Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard Read Free Book Online Page B

thehour was almost over. I looked at my watch—it was over. I got up and walked to the door. Dr. Schachtel rose, too, which was his way of saying goodbye. I had my hand on the knob, but I couldn’t leave. To leave now would have been like leaving my personality scattered all over the floor, like the Sunday
Times
. I hadn’t come through, hadn’t
worked
. I couldn’t bear my own image of myself and I searched for a punch line that would allow me to go in peace.
    I looked at Dr. Schachtel standing beside his chair in a fragile, unathletic European way. I’m disappointed in love, I said. And before he could answer or choose not to answer, I was gone.
    At my next session, I tried to take it back. I don’t know why I said that, I told Dr. Schachtel. I suppose I wanted to make myself important. In fact, my relation to Sheri is just the opposite of disappointing. You might almost say that it’s too satisfying.
    How are you disappointed? Dr. Schachtel said.
    I don’t know that I am disappointed, I said. I just blurted that out. Everyone wants to see himself as disappointed—it’s the influence of modern art.
    Dr. Schachtel resisted the temptation to be drawn into a discussion of modern art, and there was nothing for me to do but to go on. As far as I can see, I said, I have no reason to be disappointed. Yet something doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel that my happiness is
mine
. It’s like I’m happy outside of myself.
    What it is you want that you don’t have? Dr. Schachtel asked.
    I hesitated. I felt like a high jumper poised for his run. And just at that moment, I caught Dr. Schachtel’s eyes. They were shuttling across the room, followingsome secret trajectory of their own, when I caught them and held them as if I had grabbed him by the lapels. It was too good an opportunity to waste. I want to be transfigured, I said.
    I don’t know whether he was surprised by this, but I was. I had never even used the word
transfiguration
before, as far as I could remember, never thought about it. I didn’t know what I meant by it, yet I knew that it was true, that it described how I felt. When I came out with the word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood.
    In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness. Think of the men in D. H. Lawrence’s novels. Think of Hans Castorp in
The Magic Mountain
—you probably read it in German. They’re no longer schoolteachers or engineers or whatever they were before, but heroic figures. They’re exalted; they’re blessed.
    I supposed, I said, that love would change me, too, would
advance
me somehow. Because without that, it’s just sex, just mechanics. And while sex is fine—it’s wonderful; it can be like flying—it isn’t enough. It doesn’t explain, doesn’t
justify
the whole business. It can’t account for two thousand years of poetry, for all the laughing and crying. There has to be something else, something more. Otherwise, love wouldn’t be so famous; we wouldn’t be carrying on about it all the time.
It wouldn’t be worth the trouble
.
    I stopped for breath. Dr. Schachtel’s eyes had escaped and I couldn’t catch them again. I was confused. I felt that I was back on the deck of a ship in Yokohama harbor talking to myself under the yellow lights. It’snot so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.
    I saw Dr. Schachtel eleven times. He was intelligent, astute, even charming, but I never gave him a chance. I suppose that like a good analyst he wanted to see my personality grow, while what I needed was for it to be shrunk to a more manageable size. It was much too big for me.
    I insisted on presenting my problems, such as they were, in the abstract, and the abstractions of psychoanalysis were no match for mine. How can I distinguish, I asked Dr. Schachtel, between anxiety and desire? Is sex a defense against art? Is