelm Reich was living in a dream world’, she’d scribbled in huge letters on a report entitled ‘The Jailing of A Great Scientist in the USA’. It wasn’t clear to whom these notes were addressed, but because she signed them all with her full name, Aurora Karrer Reich, it gave the uncanny impression that it was the reader who was being petitioned in what increasingly seemed like a battle over sanity.
What Karrer was keen to convey was Reich’s mental state during his final years, the unravelling period in which she was involved with him. ‘In 1956 WR believed himself a spaceman’, a typical entry ran. ‘WR had massive delusions of grandeur. People believed him because their own lives were empty.’ Interspersed among these pages were transcriptions of the messages he’d apparently concealed all over his property at Orgonon, anticipating an invader of some kind. A note inside a locked steel cabinet in the treatment room read: ‘You, are you not deeply ashamed of your own rotten nature. You cannot reach my realms.’ Another, on the door to one of the cabins, warned: ‘Watch out. Want to make it kind of look like suicide? Don’t you, LM? By Proxy!!’ The last line was underlined three times.
He wasn’t just being paranoid. That year, 1956, one of his associates was caught breaking the terms of the injunction by an FDA inspector posing as a customer. On 7 May, Reich was found guilty of contempt of court, fined $10,000 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On 5 June, a US marshal and two FDA inspectors appeared at Orgonon, dressed in dark suits. They ordered Reich to destroy all his accumulators, as demanded by the injunction, and he in turn told the twelve-year-old Peeps and their caretaker Tom Ross to do the job. They took the accumulators apart, screw by screw, and then they carried them to a triangle of land beneath the observatory, where they smashed them up with axes. It took a long time. ‘The pile’, Peter wrote in his heart-breaking memoir, A Book of Dreams, ‘was crumpled and broken, and steel wool was hanging out of the panels, all frothy and grey.’
The net was closing in. A few weeks later, the FDA returned to Orgonon to oversee the burning of two hundred and fifty-one of Reich’s books. Reich watched the bonfire being assembled but refused to help, telling one of the inspectors that his books had been burned by the Nazis, and that he did not think it would happen in America. The bonfire was the prelude to a still larger conflagration. At the end of August, FDA inspectors went to New York to supervise the destruction of all the stock still held by the Orgone Institute Press in Greenwich Village, along with many of Reich’s own papers. Six tons of books and printed matter were loaded into a truck and driven to the Gansevoort Street incinerator on the edge of the Hudson River, close to where the Whitney is now. Several of the works being burned were outside the terms set by the injunction, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Though plenty of books have been banned, before and since, it remains the only nationally-sanctioned book burning in American history. Until 1960, the FDA was still engaged in hunting down and burning copies of Reich’s dangerous books.
Reich’s response to these shattering events was to sever himself still further from the world. According to Karrer’s papers, that summer he degenerated into a drunken bully, who hit his favourite dog Troll with an iron bar, breaking his hind leg, and then blamed it on a mysterious invader, perhaps from space. Tuesday 14 August 1956: ‘Willie violent and threatening. Said he felt the need to kill someone – might as well be me. He had been drinking heavily. Didn’t remember his threats and violent flailing around the next morning when sober.’ Later on the same page: ‘What gets passed off as the effects of Oranur [a negative version of orgone energy, which Reich claimed to have discovered in the early 1950s] is really violent temper outbursts by Wilhelm Reich!’ A letter, perhaps undelivered, from October 1956 added: ‘I do not plan to sit calmly and be hit, slapped or beaten by you under the influence of alcohol.’
I read my way through these pages in horror, not just because of what they revealed about Reich but because it seemed that Karrer too had become increasingly delusional in the years after his death. In one of the folders, I found a pile of newspaper articles she’d cut out and kept, many of them dating from 1984. Two of the pages had features on Reich, but the others didn’t mention him at all. I flicked through them, puzzled. There was a horoscope, a TV preview in the Washington Post of Aurora, an NBC movie starring Sophia Loren, and an article in USA Today about an Aurora Dye Laser that was designed to kill cancer cells. On each page, Karrer had underlined the word Aurora, as if mysterious messages were being sent to her by way of the medium of her own name.
To be paranoid is to be certain of conspiracy, to know that one is caught in a giant net of connections, extending out in all directions. Nothing and no one can be trusted. The threat might come from anywhere, at any moment of the night or day, and so the paranoid person must remain vigilant, poised to renounce and retreat. This retreat can occur physically, like Reich’s move to Orgonon or Arizona, or it can mean a descent into fantasy, like his belief in alien invaders. Even more damagingly, it can mean the severing of emotional relationships, as Reich did with almost all his friends and colleagues in the 1950s, cutting himself off not just from affection and love but also from the anchoring to reality that other people provide.
It was evident from the notes Reich hid around Orgon
on that he’d long since lost faith in the world around him, experiencing it as a place of attacks and hidden dangers, in which he was right and everyone who disagreed with him was not just wrong but wicked and rotten. To be the partner of someone in this state of mind is to be permanently at risk of physical harm, since dissent and even ambiguity can no longer be tolerated. One is either good or bad, angel or betrayer.
Karrer was not the only person to see this side of Reich. His second wife Ilse Ollendorff left him in 1954 after he became violent and possessive, drinking heavily and once hitting her so hard that he perforated her eardrum. He accused her of conducting secretive and sordid affairs, which she denied (‘Absolutely NOT true,’ she told Christopher Turner shortly before her death). Reich forced her to write out confessions, and locked these documents in the official Orgone Institute archive alongside his own reports on her sexual behaviour and denouncements he’d bullied his followers into composing. It was as if he was re-enacting the dynamics of the investigation against him, but this time in the role of perpetrator, not victim. The champion of women’s sexual liberty had become a prurient, vindictive spy, the McCarthy of his own domestic realm.
But this wasn’t the only dynamic he was re-enacting. He was also playing out his father’s hated role. In her biography of Reich, published in 1969, Ilse observed that he’d never come to terms with the tangled circumstances of his mother’s death. It was he who’d told his father about the affair, albeit under coercion, and for the rest of his life he felt responsible for the year of violence that followed, not to mention his mother’s increasingly grisly suicide attempts. Even in his thirties, he still woke abruptly from the nightmare that he’d killed her. He went into analysis three times before leaving Europe, but he was never able to deal with her death. It was too painful. Each time the subject arose, he shied away or terminated the analysis. Ilse thought his guilt added something obsessive and relentless to his personality, a need to be right at all costs. Difficult as it was to admit, she suspected that in the 1950s her husband had begun to lose contact with reality, and though he kept hauling himself back, ‘the continued pressure forced him to seek escape into the outer regions, into a more benevolent world.’
It was all so unutterably depressing. As a young man, Reich had seen how a net of social forces and past traumas shapes and affects every individual’s behaviour, and yet he seemed incapable of grasping what was happening to him now. He had been so brave, so stalwart in those early years, so concerned to change the conditions that affect the most vulnerable among us. Had he lost his mind under the accumulated burden of loss and grief and guilt, or was it just that men, even the most progressive, cannot unlearn the cultural lesson that a woman’s body is always a suitable receptacle for bad feelings? ‘Not’, as Andrea Dworkin once said, ‘because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized.’
Reich was among the people who taught her that, but just because he knew how power functioned didn’t mean he was immune to its effects. The biggest mistake he made was to think you can isolate yourself from the outside world. You can’t. Our past stays with us, embedded in our bodies, and we live whether we like it or not in the object world, sharing the resources of reality with billions of other beings. There is no steel-lined box that can protect you from the grid of forces that limits in tangible, tormenting ways what each private body is allowed to be or do. There is no escape, no possible place to hide. Either you submit to the world or you change the world. It was Reich who taught me that.
6
Cells
IN 1976, THE SINGER Kate Bush was browsing the shelves in an occult bookshop when she came across a copy of Peter Reich’s memoir, A Book of Dreams, published two years earlier. She was so captivated by the story of his strange childhood that it inspired ‘Cloudbusting’: an anthemic admixture of hope and loss, its weird, spacy optimism cut through with thick currents of grief and unease. ‘I still dream of Orgonon,’ it begins. ‘I wake up crying.’
In the 1980s video, she took the part of Peter herself, dressed in dungarees and a ragamuffin wig. She wanted Donald Sutherland to play Reich, calling unannounced at his London hotel to persuade him into the role. He agreed as soon as he realised what ‘Cloudbusting’ was about. He was obsessed with Reich. He’d just finished filming Novecento, Bertolucci’s epic history of the twentieth-century Italian struggle between communism and fascism, in which he’d played the brutal fascist foreman Attila Mellanchini, who rapes a boy and then beats his brains out against a wall. He’d used The Mass Psychology of Fascism as a guide to his character, much to Bertolucci’s irritation.
‘Cloudbusting’ was filmed on Dragon Hill in Oxford, not Maine. They couldn’t find a real cloudbuster, so they commissioned a model from the designers who’d worked on Alien, which looks like a vast steam-punk trombone. Bush and Sutherland haul and shove this absurd contraption to the summit, pointing it at the clear blue sky, which starts to fill with streaming clouds. Then Bush spots a black car, just as Peter did at Orgonon all those years before. It’s the men from the government, come to take her beloved father into custody. Stabbing strings. Her voice drops to a growl, splits into multiple yelping Kates. There are deep chanting voices, then children’s laughter, libidinal joy pitted against oppression and threat. The men arrive, in their shiny black shoes, to arrest Sutherland, who’s kitted out as a rumpled, tweedy scientist (Reich actually preferred plaid shirts). They root through his files, smash test tubes, force him into the car. Racing back up the hill, Bush grabs the cloudbuster controls. As Sutherland looks back through the rear windscreen, an ecstatic rain sluices from the sky.
‘Cloudbusting’ is a lightly fictionalised version of Reich’s life, but the entire album, Hounds of Love, has a compelling Reichian atmosphere. All the songs seem to struggle over the same dynamic, fretting ambivalently back and forth between repression and surrender, pleasure and withdrawal. My favourite is the hypnotic, unearthly title song, in which love is conveyed as a terrifying force. The protagonist struggles to escape, begging for help, before hurling herself down with that amazing, rejoicing line about taking her shoes off and thrrrrrrrowing them in the lake. In the video, which riffs on Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, the lover is once again stalked by government agents, as if desire itself is an anarchic, dangerous force. Bush ends up handcuffed to him, desperate to escape, longing to submit, caught up in competing waves of fear, desire and shame. Pleasure and love aren’t just alluring possibilities, but annihilating states, places you can reach but perhaps can’t come back from.
I love those songs. They seem to clarify something about why Reich’s work was so endlessly controversial, long before he built the orgone box. His vision is frightening. Pleasure is frightening, and so too is freedom. It involves a kind of openness and unboundedness that’s deeply threatening, both to the individual and to the society they inhabit. Freedom invokes a counter-wish to clamp down, to tense up, to forbid, even to destroy. Understanding this pervasive dynamic helps to explain why Reich, who longed to help people unlock the prison of their body, ended up locked in a prison cell himself.
On 20 March 1957, he was sent to the Federal Correction Institution in Danbury, Connecticut (the basis for the prison in Orange is the New Black). Two days later, he was moved to Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania to serve his two-year sentence. In the social worker’s report conducted during processing, he was described as a ‘60-year-old divorced white offender, does not embrace any religion nor is he a member of any church.’ Perhaps because of his mental state or some lingering suspicion around his communist past, he was assigned a private cell. For the last six months of his life, he lived alone in a space not all that much bigger than the orgone box itself.
He told Peter, who was away at boarding school, that he cried often. Crying was a way for the body to release feeling. The great softener, he called it. He’d suffered from psoriasis since boyhood, and after his imprisonment it flared up, as it often did in times of stress, leaving hi
m covered in painful red sores. He asked for Vaseline to soothe it, and for permission to bathe several times a week. He made no friends. The other prisoners watched him shuffling along the corridors or standing alone in the yard and exchanged gossip about him: the sex box man, who must be onto something, judging by the attractiveness of his much younger girlfriend.
Aurora applied to visit as soon as Reich was taken away, but she had to wait the standard thirty days before she received written permission. The warden’s letter was accompanied by a page of rules, setting out the terms by which her relationship with Reich would henceforth be controlled. I’d read them in the library in Washington, claustrophobia mounting in my own body. Visits were limited to three hours a month. There was no bus service between Lewisburg town and the prison. No packages, gifts, or written messages could be exchanged. When the session was concluded, all visitors must immediately leave the grounds.
Peter was also given permission to visit, and in A Book of Dreams he describes what Lewisburg was like back then, from the perspective of a child. You entered through two sets of locked doors, so that wherever you looked, you looked through bars. The entrance hall had display cabinets full of the cheap combs and wallets the prisoners made and sold for pocket change. In the visiting room, Reich sat on a plastic chair and Peeps sat opposite on a red and green couch. There was a table between them, and guards stood watching around the walls (Malcolm X, incarcerated a decade before Reich, remembered dozens of prisoners telling him that their first act of freedom would be to waylay these guards, who policed the tattered remnants of their outside lives). Reich was wearing a blue denim uniform and his face looked sad. He asked Peter about school. At the end of the visit they were allowed to hug on a black rubber mat: ‘a runway for hugging’. Then he was led back to his cell.