Through the Children's Gate (7 page)

And then there was the wacky perfection of his description of the later Mailer, with its implications of knowing (not firsthand, certainly; Mailer, as far as I know, had never been his patient) the inside story: He had, under stress, found appropriate genre subjects. American criminals. The whole speech, I thought, was so profound that it could be parsed and highlighted like one of those dog-eared assigned texts you find on the reserve shelf in undergraduate libraries: Artists suffered from
narcissism,
which made them susceptible to
banter,
which they could overcome by
resourcefulness,
which might lead them to—well, to take up
genre studies.
(“Genre studies,” I was to discover, was Grosskurthese for “journalism.” He often indulged in strangely Johnsonian periphrases: Once, talking about Woody Allen, he remarked, “My wife, who was an extremely witty woman, was naturally curious to see such a celebrated wit. We saw him in a cabaret setting. I recall that he was reciting samples of his writings in a state of high anxiety.” It took me days of figuring—what kind of reading had it been? a kind of Weimar tribute evening?—to realize that Dr. and Mrs. Grosskurth had gone to a nightclub and heard the comedian's monologue.)

I came away from that first session in a state of blissful suspended confusion. Surely this wasn't the way psychoanalysis was supposed to proceed. On the other hand, it was much more useful—and interesting—to hear that Norman Mailer had rebounded by writing genre studies than it was to hear that my family was weird; that I knew already. I felt a giddy sense of relief, especially when he added sardonically, “Your problems remind me of”—and here he named one of the heroes of the New York School. “Fortunately, you suffer from neither impotence nor alcoholism. That is in your favor.” And that set the pattern of our twice- and sometimes thrice-weekly encounters for the next five years. He was touchy, prejudiced, opinionated, impatient, often bored, usually high-handed, brutally bigoted. I could never
decide whether to sue for malpractice or fall to my knees in gratitude for such an original healer.

Our exchanges hardened into a routine. I would take the subway uptown at six-thirty; I would get out at Seventy-seventh Street, walk a couple of blocks uptown, and enter his little office at the corner of Park Avenue, where I would join three or four people sitting on a bench. Then the door opened, another neurotic—sometimes a well-known neurotic who looked as though he wanted to hide his face with his coat, like an indicted stockbroker—came out, and I went in. There was the smell of the air conditioner.

“So,” he would say. “How are you?”

“Terrible,” I would say, sometimes sincerely, sometimes to play along.

“I expected no less,” he would say, and then I would begin to stumble out the previous three or four days’ problems, worries, gossip. He would clear his throat and begin a monologue, a kind of roundabout discussion of major twentieth-century figures (Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and, above all, Thomas Mann were his touchstones), broken confidences of the confessional, episodes from his own life, finally snaking around to an abrupt “So you see …” and some thunderously obvious maxim, which he would apply to my problems—or, rather, to the nonexistence of my problems, compared with real problems, of which he'd heard a few, you should have been here then.

For instance: I raised, as a problem, my difficulty in finishing my book, in writing without a deadline. I raised it at length, circuitously, with emotion. He cleared his throat. “It is commonplace among writers to need extreme arousal. For instance, Martin Buber.” I riffled through my card catalog: Wasn't he the theologian? “He kept pornography on the lecture stand with him, in order to excite him to a greater performance as a lecturer. He would be talking about ‘I and thou,’ and there he would be, shuffling through his papers, looking at explicit photographs of naked women.” He shook his head. “This was really going very far. And yet Buber was a very great scholar. It was appropriate for his approach. It would not be appropriate for you, for it would increase your extreme overestimation of your own role.”

Mostly, he talked about what he thought it took to survive in the warfare of New York. He talked about the major figures of New York literary life—not necessarily his own patients but writers and artists whose careers he followed admiringly—as though they were that chain of forts upstate, around Lake George, left over from the French and Indian War: the ones you visited as a kid, where they gave you bumper stickers. There was Fort Sontag, Fort Frankenthaler, Fort Mailer. “She is very well defended.” “Yes, I admire her defenses.” “Admirably well defended.” Once I mentioned a famous woman intellectual who had recently gotten into legal trouble: Hadn't she been well defended? “Yes, but the trouble is that the guns were pointing the wrong way, like the British at Singapore.” You were wrung out with gratitude for a remark like that. I was, anyway.

It was his theory, in essence, that “creative” people were inherently in a rage, and that this rage came from their disappointed narcissism. The narcissism could take a negative, paranoid form or a positive, defiant, arrogant form. His job was not to cure the narcissism (which was inseparable from the creativity) but, instead, to fortify it—to get the drawbridge up and the gate down and leave the Indians circling outside, with nothing to do but shoot flaming arrows harmlessly over the stockade.

He had come of age as a professional in the forties and fifties, treating the great battlers of the golden age of New York intellectuals, an age that, seen on the couch—a seething mass of resentments, jealousies, and needs—appeared somewhat less golden than it did otherwise. “How well I recall,” he would begin, “when I was treating”—and here he named two famous art critics of the period. “They went to war with each other. One came in at ten o'clock. ‘I must reply,’ he said. Then at four-thirty the other one would come in. ‘I must reply,’ he would say. ‘No,’ I told them both. ‘Wait six months and see if anyone recalls the source of this argument.’ They agreed to wait. Six months later, my wife, that witty, witty woman, held a dinner party and offered some pleasantry about their quarrel. No one understood; no one even remembered it. And this was in the days when
ART news
was something. I recall what Thomas Mann said….” Eventually,
abruptly, as the clock on the wall turned toward seven-thirty, he would say, “So you see … this demonstrates again what I always try to tell you about debates among intellectuals.”

I leaned forward, really wanting to know. “What is that, Doctor?” I said.

“No one cares.
People have troubles of their own. We have to stop now.” And that would be it.

I would leave the room in a state of vague, disconcerted disappointment.
No one cares?
No one cares about the hard-fought and brutally damaging fight for the right sentence, the irrefutable argument? And: People have troubles of their own? My great-aunt Hannah could have told me that. That was the result of half a century of presiding over the psyches of a major moment in cultural history? And then, fifteen minutes later, as I rode in a cab downtown, my heart would lift—would fly. That's right:
No one cares! People have troubles of their own!
It's okay. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; it means you should do it, somehow, for its own sake, without illusions. Just write, just live, and don't care too much yourself. No one cares. It's just
banter.

S
ometimes his method of bringing me to awareness—if that was what he was doing—could be oblique, not to say bizarre. There was, for instance, the Volestein Digression. This involved a writer whose name was, shall we say, Moses Volestein. Dr. G. had once read something by him and been fascinated by his name. “What a terrible name,” he said. “Vole. Why would a man keep such a terrible name?”

His name didn't strike me as a burden, and I said so.

“You are underestimating the damage that this man's name does to his psychic welfare,” he replied gravely. “It is intolerable.”

“I don't think he finds it intolerable.”

“You are wrong.”

Then, at our next meeting: “Your resistance to my discussion of Volestein's name at our last session is typical of your extreme narcissistic overestimation. You continue to underestimate the damage a name like that does to the human psyche.”

“Doctor, surely you overestimate the damage such a name does to the human psyche.”

“You are wrong. His family's failure to change this name suggests a deep denial of reality.” He pursued Volestein's name through that session and into the next, and finally, I exploded.

“I can't believe we're spending another hour discussing Moses Volestein's funny name!” I said. “I mean, for that matter, some people might think my name is funny.”

He considered. “Yes. But your name is merely very ugly and unusual. It does not include a word meaning a shrew like animal with unpleasant associations for so many people. It is merely very ugly.”

And then I wondered. My name—as natural to me as the sound of my own breathing? I had volunteered that it might be peculiar, out of some mixture of gallantry and point-scoring. But my hurt was enormous. My wife, who had kept her own name when we married—out of feminist principle, I had thought—said, “Yes, when we met, I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't go out with you for a week because of it.” It was a shock as great as any I had received, and as salutary. Had he obsessed on Volestein with the intention of making me face Gopnik, in all its oddity, and then, having faced it, grasp some ironic wisdom? I had a funny name. And then the corollary: People could have funny names and go right on working. They might never even notice it. Years later, online, I found myself on a list of writers with extremely funny names—I suppose this is what people do with their time now that they are no longer in psychoanalysis—and I was, amazingly, happy to be there. So that was one score. Even your name could be absurd and you wouldn't know it. And the crucial addition: It didn't matter. Indifference and armor could get you through anything.

S
ometimes Dr. Grosskurth would talk about his own history. He was born in Berlin before World War I, at a time when German Jews were German above all. His mother had hoped that he would become a diplomat. But he had decided to study medicine instead, particularly psychiatry; he was of that generation of German Jews who found in Freud's doctrines what their physicist contemporaries found in Einstein's.
He had spoken out against the Nazis in 1933 and had been forced to flee the country at a moment's notice. One of his professors had helped him get out. (He was notably unheroic in his description of this episode. “It was a lesson to me to keep my big mouth shut” was the way he put it.) He fled to Italy, where he completed medical school at the University of Padua.

He still loved Italy: He ate almost every night at Parma, a restaurant nearby, on Third Avenue, and spent every August in Venice, at the Cipriani. One spring, I recall, I announced that my wife and I had decided to go to Venice.

He looked at me tetchily. “And where will you stay?” he asked.

“At this
pensione,
the Accademia,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You wish to stay at the Monaco, it is a very pleasant hotel, and you will have breakfast on the terrace. That is the correct hostel for you.”

I reached into my pockets, where I usually had a stubby pencil, and searched for a stray bit of paper—an American Express receipt, the back of a bit of manuscript paper—to write on.

“No, no!” he said with disgust. My disorderliness was anathema to his Teutonic soul. “Here, I will write it down. Oh, you are so chaotic. Hand me the telephone.” I offered him the phone, which was on a small table near his chair, and he consulted a little black book that he took from his inside right jacket pocket. He dialed some long number. Then, in a voice even deeper and more booming than usual—he was raised in a time when long distance meant long distance—he began to speak in Italian.

“Sì, sono Dottore
Grosskurth.” He waited for a moment—genuinely apprehensive, I thought, for the first time in my acquaintance with him—and then a huge smile, almost a big-lug smile, broke across his face. They knew him.

“Sì, sì,”
he said, and then, his voice lowering, said, “No,” and something I didn't understand; obviously, he was explaining that Mrs. Grosskurth had died.
“Pronto!”
he began, and then came a long sentence beginning with my name and various dates in
giugno. “Sì, sì.”
He put his hand over the receiver. “You wish for a bath or a shower?” he demanded.

“Bath,” I said.

“Good choice,” he said. It was the nearest thing to praise he had ever given me. Finally, he hung up the phone. He looked at the paper in his hand and gave it to me.

“There,” he said. “You are reserved for five nights, the room has no view of the canal, but actually, this is better, since the gondola station can be extremely disturbing. You will eat breakfast on the terrace, and there you will enjoy the view of the Salute. Do not eat dinner there, however. I will give you a list of places.” And, on an “Ask Your Doctor About Prozac” pad, he wrote out a list of restaurants in Venice for me. (They were mostly, I realized later, after I got to know Venice a bit, the big, old, fiftiesish places that a New York analyst would love: Harry's Bar, Da Fiore, the Madonna.)

“You will go to these places, order the spaghetti
vongole,
and then …”

“And then?”

“And then at last you will be happy,” he said flatly.

H
e was so far from being an orthodox Freudian, or an orthodox anything, that I was startled when I discovered how deep and passionate his attachment to psychoanalytic dogma was. One day about three years in, I came into his office and saw that he had a copy of
The New York Review of Books
open. “It is very sad,” he began. “It is very sad indeed to see a journal which was once respected by many people descend into a condition where it has lost the good opinion of all reasonable people.” After a few moments, I figured out that he was referring to one of several much discussed pieces that the literary critic Frederick Crews had written attacking Freud and Freudianism.