The Rest of The Master

by Colm Toibin

‘My Aunt Kate,’ Henry said,‘was very dramatic in her delivery. She told me that they had left him reading. The day was mild and they had taken us young boys for a walk. He was alone when the attack came; it appeared suddenly from nowhere, like a huge obscure shape in the night, an angry, broken, pecking bird of prey, squatting in the corner ready to take him, all black spirit, yet palpable, visibly there, hissing, come for him alone. He knew why it had appeared, she said; it had been sent to destroy him. From that moment, he was reduced to the state of an infant terrified and then terrified again until he believed that it would never go from him, whatever it was. When they found him, he was curled on the ground, his hands over his ears, whimpering, calling for them. William and I were two and a half and one, and were in turn terrified by the sight of his fear and the sound of his whimpering voice. Aunt Kate brought us instantly away. William, she said, was pale for days afterwards and would not sleep without his mother in the room. Neither of us, of course, has any memory of it.’ 

And thus, as you must have read, in a watering place, he met a lady, a certain Mrs Chichester, and he described to her his squatting, hissing beast. Mrs Chichester responded immediately: what had happened to him had happened to others and was a sign that he had come close to understanding the great plan, God’s dream for man, she said, and he must read the Swedish philosopher Swedenborg who understood these things as no one else did. During that time, it seems, my father took any new suggestion as vastly superior to the previous suggestion. In London he read two books by Swedenborg, even though he had foresworn reading, and in one of these books he found that what had occurred to him that afternoon was called a vastation, and nothing he ever heard again convinced him that it was not so. This vastation, it seemed, was a step on the road to the full understanding that God made us in his likeness, and that our urges and appetites, our thoughts and feelings are profoundly sanctified. Thus my father became happy again, and, filled with Swedenborg, believed it his mission to spread the truth to all mankind, at least to the English-speaking variety, and indeed, mainly in America, not, I should add, that any 
of them paid much attention.’ ‘Perhaps it explains why you have come back here,’ Gosse said. 

and
In the days after his father agreed that he could go to law school. Henry discovered Hawthorne. He knew his name, of course, as he knew Emerson and Thoreau, and he had glanced at some of his stories, paying him less attention than the two essayists because of a perceived level of dullness and bareness in the work he had read. They were simple moral tales about simple moral people, light and slight and tenderly trivial. Both Henry and Sargy Perry, with whom Henry discussed these matters, had agreed that literature at its most valuable and rich and intense was written in the countries which Napoleon had reigned over and attacked; literature lay in the places where Roman coins could be found in the soil. Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales reminded him and Perry of just that, tales which could have been told by their aunt about her aunt with all the social detail and sensuous landscape absent. 

This would be the fate, they felt, of anyone who tried to write about New England lives, they would have to confront the thinness of the social air, the absence of a system of manners and the presence of a stultifying system of morals. All of this, he thought, Would make any novelist miserable. There was no sovereign or court, no aristocracy, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, nor castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no literature. nor novels, no museums nor pictures. no political society, nor sporting class. lf these things are left out. he thought, for the novelist everything is left out. There In no flavour, no life to dramatize, merely paucity of feeling represented in paucity of tradition. Trollope and Balzac. Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers. or mad hairy schoolmasters had they been born in New England and condemned to live amongst its people. 

Henry was thus surprised when Perry spoke with awe of The Scarlet Letter, which he had just finished reading. Perry insisted that Henry must read it immediately, and seemed disappointed : few days later when Henry still had not begun the book. Henry had, in fact, tried the opening pages and found them almost laugh. ably ponderous, and then had been easily distracted by something else and left the novel aside. Now, trying once more, he believed that the semi-comic tone of the opening, with its talk of prisons and cemeteries and sweet moral blossoms, arose from the lack of a proper background, a varied social world. Hawthorne had replaced artistry with solemnity. This was, he thought, a puritan virtue, of which Henry’s grandfather, he was told, had been in full possession. He did not mind, he told Perry, reading about puritans, and he did not even mind having ancestors who embodied their virtues, but he did object somewhat to a book in Which they and their virtues, if you could really call them that, had seeped into the none. the very architecture of the work itself. 

On Perry's insistence, he kept the book close to him for seven! days as he busied himself with Mérimée’s stories, which he was attempting to translate, and a play by Alfred de Musset that had begun to fascinate him. Beside these, the lack of colour in Hawthorne: observations, the thinness of his characters and the slow. wooden tone in which he began did not entice Henry to spend more time with the book. He was thus thoroughly unprepared, when he embarked yet again upon its early pages, for what was to follow. 

The book's assault on his senses did not occur immediately; and even as it: spell began to work on him he was unaware that he was being pulled in and held. He could not tell at what moment The Scarlet Letter started to glow and take on the same power as one of the novels by Balzac which he had been reading. At intervals, once he had supped with his family and the night wore on, he put the book down, amazed at how Hawthorne had not bothered himself with the daily, petty meanness of New England. the comic idiosyncrasies of speech or deportment or behaviour. Hawthorne had avoided whimsy; he had eschewed pettiness. He had even kept choice and chance at arm’s length and had gone instead for intensity, taking a single character, a single action, a single place, a single set of beliefs and a single development and surrounding them with a dark and symbolic forest, a great dense place of sin and temptation. Hawthorne had not observed life, Henry thought, as much as imagined it, found a set of symbols and images which would set life in motion. From the very sparseness of the material, from the narrowness and frigidity of the society itself, from the very sense of undeveloped relations and uniform, colourless belief, Hawthorne had taken advantage of what was missing in New England and pressed on with a gnarled and unrelenting vision to create a story that now gripped its reader all through that summer’s night. 

Most of the books he read could not be discussed with anyone save Perry, or perhaps William, but now at table the next day he could ask his family about Hawthorne. Suddenly, his father became animated. Why, only six months earlier, he had met the novelist in question.When he travelled up to Boston for a meeting of the Saturday Morning Club, to which he had been specially invited, he found Hawthorne among the company. Some of the meeting was unsatisfactory, his father said, because Frederic Hedge could not stop chattering, and chattering high nonsense most of the time, so that it was difficult to hear what Hawthorne had to say. Not that he said much, he was very shy, but more than that, he was rustic and mannerless; he might have been happier saving the hay or walking on forest tracks. The main thing about him, Henry’s father remembered, was that, once the food came, he took no interest in anything else; he buried his eyes in the plate and ate with such voracity that no person dared to ask him a question. 

Aunt Kate said that years before in Boston she had known One of Hawthorne’s sisters, who was a pleasant lady, all the more pleas‘ ant for being extremely limited. The sister had told her that her brother’s marriage had crowned him, that up to then he had been a recluse, forcing his family to leave his meals outside the locked door of his room. He did not go out during the day,Aunt Kate said, and did not see the sun save through the small window in his room. He seldom chose to walk in Salem, where he lived, except at night. In the dusky hours, she said, his sister had told her that the novelist took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, she said, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of contact with life. And,Aunt Kate added ominously, his sister told her that Nathaniel had never made a single penny from all his work as a writer. 

Henry senior then asked Wilky and Bob for their view, since they had both studied at Sanborn with Julian, the novelist’s son. Even Wilky, who was seldom at a loss, could think of nothing to say except that Julian was a very fine fellow Bob told the table that he had believed until this moment that the elder Hawthorne was a minister. He thought only women wrote stories. 

Henry’s mother had not spoken until now. She interrupted the general laughter to say that she had known all of the Hawthorne sisters and that they had told her of an injury Nathaniel received While playing ball which had caused him much pain and difficulty over several years so that he was confined to bed. It was, apparently, this very confinement, she said drily, which led to his becoming a writer. 

and 
He was old enough at 56 to be able to deplore things with full conviction, 
and he deplored the girls’ accents and corrected them regularly as they moved from one museum to another. When Rosina, for example, admired the jewels in a Parisian shop window, Henry immediately corrected her. ‘Jew-el, not jool.’ 

And when she agreed that American girls did not nowadays speak out their vowels distinctly, he replied: ‘Vow-els, not vowls, Rosina.’ 

Soon, both sisters, obviously enjoying their cousin’s reprimands, began to find new outrages to commit against his fastidious ear. They reminded him now, more than at any other time, of the dead aunt who loved such an encounter and would relish the response a new remark could cause. The girls managed to stand their ground not by arguing with him, but by mocking him gently, dropping any consonant which came their way and using a modern idiom certain to irritate him.When Bay announced one morning that she needed to go upstairs to fix her hair, Henry asked her, ‘To fix it to what, or with what?’ 

and

William stared into the distance. "I said I was an American and had noted the controversy over the day of prayer (as a result of the defeat b the Boers) and suggested that the principle established b one of the early Montana settlers might be the most useful.
"And what was that?"
"Our settler was met by a very formidable and angry grizzly bear and he fell on his knees and prayed,
'O Lord, I ain't never asked you for help and ain't goin to to ask you for none now. But for pity's sake, O Lord, please don't help the bear'.

More Jung

Jung’s earthiness was off-putting to everyone; from Toni and Emma to his children and grandchildren, all were repulsed by much of his behavior, especially his eating habits and especially at breakfast. He ate soft-boiled eggs every day, breaking them into a bowl of bread and smacking his lips, slurping them up without benefit of napkin. Emma averted her eyes and ignored him, while the children wanted to but never dared to ask him to remove the dripping yellow crusts that formed on his moustache or around his chin.

and

Jaime swore to himself, to Tony Luhan, and to anyone else who would listen, that if he got “any stuff” that might be useful to Jung, he would pass it along, but he would not “sacrifice the Pueblo of Tao, for the sake of museum anthropology.” At the same time, he made clear to Jung his general dislike of the Taos Pueblo culture: “Pueblo psychology is a nasty one, too full of intrigue, lying, suspicion, gossip too far removed from the big open life. These Indians are petrified in an attitude of submissive obedience to a labyrinth of secret rules and orders.” He much preferred the openness of the California Indians “and their oneness with nature.” 

From Jaime’s account, it appears that he and Jung both tried to evolve a theory of how Pueblo psychology might lit into and contribute to Jung’s personality types. They hoped to present a system showing how jung’s position differed from the standard anthropological view held by, among others, Lévy-Bruhl who posited that primitive peoples did not find local and prelogical thought mutually exclusive. Jaime believed that the Pueblo exhibited behavior that showed balance among all four of Jung’s functions, that “each man carries the whole burden equally balanced.” He asked Cary to check with Jung to make sure his impression was accurate, and she replied that Jung “agreed with all his intuitions.” 

Cary also reported that when Jung was with Antonio Mirabal, he had “the extraordinary sensation that [he] was talking to an Egyptian priest of the fifteenth century before Christ.” Mirabal was a complex man, a hybrid who was at ease in both the general American and the Native American cultures, a sophisticated political impresario as well as a revered spiritual leader. Although he affected a quiet and seemingly indifferent manner, he manipulated officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on matters of tribal importance and rendered them all but helpless when he persuaded George Porter to harness his considerable political clout on behalf of the Pueblo nation. Mountain Lake was also the only Hopi elder who listened to Jung’s theories about the mythology of the sun and responded in intellectual kind by divulging various Hopi myths about the sun, the moon, and the state of the world in general. However, when all Mountain Lake’s remarks are taken as a whole and they can only be filtered through Jung’s recall of what he said, because that is the only extant account -it is clear that what he told Jung was superficial and guarded, little more than pleasing generalities already known to the public at large. When he invited Jung to attend celebrations within the Pueblo, they were on the level of the “Buffalo Dance,” a public ceremonial occasion written about patronizingly by the local paper.

and

Hislop was curious about what they would do once they got to the mountain, Jung told him he planned to collect the myths and dreams of two tribes, the Karamoiong and the Sabei. Hislop tried discreetly to tell Jung something he obviously did not know, that these two tribes were not even in Kenya, but in a “closed district” within Uganda, where outsiders were forbidden. As they had no documents authorizing entry into restricted tribal lands, they would have to apply to a separate nation for a permit. When they seemed “disconcerted,” he switched to what he thought was a safer topic: how they expected to communicate with the natives when and if they ever reached them. 

Jung explained that he had spent six weeks learning Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa. Hesitating to appear as a “prophet of doom,” Hislop nevertheless felt the responsibility to point out that such primitive tribes were unlikely to know Swahili, which anyway was weak in the expression of abstract ideas and emotions, and the two native tribal languages were even less likely to include concepts. Undeterred, Jung replied that “they had their own methods of getting results.” Shortly after, they took their leave. 

Whether the story originated with Hislop or with reporters who observed the trio during their time in Nairobi, the East African Standard, the largest newspaper in the area, ran a long article ridiculing Jung for thinking he could do research without knowing the native languages and concluding that even if he did it, “the natives would not tell him anything.”23 

“It was a queer thing,” Hislop recalled, but he never heard another word of the Bugishu expedition, even though he had been “on the look-out for news for many years. Unless they had resources and prepared lines of work about which they did not tell me, I cannot help thinking that their safari could hardly have produced any useful results.” 

and

Jung was fifty in 192 5. On his birthday, “there was a beautiful sunset, the waterfowl called to one another, a chill night wind came down from the mountains, and [he] drank an extra bottle of wine and smoked a birthday cigar.” One of his friends thought the occasion should be celebrated with a Festschrift, and Jung thought it “touching.” No volume commemorated the birthday, but in retrospect it was an important milestone. His fiftieth year divided his professional life almost too neatly in half, with the years before distinguished by the evolution and development of a theory, and the years after noted for its mature expression. In the first half, lasting roughly until the end of the 1920s, his professional activity shifted from the original emphasis on clinical research to an intense study of comparative histories, cultures, societies, and religions. In the last half, he replaced his attempts to interpret the human psyche through the analysis of individuals with other kinds of explorations toward defining the collective unconscious, primarily through his study of alchemy. His personal life saw several dramatic shifts as well around 1925 , when a new group of individuals came to Zurich to study his psychology. Some remained for the rest of their lives and became central figures in assisting him to develop it; others returned to their homelands to practice analytical psychology and make his theory truly international. All these persons came for therapy but also, and sometimes with greater eagerness, for admission to his English seminars at the Psychological Club. Because they considered him more a teacher than a physician, they were responsible for changing his title through a kind of informal osmosis: “Dr. Jung” became “Professor Jung” for the rest of his life.

Anatole Broyard

I wonder now: Were my sisters and I ever unself-conscious or oblivious of our parents? Did we think in terms of ”candor”? I ’m sure that, except for the traditional infant pose on a white fur rug, we would not have dreamed of allowing ourselves to be photographed without clothes. We felt that it was bad enough to have to show our naked faces. Like primitives, we were afraid of having our personalities sucked up into the camera.

We would not have been able to understand why anyone would want to photograph us playing, for playing was not yet seen as a socially significant activity. For us, a photograph was more like a visit to the doctor, or a preview of Judgment Day. We got all dressed up, scrubbed our hands and faces, tried to look as neutral as possible in order to deny what we could not anticipate. Our chins were generally lifted, as if we were trying to keep our heads above water.

And, of course, we were photographed in black and white. I don’t know whether there was color film in those days, but we didn’t think of life as colorful; it would not have occurred to us. Nor did we find it necessary to smile, we smiled only when something was funny. Under the searching eye of the camera, we stood up straight, our hands at our sides, our feet together like little soldiers, as in "Onward, Christian Soldiers.” 

We gazed out of our faces like people who had never seen themselves m a mirror. We did not think of ourselves as having "identities." These photographs were simply ”stages on Me's way," as Kierkegaard called one of his books. We obeyed the camera as if it were a gun and bore witness to the stealthy passage of time. We had no idea of embellishing the outward appearance of our lives; I believe we felt that you could not lie to a camera, that it would inevitably show you up.

The circumstances of the pictures were determined more by the available light than by any consideration of the environment. We relied on the sun to supply that light, to be the agent of our reproduction. In the earlier pictures, which were taken in New Orleans, the sun was ferocious. In fact, it rather bleached us out, left us looking pale and insubstantial, like dried flowers.

After we moved to New York, when I was six years old, we were always photographed on the roof of the brownstone in which we lived. My father believed that the roof was the only place where there was sufficient light. While he never found it, he never stopped pursuing brightness. He seemed to doubt the potency of the sun in New York and insisted on facing us directly into it. And of course, we frowned and squinted, and as a result our life looked sadder or angrier than it may have been.

My mother never took our pictures, always my father. She disdained mere images, she had produced the originals. Nor, in most instances, would either of my parents enter the photographs themselves, except for my father’s shadow at our feet. It was as if they felt that with adulthood their lives were completed and needed no further documentation.

Moving back and forth, side to side, shouting contradictory instructions, my father fiddled with the lens and peered through the viewfinder. And though we struggled to maintain our neutral expressions, he sometimes took so long that we betrayed ourselves. Every now and then, there is a picture With a personality peering out, like a deer trapped at night in the headlights of a car.

Once we moved to New York, we inhabited, in the family album, a bleak landscape of tarred surfaces, chimneys, tin cornices and clotheslines. People who did not have backyards hung clothes on the roof in those days, and we were posed against sheets, towels, tablecloths, shirts, dresses, nightgowns, pajamas and underwear. My sisters and I were aware of these intimate articles fluttering behind us and this awareness filtered in some subtle way into our attitudes.

Some time ago, Mary McCarthy wrote that the American personality always looked as if it had just had a bad haircut. That was us. We certainly had bad haircuts. After leafing through the old and new albums, I realize how far Americans have come in making themselves look better. Almost every child today seems attractive, or at least passable looking, in his long hair.

1 think they have lost something, though, in this cosmetic evolution. With our ears sticking out, our unframed faces, our secretive mouths and wary eyes, we looked as if we realized what we were in for, as if we knew that something difficult was expected of us and that we would probably have to try to do it.

I’ve been thinking about the family albums of my children’s children. I suppose that by their time, there will be nothing but movie cameras, that stillness, especially the monumental stillness of my childhood pictures, will be thought unnatural, a morbid shirking of a child’s duty to enjoy himself while he can. Probably there will be television cassettes and the children’s first faltering steps-their first everythings- will be repeated in instant replay.

Then, as American life continues its liberating advance, these tapes will be erased and my grandchildren will step out boldly into the future without the embarrassment of a past.

And

attempt. 

There was the time, for example, when the family drove down from Martha’s Vineyard one wet night to find that we were locked out. Idon’t carry a house key, for the same reason that I never carry coins: I can’t fit them into my jeans. My wife didn’t have her key, either. She is a dancer and likes to call attention to her creativity by disarming little bouts of absent-mindedness. 

My children, whom we had already awakened, were waiting for me to rise to the occasion, to solve the problem in a manner that would provide a model for them all through their lives. My wife stood apart, as if to say, ‘This is where we separate the men from the boys.” In the back of the station wagon, both of our dogs began to bark. 

And

 I dreaded these excursions, these escapades. To me, they were like a suicide pact. Didn’t my parents know that the world was just waiting for a chance to come between us? 

Inside, we were a family, but outside we were immigrants, bizarre in our differences. I thought that people stared at us, and my face grew hot. At any moment, I expected my father and mother to expose their tribal rites, their eccentric anthropology, to the gape of strangers. 

Anyone who saw me with my family knew too much about me. Nobody is so secret about his loves as a boy of six or seven. Why, I wouldn’t even confess my infatuation for a girl on the block, and here I was, exhibiting in public the most intimate relationship I was ever to know. 

To go out with my parents was to suffer for the second time the trauma of birth. My mother, who was mildly stout, might as well have been the Venus of Willendorf, a primitive fertility figure. My father was a rogue male, a creature of such reckless masculinity that I always thought of him as breaking the law. 

While I loved them, I was uneasy about our relationship. It struck me as a terrible incongruity, especially for a boy, to have originated in my mother’s belly. It was such a derivative way for me to have arrived in the world. I would rather have been store-bought, instead of homemade. 

My father flustered me more than my mother, for on him fell the full weight of patriarchy, and he was not a man to shirk it. I remember in particular a boat ride to Bear Mountain. This being a sporting occasion, my father elected to wear a pair of plus fours, or knickers. He even went so far as to pull a beret, another installment in his unpredictability, over his unruly hair. Walking beside him, I shut my eyes, 

guiding myself by the brown. ne lohaen the metal taps on the toes ang &-tip shoes. 

We had come up from New Orleans, where I was born in the French Quarter. For a bel homme, a galant, like my father, it was no simple matter to walk along the street. He had to strut, stretching and swiveling his head on his neck, arching his back and undulating his shoulders, flourishing his arms in counterpoint to his legs. I would watch him out of the comer of my eye and despair. I half-expected him to break into the Camel Walk, the Shimmy Shewobble, the Black Bottom or the Mess Around. 

I wanted desperately to run away from home. My mother and father were too folksy for me, too colorful. Conformity is the first passion of small boys. Originality, if it comes at all, arrives much later. My love for these two misfits, these character actors, was too heavy to bear. 

Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel. We buried our families in the common grave of the generation gap, silenced them with the so-called failure of communication. Parents became our shtick, a whetstone for our wit. Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity. 

I became an amnesiac, a flimsy Frankenstein monster of pop sociology. Isaw myself as spawned by time, as flies were once thought to be spontaneously generated in offal. I deracinated and rationalized my image. For my new friends and me, parents had become synonymous with the establishment, an outmoded, authoritarian and absurd institution. 

Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them. Now, in my middle age, I understand at last that personality is a conspiracy. I’m grateful to my mother and father for their quirkiness, for this gave me a glimpse of the range of styles, the richness of being. I thank them for their irrationality, which was a grand tour of unmapped territories. Especially, Ilove them for not being modern, not dumping me into the polluted river of progress before I was ready to protect myself. 

Now that I have a wife and family of my own, I’ve begun to feel what it is. When we go out together, I do my own share of strutting, and I wonder how my children feel about it. Am] an embarrassment to them, or an accepted part of the human comedy? Have they joined my conspiracy, or are they just pretending? Do they understand that, after all those years of running away from home, I am still trying to get back?