Either cannily or madly, John Cheever took up residence at the heart of the American Dream in a New York suburb, more affluent than the one I came from. He was a homosexual alcoholic artist attempting to be a straight married man. The mask and myth required to enact the gestures of servitude and constraint needed to live this kind of life proved disabling and humiliating. Cheever gave it a long try, and it enabled him to become an artist. But it never worked out; it was never going to. Chaos returned, and any fool could have predicted it would, even Cheever himself in certain moods. Perhaps there is only so much about yourself you can bear to understand.
A lot of this turns up in American writing at the time. And the question is always the same: was the repression worth it? Had too much that was essential been sacrificed for the ideal? How much of yourself could you give up and remain an ‘authentic’ person? Couldn’t there be less painful or difficult, more satisfying ways to live, more in line with ‘human nature’, as the romantics might have put it?
An interesting version of someone wondering about this was Wilhelm Reich, the subject of a biography by Christopher Turner. A psychoanalyst trained by Freud in Vienna, and living in the US in the 50s, he and other ‘liberationists’ of the times, such as Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and R. D. Laing, were thinking about how desire could free people from oppressive and frustrating ways of living. According to Reich, the wrong life could make your body rigid, inflexible and awkward. He says, in The Function of the Orgasm, ‘that the average human being of today has lost contact with his real nature’, and he writes of ‘the incrustations and rigidities in human emotional life’.
Reich considered Freud conventional and pessimistic, and thought he didn’t go far enough when it came to acknowledging the central place of sexuality in human life. For Freud, renunciation made some happiness possible, whereas Reich wanted to know why there had to be renunciation at all. Weren’t human beings attacking that which in themselves was most alive: their capacity for love? Weren’t fascist, authoritarian structures also inside the individual? Of course they were, argued Freud. But people loved their illness; they wanted to be unhappy; pleasure was the last thing they desired. A ‘complete Eros’, or ultimate cure, was impossible.
It wasn’t long before Reich gave up on the most dangerous thing — speech — and the idea of the ‘talking cure’. Speaking took too long; it was indirect and inconclusive. He began to touch his patients, believing that more and stronger orgasms were the solution. A full blast of pleasure, of orgiastic potency, would enable you to see you’d been living badly, or not according to your nature. This Salvationist view, from our less credulous and more cynical time, might seem like the least of it. But Reich was onto something here. If pleasure isn’t your guide, what will be? Reich had some grasp of the creativity of sexual desire, and the cost of constraining it. And numerous people have been awoken from relative slumber by the unexpectedness of love or sex, and by the sense of opening out to more life and possibility.
I can recall a student of mine, a woman in her mid-forties, telling me a long, moving story about being ‘awakened’ emotionally, sexually and intellectually when she fell in love with a friend of her husband. Their love caused a huge trauma for both families, but it was worth it, she said. There would have been more suffering all round — wasted energy, unused love, unemployed passion — had she remained in the status quo.
The revolutionaries of the 60s called for new ways of being and alternative forms of social interaction. However, what the adulterer usually wants is better relationships, conversation, support, attention, pleasure. Her question is: how can we get what we want while behaving well, which means, at least, not being ashamed of ourselves?
The unhappy are no good to anyone. The unhappy are dangerous. The discontented and jaded become perverse or sadistic. Adulterers are not necessarily utopians: adultery merely shows the possibility of meaning, hope and love. My student didn’t wish for anything like ‘total liberation’ — a revolution, a new social set-up — just for a satisfying marriage. And it is worth noting about the classic heroines of literature — Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, or even the characters in David Lean’s Brief Encounter — that they are not compulsive transgressors. They are asking for very little, and for everything, which, for them, is a fuller, more satisfying love. Complete happiness is a fiction, but some happiness is possible; indeed, it is essential. There are some people you can ‘realise’ yourself in relation to, and they are worth searching out. But there is a price. Something radical does have to change to make this possible — certainly, for women, in terms of the whole society — and there will be inescapable guilt.
Compared to Freud, Reich and his coevals prove, in the end, to be the more limited, if not conservative, concentrating on too small a notion of human need and fulfilment. Freud had a novelist’s capaciousness; Reich was a headline writer. If constraint of some sort is impossible to avoid, the question is: which constraint, when, where?
Nick and Meg go to Paris because love is the most considerable business of all, and they need to know what sort of relationships make life worth living, and, if they have a future together, what it might be like. Do they suffer less together than they would apart? The decision they make at the end of the film can only be provisional, and the questions they ask have to be confronted repeatedly, since there isn’t one answer that can satisfy them.
This Door Is Shut
More or less the last thing Farhana remembered before finding herself on the Boulevard Saint-Germain was her son Yasin waking up his driver and her guard, and ordering them to take her to Karachi airport. As Yasin was too drunk to drive her himself, he instructed the men to put Farhana on the 2 a.m. flight to Istanbul, where she could change for Paris.
Yasin, who had not long before dragged her across the marble floor by her loveliest silk chiffon dupatta, and struck her across the face with the back of his hand, smashing her lip, now bowed before his mother. He said that after her behaviour she should never come back to Pakistan. And since he doubted whether he would live to be old, or that he would go to the West again, it was, as he put it, goodbye, or ‘khuda hafiz’.
‘May Allah protect you, and, never forget this —’ his mother said, wagging her finger at him as she was helped into the car, ‘Allah is always watching you.’
She could hear him laughing as she closed the window.
The following morning, once more wrapped in her favourite trench coat, she was walking around her adopted city. First she’d go to the market; then, perhaps, she’d go to an exhibition, or look again at La Hune, her favourite bookshop, or the other wonderful little places on the Left Bank where she lived, selling hand-made paper and bizarre knick-knacks. In the afternoon she liked to go to the Tuileries or the Luxembourg for a sorbet, watching the children with their au pairs. There was plenty to see. When her first husband had been alive, she’d been a photographer, selling her pictures to Pakistani papers and magazines, and she knew how to look. It wasn’t that Paris looked different now; she had only been in Karachi for a month. But she was full of new words, and would talk about the city differently, when she had the opportunity.