And:
In Art…the creative impulse is essentially fanatic.
And:
…the excesses of the great masters! They pursue an idea to its furthermost limits.
These inspirational justifications for what Dr. Spielvogel might describe simply as “a fixation due to a severe traumatic experience” I also copied out on strips of paper and (with some self-irony, I must say) taped them too, like so many fortune-cookie ribbons, across the face of the box containing my novel-in-chaos. On the evening that I arrived at Susan’s with the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies in my hand, I called hello from the door, but instead of going to the kitchen, as was my habit-how I habituated myself during those years! how I coveted whatever orderliness I had been able to reestablish in my life!- to chat with her from a stool while she prepared our evening’s delicacies, I went into the living room and sat on the edge of Jamey’s flame-stitch ottoman, reading quickly through Spielvogel’s article, entitled “Creativity: The Narcissism of the Artist.” Somewhere in the middle of the piece I came upon what I’d been looking for-at least I supposed this was it: “A successful Italian-American poet in his forties entered into therapy because of anxiety states experienced as a result of his enormous ambivalence about leaving his wife…” Up to this point in the article, the patients described by Spielvogel had been “an actor,” “a painter,” and “a composer”-so this had to be me. Only I had not been in my forties when I first became Spielvogel’s patient; I’d come to him at age twenty-nine, wrecked by a mistake I’d made at twenty-six. Surely between a man in his forties and a man in his twenties there are differences of experience, expectation, and character that cannot be brushed aside so easily as this…And “successful”? Does that word (in my mind, I immediately began addressing Spielvogel directly), does that word describe to you the tenor of my life at that time? A “successful” apprenticeship, absolutely, but when I came to you in 1962, at age twenty-nine, I had for three years been writing fiction I couldn’t stand, and I could no longer even teach a class without fear of Maureen rushing in to “expose” me to my students. Successful? His forties? And surely it goes without saying that to disguise (in my brother’s words) “a nice civilized Jewish boy” as something called “an Italian-American,” well, that is to be somewhat dim-witted about matters of social and cultural background that might well impinge upon a person’s psychology and values. And while we’re at it, Dr. Spielvogel, a poet and a novelist have about as much in common as a jockey and a diesel driver. Somebody ought to tell you that, especially since “creativity” is your subject here. Poems and novels arise out of radically different sensibilities and resemble each other not at all, and you cannot begin to make sense about “creativity” or “the artist” or even “narcissism” if you are going to be so insensitive to fundamental distinctions having to do with age, accomplishment, background, and vocation. And if I may, sir- his self is to many a novelist what his own physiognomy is to a painter of portraits: the closest subject at hand demanding scrutiny, a problem for his art to solve-given the enormous obstacles to truthfulness, the artistic problem. He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself. That’s where the excitement comes in. That hard conscious work that makes it art! Freud, Dr. Spielvogel, studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?
…And so it went, my chagrin renewed practically with each word. I could not read a sentence in which it did not seem to me that the observation was off, the point missed, the nuance blurred-in short, the evidence rather munificently distorted so as to support a narrow and unilluminating thesis at the expense of the ambiguous and perplexing actuality. In all there were only two pages of text on the “Italian-American poet,” but so angered and disappointed was I by what seemed to me the unflagging wrongness of the description of my case, that it took me ten minutes to get from the top of page 85 to the bottom of 86. “…enormous ambivalence about leaving his wife…It soon became clear that the poet’s central problem here as elsewhere was his castration anxiety vis-a-vis a phallic mother figure…” Not so! His central problem here as elsewhere derives from nothing of the sort. That will not serve to explain his “enormous ambivalence” about leaving his wife any more than it describes the prevailing emotional tone of his childhood years, which was one of intense security. “His father was a harassed man, ineffectual and submissive to his mother…” What? Now where did you get that idea? My father was harassed, all right, but not by his wife-any child who lived in the same house with them knew that much. He was harassed by his own adamant refusal to allow his three children or his wife to do without: he was harassed by his own vigor, by his ambitions, by his business, by the times. By his overpowering commitment to the idea of Family and the religion he made of Doing A Man’s Job! My “ineffectual” father happened to have worked twelve hours a day, six and seven days a week, often simultaneously at two exhausting jobs, with the result that not even when the store was as barren of customers as the Arctic tundra, did his loved ones lack for anything essential. Broke and overworked, no better off than a serf or an indentured servant in the America of the thirties, he did not take to drink, jump out of the window, or beat his wife and kids-and by the time he sold Tarnopol’s Haberdashery and retired two years ago, he was making twenty thousand bucks a year. Good Christ, Spielvogel, from whose example did I come to associate virility with hard work and self-discipline, if not from my father’s? Why did I like to go down to the store on Saturdays and spend all day in the stockroom arranging and stacking the boxes of goods? In order to hang around an ineffectual father? Why did I listen like Desdemona to Othello when he used to lecture the customers on Interwoven socks and McGregor shirts-because he was had at it? Don’t kid yourself-and the other psychiatrists. It was because I was so proud of his affiliation with those big brand names-because his pitch was so convincing. It wasn’t his wife’s hostility he had to struggle against, but the world’s! And he did it, with splitting headaches to be sure, hut without giving in. I’ve told you that a hundred times. Why don’t you believe me? Why, to substantiate your “ideas,” do you want to create this fiction about me and my family, when your gift obviously lies elsewhere. Let me make up stories-you make sense! “…in order to avoid a confrontation with his dependency needs toward his wife the poet acted out sexually with other women almost from the beginning of his marriage.” But that just is not so! You must be thinking of some other poet. Look, is this supposed to be an amalgam of the ailing, or me alone? Who was there to “act out” with other than Karen? Doctor, I had a desperate affair with that girl- hopeless and ill-advised and adolescent, that may well be, but also passionate, also painful, also warm-hearted, which was what the whole thing was about to begin with: I was dying for some humanness in my life, that’s why I reached out and touched her hair! And oh yes, I fucked a prostitute in Naples after a forty-eight hour fight with Maureen in our hotel. And another in Venice, correct-making two in all. Is that what you call “acting out” with “other women almost from the beginning of his marriage”? The marriage only lasted three years! It was all “almost” the beginning. And why don’t you mention how it began? “…he once picked up a girl at a party…” But that was here in New York, months and months after I had left Maureen in Wisconsin. The marriage was over, even if the state of New York refused to allow that to be so! “…the poet acted out his anger in his relationships with women, reducing all women to masturbatory sexual objects…” Now, do you really mean to say that? All women? Is that what Karen Oakes was to me, “a masturbatory sexual object”? Is that what Susan McCall is to me now? Is that why I have encouraged and cajoled and berated her into going back to finish her schooling, because she is “a masturbatory sexual object”? Is that why I nearly give myself a stroke each night trying to help her to come? Look, let’s get down to the case of cases: Maureen. Do you think that’s what she was to me, “a masturbatory sexual object”? Good God, what a reading of my story that is! Rather than reducing that lying, hysterical bitch to an object of any kind, I made the grotesque mistake of elevating her to the status of a human being toward whom I had a moral responsibility. Nailed myself with my romantic morality to the cross of her desperation! Or, if you prefer, caged myself in with my cowardice! And don’t tell me that was out of “guilt” for having already made of her “a masturbatory sexual object” because you just can’t have it both ways! Had I actually been able to treat her as some goddam “object,” or simply to see her for what she was, I would never have done my manly duty and married her! Did it ever occur to you, Doctor, in the course of your ruminations, that maybe I was the one who was made into a sexual object? You’ve got it all backwards, Spielvogel- inside out! And how can that be? How can you, who have done me so much good, have it all so wrong? Now there is something to write an article about! That is a subject for a symposium! Don’t you see, it isn’t that women mean too little to me-what’s caused the trouble is that they mean so much. The testing ground, not for potency, but virtue! Believe me, if I’d listened
