Read Online Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik - Free Book Online

about the major figures of New York literary life—not necessarily his own patients but writers and artists whose careers he followed admiringly—as though they were that chain of forts upstate, around Lake George, left over from the French and Indian War: the ones you visited as a kid, where they gave you bumper stickers. There was Fort Sontag, Fort Frankenthaler, Fort Mailer. “She is very well defended.” “Yes, I admire her defenses.” “Admirably well defended.” Once I mentioned a famous woman intellectual who had recently gotten into legal trouble: Hadn't she been well defended? “Yes, but the trouble is that the guns were pointing the wrong way, like the British at Singapore.” You were wrung out with gratitude for a remark like that. I was, anyway.
    It was his theory, in essence, that “creative” people were inherently in a rage, and that this rage came from their disappointed narcissism. The narcissism could take a negative, paranoid form or a positive, defiant, arrogant form. His job was not to cure the narcissism (which was inseparable from the creativity) but, instead, to fortify it—to get the drawbridge up and the gate down and leave the Indians circling outside, with nothing to do but shoot flaming arrows harmlessly over the stockade.
    He had come of age as a professional in the forties and fifties, treating the great battlers of the golden age of New York intellectuals, an age that, seen on the couch—a seething mass of resentments, jealousies, and needs—appeared somewhat less golden than it did otherwise. “How well I recall,” he would begin, “when I was treating”—and here he named two famous art critics of the period. “They went to war with each other. One came in at ten o'clock. ‘I must reply,’ he said. Then at four-thirty the other one would come in. ‘I must reply,’ he would say. ‘No,’ I told them both. ‘Wait six months and see if anyone recalls the source of this argument.’ They agreed to wait. Six months later, my wife, that witty, witty woman, held a dinner party and offered some pleasantry about their quarrel. No one understood; no one even remembered it. And this was in the days when
ART news
was something. I recall what Thomas Mann said….” Eventually,abruptly, as the clock on the wall turned toward seven-thirty, he would say, “So you see … this demonstrates again what I always try to tell you about debates among intellectuals.”
    I leaned forward, really wanting to know. “What is that, Doctor?” I said.
    “No one cares.
People have troubles of their own. We have to stop now.” And that would be it.
    I would leave the room in a state of vague, disconcerted disappointment.
No one cares?
No one cares about the hard-fought and brutally damaging fight for the right sentence, the irrefutable argument? And: People have troubles of their own? My great-aunt Hannah could have told me that. That was the result of half a century of presiding over the psyches of a major moment in cultural history? And then, fifteen minutes later, as I rode in a cab downtown, my heart would lift—would fly. That's right:
No one cares! People have troubles of their own!
It's okay. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; it means you should do it, somehow, for its own sake, without illusions. Just write, just live, and don't care too much yourself. No one cares. It's just
banter.
    S ometimes his method of bringing me to awareness—if that was what he was doing—could be oblique, not to say bizarre. There was, for instance, the Volestein Digression. This involved a writer whose name was, shall we say, Moses Volestein. Dr. G. had once read something by him and been fascinated by his name. “What a terrible name,” he said. “Vole. Why would a man keep such a terrible name?”
    His name didn't strike me as a burden, and I said so.
    “You are underestimating the damage that this man's name does to his psychic welfare,” he replied gravely. “It is intolerable.”
    “I