Fear of Fifty (25 page)

It was October of our first year in Germany when I first took the trolley to his office. I entered the cobbled courtyard of a nineteenth-century clinic with high yellow walls. Tall, tilted windows winked down at me.

I climbed three steep flights. Dr. Mitscherlich lurked in his book-lined office. Oriental rugs were unfurled this way and that on the wooden floor. An old-fashioned analytic couch threatened me, and I refused to lie down.

“Sit opposite me then,” the doctor said.

I obeyed.

He was athletic and tall, in his sixties. A long face, serious intense eyes of blue gray, thick glasses glittering as squarish oblongs, a quality of total attention.

He was wearing a white clinician's coat, a purple woven woolen tie, crepe-soled shoes that squeaked faintly as he walked. His white coat seemed a sort of
Engelhemd,
or “angel shirt” (as Germans call hospital gowns). Indeed, it seemed to angelize him. When I talked, his eyes belonged entirely to me.

Why had I come?

I was blocked in my writing, blocked in my marriage, homesick for New York, glad to be away from my family. I needed my husband. I hated my husband. I was bored with my husband. I wanted to write. I couldn't write. I couldn't send work out because I was forever revising it. I stood in my own way. I knew that I didn't want to end up blocked and bitter.

From the first session on, he took me seriously, took my poetry seriously—even before he had much reason to.

I soon surrendered to the couch, from which I could scan the book titles in English, German, Hungarian, Czech, French, Italian, Spanish. I remembered my dreams and related them.

Meandering from dreams to memories, to my life in Heidelberg, I simply “taught the unhappy present to recite the past,” until sooner or later “it faltered at the line where/Long ago the accusations had begun”—as Auden describes the process in his poem about Freud. There the needle stuck in the groove, pricking my heart until I said what the pain was.

Analysis is surrender—and who
wants
to surrender? No one. We fight till we have no other option, till the pain is so great we must. The ego wants brute power—and health be damned. The ego prefers death to surrender. But life keeps trying to assert itself. We keep stumbling over the same blocks until one day, after some trivial unraveling, the floor seems clear enough for us to walk a little way without tripping.

So it goes—Monday after Monday, Tuesday after Tuesday, Wednesday after Wednesday, Thursday after Thursday, Friday after Friday. It gets easier for a while, then it gets harder. It gets boring, then bearable, then impossible again. We keep on as if inching along on a novel we have come to hate. Only the discipline of finishing carries us through. And somewhere toward the end, the light shines again, as if through a clerestory window.

Dr. Mitscherlich's Heidelberg office had clerestory windows. Those remain my metaphor for the way analysis began to shed light on my pain. Gray days followed one another endlessly; it rained and rained, as it always does in Germany. One day, the rays of sun were pouring in.

At the end of my first year of analysis, Dr. Mitscherlich moved his office to Frankfurt. From my gloomy army apartment, it was a fifteen-minute car ride to the Heidelberg Bahnhof, a one-hour train ride to Frankfurt, a twenty-minute trolley ride to the Sigmund Freud Institute.

I rarely missed a session.

I had just stopped calling Dr. M. a Nazi—having learned that his silence concealed his reputation as an anti-Nazi, as an author, as a researcher into the conditions that had made Nazism thrive. The
fatherless society
was the term he coined. He had become famous for his theories of the underlying causes of Nazism. He was a star and I hadn't even known it. More important, he always treated
me
like a star long before I was one. His belief in me made my whole creative life possible.

I commuted from Heidelberg to Frankfurt as if my life depended on it. It did.

I'd leave the house at 7:20, arrive at the Heidelberg station at 7:35, park my old Volkswagen Beetle (or “Beatle” as I liked to call it), catch the 7:50 train to Frankfurt/Darmstadt, arrive at Frankfurt Bahnhof at 8:52, wait for the 9:07 trolley (in any weather), then walk several blocks to be in Dr. M.'s waiting room at the institute by 9:40. My hour began at ten o'clock sharp.

I've never made such complicated arrangements and kept them, except when in love.

I suppose I was.

Four days a week, I took the same long journey back, running to catch the twelve-something train, reaching my apartment in Heidelberg by 1:30 or 2:00.

There was grocery shopping to do, three hours to write, dinner to cook. There were army shindigs at night that officers and their
Frauen had
to attend. The shlepping to Frankfurt never stopped seeming worthwhile. There were only two days when I sabotaged the schedule and missed the train. On both occasions I was standing on the platform and staring after it.

The train became my life. I read, wrote in my notebook, scribbled poems and stories. The rocking motion soothed me and erotic fantasies came. I scrawled them down, made fables of them, explored them with Dr. M.

Fear of Flying
somehow emerged from those train rides. On trains you can dream that the man opposite you will take off his thick glasses, strip to his savage loincloth, and make passionate love to you in an endless tunnel, then disappear like a vampire into the sunlight. The train rocks you back and forth on your wettest dreams; it merges the moist divide between inner and outer. I have come on trains without touching myself. It is only a matter of concentration. The impossible he (or she) comes
into
me. The fantasy takes over. Time stops as the train rocks. Suddenly my lap is full of stars.

After three years, I parted from Dr. M., promising to write. And I did: letters, poems, novels.

He had shown me how. He had taught me to find the courage to climb down into myself. The unconscious is full of darkness, Oedipal stand-ins, broken legends, half-told tales. A shaky ladder with rotten rungs descends into it. Another golden ladder may take you to the stars. But first you must find yourself in the dark. If you don't know yourself, how can you find anything?

“How can I receive the seeds of freedom,” asks Thomas Merton, “if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant his liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free.”

The analytic journey had at least made me
desire
to be free.

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self”—Merton again. He was describing the search for the contemplative life. But writing also requires the contemplative life.

Psychoanalysis is dismissed today as elitist, sexist, and self-indulgent. I disagree. How can you love yourself as a woman if you are looking at yourself through a wall of knives? And how can you love your sister if you think those knives are made of steel rather than of your own fear? As women we need to know ourselves more than ever. We need the truths of the unconscious more than our mothers and grandmothers did. Cynicism and despair seduce us. We are afraid to let love in. We prefer “the rotten luxury of knowing [ourselves] to be lost,” as Thomas Merton calls it.

Analysis can crack despair. It can be prayer and meditation both. But it requires a strong desire for change.

When I left Germany, I was writing fluently. I still flagellated myself, but not to the point of utter paralysis. I still trapped myself in despair, but at least I knew my despair was a flight from change.

I went back to the States with my poetry manuscripts. And I went home really slim. This had not been a goal of analysis, but suddenly I had fewer reasons to hide.

At twenty-seven, I had decided to be a writer. I thought I was
old
compared to Neruda, who published at nineteen,
old
compared to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote “Renascence” at twenty,
old
compared to Margaret Mead, who was already world-famous at twenty-seven. So I gave myself until thirty to make it, believing that once a book of poems was published, I would be happy forever. Hope was my jet-propellant.

How could I know that a published writer is hardly the happiest creature alive? “Ingrown toenails” Henry Miller called us. We sit and stew for years, picking lint out of our navels, only to experience that anticlimax, publication—which often confirms our worst fears, putting into print things only our most bitter enemies would say about us.

For a woman, the profession is doubly precarious. Sooner or later women writers come up against the problem that a woman who wields the pen is forever an outsider.

Women writers are expected to be girl guides through the swamps of heterosexual love. We are allowed to be pop novelists (coddled by the money men who run the congloms), but dismissed by the lit crit crowd as trashmeisters. We are allowed to write fleshly fables to be used as anodynes by other women, bromides to content them with their horrid lot. When we don't, but give vent instead to satire or the creation of perverse imaginary worlds, we are faulted not for our books but for our imperfect
womanhood,
since womanhood is, by definition, a fault.

Why? Because it is not manhood.

But what would my life have been like had I been born a man? My husband tries to convince me that given
my
family, I would have been forced into servitude in the tchotchke business and would never have become a writer at all.

“You only
escaped
by being born a woman,” he says. “Had you been the son, you would have spent your life peddling giftware.”

Perhaps he's right, but I see another picture. I see myself having been given the automatic entitlement of the male creator: A man who writes is not automatically considered a usurper.

A male writer surely has to find his voice, but does he also have to first convince the world that he has the
right
to find his voice? A woman writer must not only invent the wheel, she must grow the tree and chop it down, whittle it round, and learn to make it roll. Then she must clear a path for herself (over the catcalls of the kibitzers).

Even today, when one woman's book is reviewed for three men's books, it is considered uncool to mention the percentages. It's not ladylike to remember that, but for our obstinate uncoolness, we'd still be one out of twelve.

I always identified with the male heroes in the books of my bookish childhood, so eventually I tried to write picaresque novels for women. At first I did this unconsciously
(Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life).
Later I did it deliberately, mocking the picaresque form itself in
Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones.
Virginia Woolf's question “What if Shakespeare had a sister?” had led me to wonder “What if Tom Jones had been a woman?” and to apply my love for the eighteenth century to my investigation of one eighteenth-century woman's fate.

By then I knew that I was consciously adapting a male heroic form to a woman's unheroic life. That was the fun of it.

Women have been allowed few heroic stories. The archetypes of wolf or moon goddess have only recently been revived. Under patriarchy, women's stories have invariably ended in marriage or death. All the other alternatives were deemed unfit for telling.

As a beginning writer in Heidelberg, I puzzled over these limitations and decided to write my first novel from a male point of view. I called the novel
The Man Who Murdered Poets,
and went as far with it as my imitation of Nabokov's mirror worlds could take me. Not far enough. Since I could not know what a man felt in his physical being, I halted, leaving the book unfinished.

Today perhaps I
could
write from a man's point of view. I have lived with enough men to know their feelings as if from the inside. But now I also know how
much
women need their own stories to be told.

Every writer, someone said, is either a man or a woman. But for a man, there is a mold to break or follow, for a woman, there is a beckoning void. Writers usually build on each other's foundations. I think of Byblos, of Split, of Istanbul. One civilization's rubble is remade into the architecture of another. Women writers have consistently hungered for this rich creative rubble. Doomed always to start from scratch, we have begun our civilization's records by fits and starts. Our matriarchs have been invisibilized, our myths obliterated. It seems we're always listening to famous male writers telling us what we're
not.

In the past few years, we have invented some new forms and unearthed some old traditions. But our permission to be creators is still so unaccustomed that we tend to be ungenerous with each other. We prefer to denounce each other rather than denounce the self-appointed gurus who set us up as rivals.

As feminists, we ask literature to do more than literature ever can: fight the revolution, bury the dead, erect statues to our favorite heroines. That is hardly the way to stimulate a literature that mirrors life. Life is messier than politics usually allow, and less predictably pat. Life is merely
what happened next
and
to whom.
In asking life to be so purposefully political, we thwart our need to dream, to play, to invent.

In the name of feminism, some of us have forbidden women to be playful creators. Our pioneers—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, George Sand, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing—would be horrified to see us banishing play and freedom from our art. Play is the ultimate source of freedom. If we become artists of agitprop, we might as well have been born in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, or in Stalin's Soviet Union. Feminists above all must fight for freedom of expression, because otherwise we will be doomed to silence—with “decency” as the excuse.