Kafka Was the Rage (6 page)

Dr. Schachtel looked like Paul Klee—or at least like a photograph I had seen of him. It pleased me to imagine I was about to be analyzed by Paul Klee. Schachtel was thin, well-dressed, delicate-looking, almost nervous. He impressed me as the sort of man who read Schiller, Heine, and Kleist, who listened to Schubert and Mahler. His expression was melancholy and I supposed he had suffered during the war. What was it like, I wondered, to leave your own country for another, where all you met was the unhappiness and confusion of the people who lived there? Suppose when Americans went to Paris or Florence, the waiters, hotel clerks, and taxi drivers told them their dreams, their fears and nameless angers.

In Dr. Schachtel’s apartment on the Upper West Side, there was just a touch of Bauhaus. His furniture was light, almost fragile, and it occurred to me that
when Germans weren’t heavy, they were often fragile. Like Fromm and Horney, he was revisionist, and that was what I wanted, to be revised. I saw myself as a first draft.

I was not asked to lie on a couch, which disappointed me a little because I had been looking forward to talking like someone lying in bed or in a field of grass. Instead we sat face-to-face, about eight feet apart, an arrangement that had a peculiar affect on me. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that it was not I who was being analyzed but my face, which was huge, gaping.

Another thing that made me uncomfortable was the fact that Dr. Schachtel avoided meeting my eyes. His eyes would travel all around the room, as if he heard a fly buzzing and was idly trying to locate it. I thought of his eyes as following a line of dots, like the path they are supposed to take in looking at a painting. When he did turn to me, it was an unfocused, generic sort of look, a skimming glance that slid off the surface of my face.

I supposed he did this for clinical reasons, so as not to distract me, but the lack of contact was just as distracting. It was like playing a game of tag or blindman’s buff. Ordinarily, I would have looked away myself, averting my own gaze from what I was saying, but as soon as I saw him avoiding my eyes, I began to chase his.

I don’t remember what I talked about in the first hour, because my main concern was not to bore Dr. Schachtel. I was terribly afraid of boring him. I had an unreasonable desire to avoid saying anything he had heard before, which made it almost impossible for me
to speak. A successful analysis, I imagined, was one in which you never bored your analyst. In avoiding boredom, you transcended yourself and were cured. I had come there not to free myself of repressions but to develop better ones.

Dr. Schachtel’s face was composed in a concentrated neutrality, the outer reflection of what Freud called free-floating attention. Yet it seemed to me that his attention floated too freely, that I didn’t sufficiently attract it. Judging by his expression, he was thinking of something else—a poem by Rilke, or a passage by Theodor Lipps on
Einfuhlung
.

It wasn’t until our second session—and only at the very end of the hour—that I discovered what I really wanted to talk about. I had been twenty minutes late and Dr. Schachtel appeared to be upset by this. I told him that I had left the bookshop and gone home to change. I used to put on a jacket and tie to see him, because my relation to my personality was still formal at that time. What I didn’t tell him was that Sheri had been in the apartment and she had deliberately decoyed me into bed. She knew I would end by talking about her and she wanted to introduce herself in her own way.

I felt shy about telling him the real reason I was late—it was too recent, still warm—so I began talking about the whirring or grinding sound in my head. I used the word
stridulation
, and as Dr. Schachtel was not familiar with it, I treated him to a dissertation on galvanic sounds.

He said nothing, and his eyes roamed the room. He was bored, I thought. He knew all about me without being told—I was as easy to read as a Rorschach blot. I felt I had to do something to redeem myself, but the
hour was almost over. I looked at my watch—it was over. I got up and walked to the door. Dr. Schachtel rose, too, which was his way of saying goodbye. I had my hand on the knob, but I couldn’t leave. To leave now would have been like leaving my personality scattered all over the floor, like the Sunday
Times
. I hadn’t come through, hadn’t
worked
. I couldn’t bear my own image of myself and I searched for a punch line that would allow me to go in peace.

I looked at Dr. Schachtel standing beside his chair in a fragile, unathletic European way. I’m disappointed in love, I said. And before he could answer or choose not to answer, I was gone.

At my next session, I tried to take it back. I don’t know why I said that, I told Dr. Schachtel. I suppose I wanted to make myself important. In fact, my relation to Sheri is just the opposite of disappointing. You might almost say that it’s too satisfying.

How are you disappointed? Dr. Schachtel said.

I don’t know that I am disappointed, I said. I just blurted that out. Everyone wants to see himself as disappointed—it’s the influence of modern art.

Dr. Schachtel resisted the temptation to be drawn into a discussion of modern art, and there was nothing for me to do but to go on. As far as I can see, I said, I have no reason to be disappointed. Yet something doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel that my happiness is
mine
. It’s like I’m happy outside of myself.

What it is you want that you don’t have? Dr. Schachtel asked.

I hesitated. I felt like a high jumper poised for his run. And just at that moment, I caught Dr. Schachtel’s eyes. They were shuttling across the room, following
some secret trajectory of their own, when I caught them and held them as if I had grabbed him by the lapels. It was too good an opportunity to waste. I want to be transfigured, I said.

I don’t know whether he was surprised by this, but I was. I had never even used the word
transfiguration
before, as far as I could remember, never thought about it. I didn’t know what I meant by it, yet I knew that it was true, that it described how I felt. When I came out with the word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood.

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness. Think of the men in D. H. Lawrence’s novels. Think of Hans Castorp in
The Magic Mountain
—you probably read it in German. They’re no longer schoolteachers or engineers or whatever they were before, but heroic figures. They’re exalted; they’re blessed.

I supposed, I said, that love would change me, too, would
advance
me somehow. Because without that, it’s just sex, just mechanics. And while sex is fine—it’s wonderful; it can be like flying—it isn’t enough. It doesn’t explain, doesn’t
justify
the whole business. It can’t account for two thousand years of poetry, for all the laughing and crying. There has to be something else, something more. Otherwise, love wouldn’t be so famous; we wouldn’t be carrying on about it all the time.
It wouldn’t be worth the trouble
.

I stopped for breath. Dr. Schachtel’s eyes had escaped and I couldn’t catch them again. I was confused. I felt that I was back on the deck of a ship in Yokohama harbor talking to myself under the yellow lights. It’s
not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

I saw Dr. Schachtel eleven times. He was intelligent, astute, even charming, but I never gave him a chance. I suppose that like a good analyst he wanted to see my personality grow, while what I needed was for it to be shrunk to a more manageable size. It was much too big for me.

I insisted on presenting my problems, such as they were, in the abstract, and the abstractions of psychoanalysis were no match for mine. How can I distinguish, I asked Dr. Schachtel, between anxiety and desire? Is sex a defense against art? Is disappointment inevitable, like the death instinct?

What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. Of course, that’s what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

O
ne night while we were making love, Sheri screamed. She had never screamed before, and it took me by surprise. It was a loud scream, right in my face, which was close to hers. Her mouth opened very wide and I could see all the way to the back of her throat, to her uvula. I saw the fillings in her teeth, the far end of her tongue, the shiny red inside of her cheeks.

Her eyes were open, looking at me while she screamed. I thought I must have done something wrong. What’s the matter? I said. Are you all right? I knew that women sometimes screamed while making love, but she had never screamed before, and besides, it wasn’t like her. I thought I might have hurt her and I stopped what I was doing, even though it was nothing special or unusual. I could have hit a sensitive spot, or maybe she wasn’t feeling well.

Is something the matter? I asked, but of course
she didn’t answer. She didn’t
believe
in questions. But what was I supposed to do? Did she want me to keep on, or stop? I didn’t want to stop—I was too far in to stop.

I began again, very gently, hardly moving—and she screamed again. It occurred to me that the neighbors could hear her. I would see those screams in their eyes when we met in the hallway or on the street. But why should she start screaming now? When would I come to the end of her originality? Also, there was something odd about her screams, something not quite right. They were not like the screams you hear in movies, cries torn from the throat. I remembered Fay Wray in
King Kong
—she was a lusty screamer.

Most screams are wide-open vowel sounds—
ah, oh
, or
ee
—that come up from the diaphragm. They’re raw and unmodulated, which is why they’re startling. But Sheri’s screams were not like that. She screamed up in her sinuses, like a factory whistle. It was a blue note, a diphthong.

Her voice sounded hoarse, and I thought of the hoarse cry of the peacock, a phrase from a book. I remembered a line from a Surrealist poem: “The hyena’s oblong cry.” That’s the way my mind was tending.

Sheri’s face when she screamed was not screwed up around the eyes or distorted. It was only her mouth that screamed. She wasn’t like the girl in the Munch painting whose scream occupies her whole face. Sheri looked as if she was gargling. She let the scream out like an alarm clock that goes off when you can’t remember why you set it.

Maybe her screams were meant as a riddle or conundrum.
Perhaps she was punctuating unspoken sentences. Anything was possible.

It also seemed to me that they were a bit stale, her screams. I got the feeling that she was palming off on me some secondhand screams left over from her old life, her inscrutable past. This is what I was thinking as I lay there, half in, half out.

F
or most of the people in Meyer Schapiro’s class at the New School, art was the truth about life—and life itself, as they saw it, was more or less a lie. Art, modern art, was a great, intense, but at the same time vague promise or threat, depending on how you looked at it. If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality.

With the dim stained-glass light of the slides and the hushed atmosphere, Schapiro’s classes were like church services. Culture in those days was still holy. If he had chosen his own church, it would have been Romanesque—yet there was something fundamentalist in him, too. He made you want to get up and testify, or beat a tambourine.

I went to him as students twenty years later would go to India. I wanted to believe in something, anything, to become a member of a cult. My family had been neither religious nor cultivated and, coming from New
Orleans, we had always been outsiders in New York. At Brooklyn College, everyone had been a Communist but me.

Modern painting was one more exclusion, one more mystery from which I was shut out. I used to feel this way when people talked about politics, but I didn’t mind so much because I wasn’t interested in politics. And besides, I secretly thought I was right. I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics. It was the adolescence of politics, an awkward stage you had to pass through. But when it came to modern art, I was afraid that maybe the others were right, that I would never be hip or sophisticated, would never belong. I’d never know that smug sense of being of my time, being contemporary.

Perhaps this sounds like a fuss over nothing, but when you’re young, everything matters, everything is serious. And besides, I was living with a modern painter, I slept with modern painting. The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment.

There were all sorts of stories about Schapiro. It was rumored that the first time he went to Paris he never sat in a café or walked beside the Seine, but spent all his time in museums and libraries. It probably wasn’t true, but it fitted him, this story. Reading had turned him into a saint or angel of scholarship, but in some ways I suspected that he was a martyr too, a Saint Sebastian shot through with arrows of abstraction. A rival critic said that Schapiro loved not paintings but the explanations they made possible, and that he valued a painting in proportion to the ingenuity you needed to appreciate it.

Schapiro was about forty at the time. He was a slender, medium-sized man with a classically handsome Semitic face, bony and ascetic, but lit up like a saint’s or a martyr’s. He wore, as far as I can remember, the same suit all the time, a single-breasted gray herringbone, and he had two neckties.

Like many educated New York City Jews of his generation, Schapiro dentalized his consonants—or perhaps he had a slight lisp that he tried to overcome—and this gave his speech a sibilance, as if he was whispering, or hissing, secrets. The impression of secrecy was increased by the fact that he didn’t seem to be talking to us, but to the paintings themselves, like a man praising a woman’s beauty to her.