The Pursuit of Laughter (42 page)

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)

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)

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, dramatic 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.