Month: March 2012

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: AMBER FLORA THOMAS

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MAGICIAN
By Amber Flora Thomas

To the conjurer of rabbits out of black hats, the escapist
down to his final act of vanishing beneath fifty pounds of chains,
you are born. To his legacy of tricks and Houdini-style
metamorphosis just waiting to spin out

into the San Francisco morning, where delivery trucks
back up to doors, caution lights sending yellow
like a heartbeat against the night.

He puts his hand over your mouth. Are you
the fire-eater? You come direct from the illusionist
to catapult from the black raft of his blessing.
The infant devotion: eyes newly open

believe the world: murky, against the white walls
ambient motions. You’ll play a charmed rodent, and disappear
beneath his black cape. Another feat of possession.

Another vat of bottled smoke. He loosens knots,
saws the box open, rips a red scarf from his sleeve.
The silk becomes a dove becomes a rabbit
and the cages hide in the floor.


Today’s poem is from the book The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Amber Flora Thomas was born and raised in San Francisco, earned her BA at Humboldt State University, and earned her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012) and the Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. She has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Dominican University of California, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Editor’s Note: I was introduced to Amber Flora Thomas when she read with Peggy Shumaker and Li-Young Lee at a Red Hen Press reading held in New York’s Poets House. When she introduced today’s poem, she told the following story. Her parents were hippies living in San Francisco’s Haight district in the 1960’s and 1970’s. When Thomas was born, her father was asked to indicate his occupation on her birth certificate. He wrote “magician.” A child of San Francisco hippies myself, I couldn’t help but laugh. My father, too, would have enjoyed this. Listening to Thomas read this lyrical poem wrought with finely-chiseled images, I was transported to world—at once real and magical—conjured from thin air by a father for his daughter.

Want to see more by Amber Flora Thomas?
The Poetry Foundation
Buy The Rabbits Could Sing from University of Alaska Press
Buy Eye of Water from University of Pittsburgh Press

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LI-YOUNG LEE

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By Li-Young Lee:


THE GIFT

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.


FROM BLOSSOMS

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.


Today’s poems are from the book Rose (BOA Editions Ltd., 1986), and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno’s jails, fled Indonesia with his family. Between 1959 and 1964 they traveled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, until arriving in America.

Mr. Lee studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York, College at Brockport. He has taught at various universities, including Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of four books of poetry and one memoir and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards.

Editor’s Note: At his recent reading with Peggy Shumaker and Amber Flora Thomas (held in New York’s Poets House and sponsored by Red Hen Press), I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear Li-Young Lee read. Not only to experience this performance, but to shake the poet’s hand and tell him how much his words have meant to me, how his poems above all others have been a vessel for me in my grief.

Between my father’s passing and seeing Mr. Lee speak I read Rose cover to cover, perpetually weeping. When tears would not come to me, though I felt the need to express them, it was this book that opened me up and enabled release. I cannot read Lee’s simple, sincere, and elegant poetic contemplations of the loss of his father without becoming one with him in his grief, and in so doing becoming one with my own, as I must.

Lee’s words and thoughts paint themselves into the mind’s eye like the most finely-crafted calligraphy. Simple beauty that defies the painstaking art required to make it. “O, to take what we love inside, / to carry within us an orchard.” I can scarcely conceive of a poet who better exemplifies what poetry ought to be.

Want to see more by Li-Young Lee?
Buy Rose from Boa Editions Ltd.
Poets.org
Poetry Foundation

The Possible Is Monstrous: A Book Review

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The Possible Is Monstrous: A Book Review

by Okla Elliott

[The following review originally appeared in The Southeast Review.]

The Possible Is Monstrous
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (translated by Daniele Pantano)
Black Lawrence Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9826228-1-0
$17.00

Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 and died in 1990, meaning he saw WWII, its direct aftermath, the entire Cold War, and the advent of post-modernism. His work can generally be described as experimental, philosophical, and political, with themes that reflect the major world events and European cultural concerns during his lifetime. Dürrenmatt is best known as a playwright and a novelist, but his nonfiction and poetry are equally impressive. Unfortunately, Dürrenmatt’s poetry, which incorporates the historical events of his lifetime as well as philosophical meditations on those events, has been largely unavailable to English speakers—until now, that is.

Given its relative obscurity, most non-German speakers are unfamiliar with Dürrenmatt’s poetry. He is a frequent practitioner of the longer poem, and The Impossible Is Monstrous offers us a sizable sampling of these. What is most impressive about Dürrenmatt’s longer poems is how he maintains movement and breath in a way that makes the poems feel much shorter, despite their weighty subject matter and length. He writes occasionally in rhyme and meter, with the majority of his poems being in free verse. A shorter poem exemplary of his overall style is “Dramaturgic Advice,” reproduced here in its entirety:

Don’t give us any profound talk
Don’t add to the mystery

It’s not the word
Create a shape

Three men at a table
What they say is not important

They want to do right
But the dice are cast

Who boards the wrong train
May run back in it
But arrives where he didn’t
want to go

Here we have the lyric-philosophic tone Dürrenmatt uses in several other poems in the book. We also find another common theme in the book—theatre. Several of the poems are choruses from plays that can be read as stand-alone works, and Dürrenmatt discusses theatre as an art and his own particular theatrical works. Done differently, this could be a weakness, but the way Dürrenmatt handles it only adds to the reader’s pleasure. As we see in “Dramaturgic Advice,” the poem is not limited by its interest in theatre but rather made larger and more interesting, made to carry extra meaning(s) because of it. It is a poem about life, but with that title, it becomes a poem about art, representation, and meaning-making as well.

Dürrenmatt’s free verse poems—their tone, underlying music, and content—come across wonderfully in Pantano’s translations. Pantano also solidly handles the much more difficult task of translating formal verse. For example, in “O World of Men and Murders” (a 50-line poem), the first four lines “O Welt der Männer und der Morde, / Voll Schmach, voll Haß, voll grauser Tat, / Hinunter schlingt jetzt deine Horde / Der Hölle Maul samt deiner Saat” become in English “O world of men and murders, / Shameful, hateful, full of grisly deeds, / Hell consumes your hordes / Along with your seed.” Pantano has changed the rhyme from ABAB to ABCB, which is a good compromise between doing excessive violence to the content in order to retain all of the form or getting rid of the formal aspects entirely and merely doing a prose translation. After those opening four lines, he abandons this tactic for most of the poem (though there is an occasional off-rhyme), and then ends the translation with the same rhyme replacement move. He therefore begins and ends with strong hints of the rhyme in the original and has occasional reminders throughout the poem, yet he does not lose anything by way of content. In another poem, “To Unchain Man’s Chains,” Pantano cleverly orders the syntax of his English so as to have the word “chain” (or some variation on it) end seven of the twelve lines of the poem. Dürrenmatt’s original has six of the twelve lines end with the German equivalent of variations on “chain,” though his poem is more structured and every line has a rhyme (in the pattern ABAB ACAC ADAD). Pantano has, therefore, more or less used the same tactic here again. He retained the word repetition/rhyme so as to reproduce the general effect of the poem, but he didn’t slavishly chain himself, as it were, to the poem’s form, thus allowing him also to reproduce the content more faithfully. And since it is a dual-language book, if you can even just sound out the noises of the German, you can get the exact original music from the German, and then you have the English for the literal meaning.

The inclusion of the German alongside the English also increases the book’s value as a scholarly text, and that’s not the only aspect that makes it useful in this respect. The Possible Is Monstrous also includes a short scholarly essay by Peter Rüedi (also translated by Pantano) on Dürrenmatt’s poetry, as well as a longish editor’s note on his poetry. There are also three pages of end notes to help readers not familiar with German or Swiss literary figures, works, cities, etc. All of these scholarly aspects, none of which are intrusive on the reading of the poems themselves, make the book ideal for the classroom or for research on Dürrenmatt’s poetry (of which, thanks to this volume, there can be much more).

In the final analysis, Pantano has done both scholars and lovers of poetry alike a service with this (long overdue) selection of Dürrenmatt’s best poetry, and his translations are accurate, generally excellent, and, I predict, destined to become the standard English versions. The book is well designed and printed, adding another nice book (as object and as cultural product) to Black Lawrence Press’s growing list. The Possible Is Monstrous is worthy of serious attention and should be in every academic library and on every poet’s bookshelf.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PEGGY SHUMAKER

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BEYOND WORDS, THIS LANGUAGE
By Peggy Shumaker

The morning I was born
                       you held my hand.

The morning you died
                       I held your hand.


What’s left
                       to forgive?



Today’s poem appears in Gnawed Bones (Red Hen Press, 2010), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She’s at work on Toucan Nest, a book of poems set in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press.

Editor’s Note: I recently had the extreme pleasure of seeing Peggy Shumaker read with Amber Flora Thomas and Li-Young Lee at New York’s Poets House, at an event sponsored by Red Hen Press. It was one of the most moving and charged readings I’ve attended, and Peggy Shumaker delivered a deliberate, thoughtful performance. Today’s poem was recited from memory—Shumaker’s eyes locked with the audience—and tears ran down my cheeks.

On my way into the world, my father held me. On his way out, I held him. This was a gift. Being a reader and writer of poems is also a gift; an entry into shared experience, an outlet for the personal.

Want to see more by Peggy Shumaker?
Peggy Shumaker Official Website
Purchase Gnawed Bones from Red Hen Press
Read, Watch, and Listen to Peggy’s work online

What I Have Lived For

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800px-Bertrand_Russell_transparent_bg.png

 

Commentary by Okla Elliott

 

The following is the prologue to Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, which I recommend very highly to any lover of philosophy, twentieth century history, and lively characters. Russell was one of the greatest minds the human species has produced, and he has been one of my heroes since my undergrad years. The following passage is some of the most powerful and accurate language I have had the pleasure of reading. When I first found it many years ago (as a student worker in the university library, where I occasionally read the books I was supposed to be shelving), I felt an immediate kinship with Russell. I have been rereading his work lately, along with the work of his student Wittgenstein, and came across the passage again. I find it strikes home even more today than years ago when I first encountered it.

…

What I Have Lived For

by Bertrand Russell

 

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BONNIE ARNING

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DEATH LONG DISTANCE
By Bonnie Arning

The night you died I tried to find a sign
of your passing. Something obvious:
dry leaves swept up in a dust devil, a spider
the red of your hair. It was you

who taught me to make a bird by hooking my thumbs
and inching apart my fingers. Fitting then,
how your doctor should use that motion
to mimic the tumor as it swooped across your back.

We sent you to die twelve-hundred miles from
your stone bird bath and the chiropractor
who never left his wife for you, hooked
to a mechanical bed scribbling journal entries like,

today I ate an apple and felt my hair sprouts
shift and glow. I should have called—I should have
asked a nurse to hold the phone to your ear
while I sang shantih shantih shantih in a soft voice.

Why didn’t I have the courage to tell you, death
is no betrayal—die when you want to. The chemo,
the injections, the amputated leg: you did it all
for us. Instead of going to your service

I should draw faces on the foam heads
that hold your wigs. I should draw your face
in eyeliner all over my room. Come back—
the trees here are hungry for your ashes.

Yesterday I glimpsed movement in the milk-fire
of your rough-cut healing crystals. Energy
in the palpitating ribbon of distant heat. Wasps
swarm and ride each wave. You—

swarm and ride each wave.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in 2River View, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Bonnie Arning is a poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently she is pursuing an MFA from the University of New Mexico and acts as the managing editor of Blue Mesa Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Cream City Review, Gargoyle and 2River View.

Editor’s Note: My father passed away on February 26, 2012. I had found, and loved, this poem before my father took to his deathbed. Having taken a bereavement leave from this series, upon my return this feels like the right poem for reentry.

Today’s poem reminds me of the many blessings inherent in my father’s passing. That, despite living 2,500 miles away, I was able to be at his bedside in hospice, to coddle and love him on his way out of this world as he did for me, so many years ago, on my way in. That I was able to sing in his ear and tell him, over and over, how loved he was, that “death is no betrayal—die when you want to.”

Bonnie Arning, in her beautiful, simple words and aching truths that emerge from the depths of grief, has shared with the world a poem that allows for communion within a space where communion can feel both critical and unfathomable.

Want to see more by Bonnie Arning?
Blue Mesa Review
2River View

The Jackpot

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The Jackpot

by Letitia Trent

The monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough.
-Adam Philip

We are too flush

our bosky hedge funds
are fecund—
we calculate the slow
growth the return

but let’s try to poormouth
again I’ll be Cinderella
pre-slipper and you
be a cockney starveling

we’ll settle
in the slums together
hold struck matches—
our barren grate

won’t bloom—
against our fingers
where they have purpled
in December

we’ll wolf cold
casseroles of aspic and crackers
afterward still famished

we’ll shake off our
poor white delicates
and glut until surfeited see

how easy
it can be—the slow slide
soft as
a rummage sale t-shirt—

when you have nothing else
to say take me
into your alms
and mean it?

***

Letitia Trent has had work appear in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, and Blazevox, among others. Her chapbooks are Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, One Perfect Bird, is available from Sundress Publications. She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University’s The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. She writes film review for the blog Bright Wall in a Dark Room. The above poem is included in One Perfect Bird and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Robert McAlmon’s Psychoanalyzed Girl and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

Robert McAlmon’s “Psychoanalyzed Girl”

and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

by Chase Dimock

Last fall, I wrote an article for this journal that argued for renewed interest in the life and works of American expatriate author Robert McAlmon. As a writer, publisher, and connoisseur of the Parisian nightlife and artistic community, McAlmon was at the center of most of the lives and works of the now romanticized era of the Lost Generation in Paris. Yet, for those of you who (like I) enjoyed Woody Allen’s nostalgic ode to these artists in Midnight in Paris, you will notice that McAlmon does not make an appearance in the film. While Woody Allen’s vision of the expatriate community gilds the bars and bistros of Montparnasse as a golden age, McAlmon’s own contemporaneous literary renditions of the era are pessimistic, dark, and cynical. For McAlmon, the Lost Generation was truly lost–morally, psychologically, philosophically, sexually lost artists who managed to brilliantly wring out their despair onto canvases and into novels between bouts of boozing, fighting, and crying.

Early in his period of expatriation, McAlmon wrote “The Psychoanalyzed Girl” as one of several collected vignettes on the characters he met on the streets of Montparnasse.  The story below comes from McAlmon’s first book of fiction, A Hasty Bunch. James Joyce himself suggested the title to McAlmon, commenting on the speed with which he wrote the stories and their roughness. By reading just a few sentences of the story, it is apparent that Joyce’s judgment is well justified. “The Psychoanalyzed Girl” should be considered part of McAlmon’s juvenilia as its awkward phrasings search for the more polished voice of ironic detachment and sardonic wit that would come with his later, more mature work.

Nonetheless what I find fascinating about this piece is its place as a cultural artifact of the influence of psychoanalysis on the Lost Generation of American writers. McAlmon’s opinion in this story is none too favorable. He satirizes the hyperawareness and self-centeredness that psychoanalytic therapy causes in his friend Dania, depicting her as perpetually self-analyzing and becoming progressively more alienated from her own reality as she obsesses over self-knowledge at the expense of self-experience.

Written in 1922, McAlmon’s short story testifies to the sudden rise in popularity of psychoanalysis in America in the 20’s. Freud made his first visit to America along with Carl Jung and others in 1909 and gave a series of five lectures at Clark University to both academic and lay audiences. The fact that psychoanalysis would become widely adopted in America in just over a decade after his visit wildly exceeded what Freud and his contemporaries thought was possible. As Sanford Gifford writes:

“Freud had an abiding distaste for America and a mistrust of Americans. He attributed this, half whimsically, to the effect of American food on his digestion. But his real fears were based on the American propensity for popularization, for  the dilution of analysis with the base metal of psychotherapy and for American opposition to lay analysis.” (631)

Furthermore, Freud initially doubted that psychoanalysis would catch on in America due to its lingering history of Puritanism. In January of 1909, Freud wrote to Jung in a letter “I also think that once [the Americans] discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great.” (as cited by Benjamin 124)

What Freud could not have predicted back in 1909 was the great cultural shift that would take place in America shortly after World War One that would produce the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation of the 20s. Nathan Hale explains:

“In America, rebellious intellectuals supplied an important sustaining agent in the spread of psychoanalysis—an enthusiastic clientele. The writers in the group were the first to publicize psychoanalysis…the Great War provoked a disillusioned turn to their rebellion against traditional American culture…[they] launched attacks on the entrenched American faith in morality and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon race and culture… [and emphasized] the importance of the sexual instinct and the  evils of repression” (Hale as quoted by Benjamin 124).

In the wake of a devastating war that killed millions, the young artists and intellectuals of the 20s questioned the traditional values of nationalism, capitalism, and religion that led to such bloodshed. Psychoanalysis’ anti-moralistic penetration into the repressed regions of the human psyche proved to be a valuable method for understanding the en masse brutality of WWI and imagining alternative social and political structures. Cultural revolution could come from a revolution of the self.

Yet, while some thinkers and writers explored Freud’s theories for the sake of these more noble pursuits, for the majority of Americans, Freud’s scandalous discovery of the sexual libido as the root of all human endeavors was met with a sensationalism that overshadowed the intricacies of his method. Not only did Freud’s fear of American popularization come true by the mid-20s, but he himself became a part of the American popular culture as well. Daniel Akst writes:

“During the 1924 murder trial of Leopold and Loeb, Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormack cabled Freud with an offer of $25,000 or, as he put it in telegraphese, “anything he name,” to come to Chicago and psychoanalyze the killers. Later that year the movie producer Samuel Goldwyn (who called Freud “the greatest love specialist in the world”) offered him $100,000 to write for the screen or work as a consultant in Hollywood.”

Freud rapidly became known as the guru of all things sexual at a time when American popular culture was entering an age of sexual liberation. These attempts to commodify psychoanalysis for popular entertainment only served to reinforce Freud’s conviction that America was savagely materialistic and that its people sublimated their libido through money.

Beyond the fascination with the scandalous, psychoanalysis also gained popularity because its individualizing attention catered to the focus on the self that the rebels of the Jazz Age wished to cultivate. This revolution of the self with an infinitely explorable unconscious gave the individual’s naturally narcissistic sense of self-involvement a wholly new dimension of self to devote attention to that could be justified as the noble pursuit of mental health. There was now more self to fixate upon with varying degrees of fascinated self-love or loathing. McAlmon’s story mocks the results of the American popularization of psychoanalysis with Dania’s claim that she has “the mother, and brother complex.” This phrasing suggests the dilution of the psychoanalytic method that Freud feared where structural analysis of the psyche is replaced with the unqualified diagnosis of a few “complexes” that sound clinical, but ultimately mean nothing.

The young McAlmon recognizes the roots of pop-psychology, in which psychoanalysis would be progressively reduced to a few simple, memorable phrases for one’s own self-diagnosis and self-fascination. This was the “selling” of psychoanalysis in America via the reification of method and analysis into portable vocabulary. Under the belief that constant self-analysis is helping her to know herself intimately, Dania is instead presented as becoming more estranged from herself. Replying to Dania’s complaint that she cannot compel herself to pursue a handsome man that she sees everyday, the narrator states,  “Why stand on the threshold of ‘experience’ eternally saying that you don’t live, but merely exist? You must set Rome afire if you’re going to sit watching the flames with enjoyment.” McAlmon calls attention to how constant self-analysis creates a substitute for one’s own existence. Instead of the risk of participating in her own life, she settles for the pleasure of commenting on herself from a distance. Pop-psychology satisfies the basic human will to knowledge, in which the satisfaction of having neatly identified and labeled our “complexes” is confused for the real benefit of actually working through them. She “enjoys her unhappiness”. McAlmon’s psychoanalyzed girl is the alienated subject of modernity who fetishizes her estrangement from her own existence at the expense of her ability to act upon it. Whether or not he knew it, McAlmon’s story in truth satirizes Freud’s nightmare of popularization and not the true psychoanalytic method itself.

 

The Psychoanalyzed Girl

By Robert McAlmon

 

Dania wasn’t in the room five minutes before she was telling whoever it was that sat near her that, “I am all tangled up psychologically. I have the mother, and brother complex.”

She was a strange girl, Dania, that is to a person not used to strange girls, and people who live in “Bohemian Quarters”. In Paris she could be seen walking about the Montparnasse district with a Paisley shawl thrown over her shoulders, a many-colored beribboned hat, mauve stockings, or pale green—some exotic colour always—and the skirt that showed beneath her coat made of Paisley shawl was generally a corded silk one with red, white, and green, broad and thread, stripes.

Needless to say people noticed her as she went by. They might have noticed her anyway, had she dressed quietly, because her eyes were soft brow, shaded with impossibly long eyelashes; her skin was bronze olive, and days when it might look sallow, Dania knew just how much rouge to put on to give her cheeks a warm glowing appearance. Very narrow shoulders she had drawn up within herself usually. She contradicted her own manner, giving alternately a quiet, mouselike impression, a hard embitteredly sophisticated one, and again an impression of confused, wounded naive childishness.

“I don’t know how to be happy, that’s me; don’t know how to have a good time, and when all these Americans here want me to go around I can’t find any pleasure in the noisy things they do”, she said, one day as I walked down the Boulevard Raspail with her. “There! That’s me. Analyzing myself again. Why can’t I leave myself alone?”

“You are suffering from life rather than from sickness, Dania”, I commented. “Don’t look so hard for happiness, and stay away from the Bohemians at the Rotonde who are neither labourers, artists, nor intelligent—only moping incompetents, scavengers of the art world.”

One day Dania hailed me from across the street, so we joined each other and when walking down the street together. It wasn’t till afterwards that I remembered how artfully Dania managed to stop and ask a direction of a young Frenchman, who was a helper about a piano van-wagon.

After talking about where a certain street was for five minutes, very conscious that his eyes were admiring her with open curiosity and desire in them, she came on saying: “Ain’t he the handsome devil though.”

“There you are, Dania; you say you want experience. He’ll take you on. Look back. His eyes are following you yet.”

The young Frenchman was a swarthy, black-eyed being; with lithe energy. He was wearing a red shirt, and had a red scarf bound about his waist making a corsage for him. Except for Dania, he’d simply have been part of the local colour of the quarter for me. Now I wondered whether he was from the South of France, or of Spanish or Italian descent. There’d been boldness, respect too, in his attitude towards Dania. He must have been Paris bred not to have had some shyness in him.

Another day I ran into Dania, and we passed the young Frenchman again, loading furniture into a van. He looked at Dania, and an expectant look came into his eyes. Dania was returning his glance from under her long eyelashes, and flickered a tiny smile at him, whereupon his entire set of straight teeth showed in a smile.

“He always smiles at me now”, Dania said.

“You pass him often do you?”

“O yes, I usually manage to come down this street at about the same time everyday, when he’s coming in on the van to the storage house to put up the truck…Isn’t it ridiculous though. He catches my fancy, but of course I couldn’t.”

“Rats, Dania, take a chance. Start something with him, if he doesn’t with you; and he will if you’ll bat your eye the right way. Why stand on the threshold of ‘experience’ eternally saying that you don’t live, but merely exist. You must set Rome afire if you’re going to sit watching the flames with enjoyment.”

It was useless for me to remark however. The last time I saw Dania, two months after that day, she said, “I’ll have to go back to New York and get psychoanalyzed. I must find out why I can’t have average emotions, and enjoy life just a little bit.”

“Tut, tut, woman. Some of them there will be telling you again that you’re setting out to hurt yourself because of perverse instinct in you when you slip on a wet floor because of new shoes.”

If one could be sure that Dania enjoyed her unhappiness as the only thing she dared permit to give importance to her egotism…But there she is—in Paris—Dania.

 

Image: Freud (far left seated) and Jung (far right, seated) at Clark University in 1909