R.H.I. Page 9
When she met the woman, it was at Jones’s house. Her name was Morfydd, and she performed a piano composition of her own.
‘Ernest! She’s tiny!’
He laughed. Morfydd looked across to them while she was playing, giving Jones a smile. Did it also take in Joan? A smile that acknowledged something—a situation? Or a simple smile of love for Jones? Others were also exchanging whispers in the wide semicircle, one or two deep, that formed around her.
‘She’s like a sparrow.’
‘Yes. My sparrow.’
‘Ernest!’
‘She gave her first public singing performance last week. She was delightful. She’s a natural, um …’
‘I can see that.’
‘She’s a great talent. People regard her as one of our finest young composers.’
Morfydd stood—looking again at Jones, she didn’t come to him but joined a group of Welsh people who had been following the music closely from behind her. Joan felt out of place, though she was standing with the host—she wanted to ask him why he had invited her. Of course she knew: he wanted her to see his future wife, to meet her; Morfydd became a kind of evidence, a concrete item to be pointed to, and no longer just a word. It was Jones asserting something of himself, his Welshness, and it pulled him from her. The room was high and light with an unseasonal, early spring sunshine that reflected in through open doors from the garden. It was chilly, but Jones had insisted on throwing the doors wide. All his gestures today were a kind of throwing wide, done with abandon, distributing himself generously as if he were confetti. Joan hadn’t seen him like this. He shrugged, waved, smiled, and took steps too quickly to cross the room and press someone’s hand. It left Joan alone by the door, and she ducked out, just for air. She was surprised, a little, to find herself the only person outside, though it was scarcely cooler out here than in the room. Just for air? Her steps through the doorway felt like a move in a game, a game of running away and returning, of ‘here’, ‘away’, played with herself as token. She wasn’t quite content out here, though the cool air cradled her with its hint of discomfort, and the garden’s domesticated wildness formed something of an enclosure. Some of the Welsh circle had been frowning at Jones—was he too free for them, too good a talker? That group had always seemed ready to give a narrowed look when Joan had seen them, on other occasions. Though sometimes his steps were too long, she liked the way he walked. He would stop, he would turn with his upper body to look to one side while still moving; it gave him a swing, and a measure. Then, following her own measure, she turned back inside, the next move in the game.
30. Jones said to her, ‘We have to set limits.’
She said, ‘Oh.’
He said, ‘There are certain rules, certain ways to circumscribe this treatment. It should be clear what we are doing here. You know, of course, that the financial transaction serves partly to separate our sessions from everyday life.’
‘Is this separate from everyday life?’
‘Yes, Joan, you know that very well.’
‘How then can it affect life? How can it do its work?’
‘You also know the answer to that. We should work on your dream.’
‘Ernest?’
‘For example, here maybe you should call me Dr Jones.’
‘Dr Jones!’
‘Well, I suppose it’s not important, but …’
‘It would feel … I …’
‘No, you’re right. But, why would it feel strange?’
‘You really come up with some precious ideas.’
‘I’m concerned about what I have come to represent for you.’
‘Oh yes, I know. But what kind of solution is that, calling you Dr Jones?’
‘Of course, call me what you wish.’
‘What I wish? First you offer me your cottage, you invite me to your house to meet your fiancée, and now this new formality, this talk of limits. I can’t follow you. Is this some new intervention, some new idea you have for my treatment? Is this supposed to shock me into health?’
‘I don’t know, Joan.’
‘Mrs R.’
‘Come.’
‘If we are going to insist on status.’
‘You’re taking this the wrong way.’
‘Of course I am.’
‘I simply have to insist on the therapeutic situation being circumscribed.’
The difference between this conversation and others being, however, that it took part entirely in Jones’s mind. He stood and looked over a pond on the heath; he shook his head. He didn’t rock on his heels, or have his hands clasped behind him; he didn’t look to the sky. Instead, he had a hand on the side of his face. Even in his thoughts, Joan was difficult. Maybe there especially. His own part of the dialogue hadn’t gone exactly as planned either—and who would be surprised by this? That his fantasy, his imagination, this ‘practice’ conversation that he ran over in his mind, might escape his own control. Why insist on the surname? Inner-Jones, the character in his head, ceased at that point to be Jones. Who was he, then? And who was Inner-Joan? Representatives, figures, types with seemingly familiar faces that, when more closely investigated, bore cracks and blemishes, flickered and broke. The truth was that the analysis hadn’t really progressed. What was this story about? This woman seemed like a stone in his path. She seemed like an immovable object, something to circumnavigate. But even this was a Joan-in-his-head, and not Joan (who was, in some ways, also mobile, quick). Each thought he had of her fell, faltered, became a false nothing, was replaced by the next. Why was she so opaque to him (another falsity)? Why did she shift and avoid him (false!)? Why did she resist, why did she tower over him, why did she run (false, false, false!)? Thinking these thoughts, the world itself seemed closed off to him, inaccessible, as if Joan had taken it from him, as if each thought, each perception of anything else might also prove false. This pond? The war? How could he touch them? He needed something that might hold him down, that at least was solid—aha. Was he lacking this: solidity? Had something of Joan’s female castration-anxiety also infected him?
When he walked again, his thoughts fell back into their usual order. Here, the nursery; here, the street that sloped up alongside a row of houses. He was her analyst, and—such was the nature of things—her friend. Morfydd would be at home, maybe at the piano. Why think of her now? They were newly married, and the freshness of her presence in his house still surprised him—that he could have taken her from the stage and installed her there, so to speak. He still shook his head when thinking of her small stature and her intelligence, a quality visible in her eyes.
31. But then, London’s streets were quiet after all. It was the middle of the afternoon when I stepped out of the archive, and I was giving up that small haven. I had been the only researcher, and had grown comfortable there in my thoughts. I had apologised for leaving things in a slight state of disarray with the material. Would I be late to meet my wife and the children? Still I couldn’t quite hurry along the quiet streets, but felt my gaze look up—yes, as if it looked up without my directing it up, as if my gaze had a life of its own. This was a familiar feeling, this looking up—a ‘looking up’ from the paper, the fragments, the books that I would find myself reading. And wasn’t the point of books and paper not just the reading, but that we stop reading, that we look up from them? Joan R stayed with me even as I looked up and around at the houses, three, four storeys high and stone or brick. Or, that is, her story stayed with me: a forestalled story, one that couldn’t quite write itself and couldn’t quite be written, a story that stalled. My own progress was an inevitability: driven along in my steps by the walls of houses, despite my distraction—or allowing it—and pulled to the underground station to meet my wife and children; there was nothing of adventure, of ‘story’ in this walk. And of course I wasn’t looking for any. It was, despite my slightly strange occupation for the past few days, a reassuring normality. And, with this thought, and with Joan R’s non-story still lying about in bits and piec
es in my head, it occurred to me that even in Joan’s time it was already being built, had already been built: this normality, this sense that things were happening elsewhere, this sense that a problem might emerge precisely from the insulation from ‘things happening’ and that the problem might itself be a desperate, failed attempt to ‘make things happen’.
32. What we know is that Joan R’s analysis with Jones failed, and that she was sent to Vienna for analysis with Freud. I didn’t have much time to think about Joan R, however, apart from, really, those moments out on the street. The children, still toddlers, hadn’t travelled well, and they were not old enough to find new places exciting in themselves. I busied myself with them. The rest of the trip was taken up with this busyness, during which thoughts of Joan R faded. By the time we returned to New Zealand they had faded altogether. I was plunged back into my life, as it were. I looked after the children and did what work I could to bring in extra money. Any time free, any moments snatched from this—anything of that nature was fleeting, too small to build up again a whole picture, an image of Joan R, even one as partial and problematic as I had built up in the quiet space of the archive. The time that I had there, the materials all around me, all that vanished into a kind of mythical time or non-time in which time was not passing. Such was the difficulty of that kind of work of the imagination, the imagination that hoped to leap over boundaries, into other times and places, and into other heads, into the spaces of those heads that might have been nothing other than the spaces the heads carved out in the other times and places.
In any case, it was fine to let the work fade, because by fading it also carried on. Even as I spared no thought at all for Joan R, I thought about her. I thought about her without thinking about her. She now accompanied me as a kind of background, so that while I thought about my daily tasks, I thought about Joan R, and I thought about her you might say through the very act of performing my daily tasks. I won’t go into details about those tasks, since they aren’t overly interesting. It is possible, however, to think about two things at once, and to think something without thinking it—more than possible, I couldn’t help thinking: it was beneficial in some way.
War was starting at around that time. It was a war that started and at the same time continued what was already happening—it was started by a single act of terrorism that caused the war that was already there, building up in the background, to spill over into war. In this respect, if in no other, it was exactly like Joan R’s war. She was a strange sort of casualty, someone who was affected by the war without it touching her, without her symptoms having anything to do with it. That single act, the single shot, the thing that ALMOST COINCIDENTALLY started things off and continued them, the act that had everything and nothing to do with what followed—it rung out over the world. I carried on my daily tasks. Did anyone here have so much as a day off their daily tasks because of the act? An hour? I didn’t think so—everyone carried on. It wasn’t an event in our lives, but an event somewhere else that we reacted to and couldn’t react to.
33. The military operations that were begun in Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 continued a war that had been waged in that country since 1978. Different nations stepped in and out of that war; different groups within the country waged it against each other and against or alongside the foreign powers. I was working part-time in an office, and I carried a petition against that war around the various parts of the building, hoping for signatures from my colleagues. It was something I could do in the few minutes I had of my coffee break, say. I had brief conversations with some of my colleagues—some of them signed right away, while others hesitated or declined. These small pieces of paper were nothing, weren’t they, against the momentum of a machinery of war that built up and rolled in with the metal bodies of their vehicles, and that flew in overhead? Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy later that year. Another collapse. In the mornings I cycled to work through traffic that moved, as often as not, slower that myself—how can I remember this time now except as a time slowed down, even as everything was collapsing?
34. Jones wrote to Freud: ‘It is a case of typical hysteria, almost the only symptoms being sexual anaesthesia and unorganised Angst, with a few inhibitions of a general nature. Most of her neurosis goes into marked character reactions, which is one reason why I was not able to cure her. I am specially interested in the case, for as it is the worst failure I have ever had I have naturally learnt very much from her analysis. […] Seeing that she was unusually intelligent I hoped to win her for the cause, a mistake I shall never repeat. I underestimated the uncontrollability of her emotional reactions and in the first year made the serious error of lending her my country cottage for a week when I was not there, she having nowhere to go for a holiday. […] She has a most colossal narcissism imaginable, to a great extent secondary to the refusal of her father to give her a baby and her subsequent masculine identification with him.’1
Freud: ‘Mrs R does not appear to me half as black as you had painted her. We agree quite nicely so far. May be the difficulties will come later. In my experience you have not to scratch too deeply the skin of a so-called masculine woman to bring her femininity to the light. I am very glad you had no sexual relations with her as your hints made me suspect. To be sure it was a technical error to befriend her before her analysis was brought to a close. No doubt she is very clever and clear-headed.’2
Jones: ‘A day or two ago I received a handsome offer from Mrs R to take over the revision of translations for the Journal. There is no one who could do it as well, and there is no work that I would more gladly be relieved of, for it is physically impossible to do it adequately alone. […] As you remark, the feminine side does not lie far beneath the surface, but that fact I can honestly claim as a result of the analysis with me: the change in such ways, and also in her attitude towards children, has been very great indeed. I was surprised at your suspecting any sexual relations between us […] To satisfy her vanity she has always maintained the theory that I also was in love with her but was not honest enough to confess it […].’3
Freud: ‘I was glad to inform Mrs R that you had accepted her offer and would write her so. […] I am of opinion […] that you owe her a compensation having aggravated her analysis by inconsequent behaviour as you confess yourself.’4
Jones: ‘She is, as I told you, a most valuable and capable person […] but whether she will work as easily for me as she doubtless would for you remains for time to prove; it will depend largely on the result of her analysis.’5
Freud: ‘I think you should not reproach yourself for having turned her mind to psychoanalysis; she is a real power and can be put to work by a slight expenditure of kindness and “recognitions”. To be sure she is a concentrated acid not to be used until duly diluted and she is not yet even with you, but I see no real difficulty.’6
35. The Eastern Mediterranean Event occurred on 6 June 2002. This was an explosion of around the yield of a small atomic bomb, probably caused by an undetected asteroid impact. General Simon Worden of the US Space Command expressed concerns that, should a similar event occur near the conflict zone in Kashmir, a full-scale conflict could ensue if the ‘intensely bright flash’ was taken for an act of military aggression by either side. Could it be considered an act of aggression from the physical world?
Already, towards the end of the year, ultimatums were being directed at Saddam Hussein, foreshadowing war in Iraq.
But links between war and the physical world were long established. Long before, the United States Congress had pulled the plug on the highly ambitious Superconducting Super Collider experiment, a particle collider to be built in Texas. Would the collisions taking place within it unleash new and unknown particles, with dangerous effects: a black hole, centred on Texas, that would drag the earth and the solar system into it … ? Congress did not consider such possibilities; but, in the absence of war with the Soviet Union, what could the motivation be, to spend public money, the sweat of the American people, on s
uch research? What nation needed physicists now? The physical world was a friend of war; it encouraged and was encouraged by war.
36. In his autobiography, Jones has this to say about his wife Morfydd:
‘Her attachment to her father was so great that she had misgivings at “deserting” him for anyone else. Her faith and devotion, so admirable when related to her country and her people, were also unfortunately attached to very simple-minded religious beliefs, and it was at first a great grief to her that I did not share them. This had also its practical inconveniences, since she wished to attend her Church services, and even Sunday School, on the Sabbath, whereas I had long been in the habit of devoting that day to worship of the country. As time went on, however, love began to tell, and her ideas broadened. As may be imagined, my notion of adjustment in such matters consists in persuading the other person to approach my view of them, and that is what gradually and painlessly happened.
‘Our happiness grew more and more complete, but after eighteen months it came to an abrupt end. We were paying a summer visit to my father in Wales, and I was looking forward to taking her over my familiar Gowerland; though a native of the same county, she had never visited that beautiful peninsula. On the way down I wanted to buy her a box of chocolates, which for some reason she declined; it was poignant to reflect later that it would probably have saved her life. Life and great issues are always at the mercy of meaningless trivialities. Soon after arriving she fell obscurely ill, and it was a couple of days before it became plain that there was an appendicitis, which was going on to form an abscess. An operation was urgently indicated. I spent four or five hours at the telephone trying to reach Trotter; communications late in 1918 were poor, both by telephone and by rail. He advised me to secure a local surgeon and not risk the delay of waiting till he could come the next day; it was, of course, a simple operation. She did not do well, however, and after a few days became delirious with a high temperature. We thought there was blood poisoning till I got Trotter from London. He at once recognised delayed chloroform poisoning. It had recently been discovered, which neither the local doctor nor I had known, that this is a likelihood with a patient who is young, has suppuration in any part of the body, and has been deprived of sugar (as war conditions had then imposed); in such circumstances only ether is permissible as an anaesthetic. This simple piece of ignorance cost a valuable and promising life. We fought hard, and there were moments when we seemed to have succeeded, but it was too late.