Mind of an Outlaw (4 page)

FOR FREUD IT WAS UNTHINKABLE
not to have a civilization—no matter what price must be paid in individual suffering, in neurosis, in the alienation of man from his instincts,
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the alternative—a return to barbarism, to the primitive, was simply beyond the cultural shaping of Freud’s life. As a lower-middle-class middle-European Jew who rose in bourgeois society, he was not only the mirror but finally the essence of German culture. It could be argued that the nature of the Jews, the meaning of the Jews, is not to find themselves as a people, but to re-create within themselves, as works of art, the models of a culture which is forever alien to them. So it is possible that the finest understanding of manners, of snobbery, of power, or equally of bourgeois stability can be grasped only by an outsider who can never take such values for granted but must acquire them by imaginative exercises of will, talent, and social courage. Freud was not born to become a respected young neurologist in Viennese medical society at the age of forty; it took the application of his early ambition, the
subjugation of a good part of his more rebellious instincts, to acquire the training, the habits, and the
manners
of a Viennese doctor. No surprise, then, if at the moment of engaging his second career, with that long heroic passage through the underwater currents of the dream, at whose end he was to create no less than the most pervasive religion of the twentieth century, the rational gloomy ethic of psychoanalysis, it was enough to ask of him that he be ready to turn the foundations of Western society into a new view of marriage, family, and man. One could hardly ask for more: that the view be revolutionary, that the search be not for foundations but dynamic. Freud was ready to endanger his security in the bourgeois world [he had attained] in order to save that world—his unadmitted love was always for the middle class, but it was simply not within the bounds of one hero to wreak two upheavals upon thought. Society was sick, Freud could see it, but of necessity the answer for him was to redefine the nature of man in such a way as to keep society intact and Freud in his study and consulting room. If civilization was top-heavy in its structures and institutions, and instinct was therefore crippled in its expression, and able to achieve beauty (melancholy beauty, be it said) only through sublimation, then so it must be. Man, for whatever reason, and the ultimate reason was mysterious—Freud had no flair for the mystical—man for whatever reason must accept himself as a crippled being who could become less crippled but never whole—in return his civilization would presumably evolve and become less tragic. But it was a spartan view. In return for austerity, and
pure
psychoanalysis was austere, severe, unrelenting (as opposed to the more amiable and
friendly
varieties which proliferate in a pleasure-loving America today), man would at least be given the dignity of maintaining his civilization. How middle-class and Jewish this is can hardly be exaggerated. Part of the paradox in Freud’s style of mind was that he was capable of the finest intellectual distinctions, and the subtlest engagements of the opposite point of view in debate, while possessing almost no original capacity as a philosopher. At a very high level, he is the Jewish businessman raised to apotheosis, [even to the cigar,] and the sum of his philosophy in a depressed
state could come to not much more than the heavy sigh of: “I’ve never had a particularly good time in my life, and the world is dog eat dog, but I’ve raised a family and I’ve taken care of them, and who knows, the kids never listen to the parents anyway, but maybe they’ll make a better world, although I doubt it. The big thing is to do your duty, ’cause otherwise it would all be chaos. I mean, where would we be if everybody went around doing what they wanted to do?”

This gloomy view could be maintained in Freud’s time, at least until the First World War; afterward, Freud’s sense of the possibilities darkened further, his speculative toe entered the new deep waters of mysticism as Thanatos was added to Eros, the death instinct engaged in a dialectic with libido. But mysticism is the executioner of the middle-class ethic. The stability of the bourgeois has always depended upon a schizophrenic separation of the power of religion-as-an-institution from religion as a personal revelation of Heaven, Hell, Eternity, the soul, God, and human destiny. Mysticism has the nasty faculty of joining one’s public and private life, it presents as its ultimate threat the subordination of reason to instinct, even as society rules instinct by reason. Freud was the last genius of twentieth-century society, only the epigones have followed. And as he was dying in 1939, the wreckage of his world was about him, the last engineer of civilization was hearing the bulkheads blow as he went under into that dark night about which he had refused to speculate.

And a dark night it was, because the war upon instinct which was the progressive rationale of the nineteenth century, the—for so long it seemed victorious—achievement of the Victorian period, was blown beyond recognition in the concentration camps and the atomic bomb. The dam of civilization burst before pent-up floods of instinct, and even as gates were carried away in the wash, so the crippling irony remained, the debris of civilization dissolved into the instinct, and altered the language of instinct; men were not murdered by the million but liquidated, atomic residue was not a slow fatality but a fallout. Perhaps it is better to use Freud’s image of the rider and the steed, reason controlling instinct, superego the reins, id the horse, and the
rider as ego encouraging or punishing the separate heats of the animal. By that image, the wildness of the horse is controlled at the expense of the horseman’s fatigue, but one goes where one wishes to go, if not always at the desired rate. This was the central image of Freud’s psychology, civilization mounted upon the noble savage, but the results were unexpected. For the animal was controlled not a little too much but incommensurately too much, and as it came closer to death, so the horse went wild and headed for a cliff. But the rider was also insane, his fatigue was equally cruel, horse and rider had never been suited to one another, and in the gallop to the cliff, the rider was using his spurs, not his reins, they are at the moment of danger of leaping over together, each of them poisoned, berserk with frustration.

With Freud’s love for the English, the idea must have been that somehow one would muddle through.

It would not be worth saying Freud had an umbilical respect for the meanings of anxiety and dread, if it were not that his disciples have reduced these concepts to alarm bells and rattles of malfunction in a psychic machine. Anxiety and dread are treated by them as facts, as the clashing of gears in a neurotic net. The primitive understanding of dread—that one was caught in a dialogue with gods, devils, and spirits, and so was naturally consumed with awe, shame, and terror, has been all but forgotten. We are taught that we feel anxiety because we are driven by unconscious impulses which are socially unacceptable; dread we are told is a repetition of infantile experiences of helplessness. It is induced in us by situations which remind our unconscious of weaning and other early deprivations. What is never discussed: the possibility that we feel anxiety because we are in danger of losing some part or quality of soul unless we act, and not dangerously; or the likelihood that we feel dread when intimations of our death inspire us with disproportionate terror, a horror not merely because we are going to die, but to the contrary because we are going to die badly and suffer some unendurable stricture of eternity. These explanations are altogether outside the close
focus of the psychological sciences in the twentieth century. No, our century, at least our American century, is a convalescent home for the shell-shocked veterans of a two-thousand-year war—that huge struggle within Christianity to liberate or to destroy the vision of man.

THOSE READERS OF
One
who are familiar with my work may be somewhat surprised to find me writing for this magazine. After all, I have been as guilty as any contemporary novelist in attributing unpleasant, ridiculous, or sinister connotations to the homosexual (or more accurately, bisexual) characters in my novels. Part of the effectiveness of General Cummings in
The Naked and the Dead
—at least for those people who thought him well conceived as a character—rested on the homosexuality I was obviously suggesting as the core of much of his motivation. Again, in
Barbary Shore
, the “villain” was a secret police agent named Leroy Hollingsworth whose sadism and slyness were essentially combined with his sexual deviation.

At the time I wrote those novels, I was consciously sincere. I did believe—as so many heterosexuals believe—that there was an intrinsic relation between homosexuality and “evil,” and it seemed perfectly natural to me, as well as
symbolically
just, to treat the subject in such a way.

The irony is that I did not know a single homosexual during all those years. I had met homosexuals of course, I had recognized a few as homosexual, I had “suspected” others, I was to
realize years later that one or two close friends were homosexual, but I had never known one in the human sense of knowing, which is to look at your friend’s feelings through his eyes and not your own. I did not
know
any homosexual because obviously I did not want to. It was enough for me to recognize someone as homosexual, and I would cease to consider him seriously as a person. He might be intelligent or courageous or kind or witty or virtuous or tortured—no matter. I always saw him as at best ludicrous and at worst—the word again—sinister. (I think it is by the way significant that just as many homosexuals feel forced and are forced to throw up protective camouflage, even boasting if necessary of women they have had, not to mention the thousand smaller subtleties, so heterosexuals are often eager to be so deceived for it enables them to continue friendships which otherwise their prejudices and occasionally their fears might force them to terminate.)

Now, of course, I exaggerate to a certain degree. I was never a roaring bigot, I did not go in for homosexual baiting, at least not face-to-face, and I never could stomach the relish with which soldiers would describe how they had stomped some faggot in a bar. I had, in short, the equivalent of a “gentleman’s anti-Semitism.”

The only thing remarkable about all this is that I was hardly living in a small town. New York, whatever its pleasures and discontents, is not the most uncivilized milieu, and while one would go too far to say that its attitude toward homosexuals bears correspondence to the pain of the liberal or radical at hearing someone utter a word like “nigger” or “kike,” there is nonetheless considerable tolerance and considerable propinquity. The hard-and-fast separations of homosexual and heterosexual society are often quite blurred. Over the past seven or eight years I had had more than enough opportunity to learn something about homosexuals if I had wanted to, and obviously I did not.

It is a pity I do not understand the psychological roots of my change of attitude, for something valuable might be learned from it. Unfortunately, I do not. The process has seemed a rational one to me, rational in that the impetus apparently came from
reading and not from any important personal experiences. The only hint of my bias mellowing was that my wife and I had gradually become friendly with a homosexual painter who lived next door. He was pleasant, he was thoughtful, he was a good neighbor, and we came to depend on him in various small ways. It was tacitly understood that he was homosexual, but we never talked about it. However, since so much of his personal life was not discussable between us, the friendship was limited. I accepted him the way a small-town banker fifty years ago might have accepted a “good” Jew.