Solitude_A Return to the Self Page 13

  One of the most characteristic traits of the people whom psychiatrists label schizoid is their inability to make close relationships with people without feeling threatened. The typical schizoid dilemma is a desperate need for love combined with an equally desperate fear of close involvement. Kafka was a writer who vividly portrayed this dilemma in extreme form, and who also used avoidance in adult life in order that he could employ his writing as a means of preventing ‘behavioral disorganization’.

  Although Kafka, during his brief life, made a number of friends who were deeply fond of him and who sometimes idealized him, he said that, even with his closest friend and later biographer, Max Brod, he had never been able to hold a prolonged conversation in which he had really revealed himself. Strangers always constituted a threat. In a letter dated June 1913, Kakfa wrote:

  But if I am in an unfamiliar place, among a number of strange people, or people whom I feel to be strangers, then the whole room presses on my chest and I am unable to move, my whole personality seems virtually to get under their skins, and everything becomes hopeless.13

  During childhood and adolesence, Kafka was deeply ashamed of his body, which he considered disgracefully skinny and weak. It was not until he was twenty-eight years old that he felt able to appear in public swimming pools without embarrassment. His alienation from the body, which is characteristic of schizoid personalities, contributed to his doubts about the validity of his own existence, and to his fears that other people would overwhelm or destroy him. Even when he was afflicted with stomach ache, he imagined the pain as being caused by a stranger who was attacking him with a club. This paranoid phantasy is exactly comparable to those attributed by Melanie Klein to infants who are still in the paranoid-schizoid phase of development. According to her account, the human infant, because of its helplessness, reacts to frustration as if it were persecution, and fears its own destruction by the powerful parents on whom it depends. According to the Kleinian view, infants attribute to those who care for them intensely destructive impulses which are really part of their own psychology; that is, they employ the psychological mechanism of paranoid projection. In later life, suffering is liable to resuscitate these early emotions, and is therefore experienced as an attack upon the self from outside rather than as an internal experience. Whether or not one accepts Melanie Klein’s view of the infant’s psyche during the first months of life, Kafka’s account of his reaction to strangers and to his own pain certainly attests the persistence and importance of paranoid projection in his psychology.

  Given this temperament, it is not surprising that Kakfa had difficulties in his relationships with women. For five years, he was deeply involved with a girl called Felice Bauer, to whom he proposed marriage in June 1913. But, during the whole of this period, the couple, who lived respectively in Prague and Berlin, met on no more than nine or ten occasions, often for no more than an hour or two. The relationship was almost entirely epistolary. Kafka’s letters, which are frequently distressing, display an intense need for Felice and a painful anxiety about her whereabouts, even about what she is wearing or eating. He demands instant replies to his daily letters, and becomes acutely distressed if he does not hear from her. But Felice’s actual presence is treated as threatening, at least when Kafka is writing:

  You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind – for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive – even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Writing that springs from the surface of existence – when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up – is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.14

  Needless to say, the marriage did not take place.

  Kafka’s need to be alone when writing might, at first sight, be interpreted simply as a reluctance to let anyone else see or criticize the self which his writing is revealing ‘to excess’. He may certainly have considered that he needed to revise and edit what he felt to be so intensely personal before he would let even his beloved Felice read it. But his anxiety goes further than this. Actual proximity threatened to undermine the fragile organization of his psyche. Kafka hovered on the brink of psychosis. Erich Heller writes:

  Of course, this is a disposition akin to madness, separated only from it by a writing table, an imagination capable of holding together what appears to have an irresistible tendency to fall apart, and an intelligence of supreme integrity.15

  This pattern of intense emotional involvement on paper combined with actual distance from the beloved was repeated in his later relationship with Milena Jesenská. It was not until the last year of his life, when he was dying of tuberculosis, that Kafka was actually able to move in and live with a woman, Dora Dymant. Even then, he referred to this step as

  a reckless move which can only be compared to some great historical event, like Napoleon’s Russian campaign.16

  Kafka’s fear was that close involvement would threaten the one thing that kept him sane; his ability to keep the conflicting parts of his personality together by means of his writing. Without this, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’17 The person whom Kafka most needed was also a perpetual threat.

  I suggested above that introverted or schizoid personalities, when possessed of creative abilities, were more likely to be drawn to philosophy or the hard sciences than toward fiction, since they are concerned with pattern-making rather than with story-telling. Kafka is so moving an example of what I have called the schizoid dilemma that I could not forbear to quote him, even though, at first sight, he may appear not to fit this hypothesis. But Kafka’s terrifying fictional world is hardly concerned with real people. Many of his characters are not even given names, but are simply distinguished by their functions; as doorkeeper, warder, or officer. Kafka’s world is essentially that of the human being threatened by impersonal forces which he can neither understand nor master; the state of affairs which, in Worringer’s view, produced abstraction rather than empathy.

  Another question remains. Kafka’s ambivalence toward Felice and Milena inevitably reminds one of the avoidant infant who fears the very person upon whom he most depends. But is there really any justification for linking adult personality traits with infantile behaviour? I think that there is, although I am also aware that some research demonstrates that children may change considerably over the years in response to different sets of circumstances.

  There is a curious paradox connected with this problem which is worth noting. Geneticists, and many psychologists, assume that inheritance is far more important than environment in determining adult personality. Psycho-analysts believe that environmental factors, especially those obtaining in infancy and early childhood, are the paramount forces shaping what people become. But the two camps join hands in supposing that these different factors act upon the individual early in life, and that the very young child is necessarily father to the man or mother to the woman, without taking much account of the possibility that later events in childhood and adolescence are also important determinants of adult personality.

  8

  Separation, Isolation, and the Growth of Imagination

  ‘I think I could tum and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

  I stand and look at them long and long.’

  Walt Whitman

  In Chapter 6, it was suggested that an inner world of phantasy exists in every human being, and that interests in which imagination plays a part are, in many individuals, as important as interpersonal relationships in giving meaning to their lives. There is nothing
pathological in the employment of imagination. We cannot dispense with phantasy: if we could, we should lose much of what makes us distinctively human. But, as one would expect, imaginative capacity tends to become particularly highly developed in gifted individuals who, for one reason or another, have passed rather solitary childhoods. We have already noted that the effects of solitude can be damaging or rewarding according to circumstances. Unless those circumstances are so inimically severe that they cause mental disintegration, absence of, or partial deprivation of, interpersonal relationships encourages imagination to flourish.

  Imagination is generally recognized to be particularly active in childhood, and is an especially evident resource in children who either spend a good deal of time alone because other children are not available, or who do so because they find it difficult to make relationships with their peers. The people who later devote their lives to pursuits in which imagination plays a major role have often started to do so in childhood to a greater extent than the average because circumstances of separation, loss, or enforced isolation have impelled them in that direction. Isolated children often invent imaginary companions. Others go further, and invent stories in which a variety of imaginary persons take part.

  Various types of deprivation in early life may make it difficult for those who suffer them to achieve intimate attachments. But the development of an imaginary world can sometimes serve as a retreat from unhappiness, a compensation for loss, and a basis for later creative achievement. Some bereaved or very isolated children abandon any hope of making lasting intimate attachments, and only risk embarking upon relationships which are not so close. The relationships made by some creatively gifted people may be limited, incomplete, or stormy. Creative artists are quite likely to choose relationships which will further their work, rather than relationships which are intrinsically rewarding, and their spouses may well find that marital relations take second place. But this sequence of events is not invariable. There are examples of people who, as children, led isolated lives, but who nevertheless were able to make close relationships when adult. It is also not unknown for creative people, once they have achieved an intimate relationship, to lose some of their imaginative drive.

  Anthony Trollope is one instance of a novelist who himself attributed the development of his creative imagination to early isolation. In his autobiography, Trollope describes the misery of his schooldays at Harrow and Winchester. As a result of his father’s poverty, his school bills were not paid, and his pocket-money was stopped. The facts became known to his schoolfellows. Large, awkward, ugly, he became what he describes as ‘a Pariah’, who had no friends and who was despised by his companions. He took refuge in phantasy.

  As a boy, even as a child, I was thrown much upon myself. I have explained, when speaking of my school-days, how it came to pass that other boys would not play with me. I was therefore alone, and had to form my plays within myself. Play of some kind was necessary to me then, as it has always been. Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air firmly built within my mind.

  Trollope describes these compensatory romances as occupying six or seven years of his life before he left school and started work in the Post Office, and as continuing in his mind even after he had started work.

  There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.1

  Trollope’s pejorative appraisal of his daydreams as ‘dangerous’ recalls Freud’s puritanical vision of phantasy as both childish and escapist. Yet Trollope’s phantasy life later turned out to be so closely connected with the external world that some critics have dismissed his novels as being earthbound, pedestrian, and lacking in imagination. However, C. P. Snow calls him ‘the finest natural psychologist of all nineteenth-century novelists’.2

  Snow is surely right in attributing Trollope’s capacity for empathy to his early unhappiness. Feeling rejected, as we shall see in other instances, often leads to watchfulness; to a wary appraisal of the feelings and behaviour of others who may inflict further pain if one does not learn to please them. In this way, the budding novelist learns to observe human beings and to gauge their motives.

  Beatrix Potter is an interesting example of a writer who had a predominandy isolated childhood which, though not actively unhappy, caused her to grow up exceedingly shy and tongue-tied in company. Margaret Lane’s biography of her, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, was first published in 1946. Humphrey Carpenter, in his chapter on Beatrix Potter in Secret Gardens, accuses Margaret Lane of exaggerating the writer’s early loneliness and difficulties in making human relationships.3 Carpenter points out that, in 1946, Beatrix Potter’s secret journals, written in a code of her own invention, had not been deciphered; and claims that, if they had been available, Margaret Lane would have painted a different picture of her. However, a second edition of Margaret Lane’s biography appeared in 1968 in which she makes considerable use of the journals and gives full acknowledgement to Leslie Linder, who broke Beatrix Potter’s code and spent nine years transcribing what she had written.

  Beatrix Potter was born on 28 July 1866, and remained an only child for her first five years. Attentive parents can sometimes compensate for the loneliness of an only child by sending the child to kindergarten, inviting other children to the house, and in other ways ensuring that opportunities for mixing with contemporaries are easily available. No such amenities were thought necessary for Beatrix Potter. She was provided with a Scottish nurse, given luncheon in the nursery, and taken for a walk in the afternoon. What more could a middle-class child, brought up in the well-to-do surroundings of Kensington, possibly want?

  She was never sent to school, did not share her parents’ life to any great extent, and was given no opportunity of mixing with other children, apart from occasional encounters with cousins. Her parents did not entertain guests at home; the atmosphere was stiflingly respectable; and no attempt was made to meet the needs of children. Beatrix Potter was nineteen before she saw the Horse Guards, the Admiralty and Whitehall, for the Potter carriage seldom left the immediate environs of South Kensington. It is not surprising that she grew up to be ill-at-ease in company. Her only escapes from this ‘Victorian mausoleum’, as a cousin called it, were visits to her paternal grandmother at a house near Hatfield, occasional visits to other relatives, and an annual family holiday in Scotland, where she began to take an interest in, and weave phantasies around, the lives of animals. She learned to read from the Waverley novels of Scott. Her first literary efforts seem to have been hymns and ‘sentimental descriptions of Scottish scenery’.4

  A younger brother, Bertram, made his appearance in due course but, as soon as he was old enough, was despatched to boarding school. A governess, Miss Hammond, became an encouraging presence who fostered Beatrix Potter’s interest in nature and in drawing, but she left in the girl’s early ’teens, saying that her pupil had already outstripped her. Although visiting governesses came to teach her German and French, most of Beatrix Potter’s hours were spent without human companionship. But she did manage to acquire pets: a rabbit, a couple of mice, some bats, and a family of snails. Margaret Lane writes:

  She had made friends with rabbits and hedgehogs, mice and minnows, as a prisoner in solitary confinement will befriend a mouse.5

  It is interesting that, when her coded journal was finally deciphered, no secrets which appeared to require concealment were revealed. Margaret Lane writes, very perceptively:

  No hidden self-communings, no secret fantasy, even singularly few complaints. She seems to have embarked on this labour of many years almost in spite of herself, driven by a restless urge to use her faculties, to stretch her mind, to let
nothing of significance escape, to create something,6

  The journal was kept up until Beatrix Potter was thirty. Although its contents were unexciting, the fact that she wrote it assiduously for so many years argues that, for her, it was an important affirmation of her identity as an individual. In a household where little acknowledgement of a child’s separate individuality was offered, such affirmation of identity can seem to the child to be opposition to parents and therefore wrong. This may be the reason why the journal had to be encoded.

  Her other creative activity was drawing, at which, as her books show, she became delightfully accomplished.

  When she was seventeen, Beatrix Potter was taught German by Annie Carter, with whom she became very friendly. When Miss Carter married, Beatrix Potter continued to correspond with her, and to take an interest in her children. The eldest of these, a boy called Noel, developed a long illness when he was five years old. In order to entertain him, Beatrix Potter sent him a long, illustrated letter recounting the adventures of Peter Rabbit. This was privately printed as a book in 1901, and then brought out publicly in 1902, by Warne & Co.

  During the next ten years, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was followed by The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck, and by the tales of all the other charming creatures who became familiar to, and beloved by, subsequent generations of children. Beatrix Potter’s drawings of animals are so exquisite that, some years ago, there was a special exhibition of them in London. It is interesting to observe that her drawings of people never reached the same high standard. Why should they? People, at that stage in her life, had never meant as much to her as the tiny pets to whom she had given her heart, and whom she therefore observed more closely.