Gracefully Insane (15 page)

As a youth, Thayer suffered from an unspecified nervous disorder and visited the eminent Manhattan psychotherapist Pierce Clark between twenty and thirty times a month. Like Horace Frink, Thayer had the resources and the will to travel to The Source. In 1920, he confided to his partner Watson that he hoped to travel to Vienna and become a patient of Freud’s: “I am extremely eager to lay before him my troubles.” After an exchange of letters, Freud accepted him as a patient the following year:

For a writer, Thayer left very little record of the time he spent with Freud. At times, when the analysis was going well, he talked of remaining in Vienna “indefinitely.” At times it proceeded poorly. In a letter to his friend Alyse Gregory, Thayer wrote,

Thayer’s life in Vienna clearly revolved around Freud. In one letter, he recounted bringing a Chagall watercolor he was thinking of buying to Freud for his approval, which was granted. Eighteen months into his analysis, like a bolt from the blue, Thayer announced that Freud has agreed to write for
The Dial:
“I have obtained from Freud an article,” he wrote to New York editor Kenneth Burke, “about 30 pages in length, elucidating a church account of the selling of a man’s soul to the devil in Austria in the 17th century. I consider this a scoop. As in all Freud’s writings, so here also, there are, of course, passages in which ‘details’ are mentioned.”

Thayer was talking about sexually explicit details, and he left it to his New York-based colleague to determine whether Freud’s work was suited for the Yankee audience. Whatever they decided,
“Freud absolutely refuses to have anything cut or to have any passage in any way altered.... Professor Freud is willing to have certain words (penis, etc.) translated as non-grossly as possible, but is not willing to make any further concessions whatsoever.”

Not for the first time, Freud had cut himself a good deal. Thayer agreed to pay Freud the unusually high fee of two cents a word if the article was accepted. Thayer was paying for what we today would call third serial rights; Freud had already sold the same article to the German magazine
Imago
and to the
International Psycho-Analytic Journal.
If
The Dial
rushed the piece into print, they would beat out the
Journal
by a month, hence Scofield’s “scoop.” For reasons unknown,
The Dial
’s New York editors rejected the article.

Thayer remained in Vienna for more than two years, savoring the cultural high life. He befriended the writer Arthur Schnitzler and seemed to spend almost every evening at the opera or symphony and added to his astonishing art collection. It is unclear why he ended his analysis, and even his comments on Freud are maddeningly inconsistent. “When I leave Vienna, I shall, after two years forced compression, be chock full of the Great Man,” he wrote to Gregory, his lifelong friend with whom he constantly flirted in his letters. (After his analysis, he tried to lure her to Europe to spend the summer with him, “having in view the possibility of surveying the Unconscious.”) Thayer knew that his slavish deference to Freud muddled his own efforts at self-understanding. “I follow Freud’s gestures seeking dreams as does a dog who, when his master throws, leaps forward and away for the stone,” he wrote in a note to himself. “And in this case (as often with the dog) one does not know but that the hand was empty.”

Thayer started to break down in the summer of 1925, which he spent at his Edgartown home on Martha’s Vineyard. He was cultivating a bizarre feud with Philadelphia’s renowned art collector Dr. Albert Barnes, who was competing with Scofield for the masterpieces flowing from the brushes of Picasso, Georges Braque, Matisse, and Fernand Léger. Thayer asked his friend Watson to
send him a gun from New York so he could defend himself from his “enemies.”
¹³
Although he clearly had doubts about his experiences with Freud, whom he privately derided as a “privateer,” he was also angling to become a patient again. But it was not to be. Freud’s worries about the recurrence of his cancer caused him to cut his patient roster down to just six. Thayer offered to buy out another patient’s slot, but Freud would not hear of it. A few months later, Scofield resigned as editor of
The Dial
and took up residence at Upham Memorial Hall on the grounds of McLean.

Thayer stayed at McLean twice but became better known as an occasional visitor. He was so rich that he did not need to stay in a mental hospital or sanitarium for very long. For almost sixty years Thayer and his two male nurses became familiar figures at Butler Hospital in Worcester, at the Craig House sanitarium in Beacon, New York, as well as the St. Regis and Biltmore hotels in New York City, the Hotel Beau Rivage at Ouchy-Lausanne (where Stanley and Katharine McCormick had their wedding reception), or the Grand in Venice. McLean doctors remember Thayer dropping by Proctor Hall, one the hospital’s geriatric units, for occasional work-ups and suggestions of new approaches for dealing with his dementia. After a consultation involving a promising new drug or the therapeutic regimen of the moment, the trio would disappear back to Florida or to Edgartown or to a luxury hotel.

By way of life commentary, Thayer left thousands of short, undated notes narrating virtually all aspects of his life. They are articulate and occasionally insightful but suffused with the terrible random anger that presumably dragged Thayer’s “normal” behavior into madness. He wrote detailed descriptions of his wife’s sex organs and devoted several hundred scraps of paper to what reads like a homoerotic fixation on a friend in Bermuda. In one notebook, he jotted down the following entries, in order:

When Thayer died in 1982, neither the
New York Times
nor the
Boston Globe
published an obituary of the man who had shepherded so many crucial European and American artists and writers into the literary canon. For public consumption, Thayer had been out of circulation since 1926. An only child whose daughter Nancy had been legally adopted by Cummings, he had no living relatives at the time of his death. His fabulous art collection went to New York’s Metropolitan Museum—a stinging blow to the Worcester Art Museum, where it had “temporarily” resided for almost fifty years. (Thayer’s will dated back to the 1920s, when the relative positions of the Worcester and New York museums were not so disparate as in 1982.) His writing, letters, and notes ended up at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, where I found this tiny, penciled memorandum among his effects:

Until the late 1960s, McLean had a celebrity patient named Carl
Liebman. Unlike other celebrity patients such as Robert Lowell or Ray Charles, Liebman was a psychiatric celebrity. Over the span of a half-century, he had been attended by almost every major figure in European and American psychiatry—Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Eugen Bleuler, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Manfred Sakel, Abraham Brill—and received every form of treatment known to
homo
psychiatricus:
psychoanalysis, insulin shock, electroshock, hydrotherapy, and a topectomy—a sort of minilobotomy. In the 1960s, Liebman developed a small following at McLean because he was one of the few surviving analysands from Freud’s Vienna years. Young residents concocted pretexts to drift by Upham Memorial, the lavishly appointed “Harvard Club,” where Liebman spent his waning years. Tall, gaunt, intermittently erudite and noncommunicative, he was a genuine museum piece, as close as many of the young trainees would ever come to the headwaters of Continental psychoanalysis. “I knew him on Upham, and he used to talk about his time with Freud, and how they would argue about philosophers and so forth,” says Dr. Harold Williams. “The lobotomy didn’t interfere with his thinking processes; it was visible, but it wasn’t one of those ice-pick jobs.” It goes without saying that Liebman’s case file, with original letters from Freud and a catalogue raisonné of therapeutic gambits, was required reading for historically minded young doctors. (Indeed, it was after several original letters from Freud went missing from Liebman’s file in the mid-1960s that McLean restricted staffers’ access to its record room.) Longtime McLean neuropathologist Dr. Alfred Pope remembers the date of Liebman’s death in 1969 quite precisely because Pope was among those who were hoping for a clinical pathology conference on the deceased patient. In the end, there was neither a conference nor an autopsy. Pope in particular had been hoping to get (another) piece of Liebman’s brain for his experiments on the chemical architecture of the schizophrenic cortex. He had managed to scrounge some cerebral tissue from Liebman’s 1950 topectomy at the hospital. “It was kind of a bonanza,” he recalled. A postmortem tissue sample would have added to the coup. Liebman’s brain was arguably the most worked-over cerebral cortex in psychiatric history. The details of Liebman’s treatment still bring a bemused smile to Harold Williams’s face. “Here’s a guy who suffered through all the horrible stuff psychiatry could throw at him, and still managed to survive.”

Born at the turn of the century, Liebman was the only son of a wealthy New York beer magnate, Julius Liebman, one of the Brooklyn-based brewers of the Rheingold label. “His personality was always, already as a boy, different from that of most children,” according to his Park Avenue physician Dr. Leopold Stieglitz, who added: “He did not readily take part in sports and athletic exercises, was if anything, afraid of doing things such as climbing trees. His mother at times tried to overcome this disinclination on his part by twitting him and then the boy would give in rather reluctantly.”

In 1918, Carl Liebman went off to Yale, where he ran track, was a private in the precursor of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and lived in a single room for three out of four years. Stieglitz reported that his New Haven stay was not a happy one. “He was called a ‘fairy’ by the boys and acknowledged to me that he enjoyed seeing the nude bodies of the boys in the swimming pool and occasionally had dreams of an erotic nature in connection with these boys,” he wrote. “He particularly enjoyed wearing a jock strap and seeing the boys when they wore a jock strap.” In later analyses, Liebman would report that he experienced sexual excitement at the sight of a jockstrap as early as age twelve. During adolescence, he developed obsessional fears about the safety of his sperm, which he called “spermanimalcules,” worrying that by ejaculating them, he was committing genocide. After Liebman graduated, Stieglitz referred him to his Upper East Side colleague, Dr. Pierce Clark—Scofield Thayer’s doctor—who contributed a preliminary diagnosis of fetishism. Clark proved to be the first stop in Carl Liebman’s Grand Tour of world psychiatry.

After a brief analysis with Clark, Liebman took off for Europe, supposedly to pursue his career as an artist. In Zurich, he quickly came under the influence of Oskar Pfister, a Swiss Protestant minister, lay analyst, and close friend of Freud. Pfister in turn handed him off to Dr. Eugen Bleuler, head of Zurich’s prestigious Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic and a celebrity headshrinker favored by transatlantic Yanks. (“A great imbecile,” his patient Zelda
Fitzgerald called him.) Bleuler spent forty-five minutes with Liebman in 1924, during which time the patient fidgeted constantly and showed early signs of what would later become deep compulsions. Liebman talked about his urge to constantly wash his hands and his fears of the way people seemed to stare at him on the street. “It was
how
he talked about this that seemed schizophrenic,” Bleuler reported. From Pfister and Bleuler, Liebman moved on to the Big Show: Sigmund Freud accepted him as a patient in 1925.

“Do not worry about your young American,” Freud wrote to Pfister, “the man can be helped.” Freud met with Liebman’s parents, Julius and Marie, and fretted about their role in their son’s analysis: “They seem very willing to make sacrifices, which generally points to a bad prognosis.” The analysis itself proceeded in fits and starts. In August 1925, Freud wrote to Pfister, “As for your young hopeful, I think you should let him go to his ruin.” But just two months later, he changed his mind. “I began feeling sorry for the poor lad,” he wrote to Pfister. “I had a change of heart.” Freud confided to the parents that there were two good reasons for not continuing his sessions with their son. For one thing, Carl needed years of work, and Freud, who feared he was experiencing a recurrence of his oral cancer, worried that he might not live to finish the case. Also, he was concerned that Liebman’s condition might worsen. “My third and last motive, that I wanted to spare myself a terrible amount of trouble, I kept to myself,” Freud wrote.