Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

“Divorced.”

“Regular army?”

“I’ve signed on for another three years.”

Slowly through these opening statements he seemed to see the type and colour of Baird’s anxiety opening like a paper flower in water. He slipped open the drawer of his desk and inserted a paw. He always kept a packet of boiled sweets to suck as he worked. He put one on his tongue with a quick gesture and settled himself further in his oak chair. It was hard and cruel work, he was reflecting, to bore down through the carapace of pride, self-esteem, apathy; dragging out the forgotten or the discarded from the rubbish-heap of another man’s experience. Particularly so when what he had to give was not a mechanical cure — a particular focus of trauma or anxiety, a particular fact or incident — but a technique and a stance. And how did this come about? Not through any will of his own — it was as if he had turned down his conscious self to the smallest bud of flame. No. It all happened by a fluke — by an extra-sensory awareness which was being called up now from inside him ready to penetrate and seize. He felt, as he listened, quite light and empty, quite devoid of will or ambition or desire — or even interest in his patient.

Baird, it seemed, was well-read and familiar with the general theories of Freud and Adler. So much the worse. But, at any rate, he could express himself freely and without difficulty and he seemed honest enough. It was enough for the first “wax impression”, as he called it. It only remained to see what reciprocal impression he had made on the younger man.

“Well, that’ll be a guinea,” said Hogarth with a sigh as the clock struck. “Now will you go away and think me over? If you decide that you want me to help you come back tomorrow at nine. Tonight I would like you to go out and get drunk, if possible. A hangover loosens up the mind no end, and makes you able to dissociate fluently. Will you do that? Good. If you don’t want to go on with me telephone me before half past eight tomorrow.”

The sunlight suddenly shone in at the murky window and turned the lobes of his ears to coral as he stood up awkwardly on one leg. He had already placed his pipe between his teeth and was fumbling for a box of matches. Baird had not yet told him about the Böcklin dream; well, it could wait until tomorrow. He felt a tinge of chagrin to be thus dismissed at the striking of a clock. “Well, Doctor Hogarth,” he said. “Thank you very much.” Hogarth folded his cheque up and put it in his pocket. He nodded and blew a couple of puffs on his pipe.

In the waiting-room Fearmax was waiting, walking up and down like a metronome with his hands behind his back. In his hand he held some folded papers. His hat and stick lay upon the sofa. He looked tired and ill. Baird went out into the rainy street wondering whether Hogarth could be of any use to him, and whether the Böcklin dream would return.

His analysis progressed more slowly even than his friendship — for Hogarth, that dealer in sensibility often found that his best way towards a cure was to turn a patient into a friend. Baird found him a fascinating character with his ponderous medical equipment backed up by an intuition which was completely female and amoral. Between them they worked towards Böcklin’s ghost through the muddled debris of a life which Baird himself had never stopped to examine properly. Hogarth’s analytical technique was an uncompromising one; it not only combed out the purely factual data of a life, but it made the liver of it realize his responsibilities in regard to it. “Why do you think you are here?” “What sort of purpose do you imagine you have in life?” “Do you feel that you have ever contributed towards the well-being of another person?” Such were some of the questions which managed to get sandwiched in between others as cogent. “Why did you forget your latch-key?” “What do you think of when you see a spilled ink-pot?” “Do you enjoy pain?”

Together they disinterred Böcklin from his unceremonious grave. They recovered, it seemed, every thought and action connected with the incident and with those hundred and one other incidents which appeared to be connected to it in his memory. They became great friends, and when the work became too painful to continue — when the big metal ash-trays were brimming with charred tobacco and cigarette-ends — they would put on their overcoats and walk for hours along the Embankment. Hogarth would explain his theories about the structure of the psyche and give him summaries of his own condition, which were not always comprehensible. And yet behind it all, Baird felt, there was design and purpose in what he said; he was a man trying to grapple with a philosophy not only of disease, but also of life.

“All right. You kill Böcklin. It is a senseless and beastly murder; but then you are pressed into the service of murder. In the abstract, murder is being committed in your name all over the world. But this actual act shakes you. Now though killing him may be the source of a moral guilt, I’d like to know whether it illustrates merely the guilt for that act, or a much more deep-seated guilt about your role in society. Böcklin may simply be an illustration. But in point of fact your life indicates another, and — may I say? — more fruitful disturbance. You were unhappy before the war too, you say. As a puritan living unpuritanly you would have been. You found an inability to enjoy because your education, with its gentlemanly prohibitions, had taught you merely how to endure. Sometimes—” here Hogarth affectionately put his arm round the shoulders of the younger man. “Sometimes, Baird, I think there is only politics left for you — the last refuge of the diseased ego. You notice how all the young men are burning to reform things? It’s to escape the terrible nullity and emptiness and guilt of the last six years. They are now going to nationalize everything, including joy, sex and sleep. There will be enough for everyone now because the Government will control it. Those who can’t sleep will be locked up.”

They walked in silence for a quarter of a mile along the deserted Embankment, their footsteps sounding hollow in the crisp night air.

“And yet,” pursued Hogarth, “I think I see also symptoms of a purely metaphysical disturbance going on too; you are not alone, you know, in anything except the fact that it has chosen a single incident from your own life to illustrate what is common to the whole of your generation. I tell you everywhere the young men are sleeping with the night-light burning. You ask me about Böcklin and I say this is less interesting than that other feeling which you have been telling me about — what the old Abbot called ‘pins and needles of the soul’ and Böcklin himself called ‘ Gleichgultigkeit ’. It seems to me that this sharpening of focus, this aridity of feeling, this sense of inner frustration, must be leading to a kind of inner growth at the end of which lies mystical experience. Now you are laughing at me again.” He placed his pork-pie hat firmly on his head and walked a few steps in silence. “It seems to me that when you have exhausted action (which is always destructive) and people and the material things, there comes a great empty gap. That is what you have reached — the great hurdle which stands on this side of the real joyous life of the inside self. Then comes illumination — dear, oh dear. I know it sounds nonsense, but it’s the poverty of language that is at fault. What do you think the medical term for William Blake would be? A euphoric? A hysterical pycnik? It’s too absurd. The next few years will be a crisis not only for you but your generation too. You are approaching spiritual puberty — the world is. It is hard going I know — but there is always worse ahead, I have found. Yet there is a merciful law by which nothing heavier than you can bear is ever put upon you. Remember it! It is not the burden which causes you pain — the burden of excessive sensibility — but the degree of your refusal to accept responsibility for it. That sets up a stress and conflict. It sounds balls, doesn’t it? Well, so does St. John of the Cross, I suppose.”