Lilith (25 page)
No evening O. T. meeting, as Bea was busy at a staff conference. Did not go directly home, but walked up to Hillcrest and stood for a while by the fence, looking down with a pleasant sense of domain. There were swallows flying over the pond in the dusk, apparently hunting for insects; they circled swiftly very close above the surface, their wing tips sometimes touching it so delicately that the glaze was barely broken. Lovely birds, like purple shadows over the dark silver water. The Lodge seemed very quiet and tranquil when I walked back through the grounds. There was a smell of sweetgrass in the evening air, and I could hear the sound of Lilith’s flute, wandering softly, like a fume of smoke, among the mulberry trees. I glanced up at her window as I walked beneath it down the drive and could see her pale face and slender fluttering fingers, shadowed by the netting, where she sat playing at the open sill. She did not speak to me.
FRI., MAY 1:
Training lecture this morning from Dr. Newman, a dark, stocky, soiled-looking man of middle age with a hairless glittering skull and a New England accent. His subject was “Selective Inattention”—a fascinating device by which the mentally ill—and sometimes normal people, as well, apparently—fail to hear or observe things that would be painful, inconvenient or too strongly challenging to them. Ordinarily this is an “eliminative” process, some other more compatible piece of contemporaneous information being selected for attention in preference to the disagreeable one, and the mind concentrating on it to the exclusion of the other. The unawareness, however, is genuine, the faculty of “editing out” of one’s consciousness the distressing stimulus—whether it be a remark, a sight, a situation or a fact—being so mysteriously effective that one is quite literally oblivious of it. The principle, of course—the evasion of an oppressive reality—is exactly the same as that of delusion, except that in this case the alternative is provided from among competitive fragments of reality rather than by the subject’s imagination. It differs from the normal social maneuver of
pretending
not to have heard, for example, a critical or incriminating remark—either to avoid embarrassment or to give oneself more time in which to frame an adequate reply—in that, in the latter case, perception is not impaired; the reality is observed and consciously adjusted to, always with a careful and often elaborate disguise of any possible incongruity in one’s behavior. But in the other, there is no conscious adjustment to reality and no concern for the plausibility of one’s disbelief in it; although the fact is registered by the senses, the mind blankly refuses to recognize it, “plunging its head into the sand—or rather into a pile of alternate distractions—like an ostrich,” as Dr. Newman put it. It is a kind of instantaneous amnesia.
What is astonishing to me is the familiarity, in less acute forms, of all these aberrations. We constantly practice them, in degrees which are still deliberate and controlled, as everyday stratagems of life—to protect our pride or vanity, or to satisfy our impossible or impractical desires. The pleasant afternoon daydream is not very far removed from the fantasy or delusion; the expediently overlooked insult is only a step from hysterical deafness, and the comfortable conclusion that our teacher grades us poorly because she is “down on us” is a very close cousin to the paranoid persecution complex. But in psychopathic people, as Dr. Newman pointed out, these devices have become involuntary and extreme—perhaps because these people have more need of them than we, and practice them more intensely. They have lost control of them, and in doing so they often, ironically enough, suffer more than they profit by them, through the horrors of hallucination and delusion. There is something truly terrible in this—the idea of a wretched mind outwitted by its own virtuosity—as if, in so skillfully and passionately evading its oppressions, it had failed in some human obligation, had broken some natural covenant of suffering and been made to suffer even more.
Had what I consider a great success today with a third-floor patient named Sutton. He is a catatonic—a tall, stooped, sallow boy of about twenty-three who has not spoken a single word in the eight months he has been here. He is frozen into a tense, round-shouldered, standing position, his clenched fists plunged into his pockets and his thin face turned downward with a look of bitter apathy. He has to be tube-fed, but can, if pushed gently forward off balance, be gotten into an unpleasantly mechanical kind of motion, like one of those tin wind-up soldiers; after which he has to be stopped by pressing a hand against his chest. Took him down in the elevator for a walk and started him off in the direction of Hillcrest, following along at his side in a cheerfully subjective mood, as he is utterly passive and demands nothing from one in caution, conversation or attention, other than an occasional minor adjustment of his machinery.
I don’t know what gave me the idea, but as we were passing Field House it suddenly occurred to me that it would be an interesting experiment to take him into the lounge and have him listen to some music. I got him into a chair and put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto. He sat silently, staring at the floor with his usual immobility of face and body as the music thundered, ebbed and poured around him. Although I watched him carefully for about ten minutes, it was impossible to distinguish any reaction whatever, or even, indeed, to tell if he were listening to it. About halfway through the second movement I decided that the experiment was not going to be a very productive one and gave up my vigil, idly picking a volume off the bookshelf beside me and thumbing through it while I listened to the remainder of the concerto. It was a copy of Joyce’s collected works, and fell open to a play called
Exiles
,which I had never read before. This proved to be such a brilliant and exciting piece of writing that I became completely absorbed in it, and had read almost through the first act before I was aware that the music had stopped. I glanced up at Richard, who sat in the same rigid attitude of senseless preoccupation.
As there was no particular urgency to return I began—out of my enthusiasm for the play, and perhaps a half-conscious inspiration to transpose the experiment into a literary form—to read it aloud to him. It contains a scene between two friends, one of whom, whose name is Richard and who is a fairly candid projection of Joyce himself, has just returned from several years of self-exile to Dublin, the city of his youth, where he is being offered assistance in securing a suitable position by the other, whose name is Robert. This man—a companion of the hero’s youth—has arranged for his friend at eight-thirty on the following evening an interview which will almost certainly secure for him the post he so desperately needs, and urgently advises Richard to be punctual in keeping it. The irony of this benevolence has been developed in the previous scene, in which we have seen him also arranging a tryst with Richard’s wife at the very same hour as the interview, in the course of which he will be making a spirited effort to seduce her. Richard’s darkly beautiful insight into this piece of treachery is contained in muted speeches of wonderful intensity and complexity, which, in my excitement, I read with considerable effect. I was about halfway through the scene when my excitement was immeasurably increased from quite another source—a series of guttural, animal-like grunts from Richard Sutton. Raising my eyes swiftly from the page, I saw that he had taken his clenched fists from his pockets, pushed himself up out of the chair by the pressure of his elbows on its arms, and sat leaning toward me in an attitude of rigid, trembling attention, his eyes and features filled with fierce animation while he made quivering, spastic efforts to speak. It was a truly thrilling—if somewhat startling—thing to see, being the first effort at communication of any kind that I have ever known him to make; or, for that matter, the first evidence I have seen that it is possible in any way to establish contact with him.
“Do you want me to go on?” I asked.
There was an unmistakably positive quality about his grunted, eager sounds and the convulsive jerking of his head. I lifted the book again and continued, for another speech or two, to read the scene; but the sounds and spasmodic movements that he made grew so violent that I stopped and set the book down, afraid that he would become too severely agitated. I had another inspiration then.
“Would you like to read with me?” I asked.
Again there was the fierce mumbled expression of assent. I moved my chair next to his and held out the book to him. His hands unclenched gradually in an agonized, arthritic way, and, lifting them slowly, he clutched the edges of the book, taking it tensely into his lap, and in a clear, perfectly articulate voice, and with great intelligence and feeling, began reading the part of Richard. I cannot express how astonished, delighted and profoundly moved I was.
We read through the whole scene and went on to the next, a particularly difficult one between Richard and his wife, in which she reveals Robert’s deception to him, and he, from a strangely involuted motive whose investigation becomes the point of the whole play, permits her to keep the assignation if she wishes. Although my sudden switch of characterization to Richard’s wife was so disastrously comic that it would have unsettled the most dedicated professional actor, it did not seem at all to disturb the vitality and authority of Richard’s reading. It is hard to say that it was an
interpretation
of the part (in the sense of being an impersonation of some character other than his own), because, knowing so little about his original personality, it was impossible to tell in what respects it differs from the character which emerged out of the lines he was reading; but it was certainly a highly sensitive and appropriate reading which he maintained with absolute consistency, and which, in transforming him suddenly before my eyes from a rigid, mute automaton, sunken in depths of unfathomable apathy, into a volatile, gifted, highly articulate young novelist, was truly bewildering, and gave me a feeling very near to awe.
It was only when we had finished the scene and come to the beginning of the next act, in which Richard does not appear, that his transfiguration ended, as abruptly as it had begun. He searched the page of text, apparently to discover the identity of the speakers, and, seeing that Richard was absent from the scene, dropped his head suddenly, the animation fading from his eyes and features, and slumped back into the chair, as remote, inert and impassive as before. When I asked if he would not like to read Robert in the scene that followed, he made no sign of response whatever, sitting with his head sunken down upon his chest, apparently totally unaware of the open book which he still held clutched in his hands. I thought for a moment of going on to further scenes of Richard’s, but decided, from his previous evidence of agitation, that he had had enough for one such session, and that, as an experiment, it had already provided more than enough material for consideration.
My report of this event caused a considerable stir among the staff and won me the congratulations of Bea, Dr. Lavrier and Dr. Newman, who is Sutton’s analyst—which I must admit has kept me in a glow of satisfaction all day! What a strange thing it was! I shall never forget my sensations on hearing that first perfectly spoken line of dialogue come from Richard’s lips. I suppose it’s impossible to know just what it was that caused him to react as he did—whether the simple coincidence of his name being the same as the protagonist’s, or the opportunity for him to escape entirely out of his own problems and personality into a totally foreign life and set of circumstances; or, on the contrary, a strong similarity in the situation to something which has occurred in his own life (I am inclined to believe it was this, remembering the bitter look of absorption with which he followed Joyce’s profound and beautifully evoked ironies of the scene of Robert’s treachery). At any rate, it is not only a fascinating development in itself, but will—as Dr. Newman himself agreed—provide many useful and exciting clues for his analyst to pursue.
What a sense of achievement it has given me! Something I sorely needed after my disastrous day with Lilith. I realize, of course, that it was largely accidental—but then, so was penicillin and many other scientific discoveries, which were nevertheless, as Dr. Lavrier reminded me (I am going to write his words down here, I am so proud of them!), “born out of the intelligence and patience of the investigator, and what is probably the greatest natural gift there is—the ability to improvise and capitalize on any interesting accidents that occur along the way.”
I feel that all of these experiences, however discouraging or inscrutable they may seem at the time, are deepening my insights, strengthening my sensitivity to these people’s needs and natures and making me gradually into a really effective member of a profession I am beginning to love. I wonder if I have begun to learn for the first time what it means to be ambitious!
Going to make an earnest beginning this weekend on the psychology books I took out. Have done little but dabble in them so far. Think I will begin Jung’s
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
, which seems, from glancing through it, to be a tremendously exciting book. I have not yet finished
The Red and the Black
, and have been so absorbed in my work for the past few days that I have had little time to go on with it. I feel somewhat ashamed of having left Julien so long in prison, but perhaps it is a kindness. There is no possible place for him to end but at the guillotine; and I don’t feel very much inclined, just now, to tread the gallows with him.
MON., MAY 4:
Received my first pay check this evening! We get paid every two weeks, and I earn $55 a week—110 wonderful, well-earned dollars. (Actually only about $85, by the time social security, income tax, etc., are taken out.) Never felt this way about my army pay, which I could never help thinking of as conscience money of some sort, and was always a little ashamed of accepting. Gave fifty dollars to Grandma as soon as I got home. She said, “Oh, my . . . why, Vincent, Sonny . . .” and stood in the middle of the kitchen floor with misty eyes, looking desolate with emotion. Felt as I did when I was eleven and gave her a little imitation amethyst brooch for Christmas. Then I ruined this, and the pleasure of being paid, and the whole evening, by the ugly scene with Grandpa after dinner. Went out to water the porch geraniums and was sitting on the front steps afterward when he came out to talk to me.
