Outside of a Dog (16 page)

That sounded terrible, but the remedy was obvious. There must have been some inscrutable oriental mistake. We threw the sticks again:
The Abysmal (Water)
. The odds against this reading
coming up twice in a row are huge. But surely the text was open to interpretation? What does ‘abysmal water’ suggest? Our first associations, as if we were interpreting a dream, were
dank, polluted, stagnant, filthy, dangerous to life
. Or perhaps a torrent was envisaged, like a tsunami that would drown all those in its path? What could we salvage from that?

We were both fully aware that the archetype of the journey into the underworld, the descent into the murky symbolism – the abysmal waters – of the unconscious, presented one with
trials and dangers. That didn’t mean it wasn’t worth the effort. Surely if we could plumb or navigate those waters we would be strengthened by the process? The
I Ching
was
offering us a challenge, and an opportunity:

We were married in the Oxford Registry Office on 11 October 1969. It had been a tumultuous courtship, was going to become an even more unsettling marriage, and it wasn’t an unambiguously
happy moment. Barbara looked both stunned and stunning in a flowing, dreamy silk dress in reds and blacks bought at a shop near Harrods, and subsequently worn by her Auntie Nancy on cruises. My
three-piece pinstriped blue business suit made me look like a trainee lawyer in need of a decent haircut.

Her parents welcomed me into the family gracefully and with, I suspect, some relief. She was twenty-six by then – and if she didn’t marry me, her father said anxiously to her mother,
she would be ‘damaged goods’. Catherine characteristically repeated the comment to Bar, who chortled, and remarked that she’d been damaged goods before she met me. The first time
I visited the parents, in their semi on a modest little road in Kenilworth, a bastion of Tory petit bourgeois life, I arrived in the Morgan convertible dressed in a red Arab djelaba, with a long
bushy beard, and an overstuffed meerschaum pipe filled with some noxious tobacco that made me into a walking bush fire. (Some time later, teaching a seminar at Warwick – students kept asking
if I could please open the window – my beard caught fire from a stray ember. It didn’t smell all that different from the reeking Latakia tobacco, and I burbled on regardless, until the
flames became visible beneath my nose. I snuffed it out one-handed, barely missing a phrase. Nobody laughed, but there was a general sense in the room that it served me right.)

We were cloistered together in the hothouse of a tiny flat in Stanley Road: she emerging only to go to her newly located analyst. Her anxieties, while severe and debilitating, struck me as
somehow not personal, more a function of her life situation. She was a changeling, placed in the wrong family and environment, too curious, finely tuned and thoughtful to feel comfortable in the
provincial life she had, inappropriately, been given. She’d educated herself as an adolescent, reading her way through the Kenilworth Library stock of books on the history of art, and through
a selection of writers including Sartre and Camus, many of the English poets, and a run of contemporary novelists, while studying shorthand and other secretarial skills. She yearned for something
larger and freer, left home for London at the age of sixteen, later moved to Oxford, tried to make relationships that were challenging and sustaining. The price she paid for entering the world she
should have been given in the first place was too high and too cruel.

Getting her back, well and functioning, became our joint project, more important than anything else. We ceased to go out, lost touch with our best friends, engulfed by the psychoanalytic miasma,
claustrophobic and ingrown. The rituals of everyday life became an essential point of stability, but even these were delicately poised. We would wander off companionably in the mornings to do the
shopping, perhaps have a coffee at the local café. But this progress was retarded by the intercession of the neighbour’s dog, an Alsatian of malign disposition, like the Hound of the
Baskervilles on steroids, who would hide behind a tree until passers-by got to the garden gate, and then come charging towards them, barking ferociously, jumping upon the gate in an attempt to
scale it and eat the terrified pedestrians. The first time it happened I almost fainted from fright. Then I got furious.

‘I know,’ I said to Barbara, plotting revenge that evening. ‘I’ll buy a huge rump steak and put rat poison all over it, and chuck it in their garden.’

‘You can’t do that!’ said Bar, genuinely disapproving. (She liked dogs enough, even, not to want to kill this one.)

‘I guess you’re right. How about lashings of Tabasco sauce?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I can think of something much worse. When the dog is inside one evening’ (we’d noticed he was often in the house for a couple of hours at night
– perhaps they fed him one of their many cats) ‘we can sneak into the garden and snip their daffs!’

‘Snip their daffs?’

‘That’d do it!’ she said.

We never visited our neighbour with this quintessentially English form of retribution, alas, nor my archetypal American one, and learned to walk down the other side of Stanley Road instead. The
dog still tried to get us, but it was less frightening at a distance.

In the flat, we read together the essential works of Freud, Jung and A.S. Neill, and for a period we were both entranced by R.D. Laing, who all of a sudden had become a cult figure. His first
book,
The Divided Self
, had been published in 1960, way before all the sixties shenanigans began. It was not so much ahead of its time; in part, at least, it caused it. It became an
extraordinarily influential book. Laing argued that even the most extreme cases of schizophrenia – psychoanalytically regarded as untreatable – were capable of being both understood and
treated therapeutically. Schizophrenics were not mad, insane, or deranged – categories that merely demonstrated the observer’s incomprehension – rather, the individual
schizophrenic was to be understood as someone who had creatively tried to accommodate sets of radically conflicting demands. Using Gregory Bateson’s double-bind theory, Laing and his early
colleagues were working towards an understanding of the reasonableness of the schizophrenic world, however apparently incomprehensible the symptoms manifested by any given schizophrenic might
seem.

To this set of ideas was aligned a bias towards phenomenology which claimed that no response or set of responses to the world, if sincere and accurately reported, could be given privilege over
any other. The schizophrenic’s inner voices and inward experience were real to him or her. That’s what real is: reality is what is generated by an act of perception.

You might wonder why the emerging hip generation of the sixties should have cared about schizophrenia, and how it should or should not be regarded and treated. And we didn’t, really; the
reason
The Divided Self
had such an impact was that it posited radical alternatives to received wisdom, that it was so stringently anti-establishment. It allowed people their own voices,
however deviant: it seemed to extend a remarkably generous form of fellowship.

It sounded great to us. Authentic self-realization seemed an admirable goal; after all, I regarded myself as a student of the results of inspiration, a romantic not a classicist. Barbara was
determinedly trying to find a way to escape the various mixed messages and double binds of her upbringing. Laing, without denying the stresses of the internal life, made it sound
exciting
.
Listen to your inner voices! Be inhabited by spirits! Hadn’t Blake told us that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom? Though my reading at the time was dominated by Freud, and my
life by the Freudian, Laing seemed to take more risks than Freud, and to point in less conventional directions. Barbara, coming home from a session with her Freudian analyst one afternoon, quoted
him as saying that she should be more like his wife, who was ‘a good, sensible woman’. I’d seen the frumpy figure thus alluded too, and was certain I would prefer Barbara as she
was.

But therapy helped her. After a lot of time, and a brave internal effort, the boundaries of life began to expand: we went out more, and more people came round. We were friends with a number of
people ranging from the eccentric to the downright dangerous. John lived off vegetables discarded in the bins at the Oxford market, and never washed his hair, ever; Reg, a brilliant but schizoid
potter, had served time at Broadmoor Hospital for a murder committed in a pub, and became a founding member of the Oxford Arts Lab; John Preston, a frustrated painter, woodcarver, husband and
spirit, ran a contemporary ceramics gallery on North Parade. He was the sort of person that North Oxford sub-culture was made for: talented, but not talented enough, unhappy, something of a
fantasist.

From the moment Barbara first came into his shop, beautiful, enthusiastic, approachable, he fell in love with her. She hardly had the income to indulge her excellent taste, but bought things
anyway, even if it meant eating less: a beautiful yellow Lucie Rie bowl, a larger brown one by Gwen Hanson. Sometimes John would offer a lovingly cooked dinner, a bottle of wine, and a lot of talk
about himself. He carved a wooden figure of her in a piece of gnarly fruit wood, about four inches high mounted on a plinth, that was an unsettlingly accurate image of her in the nude. He
frequently came round to our flat to visit her, and to complain about the constraints of his marriage, and how much his children sided with their mother against him.

One weekend John came round after closing his shop. He was in a lot of pain with headaches, which had increased in severity over the last month, and which he described – and we agreed
– as a symptom of the unhappiness that his marriage caused him.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I don’t think I can stand it any more. I feel like I’m going mad.’

We listened sympathetically. Mad didn’t scare us.

‘Sometimes I have these thoughts, I keep having them, that one day I’ll just get a gun and kill us all . . .’ He held his head in his hands. I went to make tea while Barbara
comforted him.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘people often have fantasies like that, I’m glad you can talk about it. You’re not mad. You mustn’t feel guilty.’

He shook his head. ‘I can actually see myself doing it. I go upstairs and get the shotgun...’

‘Don’t!’ Barbara said. ‘Don’t dwell on it. It isn’t good for you.’

He cheered up a little after dinner, stayed the night, and headed back to his house in the country in the morning.

Later that week, I found Barbara waiting for me tearfully, clutching a copy of the
Guardian
, outside St Clare’s College, where I had been teaching a course on modern English
Literature to a group of American junior year abroad students. On the front page was the story. John had, indeed, shot his wife and children, then himself after setting the house on fire.

‘We should have taken him more seriously,’ she said, ‘we should have helped him.’ Although the autopsy revealed a brain tumour, which was held by the coroner to be an
explanation for the tragedy, we couldn’t help but feel responsible. Our problem hadn’t been lack of seriousness, we’d been serious in the wrong way. The obvious and appropriate
response –
are you sure you’re getting the right medical advice about these headaches?
– was disabled by the times. Doctors were not to be trusted: purveyors of
mother’s little helpers like valium, barbaric imposers of ECT, doctors treated symptoms rather than causes, believed in suppression rather than expression.

The example of John Preston might have shaken my faith in my psychological premises, but it didn’t destroy it. Only a few years later – some time in 1973 – I resolved to quit
university teaching to begin training as an analyst, and drove down to London for an interview with a member of the Philadelphia Association, which had been founded under Laing’s aegis in
1965.

Haya Oakley was an Israeli therapist with the requisite phenomenological biases. Sympathetic though I was to the practical effects of such a position, however useful it might be in talking with
patients mired in some alternative reality, I expressed some scepticism about whether she actually
believed
in what she was professing?

‘Absolutely,’ she said.

‘If a patient believes he is accompanied into your consulting room by a pink elephant, then that pink elephant is actually there?’

‘For him, it is.’

‘Or Manchester United football team? The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra? The hunchback of Notre Dame? Cliff Richard?’

‘Yes, in all cases,’ she responded, a little tartly. ‘If that is what he perceives, then that is what is there.’

‘For him,’ I acknowledged. ‘But he is wrong.’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘For him there is an elephant, or whatever. For me there is not. Neither of us is wrong. Or right.’

‘But surely it is your job as a therapist to banish the pink elephants of your patients’ imaginings?’

‘Quite the opposite,’ she said firmly. ‘It is not up to me to judge what my clients perceive.’

‘What about dreams then? If I dream that I am in a relationship with the hunchback of Notre Dame, that doesn’t mean it is actually true, does it?’

She looked at me with a sudden new interest, and I had a feeling she was about to ask me about my marriage.

‘These are just philosophical cavils, and smart counter-examples. Perhaps you haven’t read enough, and need some clinical experience? I think you’d better talk to
Ronnie,’ she said. That would sort me out.