On the Way Home

Conversations Between Writers and Psychoanalysts

Marie Bridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917066
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Literature was present at the birth of psychoanalysis. When Freud made his momentous discovery of the Oedipus complex within himself and his patients, he recognised that this psychic configuration had already been depicted in Sophocles's tragedy. The father of psychoanalysis wrote "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious... What I discovered was only the scientific method by which the unconscious might be studied". On the Way Home is a collection of public dialogues which bring together authors whose work similarly provokes recognition and resonance in the minds of readers; analysts with a professional and passionate interest in the unconscious and a wish to learn from writers; and a wide audience of people interested in literature and psychoanalysis. The dialogues intend to forge links between psychoanalysis and other disciplines, including the physical and the social sciences, history and literature. They are held at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and attract a wide audience.

Rose Tremain in conversation with Margot Waddell

Chair: Nicola Abel-Hirsch

20 October 2000

NAH: Rose Tremain’s most recent novel Music and Silence won the 1999 Whitbread Prize for Literature. She has published eight novels and three collections of short stories and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She’s a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her novel Restoration, and has won a number of other awards. In 1995 Restoration was made into a film and she’s currently working on film scripts for both Sacred Country and The Way I Found Her. Rose Tremain told me she began to write what she called “little stories” at eleven when on her parents’ divorce she was sent with her sister to boarding school. Her early stories included one about a boy who ran away to join a troupe of travelling gypsies and another about a man walking through a foggy, smoky London in search of his childhood. There was also a story set under water with mermen and mermaids. Rose then began to write plays and to act in them. In doing so she found her place at school. She tells me that in one play two girls decided to learn about the world by cleaning people’s houses. Their employers were nasty and persecuting, and the wages poor. In another a circus troupe figured again and there were parts for everyone. This play included a dream sequence which Rose remembers little about except that it was set to Sibelius’s Finlandia. Rose went to the Sorbonne for a year and then took up a place at the University of East Anglia. She chose East Anglia because it was a new university and because the writer Angus Wilson was there, a living writer. He read her work and asked to read her first novel. He liked it and helped her with a quote for the front cover. Much later, from 1988 to 1994, she herself taught on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and was awarded an honorary doctorate by UEA this year. What next? As well as writing the screenplays for her two films, Sacred Country and The Way I Found Her, she also has the idea for her next book. On a recent trip to a writers’ festival in New Zealand with her partner Richard Holmes, she went to South Island, a place that may be familiar to you from the film The Piano. Rose learnt that there had been a gold rush in this “mountainous, volcanic and difficult terrain”. This provides the setting for a novel about a man in search of gold, and a woman’s journey into the wilderness.

Rose will be in conversation this evening with psychoanalyst Margot Waddell. Of course Margot has read Rose’s fiction but at a preliminary meeting a couple of weeks ago it became clear that Rose Tremain had read Margot’s work, specifically her book Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality. Rose spoke to me of its clarity: “It has no jargon,” she said, “and the case studies are marvellous.” Margot Waddell studied Classics and Literature at Cambridge and wrote a PhD on the topic of “George Eliot and the Idea of Nature”. She went on to train as a child psychotherapist and as a psychoanalyst. She is a consultant child psychotherapist in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic. Two weeks ago the two of them sat on either side of a fire, clearly curious about and enjoying each other’s thoughts on literature and psychoanalysis. We are lucky to have them here and I hope you will both enjoy their dialogue and later join them in conversation.

MW: I’d like to begin by putting to you some thoughts about the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature that were provoked by a comment of Johanna’s, one of Kirsten’s maidservants, in Music and Silence. At one point she says “a fable can awaken the mind to the truth of what it perceives in the daily world.” That notion reminded me of a line by John Dryden, who speaks of poetry as “that which moves the sleeping images of things towards the light”—a line that I’ve always found to be a wonderful description of the psychoanalytic process. Reading your novels, I’m aware of just how much your way of thinking and writing has in common with a psychoanalytic way of thinking.

Perhaps, by way of introduction, I can proffer a few ideas about this common ground and see what you have to say about it. I think that, in their very different ways, both novel-writing and psychoanalytic practice are trying to find symbolic form for perceived aspects of human nature, human behaviour, the meaning of things, the value of things, and to convey those perceptions to somebody else, a reader, a patient. More specific-ally, it seems to me that throughout your work, from Sadler’s Birthday to Music and Silence, you share with psychoanalysts an interest in the nature of identity and of personal development. I have in mind the way that you are alert to the kinds of factor, both internal and external, that lend themselves to a person’s development and the kinds that arrest that development; the factors which cause a character variously to go on growing, to go mad, to shallow out, or to become merely conventional. One of the things that really strike me about your novels is that some characters do go on growing, even into old age; that, as George Eliot said, “it is never too late to become the person you might have been.”

Another dimension I would like to explore is your interest in the creative process itself. Many of the novels seem to me to be about the nature of creativity, be that in music, for example, or in writing, or in architecture. In Music and Silence there’s that extraordinary depiction of the cellar where the musicians are playing together and creating something marvellous. I take this situation to be a central metaphor of the book, perhaps a metaphor for creativity itself. But it could also be said to be a powerful representation of the psychoanalytic process too. There is a passage in Sacred Country where Harker, the cricket bat maker who also works away in a cellar, describes a feeling that he is the reincarnation of the lutenist from the court of Christian IV [Peter Claire in Music and Silence]. So it would seem that the metaphor is one that you’ve been mentally turning over for a long time. It’s been working away somewhere, to become absolutely essential to this most recent book.

But perhaps we can begin with my asking you how you bring together historical fact (because that scene in the cellar has clearly been recorded as something that actually happened) with creativity? How do you interweave the two? It’s a question of interest to psychoanalysts for it abuts on the endlessly fascinating relationship between inner and outer worlds, and between clinical facts and actual facts.

RT: I think that the idea of “working away” is very important. I was told this story about the cellar at Rosenborg about nine or ten years ago. I think it was 1990 or 1991, when I was in Denmark. It was the legend about King Christian IV, who keeps his musicians—the most creative people in Europe, the best musicians from France, Italy, Germany and Finland, a group of people who are very, very eminent—not in the state rooms but underneath the state rooms, in a cellar. That way, their music can drift mysteriously up. They won’t be visible, but the music will come unnoticed into the upper rooms and cause wonder. I thought it presented a very powerful series of images. I saw it as a kind of split stage with the musicians—the creative people—underneath, in the cold, in the Danish winter. We know how hard it is to play a musical instrument, but imagine playing it in a cellar in Denmark in the winter! How hard it would be to keep the instruments in tune, and so on. Light was very important, the quality of light in the first two images. The musicians had a very unstable kind of light: flickering candles, and then, above, there would be a more stable, perpetual illumination of fire and oil lanterns. On one level you had people in darkness and then above them a man of power and all the appurtenances of power, up there in the light. I thought these were very beautiful images which also had infinite metaphorical possibilities. But I think the reason it took me so long to make anything coherent of them was because I felt, in a way, that their potency might be such that the story I would write would never be able to do justice to them.

MW: This idea of working away in the dark, such an intense and painful creative effort, is very suggestive for psychoanalysts as well. But there is also the striking detail that all the musicians are so different each from the other, and that their very difference is distinct from the quality of the music that they eventually produce. My own feeling is that many aspects of this novel, and of some of the others too, have to do with the process by which some way of integrating the different parts of the personality is found such that, even perhaps momentarily, there’s a sense of a whole which can be communicated to others.

RT: Well, the story opens at a moment of crisis and we meet this character, Christian IV, who is, in various ways, finding his way through a maze of chaos and disorder. He is trying to re-impose some sort of harmony, to struggle through things which are disparate and split and difficult for him to something which is harmonious. And, of course, that’s where music comes in. His aspirations to commission beautiful music underlie his struggle out of confusion towards something which is ordered and fruitful.

MW: Yes, and the interesting thing about the way he seeks to discover what harmony is comes in the person of Peter Claire and what Christian uses Peter Claire for. Because, as you make clear in so many ways, the music is to do with linking; to do with the possibility of memory based on expectation; with the sense that something can be ordered and that form can arise from chaos. The pattern by which Christian seeks to realise these creative possibilities is, in psychoanalytic terminology, what amounts to a transference relationship with Peter Claire. As the latter says, he doesn’t have the faintest idea who Christian is but this figure has selected him as his angel—an angel to watch over him. Christian needs Peter to perform the function of what psychoanalysts would describe as a container for the otherwise chaotic and confused states of mind in which he finds himself. He turns to Peter in order to help himself to think, and when he’s feeling most distressed and disintegrated he calls Peter up and has him play. Then he talks. Peter Claire doesn’t actually say anything of enormous interest in itself, but it is as if Christian, through Peter Claire’s presence and his music, is able to think for himself and, as a consequence, to resolve something for himself in the course of the book.

RT: I think Peter Claire is struggling to say things as interestingly as he possibly can. He is aware of this man who has given him this task. Christian has asked him to watch over him in a kind of angelic way. But of course Peter Claire is in the dark as to what really that task constitutes, and he’s certainly in the dark about the way in which he is a kind of projection of an earlier very significant relationship that the King had in childhood and to which much guilt and sadness still adheres. So Peter Claire’s task is really very difficult because he doesn’t understand the parameters of what’s expected of him. What can the King mean? He’s asked to “watch over” him and this seems strange and undefined, yet Peter feels immediately bound to try and fulfil this role. What I was looking to establish here was the idea that the stranger who arrives in this dark kingdom is immediately entrapped. Even though Peter Claire can’t formulate what the precise nature of his task is, he intuits the fact that he has to stay until that task is complete. He’s in a sense a kind of prisoner.

MW: But his role is immensely helpful to Christian. Indeed, I’m very struck by the fact that in your novels there tends so often to be a central relationship of a particular kind: somebody has a “somebody else” who enables him or her to develop. I’m thinking of Mary Ward in Sacred Country, for example, and the very few, but significant, figures in her life. Mary is a six-year-old little girl when we first meet her. She suspects that she’s really a boy, and as she becomes ever more certain, she faces the absolute destitution of her life as a girl and the attendant overwhelming loneliness. But she does have a few figures who enable her to express something of her real self: Miss McRae, the village school teacher, Harker, the cricket bat maker, Irene, a comforting soul, and Irene’s daughter, Pearl, who is, like Peter Claire, described in “angelic” terms.

RT: Yes, I think that Sacred Country is primarily a story about emotional drought. It’s a good phrase that you identify in your book Inside Lives. We all go through these periods of severe emotional drought, and I think Mary Ward is experiencing absolute emotional drought and would indeed perish, would die of confusion and heartbreak, were it not for one or two understanding figures who can make some attempt to identify with the problem—even though the problem is very extreme. There only needs to be one or two of these figures in any life. I think I understand, having written for more than twenty years now, that almost all my books have one or two such people, who are, of course, idealised. They’re quite often male, avuncular figures—the perfect father or the perfect uncle or grandfather: the perfect understanding, intuitive, wise and faithful older person—who tries to alleviate the misery and the confusion of the younger, suffering characters. These avuncular figures have cropped up so many times that I’m starting to think of them as being a bit suspect, but there they are. They are wonderful. I wish I knew people as wonderful as them. (laughing)

MW: Well this is what analysts are supposed to be—except, perhaps, without the idealisation.

RT: Exactly, exactly.

MW: To change tack slightly, I’d like to explore another distinctive set of themes that thread their way through all the books, and that is the complex relationship between dreams and reality, between sanity and madness, between illusion, delusion and a sense of reality. I am, of course, particularly interested in your use of dreams. Your novels are full of them, and they would seem to be tremendously rich ways of gaining access to the internal worlds of the characters. Needless to say, psychoanalysts think about dreams all the time, but it is less usual, perhaps even risky, for novelists to draw on them.

RT: Yes, it’s interesting that the analyst’s reaction is “yes, dreams are fantastic, we’ll pay special attention to the dreams in this book,” whereas I remember my agent’s response to an earlier novel which had an awful lot of dreams in it. My agent said: “Look, get these dreams out, because nobody’s going to read them, they’ll just pass over onto the next bit.”

I think there is a peril about dreams in literature. The prime danger is that the lay reader, if you like, will not see them as significant and will skirt over something which might be thematically important, but I’m also aware that my understanding of the power of dreams, not having had psychoanalytical training, might not be sufficient to make the dream as powerful and potent as it should be at that particular moment in the story. So in recent novels, the dreams get shorter. I only allow myself just the briefest context of the dream rather than a great rambling new story in the middle of a sequence of events.

MW: This is true, but in Music and Silence I think the dreams have a sort of pivotal role, especially King Christian’s dream about Bror Brorson. An enormous amount hangs on how one understands these dreams. I felt it was possible that the reason the King had to resolve something about what Bror Brorson meant to him was that Bror was effectively an aspect of himself. Christian’s kingship meant that he had to let go of this aspect of himself. But he couldn’t it let go. He needed to hang onto it and he felt very guilty about that, and as he moved into greater and greater grandiosity and excess, he found it increasingly difficult to discern that the difference between his vision and the actual grandiose realisation of his dreams, in Fredericksborg for instance, has something huge. (He was himself a huge person.) There is a distinct blurring between grandiosity and insight. But I think that the loss of the Bror Brorson part of himself, a part which, as he experienced it, gave him life when he brought Bror Brorson back to life, is something that torments him. If one interprets the dreams from my way of thinking, one is able to get at the fact that that was part of himself as well as an external figure.

RT: Does that mean therefore that you think the symbolism of the dreams is right? There’s one dream, for example, where Christian is walking towards this figure in a snowy, desolate landscape and he thinks the figure, who resembles Bror, is going to get larger and larger because he’s coming towards him, and then he realises that in fact he’s walking away from him, so he’s getting smaller and smaller. Does this dream fit with your perception that for King Christian Bror Brorson is part of himself, a part that he feels is lost but actually needs to recover? Is that symbolism right? I’m not certain.

MW: Yes, that is indeed how I would see it. The point is that these sorts of dreams are so suggestive that one gets left with all manner of questions and not necessarily, thankfully, with answers. I’d like to move on now to a further point.

Many of the novels are about the respective ways in which characters are enabled to develop or, by contrast, find themselves stuck. In The Way I Found Her, I am interested in the portrayal of Lewis as having to live through his particular pubertal crisis more or less on his own, for his parents are, in effect, completely letting him down. He is faced with something that seems unbearably exciting in Valentina because he is involved, one would think, with her as a sort of oedipal displacement for his mother—so common in early adolescent infatuations. The book then takes off into a kind of adventure story with quite a “Boys’ Own” atmosphere. At this point my own sense was that it was as if the story becomes a kind of concrete enactment of unmanageable pubertal feelings, an explosion of adolescent needs, desires, and masturbatory fantasies. It ends in catastrophe, because, as I would see it, there wasn’t a sufficiently strong parental relationship available to help Lewis with so troubled and troubling a stage of development. The impression one gets is that the marriage isn’t good and that Lewis is left, bereft of parental involvement, emotionally trying to survive through his capacity to draw on his own imagination. The story finally becomes a tragic playing out of Lewis’s incapacity to get beyond puberty and to enter a world, perhaps of adolescence proper, which, whatever the obvious pitfalls of characteristic group life, would actually be more helpful to him. So he’s just left with a mess at the end.

RT: Yes, he’s left with something which you would define—your definitions of kinds of kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• THE DIALOGUES