R.H.I. Read online

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  vup.victoria.ac.nz

  Copyright © Tim Corballis 2015

  First published 2015

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Corballis, Tim.

  R.H.I. / Tim Corballis.

  ISBN 978-0-86473-982-7

  I. Title.

  NZ823.3—dc 23

  ISBN 978-0-86473-982-7 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-77656-020-2 (EPUB)

  ISBN 978-1-77656-021-9 (Kindle)

  Ebook conversion 2015 by meBooks

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s note

  Part 1. R

  Part 2. H

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s note

  I began these sketches of Joan Riviere and Hermann Henselmann while staying in Berlin for a year on a writer’s residency, and finished them years later in New Zealand, after our children were born. While in Berlin, I made occasional trips to London, to research Riviere’s manuscripts in the archives of the British Psychoanalytic Society. There were also other small pilgrimages, such as the walk, on a visit to Vienna, up a cobbled street to the house where Riviere stayed when she was being analysed by Freud in 1922—a piece of research that never found its way into the work. My partner, who was using the resources of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin for her own work, brought home volumes of Henselmann’s writings and sketches. We stayed just around the corner from Frankfurter Tor, where the great ‘socialist realist’ avenue instigated by his designs began, running west towards the centre of the city.

  Later, in Wellington, in the few hours that began to be available to me here and there once I was working on the projects again, it was also possible to follow threads, thanks partly of course to the ease of digital communication. I ordered memoirs by Henselmann and his wife Isi from German bookstores; I found, at the library of the University of Auckland (where I was then enrolled in a doctorate) an enormous volume in a series on Berlin town planning and apartment design; and I chased snippets published here and there on the internet.

  Riviere was an English lay psychoanalyst, a patient of Ernest Jones and a later follower of Melanie Klein, and one of the translators of Freud’s work. Through her article Womanliness as Masquerade she left something of a mark on theoretical, third-wave feminism—otherwise, she remains relatively obscure, mostly of interest only to those interested in the history of psychoanalysis. Her archives contain very little material. Henselmann, for a number of years Chief Architect of the German Democratic Republic, is a different story: he wrote and designed a great deal, and there is a great deal written about him, almost all in German. He is a large figure in Berlin, if only through the influence he had on the shape of the city.

  Until near the end of my time pursuing these strangely matched, idiosyncratic interests, I failed to realise that I was writing a history of the twentieth century. It is an incomplete history, produced by accident, and viewed telescopically, through lens upon lens, so that it is unclear whether the resulting blur is some original fog, or the effect of layers of imperfections. It was written on the basis of a good deal of luck and opportunity (notably the availability of public funding, for which I am very thankful) but also under the impact of a pressing, interrupting life as a student and parent. As its author, I am or have become a non-professional, a non-expert, even a trespasser in the fields of history and biography.

  Because it is written by a non-expert, I suspect, it becomes more difficult rather than easier to know what to make of it. I mean it to express some of the confusion and the mess that we encounter in ourselves and in our understanding when we don’t pretend that we know it all, when, thrown in amongst the chaos of our own lives, we are faced with distant echoes of facts. I mean to suggest that there might be another kind of expertise, one that is widely accessible if we only recognise it as such: an expertise of not-knowing. There is, I hope, something democratic about trying to do something one doesn’t quite understand.

  The history here begins just before the beginning of the century and ends just after its middle. It takes place in Europe, and covers two topics, two milieux, which fall under the headings of psychoanalysis and communism respectively. All of this—Europe, psychoanalysis, communism, even the twentieth century itself—yes, it is all a long way from contemporary New Zealand. Together, in fact, the two milieux present a simple arc: psychoanalysis is about the continuing impact that the world has on us and our inability to know ourselves; and communism represents the attempt, nonetheless, to find or build something new in the midst of it all. It is a European arc from the end of the age of empire to the beginning of the Cold War; it is an arc from the psychoanalyst’s obsession with the past to the communist’s obsession with the future. It does disturb me that I have, against my beliefs, made a woman the emblem of passive suffering, and a man the emblem of active imagination. Gender, I hope, is in these books also in more complicated ways.

  To talk of the historical arc, though, suggests a clear lesson of history, a story that, once completed, can be set aside. It suggests, after all, understanding and expertise. There are many facts, many ideas in this work, but they have arrived in no systematic form. Stories begin but are interrupted; fiction interrupts fact, fact interrupts fiction, neither comes complete. The world exists here less in the form of its stories than in the form of what makes story difficult. These works, European in content, are Antipodean in form because they are a result of how facts fall to us here from a long way away, leaving us to make something of them. For the same reason, their form is also a form for the internet age.

  These novellas present less an arc of history, then, than an inconsistent tableau, one that presents its pieces, not one after the other, but side by side. History is the name not just for one event following another, but for some stubborn thing against which, and within which, all our projects and selves become troubled and confused. These novellas have the form of trouble and confusion—the face of history. Riviere comes to us not as her real, historical self, and not as a fictional character, but simply as Joan R, the dramatised mark of a situation, a problem, and a form of thinking, in the face of history. The same goes, of course, for H. The same goes for I, the author, the reader.

  —Tim Corballis, 2015

  Part 1. R

  1. ‘Everything is collapsing.’

  2. In an extract copied from his diary the soldier records a moment on the field of battle. The passage must have been written some days later, as he convalesced in a field hospital after the gas attack immobilised him. He was initially informed by the nurse, in a cheerful voice, that he would return to service without problems, having had only a ‘small lungful’.

  The lungful had taken him by surprise. There was a shout as they watched for dawn attacks, then he turned his head and was faced, through the mask’s glass, with the shell’s explosion not far behind their lines. It was the first shell that morning. He saw the turned heads of his comrades in their own masks, their head-bags that reduced their faces to nothing (the faces he had come to know well) and more shouts. The gas from the shell somehow caught him in the lungs, despite the mask, gripping him and stopping him in the midst of his inhale. He stepped back from the parapet in readiness for the attack but was unable to move. He doubled over instead, his frame around his lungs (another shell burst), bent forwards as if to then raise his shoulders in an attempt to dra
w them open—but they had become a solid object, like coal, in his chest. All around, activity—another shell. It was all he could do to put a hand out to steady his slide down to the boards, then another hand forward to counter his doubling over, his retch that threatened to fill the mask, but he quickly pulled it off, still more unable to breathe. All this he records in the passage in his diary.

  Was this a new weapon, a gas that could penetrate the filters? Then, surely, the troops would come next—the enemy would push over across no-man’s-land. He was unable to move, still bent forward like a child, his knees now underneath him, his body around his chest. He could take in some air now, though how much more of the gas he was inhaling he wasn’t sure. If another shell burst as close it would deliver another concentrated dose of the gas like his last. He remembered all this without sound. He had only seen the initial gas shell, hardly heard or felt its shock. Now the running of feet around him as he remained curled into himself, looking closely at the board and the back of his hand and the layer of dirt on both. He screwed up his eyes and his hand, then his body as a whole, tightening in preparation for the attack, its success guaranteed by the new gas (but others were running, back and forth).

  He remained like this. Slowly muscles relaxed, lungs allowed the tiniest movements, drawn with difficulty and with each breath the feel of something torn. Would the attack be announced simply by a strike from behind and above, or the kick of a boot, even a bullet? Or, then (and he had seen their faces, occasionally, not more than once or twice, but he had a memory of them looking back at him, perhaps once only when he could see a face, and he and the German had each other in their sights, looked impossibly across a hundred yards into each other’s eyes and both in that moment refused to fire) captured.

  This thought of capture was somehow worse even than the bullet. This was the intended fear, he suddenly found himself with the time to think, now in the midst of this final attack. A fear of them, their cruelty (how the Hun thinks) and not so much the cruelty that might land a boot on the back of his head, or a bullet, but the cruelty that might, too, enter him. Later, in the thoughtfulness brought about by this single incident, he would also remember the novels he had read about the terror of invasion, even years before the chain of events that had sparked the war. The novels had painted the Germans as dangerous and virile. And Britain would (if we didn’t raise ourselves out of our passivity) be attacked, and become German.

  Then, doubled over, his mind freed, as if the cage that his body formed around his lungs enclosed a small and distinct world, there was the fear that even this private world might be invaded, become German. The very first thought, the one that initially terrified him and at the same time opened the possibility for that invasion—that threatened to lower the defences, let him turn over and lie, open to the sky—was this: and would that, then, be so bad? He had, that once, looked across genuinely at the face of the enemy, and, if he hadn’t seen anything he could name, neither had he seen the Hun’s cruelty—he had in fact seen nothing but a face.

  Was the surprise of his thoughts, and their ease, brought about by the fact that he was caught between his fear and his duty? Not in the ordinary way, of being too afraid to carry out that duty (carrying it out had been only too easy) but of finding that the fear required by his duty (terror of the Hun, the unknown, unknowable figure) was his own fear (yes, how much he feared that attack!). If his fear was just the fear that his country required of him, how could he tell whether he genuinely felt it, or whether it was simply commanded? The uncertainty, he thought much later, might have prised open a space for him to wonder at what remained within him. Or, rather, left an empty space where his own fear may or may not have been, much like the space he was trying to carve out for his lungs.

  Then, more shouts, an arm, and he was being pulled away from the parapet. This was how it would happen, simply with hands pulling him away. But he looked to see one of his comrades, hidden in his mask, who forced another mask over his own head and pushed him down somewhere else. There was no new weapon, only a leak around the filter canister, and the attack that he could almost feel, that he could sense—the Germans climbing over the parapets and taking them all (whatever that might mean), all lying prone much as he had—had never happened. The troops had never come.

  Later, or so he writes, he was told by Joan R about the idea of psychological resistance. He pictured his own situation, the few minutes of certainty that he would be captured, in this notion: what in him resisted capture? What in him wanted to stop them from entering the space he had formed with this skeleton, his frame, the space in the centre of which hung his damaged lungs? And what existed in that space for them to capture, if all it was, was space? Was the resistance, then, nothing but the skeleton he formed for those minutes around himself?

  Those minutes recurred as nightmare for the first time in the hospital, a hall at the back of the small French town some way from the front lines. The lines had not moved for well over a year here, a stand-off with the enemy, and he had grown used to thinking of this town as a place that despite the occasional bombardment would never be occupied. Indeed he thought from time to time of their own stand-off as permanent, lines that would never move.

  His condition worsened, despite the nurse’s reassurances. Two days later, his lungs were as bad as after the first shock of gas, each breath an almost audible tearing accompanied by a pain that made him grip at the covers on the bed. His new urgency was to talk with her, both because she seemed kind, but more because talking was, right now, next to impossible.

  ‘Will I die?’ As she helped him to the toilet.

  ‘You’d be amazed, everyone asks that.’

  ‘Not so amazing.’

  She laughed. She said, ‘You won’t die.’

  After a slight pause: ‘Oh good.’

  He didn’t believe her. He envisaged himself less and less able to talk, even to wheeze out the few syllables he’d managed, until, even surrounded by perfectly breathable air, he would suffocate or drown—his final, impossible lungful would be water in the midst of air.

  The next day, his condition had, in fact, improved somewhat.

  She said, ‘You write so much! What are you writing?’

  He shrugged. ‘Diary.’

  ‘Everyone’s writing a diary.’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Just look at you—you must have filled pages since you’ve been here, pages and pages!’ When he didn’t reply, but stayed looking at her, she said, ‘Oh well.’

  He turned over a page and tore the next one out. He wrote on it: Hurts to talk.

  She said, ‘Yes, of course. You should be resting anyway.’

  He wrote: I want to talk to you.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  He wrote: Where are you from?

  ‘Connecticut. From a small town, you won’t have heard of it.’

  He wrote: Undoubtedly!

  Another laugh. Then: ‘What are you writing?’

  He said, ‘Nightmare.’

  ‘Writing your dreams?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You must dream an awful lot.’

  He shook his head. He said, ‘The attack.’

  ‘That’s the nightmare? You mean it’s a nightmare, what happened?’

  He wrote: Yes. No. Then he wrote: I dream it too.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ There was a pause. She looked down, then up, and said, ‘You must—I don’t want to sound awful, but you must have seen worse? You must have experienced worse? This really wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  She said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t be talking. Try to rest and I’ll come back to see you soon.’

  She did come back, and the soldier passed his book across to her, indicating a passage of around a page for her to read—he had written it while she saw to other patients. The room had a strange quiet, as if the sounds—talking or the occasional cry of pain—rose up into the ceiling that was too high for the
hall’s size, muffled and trapped in the rafters. There were only ten or twelve beds arranged in this hall, on top of those in another small room and outside in tents. Sunlight entered at an angle, through small windows and the door when it was left open, though soon enough one of the nurses would see it hanging, moving heavily and almost imperceptibly on its hinges in the wind, and quickly cross from the opposite end, between the beds, her footsteps suddenly breaking the silence, to close it. His nurse looked at the passage, up at him, then down again and began to read. When she was done her gaze stayed on the words for a minute, and her brow pushed down, only briefly, in a quivering expression that made her seem, he thought, suddenly young (she was, as was he).

  He said, ‘Do you—?’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but it seems to me like you’re afraid of being—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Of being raped.’

  He said, ‘I see.’ She had said it quietly to him, and looked at him now, half afraid. He laughed now, or rather wheezed. He said, ‘That’s quite a suggestion!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shook his head and smiled. It did add something to his picture, to the image he had formed of the invasion, the attack, of whose occurrence he had been momentarily only too certain. He couldn’t help another laugh, but didn’t know what to say. Although she had only just sat with him, she stood awkwardly again.

  She said, ‘I should get on with things.’

  But the fear, wasn’t it more complex than that? It was at once, yes, fear that someone might force themselves inside him—he could see a meaning to her words that was, of course, not quite literal—but also that this might not have been entirely unwelcome; a fear that he himself might be the agent that allowed them in, allowed something Germanic to take his thoughts. He might be a traitor to himself, simultaneously the traitor and the betrayed, and all at once allow an invasion, a change, right to his core, thus revealing to him (and the revelation wasn’t entirely unpleasant) that he was already multiple, and that at his core there was nothing, or nothing solid. Something of him, then, wanted to hold on to what was there (if it were to go, what indeed would be left of him?).