Yours Ever (35 page)

Burroughs often lets his own letters simmer “on the stove” for days on end; their composition betrays more shaping than haste. In them he stages some of the vaudeville vignettes that dapple his novels, and he indulges in that fifties specialty, the sick joke: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” He can mix hipster riffs, camp and Papa Hemingway’s Injun talk in a single letter, but he’s at his best when playing it starkly straight. His high-speed photos of Peru have a terrible vividness: “Lima, a city of open spaces, shit strewn lots and huge parks, vultures wheeling in a violet sky and young kids spitting blood in the street.”

Burroughs was of course a gun nut, thanks to that aggressive sense of personal liberty and who knows what dope-soaked collision between the sexual and death-seeking urges. He famously killed his common-law wife, Joan, in a drunken game of William Tell that the two of them enacted with a gun and a glass. His literary exploitation
of the incident is less repellent than his effort, a few years later, to explain it to Ginsberg. “May yet attempt a story or some account of Joan’s death. I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it. I think I am
afraid
. Not exactly to discover unconscious intent. It’s more complex, more basic and more horrible, as if the brain
drew
the bullet toward it.” He knew that a passage like this might eventually be read by more eyes than Ginsberg’s. “Better save my letters,” he’d written him three years earlier. “[M]aybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” Eventually he had one, and his letters by and large confirm it. But it is a reputation for talent, not genius, and so the lines above must stand pretty loathsomely amid all the grubby levelheadedness surrounding them. Genius may have its license, but talent is too common to be the basis for forgiveness, at least on the scale he required it.

VIOLENCE—AGAINST EITHER
the superfamous recipient or the desperately obscure sender—never seems far from the extreme fan letter, the kind that confesses not a burst of infatuation but grinding obsession. During the 1980s, two rock ‘n’ roll chroniclers named Fred and Judy Vermorel “read about 40,000 letters” written to British pop idols before offering a sample of them in an anthology called
Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans
. The ghost of John Len non and the gun of Mark David Chapman hover over the whole production.

The lonely devotion of “Cosima” to David Bowie (“please don’t think I am crazy”) is such that “every time people say bad things about you I feel the duty to defend you and sometimes I become violent.” Cosima begs Bowie to understand that he is her “central life” and “the only human being for who I would be capable to do sacrifice.” Of whom it is not entirely clear. One fan of Nick Heyward tells him that “It deeply disturbs me knowing you will never belong to me,” while another explains that she has considered falling into a coma in order to get his attention.

CIA interception of these letters is sometimes feared by those
who write them, and another of Bowie’s fans, “Heather,” suspects that the rock star is tapping her family phone. And yet, amid the threats and paranoia, one occasionally finds, especially in the closings, a peculiar sweetness. “Melanie” is startled to realize that she may have begun to feel Bowie’s loneliness along with her own: “I am your friend, David. Feel free to push unmanageable emotions in my direction.”

With more typical anger, however, “Cheryl” warns Nick Heyward that she “never got on well writing a diary because I couldn’t communicate with a blank piece of paper,” and if he thinks he can get away without responding to her letters, he’s “got another think coming—what a nerve.” Even unanswered, these letters have a usefulness to their writers beyond anything the diary’s blank brick wall can afford. They entail a physical transmission, a penetration of the beloved’s space, if only just his outer office; they offer themselves to be ripped open or flung into the trash, a fate that Cheryl imagines and protests even as some masochistic part of her is relishing the negative attention.

The Who’s Pete Townshend, in an introduction to the Vermorels’ anthology, admitted to being a bit scared by some of the letters he himself had received over the years, but he concluded that the writing of them is part of an understandable, if displaced, search for God: “what matters is that I have made myself available as what Jung called a symbol of ‘transformation.’”

WHICH BRINGS US TO
the most famous mail ever to pass between Vienna and Zurich.

“We must never let our poor neurotics drive us crazy,” writes Dr. Sigmund Freud to Dr. Carl Gustav Jung on New Year’s Eve, 1911. The revelations, humbling but healing, that Freud and his acolyte are in the midst of bringing to the human psyche result, the men’s letters make clear, only from long, daily, tricky labor. Misapprehension and overwork are prominent themes of the correspondence conducted by mentor and disciple between 1906 and 1914. Jung is “swamped” by his practice and Freud “enslaved” by his,
enough so that the toil threatens the latter’s “so-called health.” But if the therapeutic truth is to spread beyond the consulting rooms of central Europe, there are journals to edit, conferences to convene, converts to make and dissenters to punish. The letters shuttle back and forth like some great clerical superego, keeping everything organized.

Even in the years of Jung’s fealty toward Freud, cracks are visible in their professional alliance and personal devotion. Freud, after all, scorns those who suspect a physiological cause of mental illness (“they are still waiting for the discovery of the bacillus or protozoon of hysteria”), leaving the more curious Jung to apologize at one point for having resorted to “a wee bit of biology” in explaining the libido. Before fully embarking on the expeditions that will make him see the unconscious as more than sexual and even collective in its nature, Jung tends to report any deviation from Freud’s still-new orthodoxies with a certain embarrassment: “I have been dabbling in spookery again,” he writes on November 2, 1907. Freud pronounces the occult “a charming delusion,” and the younger man promises to be “careful” in his exploration of its precincts. By 1911, when considering astrology and mythology, Jung still seems bent on convincing himself that he intends no more than a temporary detour from the Freudian fold. He begs Freud for a bit of time: “Please don’t worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes. I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche.”

Freud will, of course, make his own investigations of mythology but continue to believe that it “in all likelihood … centres on the same nuclear complex as the neuroses.” Whereas Jung would like to see Christianity regain the mythic symbols and joy it once contained, the home office in Vienna regards religion as the immature manifestation of a helpless, psychosexual need. Freud calls his own view of the matter “very banal,” but he doesn’t retract it: “After infancy [man] cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for himself a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.”

In his association with Jung, Freud craves not a parent but a son,
someone more intimately bound to him than a mere trained successor. As for God: Freud can fill that role himself. Jung, at the start, is conveniently subservient, prone in fact to slavish expressions of admiration and loyalty. Early in 1908, he asks Freud “to let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of father and son.” Freud admits that he likes being in the right and throughout the correspondence is always delighted by signs of submission: “I was overjoyed at your interest in
Leonardo
[Freud’s essay on da Vinci] and at your saying that you were coming closer to my way of thinking.” Jung owns up to a “father complex,” which Freud tends to notice only when the condition is prompting resistance by the son. Jung stages small rebellions followed by wholesale surrenders. In April 1909, after some disagreement over his interest in poltergeists, the younger man fancies that the dispute has “freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority,” but a year later he’s once again asking that Freud “forgive me all my misdemeanours.”

After their first face-to-face meeting in 1907, Jung had written to Freud less like a colleague than a patient engaged in transference: “I have the feeling of having made considerable inner progress since I got to know you personally; it seems to me that one can never quite understand your science unless one knows you in the flesh.” Freud’s own imagery for the relationship during this early period is sexual and Eucharistic: “when you have injected your own personal leaven into the fermenting mass of my ideas in still more generous measure, there will be no further difference between your achievement and mine.” He even realizes that Jung’s birthday is the same as his wife’s.

Jung confesses that his “veneration” of Freud has “something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush” with an “undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped.” However startling this revelation, it occupies a less crucial position in the letters than an exchange concerning Jung’s first patient, a “hysteric” Russian émigré named Sabina Spielrein, with whom Jung came to have a sexual relationship. By 1909, Spielrein is making
trouble, causing Jung to write this half-candid, and quite put-upon, confession to Freud:

Jung, one should note, does not deny a sexual relation; he admits only his refusal to father a child. But Freud, who has heard about the woman’s complaints from another source, refuses even to believe that Spielrein was Jung’s mistress. He assumes that his son and heir is being “slandered and scorched” by “the neurotic gratitude of the spurned,” and he tries to soothe Jung’s feelings by explaining that the incident represents an occupational hazard for the psychoanalyst: “it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.”

Jung is “relieved and comforted” by Freud’s assurances, but he can’t hide his telltale guilt or a seeming awareness that his confession has put him in a permanently vulnerable position with his mentor: “my father-complex kept on insinuating that you would not take it as you did but would give me a dressing down”—one more or less disguised as brotherly love. Nine days later, he adds: “Although not succumbing to helpless remorse, I nevertheless deplore the sins I have committed, for I am largely to blame for the highflying hopes of my former patient.” He goes on “very reluctantly [to] confess to you as my father” that he unprofessionally (and untruthfully) wrote a letter to Spielrein’s mother saying that he “was not the gratifier of her daughter’s sexual desires, but merely her doctor.”

Two years earlier Jung had disclosed to Freud his view that “sexual repression is a very important and indispensable civilizing factor, even if pathogenic for many inferior people.” But in the wake of his difficulties with Sabina Spielrein—who will go on to become a more orthodox Freudian analyst than Jung himself—he ponders the possibilities of “sexual freedom” and infidelity: “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the licence to be unfaithful.”

The real adultery that Jung requires is intellectual, a long-postponed apostasy that’s no doubt been inhibited by all the invective he’s accustomed to hearing—and speaking—against foes of the Freudian movement. Early on, Freud tells Jung of his own “inclination … to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation.” The “enemy camp” produces “emotional drivel.” Dissidents are not merely sick; they are malicious and sometimes satanic. The psychiatrist Adolf Albrecht Friedländer, an opponent of analysis, is a horned “Beelzebub,” according to Freud, who tells him off in person and then confesses to Jung that he had “a fiendishly good time” doing it; “I couldn’t get enough.” Jung quivers vicariously over the report: “I hope you roasted, flayed, and impaled the fellow.”

Jung can be even more vivid than Freud in expressing disgust and fantasizing revenge. The opposition makes him “feel the urgent need of a bath,” he says, and it’s a “pity there are never enough good men around to applaud loudly whenever these weaklings, mixtures of muck and lukewarm water, have to eat humble pie.”

Freud admits to a certain childishness in his own makeup but doesn’t recognize the megalomania that from time to time has him sounding like Ayn Rand: “when a man stands firm as a rock, all the tottering, wavering souls end by clinging to him for support.” He may advise Jung to treat the battle “with humour as I do except on days when weakness gets the better of me”—but that would be most days. Freud insists that his colleague not “regard me as the founder of a religion,” but a certain cultishness seems distinctly permissible. As late as 1910, Jung himself suggests to the master that psychoanalysis “thrives only in a very tight enclave of like minds,” and
even a year after that he’s asking: “May we know the names of the dissidents soon? In my view this purge is a blessing.”

In one of his first letters, Freud speaks of “the torments that can afflict an ‘innovator,’” and after his friendship with Jung has flowered makes a telling joke about his intellectual suffering: “sometimes it annoys me that no one abuses you—after all you too have some responsibility in the matter.” But even when Jung at last rises to full-throated rebellion, Freud himself will not abuse the younger man, at least not forthrightly. His own letters remain a model of passive aggression—as they have been from the beginning, when he told Jung: “I should be very sorry if you imagined for one moment that I really doubted you in any way.” Whether straightening him out on the subject of paranoia or playing him off against another disciple (“Apart from that, you have every advantage over him”), it has been Freud himself cranking the spin cycle that Jung speaks of being caught in: “The feeling of inferiority that often overcomes me when I measure myself against you has always to be compensated by increased emulation.”