Adventures in the Orgasmatron (44 page)

At Rosenfeld’s urging, Bellow, who was also teaching at NYU, entered therapy with Dr. Chester Raphael, another member of Reich’s circle, who goaded him in Reich’s style about his stagnant, repressed body. In one of Bellow’s unpublished manuscripts, a novel that was to have been based on Rosenfeld, there is a parody of a Reichian session in which the therapist taunts his patient, “You look to me like an overfed, jowly, snouty white pig. You have erectile potency, but you are not a potent man…I can tell by looking at you—the retracted pelvis, the stasis with accumulated fat, the shallowness of breathing. How can you have had real sexual experience?”
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This script, with its allusions to animals, was close to the truth; Bellow once joked of his own therapy, “That wasn’t sexology, that was zoology.”
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However, Bellow reported that he initially found the stimulation of his repressed rages therapeutic. In his novel
Henderson the Rain King
(1958) there is a passage that captures the dramatic catharsis sometimes achieved in Reichian therapy: “A sob came out of me,” says Henderson. “It must have been laid down early in my life, for it was stupendous and rose from me like a great sea bubble from the Atlantic floor.”
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Bellow, an ex-Trotskyite (he had traveled to Mexico to see his hero, only to find that Trotsky had been murdered the day before their appointment), also built an accumulator; like Rosenfeld’s device it was homemade, built by a mutual friend from their Chicago days. Bellow would sit naked in the claustrophobic space for daily irradiations, reading under the glare of a bare bulb. He evidently believed in its efficacy: he told his biographer Ruth Miller that “he cured a couple of warts [with it] and improved his breathing.” A New York orgonomist he’d met claimed to have cured a case of cervical cancer with the device, and to have got one “near remission,” but Bellow’s credulity had its medical limits—according to Miller, Bellow laughed at the uncomforting idea of a “near cure.”
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Bellow would later claim to have been deluded in his belief in Reich’s ideas and characterized his period on Raphael’s couch as a “disaster”; in fact, in his later, more reactionary days, Bellow described the entire sexual revolution as “a thirty-year disaster.” (Sexual liberation, Bellow said, “was terribly destructive to me; I took it as entitlement, the path to being a free man.”)
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He confided to his friend and fellow novelist Philip Roth that Reichian therapy was “really a horror,” and he blamed his having submitted to it on Rosenfeld’s influence. He only began therapy, he explained, so as not to lose his friend: “He insisted that I had to have this done, since he was doing it…Not anything I’m terribly proud of, but you could not keep your respect for yourself if you had not faced the ultimate rigors. And it was a link between Isaac and me. I felt that I could not let him go through this without going through it myself so that I would know what was happening to him.”
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Chester Raphael remembered things differently when presented with this picture of a folie à deux: “That’s a peculiar way to put it,” he told Bellow’s biographer James Atlas, remarking that Rosenfeld’s name barely ever came up in sessions. “[Bellow] came because he had problems.”
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Bellow would later accuse Raphael of creating more problems than he cured by contributing to the breakup of his first marriage (he quit therapy in 1953 when his first marriage broke up). The “brutal candor” that Reichian therapy insisted on, in Bellow’s estimation, had only made him “nastier.” The Rosenfelds also split up at this time, finding marriage incompatible with their radical sex lives.

Rosenfeld died young from a heart attack in 1956. “At thirty-eight, [Rosenfeld] died in lonely sloth,” Irving Howe wrote of the writer who had showed so much promise.
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Alfred Kazin also characterized Rosenfeld as a worn-out failure, “as even the [Greenwich] Village desperados noticed” he had become. Rosenfeld, Kazin wrote, “sat in his orgone box looking for a message, for the Messiah, for the perfect freedom and happiness that would come to him as unprecedented sexual power—from the spheres.” But he died, Kazin concluded, “a prisoner in his cell, the orgone box.”
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Actually, before Rosenfeld died, he had ceased to use his accumulator, despite the assertions of Kazin and others that it was the box that finally suffocated him. As Steven Zipperstein noted in an essay on Rosenfeld published in
Partisan Review
in 2002, Rosenfeld did have the box with him in Chicago when he returned there toward the end of his life, but it was unused, dismantled and flat-packed in the corner of the room. The novel Rosenfeld was working on when he died was a dystopian tale that questioned the authoritarian nature of Reichian therapy: the action unfolded in a sex colony run by a scientist clearly based on Reich, who shows repressive intolerance to those who resist his call to pleasure.

Among Bellow’s papers at the University of Chicago are eight hundred pages of his unpublished work on Reich and Rosenfeld, a study in failure. Bellow aborted it as too cruel a memorial, and wrote
Herzog
(1964) instead. (Moses Herzog parodies Reich’s position when he muses that “to get laid is actually socially constructive and useful, an act of citizenship.”) A small fragment of his Rosenfeld study was published as a short story, “Zetland: By a Character Witness.” But these few pages take the reader only from Zetland’s precocious Kant-reading childhood in Chicago to the moment he jettisoned the philosophy Ph.D. he was working on at Columbia, ready to head off to pursue a bohemian literary life in the Village. Even in this brief character sketch, however, Bellow includes clues of a life—and orgone box—to come: “Living in a kennel,” Bellow writes of the bookish Zetland, “his thoughts embraced the universe.”
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Bellow considered Rosenfeld to have been a victim of New York: “He came to take the town and he got took,” Bellow told Philip Roth. “His considerable gifts as a writer never matured in New York. He became a follower of the onetime Freudian Wilhelm Reich. This would not have been possible in any other American city. It took Isaac years to cast off the Reichian influence. This ideological ordeal, one might say, followed him from Vienna to New York. He was ruined by this stuff,” Bellow concluded.
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In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship, described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair.
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Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.”
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The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.”
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Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical school, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh–like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulate the unconscious.

Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaptation of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
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Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Times Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke for every interviewee he sent to his room at the Hotel Astor, and the beat trio were among them. (When Kinsey, who was fond of using slang in his interviews to put people at ease, asked Ginsberg directly, “Did you ever ‘brown’ anybody?” Ginsberg said that he had no idea what he meant. The house detectives at the Astor objected to the prostitutes, pimps, and drug addicts who were piling into the lobby from Times Square to catch the elevator up to Kinsey’s room so as to earn the dollar he would give them for recounting their sexual histories. The manager wanted him out. “Nobody’s going to undress in our hotel room,” Kinsey assured him. “Yes,” the manager replied insistently, “but you’re undressing their minds.”)
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After Burroughs left New York for Texas, sent home by a judge after he forged a prescription for morphine, Ginsberg wrote that his “wild analysis” with Burroughs, a bastardized version of Reichianism, had left him “with a number of my defenses broken, but centrally unchanged, with nothing to replace the lost armor.”
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Conflicted about his homosexuality (he was now having an affair with Neal Cassady, for whom sex was, according to Ginsberg, “a sort of joyful yoga”), Ginsberg wrote to Burroughs that he was thinking of going to see an analyst. “I think you would be better with the Reichians who sound a good deal more hip,” Burroughs recommended in February 1947, certain that most other types of analysts were slaves to conformity, only content when they had turned their patients into “bank clerks…[all] scared and whipped down.”
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Reichianism appealed precisely because its practitioners, Burroughs thought, wouldn’t dictate to you what to do.

Ginsberg wrote a letter to Reich the following month:

My main psychic difficulty, as far as I know, is the usual oedipal entanglement. I have been a homosexual for as long as I remember, and have had a limited number of homosexual affairs, both temporary and protracted. They have been unsatisfactory to me, and I have always approached love affairs with a sort of self-contradictory, conscious masochism…I have had long periods of depression, guilt feelings—disguised mostly as a sort of Kafkian sordidness of sense of self—melancholy, and the whole gamut I suppose.
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Reich, as Ilse Ollendorff noted, refused to treat homosexuals. He did, however, recommend three other orgonomists who might, and from among them Ginsberg chose Dr. Allan Cott, a member of Reich’s inner circle who had a practice in Newark, New Jersey. Beginning in the winter of 1947, Ginsberg saw him for twice-weekly therapy and sessions in the accumulator. Ginsberg wrote of his vegetotherapy with Cott, “It was really remarkable, I felt this strange buzzing from disturbing the mouth area.”
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Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically.
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But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
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Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg thought cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.”
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Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
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