The Lost Prince (24 page)
And it did not help matters that Will Honeycutt, ever the scientist, kept mulling over and over the details. It had been the worst of her Cassandra dilemma, knowing the future but, by the very nature of her fate, being powerless to do anything about it. The sheer size of what was to happen with the
Titanic
—that such a monumental ship was to sink in mid-voyage—made it unthinkable, impossible to believe.
“What they ran into out there was bigger than the ship itself,” he said that first day, when everyone was still adjusting to the enormity of what had happened, “much bigger, and you know, only one-ninth of an iceberg rises above the surface. Eight-ninths below the surface, down into the icy inky black.” He stopped, his mind working. “Then there is the depth. The ocean at that point is two miles deep. It is my figuring that it took that great ship something like ten minutes to fall to the bottom.” He made a sinking gesture with his hand. “Imagine being trapped inside the hull, as many were, I’m sure, sinking to the bottom—”
“Please,” she burst out finally, stopping him. “I have to sit down.” The observation made her swoon and left her with a feeling of great emptiness.
He stared wildly, not noticing or caring about her dismay. “How did you know?” he repeated, this time with complete scientific detachment.
As reports came in over the next few days, it became obvious that J. P. Morgan had not been on board. In the years that followed, no reason for his not sailing leaked out. The great banker had simply changed his plans and not sailed on his opulent ship’s maiden voyage. Obviously, Mr. Morgan would have realized immediately and completely the full import of Eleanor’s warning to him, or perhaps, although not likely, the whole incident had slipped from his mind in the confrontation of such enormous loss. He died a year later in Rome, of natural causes, apparently intending to keep secret forever his reason for making the fateful change. As agreed, Eleanor Burden had not heard from him again.
She read about his death in the
Boston Globe
on April 1, 1913, a year almost to the day after the
Titanic
tragedy. A few weeks later, she received in the mail an envelope posted from Italy, with no return address. Inside, on a sheet of stationery headed by the name John Pierpont Morgan, was a handwritten note and an illegible scrawl of a signature that looked, she discovered after some investigation, very much like Morgan’s. “If ever you should need a return favor,” the letter read, “contact my son, Jack. He knows of your intervention on my behalf.”
HEART OF DARKNESS
T
he weeks around the
Titanic
tragedy were a quiet time of action on her part for maintenance of the Hyperion Fund. That was a good thing. Will Honeycutt, now, thanks to his friendship with Jesse Livermore, returned for some time from Chicago, where he had become adept at buying and selling real properties.
“You amaze me, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said to him as he showed her his figuring on profits from selling a twenty-story building on Wacker Drive, by the Chicago River.
“I tend to become bedeviled by the details,” he said, “to the exclusion of all else.”
She nodded with a knowing smile. “And I am grateful for that,” she said, “and glad that I do not have to worry about those details.”
“Or about me?”
“Mr. Honeycutt,” she said with a sigh, “I have long since given up the futile effort of worrying about you.”
She had other things, bigger things, to worry about, she thought. Ever since the death of William James, she had been revisited by recurring dreams of vastness, like the one of falling off the cliff or another one that involved being a little girl out alone on an endless expanse of ice. But ever since the
Titanic
tragedy, one dream in particular recurred with regularity, “the Big Dream,” Carl Jung later called it when she described it to him in a letter. And now as time passed and she began writing parts of it down in her notebook, it began to make more and more sense.
In the dream, she found herself perched on the top of a huge iceberg, in the middle of a dark and glassy sea. She sat precariously, fearful that she would slide off. Below her, on the waterline, she could see a large long swath of red paint, and below that she was aware of the huge mass extending way down into the deep, beyond where she could see. The depth of ocean beneath her, the two miles that Will had described, gave her an even greater feeling of dread. As she began to slide, desperately digging in with her heels and fingernails, she always woke up, perspiring and gasping for breath. At night when she had to get up and walk around, she could feel nothing but a deep dread, the feeling of vastness. She wrote of it in one of her monthly letters to Carl Jung, and two weeks later she received a telegram from him. “We shall discuss it,” it said, “when I come to Fordham.”
In the fall of 1912, a few months after the tragedy, Jung had been invited to Fordham University in New York City. It would be his third trip to America and an excellent opportunity for the two friends to meet. The visit would do them both good. The Swiss doctor wanted to talk about Sigmund Freud, and Eleanor wanted very much to talk about the dream.
During that time in 1912, the disagreement between the two psychologists over the origins of hysteria had not yet grown into a full-blown feud and its eventual rancorous and permanent estrangement. The two were extremely close, perhaps too close. Although Jung had established an independent reputation and was highly regarded in the psychological community of Zurich, the great Viennese doctor and his following thought of the younger Swiss doctor as a disciple. Freud appointed the younger man president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and expected him to lead with authority and eventually rise to replace Freud himself. Tensions arose over a number of technical points, ones that William James had noted in 1909 at Clark University. Freud began to imagine jealousy in his younger colleague, where Jung insisted there was none, and he became critical of Jung’s leadership, first in letters, then in personal encounters. Eventually tensions would rise and lead to disagreements and disagreements to hostility, but in the fall of 1912, both men trying to minimize the common strands of what they believed, there was a nervous peace. It was the Fordham lectures, delivered far from either Zurich or Vienna, an ocean and continent away, that caused the beginning of the end.
Because he shared some of all this with Eleanor in letters, she knew before their meeting in New York that his disagreements with Dr. Freud had become more apparent since their conversations at Putnam Camp three years before. She found herself flattered by how much he shared with her, yet shocked and disappointed that these two giants of the new thinking in psychology were behaving with such childish peevishness.
In a way, the disagreements between Freud and Jung were as inevitable as their initial infatuations. The Viennese doctor was nineteen years the senior and considered himself the founder of the psychoanalytic movement now seeking an heir apparent, “the crown prince,” as a colleague described him.
Jung fell into that role willingly in the beginning because of his strong affinity for the older man. “Dr. Freud was far wiser and more experienced than I,” said Jung. “In the beginning I knew I must simply listen to what he had to say and learn from him.” But it did not take the younger man long to begin to chafe at the subservient role, as he began to find the formality of his position an impediment to his own development. In many ways it could be noted that the position of heir apparent was one to which Jung’s robust questioning nature and spontaneity made him unsuited.
During their trip to America together in 1909, when they spent long hours on shipboard talking and analyzing each other’s dreams, a number of tensions rose to the surface, including one moment when Freud actually accused Jung of wishing him dead, in solid oedipal tradition. “His friendship meant a great deal to me. I had no reason for wishing him dead,” Jung reflected later. “But it was possible that the dreams that I shared with him willingly on that trip could be regarded as a corrective, not as a negative wish but as a compensation, an antidote to my conscious high opinion and admiration of him. Therefore the dream recommended a rather more critical attitude.”
Freud was obviously more concerned about usurpation than he admitted, and Jung was more worried about the patriarchal dominance than he admitted.
Jung began straining at the strict ideas in Freud’s speeches and writing. “It is mostly a disagreement with Freud’s views of libido, the primal drive at the heart of all human impulse,” he wrote to Eleanor. “For Freud, the libido is purely sexual; for me it is the much broader derivation.” When Freud heard of these views from his supposed disciple, he began criticizing
him directly in letters and indirectly to others. Soon Jung was responding to the criticism, not by acquiescing but by snapping back.
Jung had also written to Eleanor about a dream he had shared with Dr. Freud on the 1909 trip.
I found myself in an unfamiliar two-storied house, on the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces of rococo style, a number of precious old paintings on the walls. It all seemed vaguely familiar. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older. The furnishings were medieval. The floors were redbrick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I came to a heavy door and opened it, discovering a stone stairway that led down into the cellar. Descending, I found myself in a beautiful vaulted room that looked exceedingly ancient, dating from Roman times. I came to another stone stairway and descended, leading down into the depths. Thick dust lay on the floor, and on the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of the primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half-disintegrated. Then I awoke.
Dr. Freud became convinced that the skulls represented somehow my desire to have him dead, an opinion from which he could not be shaken. I did not believe any part of that interpretation.
It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche—that is to say, of my then–state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the upper-floor salon. The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious, and the deeper floors, the ones of primitive culture, represented a primitive psyche of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before men laid claim to them. It was during this time that I became aware of how keenly I felt the difference between Dr. Freud’s intellectual attitude and mine.
That dream which Sigmund Freud was so certain represented my contention with him was for me the first inkling of a collective existence beneath the personal psyche. It is when I first became convinced of the collective unconscious.
One month before Jung’s visit, she received a letter explaining the details of his forthcoming visit to Fordham University that included the following note: “When we are in New York together, we shall dine alone. Grand theatrical attire required, of course.”
Grand and theatrical,
she found herself thinking with a good deal of awe and amusement.
I am sure that the evening will be one to remember.
After making careful arrangements and the usual explanations, she traveled alone to New York by train to a room she had booked at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She packed for the occasion a beautiful black silk evening dress she had worn to the New Year’s ball that January. It was bare at the shoulders and cut in a way she knew he would enjoy, being prepared by this time in their relationship for Jung’s highly developed sense of drama—albeit with healthy suspicions.
On the chosen evening, alone in her room, she received from room service a box containing a book by Joseph Conrad and a very plain cardboard box containing a gaudy diamond necklace that she guessed from its luster to be made of ordinary glass. By then, Eleanor knew her Swiss friend to be purposeful when it came to details of ritual and ceremony, so she could not wait to hear what it all meant.
