The White Hotel (15 page)

Then occurred a melancholy event which might have provided me with a perfect excuse for breaking off treatment: the sudden and unexpected death of one of my daughters.
¹
Perhaps my oppressed mood of the preceding weeks had been a preparation for it. Such an event is not to be lingered over; although, were one given to mysticism, one might well ask what secret trauma in the mind of the Creator had been converted to the symptoms of pain everywhere around us. As I was not so given, there was nothing
for it but “Fatum & Ananke.” When I returned to my duties I found a letter from Frau Anna. Besides condoling with me on my loss, and informing me that she had gone with her aunt to spend a short holiday at Bad Gastein,
¹
her letter contained an allusion to the dream of some weeks previously. “I have been sorely troubled by the element of prediction in my dream. I would not mention it except that I am sure it will not have escaped your memory either. At the time, I was half convinced that the man who received the telegram was you (at least in part) but I feared to upset you needlessly, knowing of your tender feelings for all your daughters. I have long suspected that, together with my other infirmities, I am cursed with what is called second sight. I foresaw the deaths of two of my friends in the war. It is something I have inherited from my mother’s side, apparently—a strain of the Romany; but not a gift that gives me pleasure—quite the reverse. I hope that this will not have upset you more than you already are.”

I have no comment to make on Frau Anna’s “prediction,” except to say that the sorrowful news did arrive (not unusually) by telegram. It seems plausible that the patient’s sensitive mind discerned in me anxieties, much below the level of consciousness, over a daughter with small children, living far away, at a time when there were many epidemics.

What happened on Anna’s return from Gastein was totally unexpected and illogical. So much so that, were I a writer of novellas instead of a man of science, I should hesitate to offend
against my readers’ artistic sensibilities by describing the next stage in our therapy.

Arriving five minutes late for her appointment, she breezed in with the carefree air of someone merely wishing to say hello, before going off to meet a friend for the theatre or the shops. She spoke loquaciously, in a firm, vibrant voice without a trace of breathlessness. She had put on perhaps twenty pounds in weight, so gaining, or regaining, all the attributes of personable womanhood. There was a lively glow in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. She wore a new dress of an appealing style, and a new coiffure which suited her face. Here, in short, was not the painfully thin, depressed invalid I expected, but an attractive, slightly coquettish young lady, bouncing with health and vigour. She hardly needed to inform me that her symptoms had disappeared.

I had often spent vacations at Gastein, but never in my experience had its thermal springs been so miraculous. I said as much, adding drily that perhaps I ought to abandon my practice and become a hotel-keeper there. She positively roared with laughter; then, recalling my bereavement, fell into a penitential expression at her thoughtless gaiety. I assured her that her good spirits were a cordial to me. However, it soon became apparent that, far from her having thrown off her hysteria, it had simply changed direction.
¹
Whereas before, it had sapped her bodily strength with fierce pangs, yet left her mind rational, now it had released her body at the cost of her mind. Her unbridled talkativeness soon gave evidence of a wild irrationality. Her cheerfulness was the desperate humour of soldiers joking in the trenches; and
her efforts at a sustained discussion drifted into a dreamlike monologue, almost a hypnotic trance. Before, she had been miserable but sensible; now she was happy and demented. Her speech was full of imaginative products and hallucinations; at times it was not so much speech as
Sprechgesang
, practically an operatic recitative, elevated and lyrical-dramatic. I should add that, since joining the orchestra of one of our leading opera companies, she had become devoted to the art.
¹

She seemed unconscious of the effect she was producing, and remained joyfully convinced of a full recovery. Failing to make any sense of her account of her stay at Gastein, I suggested to her that she try to write down her impressions. She had, on a previous occasion, responded well to such a proposal, since she had a taste for literature and enjoyed writing—she was, for example, an inveterate letter-writer. However, I was not at all prepared for the new Anna’s literary productions, with which she came armed on the day following. Hesitantly she put into my hands a soft-covered book. I saw it was the score of Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
. She had, I discovered, written her “impressions” of Gastein between the staves, like an alternative libretto; and had even attempted rhythm and rhyme, of a sort, so that her script could be read almost as doggerel verse. Had Frau Anna’s version of Mozart been sung in any of our opera houses, however, the house manager would have been prosecuted for the abuse of public morals; for it was pornographic and nonsensical. She had used expressions heard only in slums, barracks and male
club rooms. I was astonished where she had learnt such terms, for she had not, to my knowledge, frequented the places where they were spoken.

At first glance, little was evident to me except some references to her hallucinations, and a bold acknowledgment of the transference. In her phantasy Don Juan’s place was taken by one of my sons—with whom, I need scarcely add, she was unacquainted. It was fairly clear that she was expressing a wish that somehow she might take the place of my missing daughter, through marriage. When I confronted her with this inference, Anna rather shamefacedly said it was only a joke, “to cheer me up.”

Finding the flood of irrational images too much to deal with, I invited her to go away and write down her own analysis of the material she had produced, in a restrained and sober manner. She took my request not unreasonably as a rebuke, and I had to assure her that I had found her “libretto” of great interest. After a gap of several days, she handed me a child’s exercise book, filled with her untidy writing. She waited breathlessly (literally so, for she had suffered a slight return of the asthmatic symptom) while I glanced through a few pages. I saw that, instead of writing an interpretation, as I had asked, she had chosen to expand her original phantasy, embroidering every other word, so that I seemed to have gained nothing except the herculean task of reading a document of great length and untidiness. Though she had, to some extent, tempered the crudity of the sexual descriptions, here was still an erogenous flood, an
inundation
of the irrational and libidinous; the billows were less mountainous, but they covered a greatly enlarged terrain. I was now dealing with an inflated imagination that knew no bounds, like the currency of those months—a suitcase of notes that would
not buy a single loaf. We spent a fruitless hour, after which I promised I would read her document carefully when I should be at leisure. Upon doing so, I began to glimpse a meaning behind the garish mask. Much was the purest wish-fulfilment, mawkish where it was not disgusting; but here and there, also, were passages not without a touch of skill and feeling: natural descriptions of an “oceanic” kind, mixed with the erotic phantasy. One could not avoid thinking of the poet’s words:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact…
¹

By the time I had put down the notebook I was convinced that it might teach us everything, if we were only in a position to make everything out.

There is a joking saying that “Love is a homesickness”; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: “This place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,” we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. All who have hitherto, in a learning capacity, had the opportunity to read Frau Anna’s journal have had that feeling: the “white hotel” is known to them, it is the body of their mother. It is a place without sin, without our load of remorse; for the patient tells us she has mislaid her suitcase on the way, and comes without even a toothbrush. The hotel speaks in the language of flowers, scents and tastes. There is no need to attempt to apply a rigid classification of its symbols, as some students have done: to claim, for instance, that the
vestibule is the oral cavity, the staircase the oesophagus (or, according to others, the act of coitus), the balcony the bosom, the surrounding fir trees the pubic hair, and so on; what is more to the point is the overall feeling of the white hotel, its wholehearted commitment to orality—sucking, biting, eating, gorging, taking in, with all the blissful narcissism of a baby at the breast. Here is the oceanic oneness of the child’s first years, the autoerotic paradise, the map of our first country of love—thrown off with all the
belle indifférence
of an hysteric.

Here, it seemed to me, was evidence of Anna’s profound identification with her mother, preceding the Oedipus complex. Nor, except in its degree of intensity in Anna’s case, should this particularly surprise us. The breast is the first love object; the child sucking at the maternal breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of a love object, in puberty, is in fact a refinding of it. Anna’s mother, warmhearted and pleasure-loving, bequeathed to her child a lifelong auto-erotism,
¹
and therefore her journal represented an attempt to return to the time when oral erotism reigned supreme, and the bond between mother and child was unbroken. Thus, in the “white hotel” there is no division between Anna and the world outside; everything is swallowed whole. The newly born libido overrides all potential hazards, like the black cat she describes as making hair-raising escapes from death. This is the “good” side of the white hotel, its abundant hospitality. But the shadow of destructiveness cannot
be ignored for a single moment, least of all in the times of greatest pleasure. The all-giving mother was planning her visit to the doomed hotel.

I now had the ludicrous sensation that I knew absolutely all there was to know about Frau Anna, except the cause of her hysteria. And a second paradox arose: the more convinced I grew that the “Gastein journal” was a remarkably courageous document, the more ashamed Anna became of having written so disgusting a work. She could not imagine where she had heard the indelicate expressions, or why she had seen fit to use them. She begged me to destroy her writings, for they were only devilish fragments thrown off by the “storm in her head”—itself a result of her joy at being once more free from pain. I told her I was interested only in penetrating to the truths which I was sure her remarkable document contained; adding that I was very glad she had evaded the censor, the train guard, on her way to the white hotel!

It was only with the greatest reluctance that the young woman would consent to go through her narrative with me, pausing where any associations occurred to her. Her slight recurrence of breathlessness having passed, she was convinced she was fully cured, and could not understand my insistence that we press on. Fortunately the effect of the transference made her also reluctant to bring the analysis to an end.

“The white hotel is where we stayed,” she began. “I loved being in the mountains, it was such a relief after the miseries of Vienna; but I wanted a lake too, a huge one, because I feel freer beside water. The hotel had a green swimming pool, so I allowed it to grow into a lake! Most of the people were guests at the hotel. There was an extraordinary mixture—people trying to
take up their habits again after the war, I suppose. For instance, there
was
an English officer, very straight-backed and courteous, who had been shell-shocked in France. He wrote poetry, and showed me one of his books. It took me by surprise; even though it didn’t seem very good, so far as I can judge English. He kept mentioning a nephew who was going to join him later, to go skiing. But I heard someone say his nephew had been killed in the trenches. The major summoned us to a meeting once, to say we were under threat of attack. I thought I would weave an amusing scene around it—because after all there are so many things we don’t understand, such as leaves in autumn and falling stars.”

I interrupted to inquire if there was not something of her childhood in the comparison she often made of falling stars to flowers.

“How do you mean?”

“I remember you said the jelly-fish looked like blue stars under the water.”

“Oh yes! I used to run down to the beach in the morning, first thing, to see if any more jelly-fish
¹
had swum in during the night. Yes, of course, there’s a lot of my past mixed up in it. We had a little Japanese girl as a chambermaid, in Odessa, and she used to quote haiku—little verses—to me while she was dusting and polishing. I somehow thought it would be nice if she made friends with the English major staying at Gastein, as they were both lonely and fond of poetry. The major looked so sad, trying to persuade people to play him at snooker. It’s a mixture of the past and the present, like I am. The Russian, for instance—he’s
my friend in Petersburg as I imagine him now. He’s risen quite high, I’ve seen his name in the newspapers.”

I remarked that her portrayal of him was very satirical.

“He abandoned me, you see. More to the point, he abandoned himself, because there was a lot of good in him when we first met; he could be affectionate and tender, even shy. That was why I loved him.”

Frau Anna paused to gather her breath, then continued:

“There were an awful lot of selfish people in the hotel. They really would have carried on writing their cheerful postcards if the hotel had burnt down, so long as
they
weren’t in the fire.” (A reference to that part of her journal written in the form of postcards, of the banal type so often written to friends when one is on holiday.) “There was a gypsy band, and a whey-faced Lutheran pastor, and a nice little man everybody laughed at, because he was only a master baker and spoke roughly; and a large Dutch family. But the old Dutchman wasn’t a botanist. The mountain spiderwort was a little gift for you.” She blushed, smiling. “I know how you love finding rare specimens. I looked it up in a book of mountain flowers, and it seemed the rarest.”