Through the Children's Gate (6 page)

Howells himself became a Tolstoyan (i.e., mushy) socialist, and he wrote for Basil March a long concluding speech in which March realizes that the hazard of new fortunes is his, too. “What I object to is this economic chance world in which we live and which we men seem to have created,” he tells Isabel. A workingman should be guaranteed his livelihood and his repose, and it is insupportable that he is not:

At my time of life—at every time of life—a man ought to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things are now, and so we go on. Pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot, lying, cheating, stealing; and when we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back over the way we've come to a palace of our own, or the poorhouse, which is about the only possession we can claim in common with our brother men, I don't think the retrospect can be pleasing…. People are greedy and foolish and wish to have and to shine, because having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good of life…. We can't help it. If one were less greedy or less foolish, someone else would have and would shine at his expense.

This economic chance world in which we live.
A hundred years ago, the one thing that Howells—and Henry Adams and so many others—knew for sure was that a society with a tiny plutocratic class, a precarious middle class, and a large and immigration-fed proletariat simply could not go on. Now, at the turn of another century, we find it is the only thing that has gone on, in nearly perfect duplicate. August Belmont celebrated the last fin de siècle in a suit of golden armor; everyone who celebrated this fin de siècle in costume with the Soroses came away, we're told, with a bronze medallion embossed with the hosts’ profiles. Three-star chefs are flown in from Paris for a night's diversion; ghost mining towns in Colorado are revived and fully peopled for two weeks each summer as “camps” where the rich can entertain their courtiers. Someone has just bought the International Center of Photography, a grand old mansion on Fifth Avenue, in order to turn it back into a private house, reversing the century-old process by which the mansions of the fin de siècle rich became institutions. The plutocracy has never been so plutocratic.

What makes it possible for the economic chance world to go on so peaceably now, with hardly a hint of the opposition that Howells took for granted? It is that a sense of Hazard has been replaced by Hope. It seemed to Howells that hazard and fortune were as right together as pride and lions, that risk and moneymaking were one. What's striking about this new Gilded Age isn't just that people are selling hope but that everyone is buying it. All the folk memories of busts and depressions past seem to have vanished; the rhetoric of hope has overcome even the romance of risk, the sinister glamour of greed.

The new tycoons are not in industry, like Howells's, or in asset stripping, like Tom Wolfe's. They don't look like old man Dryfoos, grasping and raw. They look, more often, like his son, Conrad, all quivering sensitivity and high-minded devotion to the future. The places of the new fortunes are not sweatshops or mines—not here, anyway—but ateliers reclaimed from the light-industrial Old New York the Marches knew. Six computers, a server, a wall of glass brick, a stamped-tin ceiling, a bright post-ironic attitude—these are the materials of a dot-com company, of the new fortunes. It is hope (and its Siamese twin, debt) that empties out the buildings on North Moore
Street and calls on you to extrapolate from the samples, hope that keeps you looking, that gets you to dramatize the whole thing. If it is a bubble—and common sense tells you that it must be—it has a bubble's bright, single highlight, and it encloses Manhattan from Ninety-sixth Street to the harbor. Hope is what gives this age its odd and original gleam, a strange ingenuous glow different from that of the Marches’ age, a century ago, when even the people who had the gold knew the age was merely gilded. “Having and shining, having and shining”: We still believe it. But now we shine first and assume that, if the glow is bright enough, we will all have later.

H
owells, like Basil, was radicalized by his experience in New York in the 1890s. “I abhor it,” he wrote to Henry James of American capitalism, “and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality.” But, like Isabel, he also learned that New York is a city of accommodations. This double movement gives his masterpiece its pathos and its enduring moral. Later, he wrote of himself and his wife, “We are theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats. But it is a comfort to be right theoretically, and to be ashamed of one's self practically.” “Practical aristocrats”: a lovely calling, nice work if you can get it.

It is at least a relief to discover that at the end of
A Hazard of New Fortunes,
the Marches find a place to live for good. If the explicit moral of the novel is radical, its dramatic point is liberal: Isabel's acceptance of New York domestic arrangements and her education in the irony necessary to accept them. Dryfoos, after the death of his son, goes off to Paris, selling
Every Other Week
to Basil and his publisher for a song. There is a big empty space on the second floor of the building, right above the editorial offices, and Basil and Isabel decide to live there with the kids. It is a sign of Isabel's transformation that this idea—in Boston, she thinks, fit only for Irish laundresses—is now acceptable to her. She has become as diffident and ironic as her husband, as someone seeing life pass by from the El. She has become a New Yorker, and she will live above the store. “In New York,” she reflects at last, “you may do anything.”

L
ately, a lot of people—why, I'm not entirely sure—have been sending me clippings about the decline and fall of psychoanalysis. Most of the reasons given for its disappearance made sense: People are happier, busier; the work done by the anti-Freudian skeptics has finally taken hold of the popular imagination, so that people have no time for analytic longueurs and no patience with its mystifications.

Along with those decline-and-fall pieces, though, I also got sent—and in this case I don't entirely want to know why—a lot of hair-raising pieces about mental illness and its new therapies: about depressions, disasters, hidden urges suddenly (or brazenly) confessed, and how you can cure them all with medicine. Talking is out, taking is in. Some of my friends seem to be layered with drugs from the top down, like a pousse-café: Rogaine on top, then Prozac, then Xanax, then Viagra…. In this context, my own experience in being doctored for mental illness seems paltry and vaguely absurd, and yet, in its way, memorable.

I was on the receiving end of what must have been one of the last, and easily one of the most unsuccessful, psychoanalyses that have ever been attempted—one of the last times a German-born analyst, with a direct laying on of hands from Freud, spent forty-five minutes twice a week for five years discussing, in a small room on Park Avenue decorated with Motherwell posters, the problems of a “creative” New York neurotic. It may therefore be worth recalling, if only in the way that it would be interesting to hear the experiences of the last man mesmerized or the last man to be bled with leeches. Or the last man—and
there must have been such a man as the sixteenth century drew to a close and the modern age began—to bring an alchemist a lump of lead in the sincere belief that he would take it home as gold.

So it happened that on a night in October 1990, I found myself sitting in a chair and looking at the couch in the office of one of the oldest, most patriarchal, most impressive-looking psychoanalysts in New York. He had been recommended to me by another patient, a twenty-year veteran of his couch. The choice now presents itself of whether to introduce him by name or by pseudonym, a choice that is more one of decorum than of legal necessity (he's dead). To introduce him by name is, in a sense, to invade his privacy. On the other hand, not to introduce him by name is to allow him to disappear into the braid of literature in which he was caught—his patients liked to write about him, in masks, theirs and his—and from which, at the end, he was struggling to break free. He had, for instance, written a professional article about a well-known patient, in which the (let's say) playwright who had inspired the article was turned into a painter. He had then seen this article, and the disputes it engendered, transformed into an episode in one of the playwright's plays, with the playwright-painter now turned into a novelist, and then the entire pas de deux had been turned by a colleague into a further psychoanalytic study of the exchange, with the occupations altered yet again—the playwright-painter-novelist now becoming a poet—so that four layers of disguise (five, as I write this) gathered around one episode in his office. “Yes, but I received only one check” was his bland response when I pointed this out to him.

His name, I'll say, was Max Grosskurth, and he had been practicing psychoanalysis for almost fifty years. He was a German Jew of a now vanishing type—not at all like the small, wisecracking, scared Mitteleuropean Jews that I had grown up among. He was tall, commanding, humorless. He liked large, blooming shirts, dark suits, heavy handmade shoes, club ties. He had a limp that, in the years when I knew him, became a two-legged stutter and then left him immobile, so that our last year of analysis took place in his apartment, around the corner from the office. His roster of patients was drawn almost exclusively from among what he liked to call creative people, chiefly writers and
painters and composers, and he talked about them so freely that I sometimes half expected him to put up autographed glossies around the office, like the ones on the wall at the Stage Deli. (“Max—Thanks for the most terrific transference in Gotham! Lenny.”) When we began, he was eighty, and I had crossed thirty.

I've read that you're not supposed to notice anything in the analyst's office, but that first evening I noticed it all. There was the couch, a nice Charles Eames job. On one wall there was a Motherwell print—a quick ink jet—and, opposite, a framed poster of one of the Masaccio frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. I was instantly impressed. The two images seemed to position him (and me) between Italian humanism, in its first, rocky, realistic form, at one end, and postwar New York humanism, in its jumpy, anxiety-purging form, at the other. On a bookshelf beside him were nothing but bound volumes of a psychoanalytic journal, rising to the ceiling. (He had edited that journal for a time. “Let me give you some counsel,” he said to me much later. “Editing never means anything.”)

He was lit by a single shaded bulb, just to his left, in that kind of standing brass lamp with a long arcing neck. This put his face in a vaguely sinister half-light, but, with his strong accent and the sounds of traffic out on Park Avenue and a headlight occasionally sweeping across the room, the scene had a comforting European melancholia, as though directed by Pabst.

Why was I there? Nothing interesting: the usual mixture of hurt feelings, confusion, and incomprehension that comes to early-arriving writers when the thirties hit. John Updike once wrote that, though the newcomer imagines that literary New York will be like a choir of angels, in fact it is like
The Raft of the
Medusa—and he was wrong about this only in that the people on the raft of the
Medusa
still have hope. In New York, the raft has been adrift now for years, centuries, and there's still no rescue boat in sight. The only thing left is to size up the others and wait for someone to become weak enough to eat.

I spilled out my troubles; told him of my sense of panic, anxiety; perhaps wept. He was silent for a minute—not a writer's minute, a real one, a long time.

“Franz Marc was a draftsman of remarkable power,” he said at last:
the first words of my analysis. His voice was deep and powerful, uncannily like Henry Kissinger's: not quacky, pleading Viennese but booming, arrogant German.

The remark about Franz Marc was not
quite
apropos of nothing—he knew me to be an art critic—but very near. (Franz Marc was the less famous founder of the German Expressionist movement called Der Blaue Reiter; Kandinsky was the other.) He must have caught the alarmed look in my eyes, for he added, more softly, “There are many worthwhile unexplored subjects in modern art.” Then he sat up in his chair—swallowed hard and pulled himself up—and for a moment I had a sense of just how aged he was.

“You put me in mind,” he said—and suddenly there was nothing the least old in the snap and expansive authority of his voice—“you put me in mind of Norman Mailer at a similar age.” (This was a reach, or raw flattery; there is nothing about me that would put anyone in mind of Norman Mailer.)
“Barbary Shore,
he thought, would be the end of him. What a terrible, terrible, terrible book it is. It was a great blow to his narcissism. I recall clearly attending dinner parties in this period with my wife, an extremely witty woman, where everyone was mocking poor Norman. My wife, an extremely witty woman …” He looked at me as though, despite the repetition, I had denied it; I tried to look immensely amused, as though reports of Mrs. Grosskurth's wit had reached me in my crib. “Even my wife engaged in this banter. In the midst of it, however, I held my peace.” He rustled in his chair, and now I saw why he had sat up: He suddenly became a stiff, living pillar, his hands held before him, palms up—a man holding his peace in the middle of banter flying around the dinner table. A rock of imperturbable serenity! He cautiously settled back in his chair. “Now, of course, Norman has shown great resourcefulness and is receiving extremely large advances for his genre studies of various American criminals.”

From the five years of my analysis, or therapy, or whatever the hell it was, there are words that are as permanently etched in my brain as the words “E pluribus unum” are on the nickel. “Banter” and “genre studies” were the first two. I have never been so grateful for a mot juste as I was for the news that Mrs. Grosskurth had engaged in banter, and
that Norman Mailer had made a resourceful turn toward genre studies. Banter, that was all it was; criticism, the essential competitive relations of writers in New York—all of it was banter, engaged in by extremely witty wives of analysts at dinner parties. And all you had to do was … refuse to engage in it! Hold your peace. Take no part! Like him—sit there like a rock and let it wash over you.