New York in the '50s (34 page)

After this short length of time on the couch, Emily called to say she was back from Europe and couldn't wait to see me. It had been a little more than six months. I'd had one letter from her, mostly about scenery, and wrote one back, mostly about literature, matching her friendly, noncommittal tone. I hadn't reported that I'd started analysis and moved to the Village to share an apartment with Ted the Horse, my Indiana buddy. I felt that on the whole—with results of the analysis still pending—I had put my life back together after the breakup with her and the sexual failure that caused it. I was going out with a nice, bookish girl whose shyness matched my caution, and thought I had pretty much gotten over Emily.

Now here she was again, more attractive than ever, sitting across
from me in the Menemsha Bar, a place we'd gone in the old days (six months ago), even though we knew it was corny. It was in the Allerton House, a residential hotel where girls just off the train to New York could stay and be protected while they learned how to fend off the evils of the big city. Behind the bar was a kind of diorama of the town of Menemsha, on Martha's Vineyard, and at regular intervals a “storm” was produced, with dark clouds, muted thunder, and miniature lightning, followed by the fall of rain; then the storm ended and the sun came out again. Very popular with college girls and their dates. Not the place for a Village writer, but what the hell, she invited me.

A light streak in her dark hair and a hint of eye shadow (something she'd learned in Italy?) made Emily look sexier. She loved her time abroad but was glad to be back. The only thing she regretted was that she hadn't given us a chance. She realized she still loved me, she said, and wished we'd gotten married. She was staying at the apartment of a former college friend who had gone back to visit her family in Texas for a week. Would I like to come up and have a drink?

Emily started kissing me as soon as we got in the door of the apartment. On the way to the bedroom, when I told her I had only just begun psychoanalysis, she said not to worry about sex, she was no longer a virgin. An Italian guy had initiated her, and evidently gave her tremendous confidence. (His name was Giorgio. By the end of the decade, it seemed that every woman I knew in New York had gone to Italy at some time or other and had a masterly Italian lover named Giorgio. I wondered if it was the same guy, waiting at docks and airports for American girls to arrive.) I wasn't upset or jealous. I was relieved. I caught some of her confidence and simply stopped worrying about the results.

“It was fabulous,” I reported to the doctor next day as I lay on the couch. “We did it in the bed, and then we took a bath, and we actually did it in the bathtub. Under water. Did you know you could do it under water? Then we dried off and did it again. I was so completely satisfied and slaked I didn't have a single dream. I woke up the next morning and found my penis standing at attention, ready for a new day. It was glorious. We did it again before breakfast, and then went back to bed and did it
after breakfast again. We had French toast—I mean for breakfast.”

I waited for the doctor's response to the miracle.

“Yes, go on,” he said.

“I intend to,” I said.

Emily and I made up for all the time we'd lost, all the anguish we'd gone through when we simply hadn't been experienced enough and patient enough. No one had even told us to hang in there, to give each other a chance to get comfortable when we undertook this enterprise for the first time in our lives. She said we should write an advice column for fumbling, fearful new lovers. I said we should write a book. Whenever we tried new positions and styles and settings, we said we were only doing research. We made love in every room of her apartment—even in a broom closet, standing up. Emily said it was a good time of the month, right after her period, so we didn't have to worry; she had timed getting in touch with me so it would be safe to do it.

I could hardly lie still on the analyst's couch, I was so excited with my new sexual prowess, my miracle cure. I was happy to give the doctor credit, though I felt he had to share it a bit with Giorgio. I figured the doctor would at last express an emotion. After all, how many patients undergo a complete recovery in three months? If only Freud were alive to accept his rightful share of the glory! I would be right up there with his other famous cases, like the Wolfman. The doctor said nothing, though, so I asked him, “What do you think?”

“What do
you
think?” he responded.

“I think I'm cured,” I said. “I guess I just needed a short analysis. Maybe the dream about my mother did it.”

The doctor explained patiently that my sexual difficulty was merely a symptom, a small part of the overall work of analysis, which seemed to be (from what I could gather, though the doctor, of course, couldn't come right out and say it) nothing less than the full flowering of the human personality, free from anxiety, from self-destructive impulses and patterns, from blockages of creativity, free to live up to its full and glorious potential. Who wouldn't want to reach such a goal, to realize such a complete functioning of all one's powers?

Emily was in favor of my pressing ahead with it. Maybe it would unlock my creative potential—not only get me writing better magazine articles but provide the key to the great novel that was locked away in my head. The important thing now for me and Emily was to take up where we'd left off and get married. We didn't want to do it in Dayton or Indianapolis but right here in New York City, where we met and where we planned to live our exciting, fulfilling, creative lives, at the very center of the universe.

We nuzzled and giggled as we fantasized our ideal New York wedding, with the ceremony at the Circle in the Square Theatre, directed by José Quintero. Afterward, all our friends would be taken by horse and carriage uptown to the Plaza, where we'd dive into the fountain like Scott and Zelda before going inside to guzzle champagne in the Edwardian Room, and then on to a fabulous dinner of coq au vin and French-style green beans at the Café Brittany, followed by a party at the Museum of Modern Art, with Marie Blake of Marie's Crisis Café playing the piano and for the finale Mabel Mercer appearing beneath a single spotlight to do her plaintive rendition of “My Funny Valentine.”

The doctor didn't approve—not of the plans (in reality they were considerably more modest) but the marriage itself. In fact, he said no. I had roused him at last. He asked me to sit up on the couch while he told me the rules again, reminding me that I had agreed to them when we began. The rules were the same ones Mary McCarthy later described in her novel
The Group
, about Vassar graduates who lived in New York City in the 1930s: “The psychoanalyst said it was a principle of analysis that the patient should not change his life situation while undergoing treatment; this would upset the analytic relation.” In the case of Gus LeRoy, the editor in
The Group
who had just begun his analysis when he met and fell for Polly Andrews, the restriction against a “change in his life situation” meant he could not get divorced; in my case, it meant I could not get married. Not until the analysis was over. How many years that might be, the doctor couldn't say.

Emily didn't understand. Not only did she fail to understand the necessity of this analytic “agreement”; more important, she didn't understand, or accept, my willingness to put it above my love for her and my desire to get married, especially now that we had solved
our sexual problems. We argued. We drank. We cried. We made up. We made love. We argued again. I poured it out to my analyst—the anguish, the pain, the loss of someone I loved. She was leaving me. She was leaving New York again too, but this time for good. She was going to San Francisco. She went. I got drunk.

“Yes, go on,” the doctor said.

And I did.

On and on, to new girls, new breakups, new relationships that lasted from a night to three or four dates to three or four months. Again and again and again.

Marriage was
verboten
. The doctor decreed no change in my life situation, so I put my life on hold. Commitment, except to the analysis, wasn't necessary—in fact, it wasn't allowed. This might have been a cause of conflict with the women I became involved with were it not for the convenient fact that most of the young women I met in New York during those years were also in analysis, so they too were committed to the same kind of impermanent relationships.

Perhaps because of our middle-class backgrounds, most of us did not believe in promiscuity, or think that we were being promiscuous. In other words, we didn't screw around with other partners while “seeing” someone. The name of the game that analysis spawned was serial monogamy: when you tired of one partner or the relationship got difficult, you simply moved on to the next one. It was like musical beds, with the latest cool jazz as accompaniment to the mood. Of course, we didn't call it serial monogamy. We called it love.

THE BED AND THE COUCH

Being a committed analysand made me a part of my time the way that being a member of the Young Communist League had made Murray Kempton part of the legend of his own generation of the Great Depression. The Communist dream, which offered to idealistic youth of the thirties a road to salvation through politics, was already seen as what Arthur Koestler called “the God that failed” by the time my own generation came of age. The new hope of salvation,
this time of a personal rather than a societal kind, was psychoanalysis.

Richard Lingeman feels that analysis was “a preoccupation, not necessarily with sex, but in the sense of what people called ‘finding yourself.' It was the Silent Generation turned inward, rather than expressing itself through political action. It seemed like the alternatives were going into the corporate world or going ‘on the road.'”

“Finding yourself” was the overall hope, the grand purpose of Freud's method of treatment for the human condition, and those of us who entered it thought of the process as noble and ennobling, a search for the truth through painful dark passages of the past, a delving into the heart of the matter, whatever the psychic pain. The idea that the truth was buried, that the nub of our very angst and disorientation was hidden like some precious stone in the tar pits of our earliest childhood memories, spoke to us in literature and art. The concept seemed to blaze forth from the screen in Orson Welles's
Citizen Kane
, with the dying man's utterance of “Rosebud” surely the key to the riddle of Kane's whole life. The idea was even more eloquently stated in T. S. Eliot's “Little Gidding,” which we saw as analogous to our analysis, which after all involved countless houses and countless dollars spent in exploring our past in hopes of finding some “Rosebud” of our past and being able to finally recognize it. Yes, wasn't that the exact summing up of the course of our sacred journey into the unconscious?

The dream of wholeness was what drew me and other analysands into the expensive journey we undertook in committing ourselves to years on the couch in a free-association, stream-of-consciousness monologue punctuated only by the doctor's inscrutable “Yes, go on.” Wasn't this the real American dream, the key to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence? No wonder Freud's treatment had caught on in hopeful America far more sweepingly than in gloomy Europe, where the notion of happiness wasn't even written into the law of the land.

For many of us, though, the less lofty, more urgent and specific promise of psychoanalysis was that it offered the cure for what ailed you sexually. If we'd stayed back home in Indiana or Kansas or Alabama, we'd probably have taken our troubles to our minister,
priest, or rabbi, but our parents' religion was part of what we'd left behind when we came to New York. As Helen Weaver explains: “We didn't go to church with our problems because that's where we came from, and that might have been what fucked us up anyway with sexual guilt. It wasn't happening in bed, and it drove us all to the couch.”

Helen went into analysis around the time she had her affair with Kerouac, who, she says, recommended another method: “Jack used to say, ‘Go to confession, it's free.'”

But the priest didn't offer sexual salvation and the analyst did. He became our priest, garbed in his vestments of three-piece dark flannel suit, and his orthodoxy became our religion. Whether one partook of it or not, this communion on the couch was part of the dialogue and texture of our time and place. Donald Cook, a young psychology instructor at Columbia, walked out of the West End after lunch with his colleagues one day and hailed a cab on Broadway. One of his friends asked why he was in such a hurry that he had to take a taxi, and Donald said, “I'm going to have a synapse pinched.”

They all laughed, knowing what he meant.

“That was the first time,” Cook says, “I revealed to my colleagues that I was in analysis, but eventually it turned out all of us were. We later had the daring idea of going to the same analyst, getting him to come uptown to see us so we wouldn't have to travel so far—though we never actually pulled it off. I knew a lot of people in analysis then, not just in the psychology department, and we all talked about it, traded labels, like ‘I'm an ego neurotic.'” Cook remembers seeing Lionel Trilling on campus one afternoon and telling him he'd had a dream about him. Trilling immediately smiled and said, “I hope you had it analyzed.”

Cook also believes that “talking about psychoanalysis was a way of legitimizing talking about sex.”

We all talked about both, with friends, mentors, and lovers, in bed and in bars, wherever we met and gathered and conversed. “Everyone went to a shrink,” Meg Greenfield recalls. “Everyone said at parties, ‘He said such-and-such today,' and we all knew who ‘he' was. None of us had money but we all went to shrinks.”