My patients and colleagues didn’t seem to appreciate my new roles. From this date my reputation began to decline and my notoriety to rise. My college professor of English at Yale, Orville Boggles, was the first troublemaker.
A big, toothy man with tiny dull eyes, he had been coming to me off and on for six months to overcome a writing block. He hadn’t been able to do more than sign his name for three years, and in order to maintain his academic reputation as a scholar he had been reduced to digging out term papers he had written as a sophomore at Michigan State, making small revisions and getting the articles published in quarterlies. Since no one read them past the second paragraph anyway, he hadn’t been caught; in fact, on the basis of his impressive list of publications he had received tenure the year before he came to me.
I had been unenthusiastically working on his ambivalent feelings toward his father, his latent homosexuality and his false image of himself, when under the impetus of the dictates of the dice I suddenly found myself one day exploding.
‘Boggles,’ I said after he arrived one morning (I had always previously addressed him as Professor Boggles), ‘Boggles,’ I said, ‘what say we cut the shit, and get down to basics? Why don’t you consciously and publicly decide to quit writing?’
Professor Boggles, who had just lain down and hadn’t yet said a word, quivered like a huge sunflower leaf at the first breath of a storm.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why try to write?’
‘It is a pleasure I have long enjoyed –’
‘Merde.’
He sat up and looked toward the door as if he expected Batman to break in any moment and rescue him.
‘I came to you, not because I am neurotic, but in order to cure a very simple writing block. Now –’
‘You are a patient who came with a cold and who is dying of cancer.’
‘Now that you seem unable to cure the block you try to convince me not to write. I find this –’
‘You find this uncomfortable. But just imagine all the fun you could be having if you gave up trying to publish? Have you looked at a tree in the last six years?’
‘I’ve seen many trees. I want to publish, and I don’t know what you think you’re doing this morning.’
‘I’m letting down the mask, Boggles. I’ve been playing the psychiatrist game with you, pretending we were after big things like anal stage, object cathexis, latent heterosexuality and the like, but I’ve decided that you can only be cured by being initiated into the mysteries behind the façade, into the straight poop, so to speak. The straight poop, that’s symbolism. Boggles, that’s –’
‘I have no desire to be initiated –’
‘I know you don’t. None of us do. But I’m letting you pay me thirty-five dollars per hour, and I want to give you your money’s worth. First of all, I want you to resign from the university and announce to your department chairman, the board of trustees and to the press that you are going to Africa to re-establish contact with your animal origins.’
‘That’s nonsense!’
‘Of course it is. That’s the point. Think of the publicity you’ll get: “Yale professor resigns to seek Truth.” It’ll get a lot more play than your last article in the Rhode Island Quarterly on “Henry James and the London Bus Service.” Moreover –’
‘But why Africa?’
‘Because it has nothing to do with literature, academic advancement and full professorships. You won’t be able to fool yourself that you’re gathering material for an article. Spend a year in the Congo, try to get involved with a revolutionary group or a counter-revolutionary group, shoot a few people, familiarize yourself with the native drugs, let yourself get seduced by whatever comes along, male, female, animal, vegetable, mineral. After that, if you still feel you want to write about Henry James for the quarterlies, I’ll try to help you.’
He was sitting on the edge of the couch looking at me with nervous dignity. He said, ‘But why should you want me to stop wanting to write?’
‘Because as you are now, Boggles, and have been for forty-three years, you’re a dead loss. Absolutely. I don’t mean to sound critical, but absolutely. Deep down inside you know it, your colleagues know it and at all levels I know it. We’ve got to change you completely to make you worth taking money from. Normally I’d recommend that you have an affair with a student, but with your personality the only students who might open up for you would be worse off than you and no help.’
Boggles had stood up but I went serenely on.
‘What you need is a more extensive personal experience with cruelty, with suffering, hunger, fear, sex. Once you’ve experienced more fully these basics there might be some hope of a major breakthrough. Until then none.’
Old Boggles had his overcoat on now and with a toothy grimace was backing toward the door.
‘Good day, Dr Rhinehart, I hope you’re better soon,’ he said.
‘And a good day to you, Boggles. I wish I could hope the same for you, but unless you get captured by the Congolese rebels, or get sick in the jungle for eight months or become a Kurtzian ivory trader, I’m afraid there’s not much hope.’
I rose from behind my desk to shake hands with him, but he backed out the door. Six days later I got a polite letter from the president of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists (AAPP) noting that a patient of mine, a Dr Orville Boggles of Yale, had paranoic hallucinations about me and had sent a long, nasty, highly literary complaint to the AAPP about my behavior. I sent a note to President Weinstein thanking him for his understanding and a note to Boggles suggesting that the length of his letter to the AAPP indicated progress vis-à-vis his writing block. I also gave him permission to try to have his letter published in the South Dakota Quarterly Review Journal.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Jenkins,’ I said one morning to the masochist Milquetoast of Madison Avenue, ‘have you ever considered rape?’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Forced carnal knowledge.’
‘I … don’t understand how you mean that I should consider it.’
‘Have you ever daydreamed of killing someone or of raping someone?’
‘No. No, I never have. I feel almost no aggression toward anyone.’ He paused. ‘Except myself.’
‘I was afraid of that, Jenkins, that’s why we’d better give serious consideration to rape, theft or murder.’
Jenkins lay neatly and quietly on the couch through this whole interview, not once raising his voice or stirring a muscle.
‘You … you mean daydream about such actions?’ he asked.
‘I mean commit them. As it is, Jenkins, you’re becoming just another dirty old man, aren’t you?’
‘P-p-pardon?’
‘Spend most of your time lying on your crumb-filled bed reading porno and fantasizing about lovely girls who need you to save them. After they’ve narrowly missed being crushed by the landslide, or cut in two by the cultivator, or stabbed by the lunatic or burnt by the fire, you rescue them and they give you a spiritual kiss on the fingertips, right? But when do you reach a climax, Mr Jenkins?’
‘I … I don’t know what … I don’t