Abstract
All sorts of questions arise in my mind as I begin writing the review of this elegant and engaging memoir by the Boston-based psychoanalyst Joan Wheelis. The cacophony of inquiry puts a lid on the emotions that have become liquid inside me. I feel the tenderness of an older brother, the vaguely remorseful glee of a voyeur (I know the author and her analyst parents), the admiration of a demanding reader, and the envy of a proud writer. More powerfully, I experience the empathic resonance of a fellow human being with the fact that we—all of us—lead lives of pleasure and pain, certainty and doubt, rupture and continuity, reality and imagination. The questions that crowd my mind may be intended to divert attention from this sentimental chaos, but that does not diminish their significance.
Prominent among these questions are the following: Should I be “scientific” in my approach to the book? Should my review be replete with page numbers of cited passages, references to pertinent psychoanalytic literature, and “translations” of the author’s observations into psychoanalytic jargon? Or, like someone seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time, should I allow rapture to take over, to become mesmerized and haunted by the tales, true and apocryphal, about the monument and its maker? Another line of inquiry presses me to ask if a modicum of self-disclosure (regarding my parents, my childhood, my personal life) will add to or detract from my giving the reader of this review a full sense of Wheelis’s highly personal account? What should I do with this literary countertransference? And, finally, there is the big question: How do I avoid the risk of “wild analysis” here? Being a psychoanalyst faced with emotionally charged recollections of people’s relationships with their parents certainly tempts one to poke at the impish conceit of memory, unmask what lurks beneath the surface, and make conscious the self-serving aims of personal myths tucked neatly into the pockets of our hearts. As psychoanalysts, we approach moments of joy with trepidation, stay alert to their transient nature, and look diligently for the dark insecurity they surely veil. The question then is how to approach a childhood narrative that is filled with “endless, undisturbed satisfaction,” where the parents have a deeply loving marriage, and where the child grows up feeling “lucky and protected,” taking safety and comfort for granted? Unmoored from his customary skepticism, the psychoanalyst in me is at a loss. Disheartened, I seek refuge in the welcoming embrace of my writer self.
The first thing he tells me is to stop referring to the author by her last name. “Call her Joan. It is all very personal, after all, and you know her, so stop being so formal and stuck-up.” Given this freedom, I begin to relax. I notice how deeply I am enjoying the lyrical cadence and heart-breaking sensuality of Joan’s prose. I can touch, hear, and smell what she describes. I have become her. The identification is total. With boyish admiration, I note how seamlessly she has embedded her life’s narrative in the whispers of domestic accoutrements. Take a look at the following and you will see what I mean.
Our dining room was circular. Each of the three tall arched windows parted and opened onto the patio and the gardens beyond of the neighboring mansion, a majestic copy of the Petit Trianon. An arched mirror across from the windows flanked by vases with long branches of quince or willow rendered the impression of yet more gardens on the other side of the room. My father always sat at the head of the table, his back toward a green and white marble fireplace with another arched mirror above the mantel. A simple silver candelabra holding seven candles was at the center of the mantel and a vase of flowers sat off to one side. The room was lit by two ornate wall sconces, each displaying a bouquet of delicate lights under their gilded petals. Japanese, Persian and Italian art hung on the walls between the mirrors. A delicate asparagus fern stood before one of the arched windows. The dark wood parquet floor was adorned by an antique Bokhara rug. There was a Danish sideboard and a small table on wheels and a simple oval teak dining table, which could be expanded to seat twelve. Four burnt orange upholstered chairs, which had belonged to my mother’s first husband, flanked the table. We ate dinner in that beautiful room each night of the week. I always sat to my father’s right facing the mirror, which reflected the gardens behind me, and my parents sat facing one another. My mother, though a marvelous cook, worked full-time and employed a cook to prepare and serve dinner during the week. Veal scaloppine, asparagus, fried eggplant, crepes Suzette, floating island. And always some wonderful, dark, blood red French wine.
The keen eye for detail is impressive. More important, the atmosphere tells a story of safety, comfortable “going-on-being,” and a childhood that basks in the warm glow of parental solidity. Joan’s home is imbued with behavioral reliability (“My father always sat . . .”) and temporal continuity (“. . . belonged to my mother’s first husband”). That the ambience is also cosmopolitan and opulent is not restricted to this passage. Sprinkled throughout the book are mentions of Mont Blanc pens, the “Austrian silver box with cigarettes,” the well-stocked wine cellar, the carefully designed “rosewood bookcases,” the “Crane Distaff linen bond stationery,” the “architectural marvel” of the family’s labyrinthine five-floor residence, and, if all this is not enough for you, the “French cook from the Bretagne region who came in the afternoons to prepare the evening meals.”
However, there is not an iota of boastfulness about such affluence; it is described in a matter-of-fact way. Moreover, unlike many unfortunate souls who, intoxicated with lavish trappings in life, lose contact with the ordinary joys of nature, Joan maintains a deep and nearly spiritual contact with her ecological surround. Traveling as a child with her parents to the family’s annual vacation spot, she notes: There were three stop signs in the five miles from the west side of the island to the east. Sometimes the road was straight and flat and sometimes it twisted up and down like a roller coaster. In some places sunlight flooded the road and in others it dappled the leaves in the dense forest. There were Douglas fir, cedar, hemlock, alder and maple and a vast undergrowth of huckleberry and salal. The scent of pitch from the towering Douglas fir and the deep aroma of moss and ferns were intoxicating.
And, describing the garden back in her San Francisco home, she writes: The camellia was blooming and the thorny bougainvillea climbing up the side of the house was full of signs of the paper-thin magenta flowers to come. Primroses, clematis, and Icelandic poppies rose from the low concrete planters that ran the length of the house from the wrought-iron gate to the backyard. A Meyer lemon and a fragrant pink and white rose planted in large pots stood tall near the front door, and many other pots sprouted white cyclamen and other bulbs.
Such enchanted domesticity and agoraphilic ecology are not mere envelopes of Joan’s narrative; they are integral elements to her lived life, which is expectably replete with instances of childhood curiosity: Is there a God? What is the nature of my parents’ work? How do we know what we know? Could the buck that slowly but majestically came out of the nearby forest during a countryside funeral have been the deceased old man himself? In prose that is spare but textured and emotionally alive without ever being maudlin, Joan weaves dreams, apparitions, old photographs, letters exchanged between her parents, little and big animals, and carefully measured dollops of memory into a fabric of magical surrealism, even though what she is describing are facts. Or, so it seems.
One particularly moving episode is of her father, the distinguished analyst and writer, Alan Wheelis, teaching her, at age eight, how to eat the pastry known as a Napoleon. Later in the book, Joan recounts her pleasure in passing this skill on to her son. In those moments, her past becomes her son’s present, which, one day in the future, will turn into his past. Time goes on. We age. The footsteps of approaching death can no longer be denied.
This brings up Joan’s description of the infirmities, illnesses, and demise of her parents. Reading these pages of her book, I break down and cry. This is because personal losses of my own get stirred up and also because of my great fondness for Joan’s parents. Allow me to clarify, though, that the hues of sadness and pain in her book are not restricted to death and mourning. She offers us glimpses of her father’s troubled bond with his harsh, almost cruel, father, and of her mother’s lifelong suffering at having lost her parents in the Holocaust, even though these traumas were never openly mentioned in the family’s conversations.
Talking of silences, secrets, and significant omissions brings me to the existence of similar “devices” in Joan’s memoir. The guilt of her parents at breaking their marriages to marry each other (and that guilt’s impact on their union and their child-rearing attitudes) is nowhere mentioned. The difficulties the offspring of a Southern, lower-middle-class Christian father and a wealthy European Jewish mother might face in forming a coherent identity is never brought up. The fact that her father’s mother tongue was English and her mother’s was German is also not addressed. Similarly bypassed is Joan’s being the only child of this marriage and having few, if any, child visitors to her house. Joan’s two stepbrothers, presumably much older, are allotted one sentence each. Her husband is given similarly short shrift: “six months after my father died, my husband left” is all we are told. Left? What does that mean? Absconded? Died? Separated? Fell in love with someone else and moved in with her (him)? Joan does not tell us anything about this event or about the marriage, which had lasted twenty years. She is equally circumspect about her mother’s “indolent cancers” and her own “brush with cancer” when a junior at Harvard. Such omissions stir our customary skepticism. We want to know more. We protest against being kept in the dark. The psychoanalyst in us feels frustrated and begins to spin tales to fill the lacunae in the narrative served to us on a “blue and white Oriental plate” resting on “the Danish credenza.”
The risk of “wild analysis” becomes great under such circumstances. Even after exercising restraint over temptations to “interpret,” we are left wondering why a psychoanalyst would write a memoir in the first place. Surely, not to be subjected to “wild analysis.” There has to be some other motive. My sense is that most analysts subject themselves mercilessly to self-analysis and hence need a respite from self-questioning; this motivates them to write essays preserving their personal myths. For the same reason, most analysts like having some friends who are not analysts. Not being analyzed all the time, by oneself or by one’s peers, has its own value.
We therefore give up being the analyst of a memoirist and return to reading it in a “simple” literary manner. We remind ourselves that writing a memoir is not like free associating on a couch. Writing a memoir has its own formalities, its intrinsic etiquette and demands. Literary parsimony is not synonymous with psychological guardedness. The creative writer is not a patient. And our insistence on thinking otherwise does not reflect clinical virtuosity. It betrays our lack of humility vis-à-vis literary craft, a ballgame altogether different from the dynamic intricacies of an analytic session. Keeping this distinction in mind curtails our “greed for interpretation” and permits us to remain receptive and respectful as readers.
In an elliptical way, this point is brought home by the following passage from Joan’s book: My father liked things done without any unnecessary movements. He liked the power of precision. He wrote that way—spare yet rich. And he spoke that way—with his love of clarity, finding just the right words parsed with powerful eloquence. There was never any “uhm,” “hmmm, “gosh,” “you know,” in his speech. It was orderly and enunciated with precise diction like the crisp conducting of a symphony orchestra. He approached everything like a chess game, traveling forward in time to consider all factors, small or large, that could affect the execution or influence the outcome. He loved to watch me work in the kitchen. He felt that my ability to prepare risotto and a rack of lamb and sauté green beans and make a salad dressing and have it all ready at the proper time was the pinnacle of the economy of motion. He sat at the table watching me, describing my actions. “You make it seem so effortless. I see that you have arranged your tasks in your mind and now have things arranged around you in a way that doesn’t require you to move around unnecessarily. You are accomplishing so much, yet there is no frenetic motion. It’s marvelous to watch.” “Economy of motion?” I teased him. “Right, Daddy?” “Exactly!”
And now let us apply this insight to our encounter with Joan’s book. What it gives us is pleasant, informative, and enriching. What it hides, omits, and withholds is not defensive whitewash but a reflection of sincere and literary “economy of motion”!