Needless to say, this rejection only recommended Freud and the surrealists to me. I felt strongly, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself. My head was filled with half-digested fragments of Kafka and Joyce, the Paris existentialists and Italian neorealist films such as Rome, Open City, the high tide of heroic modernism, played out against the background of the Nazi death camps and the growing threat of nuclear war.
All this pressed around me, but I was stuck in a deeply provincial outpost, England in the late 1940s. Few of the painters, philosophers, writers and film-makers I admired were English, but at the same time I could see that I myself was becoming more and more English, if only to get along more comfortably with everyone I met. By 1948 I knew that the Communists under Mao Tse-tung would soon take over the whole of China and that I would never go back to Shanghai. Lunghua Camp and the International Settlement would be swept away. England was my home for the indefinite future, and the locks had been changed.
But surrealism and psychoanalysis offered an escape route, a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world, where shifting psychological roles are more important than the ‘character’ so admired by English schoolmasters and literary critics, and where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more than the social dramas of everyday life, as trivial as a tempest in a tea cosy.
Freud’s serene and masterful tone, his calm assumption that psychoanalysis could reveal the complete truth about modern man and his discontents, appealed to me powerfully, especially in the absence of my own father. At the same time, the surrealists’ rejection of reason and rationality, their faith in the power of the imagination to remake the world, resonated strongly with my efforts as a novice writer. I wrote short stories and fragments of incomprehensible novels which made complete sense if deemed to be surrealist. Ever since childhood I had a flair for drawing, and in the art department at The Leys I made plaster casts of the faces of friends (I called them ‘death’ masks after those of Shelley, Blake, Napoleon and other heroes). I nearly suffocated one classmate when the plaster failed to set and I physically restrained him from clawing away the oozing carapace. To my lifelong regret, however, I lacked the skill and facility to become a painter, whereas my head was filled with short stories and I had the beginnings of a knack for expressing them.
Despite my efforts to fit in, I think I was a bit of a misfit at school, an over-aggressive tennis player who would throw a game so that I could slip away to see the latest French film at the Arts Cinema. I was introverted but physically strong, and knew from my wartime experience that most people will back away if faced with a determined threat. One of my classmates called me an ‘intellectual thug’, not entirely a compliment, and my years in Lunghua had probably given me a tendency to watch other boys’ plates in the dining hall. I was also prone to backing up an argument about existentialism with a raised fist.
I had a few close friends, an Anglo-Indian boy who went up to Trinity a year ahead of me to study medicine, and an American exchange student. There was also a boy called Frank who was an Auschwitz survivor and had his number prominently tattooed on his arm. He was adopted after the war by an émigré Cambridge physicist and his wife, and attended The Leys as a day boy. To begin with he spoke no English, but he was well-liked. I was drawn to all of them because they were foreigners, but when my parents returned from Shanghai on a visit, my mother stepping from their new Buick, dressed in the latest New York fashions, I thought rather critically of how un-English they seemed. I knew, as I thought this, that it marked how English I was becoming, despite all my efforts. The camouflage always imitates the target.
In the Upper VIth I passed the King’s College entrance examination and met the admissions tutor. I had applied to read psychology, but at the time psychology was not an independent faculty at Cambridge, and he told me that I would have to read philosophy, which contained a small element of psychology within it. ‘What do you want to do when you graduate?’ he asked me. When I said that I was really interested in psychiatry, he told me that I would need a medical degree. I was interested in medicine, which seemed to abut abnormal psychology and surrealism, so I agreed there and then, perhaps not the wisest decision in the long term. My parents, naturally, were delighted. In October 1949 I moved half a mile down Trumpington Street to King’s, and began my study of anatomy, physiology and pathology.
As I left The Leys for the last time, entering the world as an adult, I felt more confident about the future than I had at any time since arriving in England. In the last two years at school I had read a great deal, endlessly experimented with my short stories, which were becoming steadily more unreadable, and through my study of biology had even found a strain of scientific mysticism in my imagination. I was happy with the prospect of becoming a psychiatrist, and knew that I already had my first patient – myself. I was well aware that my reasons for studying medicine were strongly influenced by my memories of wartime Shanghai, and by the horrors of the European war exposed at the Nuremberg trials. The dead Chinese I had seen as a boy still lay in their ditches within my mind, an ugly mystery that needed to be solved.
The faith in reason and rationality that dominated postwar thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry was as much with the sane as the insane.
My last act at The Leys, in the week before I left, took place in the basement kitchen in North B house, when I skinned and then boiled a rabbit. I was determined to expose the skeleton, wire it together and use it as a combined mascot and table ornament. I filled the entire building with steam and a disagreeably potent stench. The housemaster came down to stop me, but backed off when he saw that I was on an intense mission of my own. Why the rabbit skeleton was so important I can’t remember.
* * *
Shanghai was still very close to me, and the American airbases that surrounded Cambridge were a constant reminder, as were the American airmen who visited the pubs and cinemas with their English girlfriends. I was strongly drawn to flight, and could still see the B-29s sailing slowly over Lunghua, releasing their coloured parachutes like toys thrown to desperate children. I once climbed through the fence around a British airfield and crept into one of the parking bays protected by an earth embankment. Security was lax, and none of the service crews was around. There was a four-engined bomber with a tricycle landing gear – probably a Liberator – and I swung myself through the open ventral hatchway, and sat surrounded by the clutter of equipment inside the cockpit.
Today I would have been arrested, held in a child remand centre, examined by psychologists, sent to a juvenile court, and generally made to feel like a dysfunctional and even dangerous member of society. In fact, I had touched nothing and damaged nothing, and merely gazed through a small window into a dream. I might think that England was deeply repressed and ready to be laid on the analyst’s couch, but I was well aware of my own flaws. I liked to think I was rootless, but I was probably as English as anyone could be, and being rootless was anyway a huge handicap. I was drawing a curtain over my past life, accepting that I would never go back to Shanghai and would have to make a new life in England, with all that this entailed.