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This, for what it’s worth, is what I was reading and writing in 1965 after dropping out from VUW. Looking back, I thought it weird that the book that eventually “grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me” was written by a German psychotherapist in 1930 — and which I’d completely forgotten about.
And he says there’s really no excuse for bad memory or poor mathematics? ~ Ian
§
My second year in Wellington didn’t start any better than the first. I didn’t show up for lectures in the new year — I stopped studying and started reading. Over Summer my diary had been filled with interesting characters, sunshine and fresh air, but now reverted to talking about my Christian faith, morality and personal inadequacies.
Not only that, I was constantly embarrassed “by what I write and how I write it.” I couldn’t win!
But just because it’s embarrassing to read doesn’t mean that everything I wrote was entirely wrong:
Religion is the promise of meaning, Christianity of salvation.
…
Religion is also rationalising. The truth is not analysed, but experienced, but once experienced must be analysed — for other’s benefit, and one’s own satisfaction. Intellectual persuasion comes after psychological persuasion. One experiences an emotion, and then says it has truth — hopes it has truth. Rationalises.
But still, I wrote, don’t listen to me:
That’s why it’s important to develop character, to strive for and conquer oneself. By so doing one builds a greater receiver for greater truths. That’s why what I say is worthless…
…
And in the company of your betters, listen…
And remember, religion is emotion first, explanation after.
Not bad! I think that’s insightful for a kid who felt so bereft — the idea that perhaps mankind can’t be explained by “the selfish gene” alone. That we’re a species that needs a sense of meaning and purpose to thrive. I could see the psychological foundations of my own faith, which is no small thing.
What was harder to confront was that I was using Christianity as a cuddle rug. I spent the rest of the year coming closer to that realisation.
§
The first book to make an impression on me was Battle for the Mind by William Sargant — How can an evangelist convert a hardboiled sophisticate? Why does a POW sign a “confession” that he knows is false? How is a criminal pressured into admitting his guilt? Do the evangelist, the POW’s captor, and the policeman use similar methods to gain their ends?
Then came John O’Hara’s jaundiced short stories in Hope of Heaven — the girl who works her way up as the Director’s mistress and the heir’s wife. The woman dining with her lady friend, who discovers that the friend has seduced her husband.
§
We were arguing tonight, and Kevin said my concerns about right and wrong, and God, and society were ridiculous. Sure, he agreed, the life we lead is a dull. He only worked to earn money, like everyone else, so those hours were wasted — and even the rest of the day was worthless and dissatisfying. But give him a warm island with his family and friends, tilling the soil for their own benefit, fishing at his own whim, and that would really be life!
Ruth comes from Samoa, just such a warm, simple, earthy land, and she soon disillusioned him. People were the same there, she told us sadly. They squabbled, they fought, they niggled, and made each other unhappy. And those who lived alone just added loneliness to unhappiness. Her father died of worry, and her friend writes constantly to the government, asking to come to New Zealand…
Yes, yes, yes said her husband — but they don’t know what it’s like in this lousy place.
We were both surprised at the vehemence with which she rebuked him. Maybe, she said, but people are the same everywhere.
§
I spent an age with Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.
On Christmas Day 1954, alone in his room — according to Wikipedia — Colin Wilson sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He said:
It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun’s Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished…Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book.
That was me right there, except — no book!
Colin Wilson was 24 when he persuaded Victor Gollanz to publish his. It was a great success, although his reputation seems to have tanked. A Time magazine review of a later book called him a “scrambled egghead”.
§
It must have been a relief reading Tom Jones after The Outsider — Henry Fielding trying to “laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices.”
But Tom’s adventures came with a lecture on the side for god-botherers like me:
The truth finder, having raked out that jakes his own mind, and being there capable of tracing no ray of divinity, nor anything virtuous, or good, or lovely, or loving, very fairly, honestly and logically concludes that no such things exist in the whole creation…
Examine your heart, my good reader, and resolve whether you do believe these matters with me… if you do not, you have already read more than you have understood; and it would be wiser to pursue your business, or your pleasures (such as they are), than to throw away any more of your time in reading what you can neither taste nor comprehend.
That’s telling me.
I loved the movie too — especially the indelible memory of Diane Cilento coming on to Albert Finney. It took me back to school, and laughing in the dormitories at night about our fumbling approaches to girls.
§
18.5.65
The war will come and
This tree that cradles me
Will disappear
From my horizon forever.
The war will come and with it
The problem
Shall I fight or
Shall I be fought for or
What?
The war will come and
I will have made no decision
But
I will fight and so will millions
For honour’s sake and
I will go away to lose
My honour my manhood my everything.
The War will come and there will be
An inhuman convulsion
And this age and its concerns will be
Played out to their
Trivial tragic senseless violent ends.
I’d started thinking about conscription, pacifism and Vietnam.
§
I seem to have been always on the outside, looking in — trying to be a writer, I suppose:
I was sitting under a massive Pohutukawa with my notebook, halfway up a steep grassy slope and looking down to the sea. It was a drizzly day, the sky gentle and misty, with the afternoon sun just managing to penetrate a spent shower [and my purple prose].
The tide was receding. A Māori family was gathering oysters on the rocks. Offshore, birds were diving on a thrashing shoal of little fish. Two men were in amongst the fish in a little dinghy. They were towing a spinner to hook Kahawai that, like the birds, were feeding off the shoal. I could hear the occasional laugh or shout, the crunch of oyster shells and the drone of the outboard.
The family lived around the point from my tree, and when I’d seen the birds congregate I’d gone and asked the old man if I could borrow their boat. They were all sitting outside the house pulling on gumboots and old shoes when I came. I told the old man I wanted to photograph the birds and get in amongst the fish. But one of the old man’s sons said he wanted to fish the school and his brother nodded. As I walked away I thought I heard them laughing.
They’ll fight when the war comes, I thought. I don’t know why but they will.
§
25.5.65: The idea that evil could be conquered was getting a little shaky. It was Doctor Zhivago that brought home what “revolution” means. I quoted whole pages from my paperback translation:
…revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days; the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at the most years; but for decades thereafter, for centuries, the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.
One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.
But could we condemn the Revolution? It had its cause — it was born in “dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker as a human being, the degradation of women.”
§
Ernest Hemingway had been a favourite since I’d bought a nice edition of The Old Man and The Sea as a school prize. Which is why I read Lillian Ross’s Portrait of Hemingway. I described it as an attractive little book that gave an insight into the man:
far different to the one I get from reading his own books. He is friendly and humorous, a strange, thoughtful, lumbering man, given to talk of fights, games, shooting, flying to illustrate his conversation. Garrulous and tolerant, he nevertheless dislikes those who sit at home and preach, or who write without firsthand knowledge. He is annoyed by critics and moralists but thoughtful of the world about which they argue: “I’m trying to be a good guy,” he says, “but it is a difficult trade. What you win in Boston you lose in Chicago.”
But I’ve just re-read the 1950 New Yorker piece on which Lilian Ross based her book, and he comes across now as rather tiresome, surrounded by women who indulged him too much. It would have been nice to meet Marlene Dietrich, though, one of the panderers. “Papa Hemingway.” And yes, only 47.
My copy of The Old Man went in the ground a couple of years ago with a young friend who loved fishing and died too young.
§
Hemingway again:
The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.
While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please Christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus.
§
From Time magazine, July 19651
By the following morning the Communist attackers had had enough. They faded like smoke into the jungle, leaving behind 700 dead. The defenders toll was terrible too: at least 108 dead (including 18 Americans), 46 wounded, 126 missing and presumed dead. Along the defence perimeter lay 12 disembowelled children. An American, his body as black and twisted as a burnt match, sprawled among the debris in the Special Forces camp, his dog tag soldered to his bones and his charred pet monkey clinging, even in death, to his back. The Dongxoai church was cluttered with severed heads; bodies of South Vietnamese soldiers used as human shields lay bound and eviscerated.”
…
Laughing Larry Luong fights the Viet Cong because he is a professional soldier and also because the Communists killed his peasant father by dragging him across a thorny durian patch, then burying him up to his neck for several days before decapitating him. Larry customarily shoots Viet Cong prisoners, giggling the while, not because he is cruel, but because he knows that if he hands them over to the local authorities, they would only be released to rejoin the communists.”
§
I’d bought a copy of Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in a gloomy Soviet binding. Robert C. Tucker, an American academic, described the basis of Marx’s thought in this work as a moral one, and Marx as a moralist of the religious kind2. “The good and evil forces in the world are present with such overwhelming immediacy, and the conclusions for conduct follow with such compelling force that ethical enquiry must seem to them pointless or even perverse.” Proper social relationships are reciprocal, he said:
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust… If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people… If you love without evoking love in return — that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent — a misfortune.
I agreed with him. But money makes impotency potent, I wrote. Money talks, money buys; money subordinates the good man, the talented man, the great man to the rich man.
So how does Communism change that?
Marx seems to have believed that degradation and injustice will disappear — and a dynamic, creative other-regarding society replace it — when capitalism is replaced by communism, and property is owned by everybody, not by a restricted class.
I didn’t think that was likely. I’d already read Doctor Zhivago, in which Boris Pasternak accuses Russian Marxism of the selfsame crime — sacrificing man to dogma, man to state.
To succeed, Communism requires a change in people, I reckoned, not just in our property rights — our rebirth in a generous, not a selfish, mould. I thought human selfishness could survive any change in the system, and was ingenious enough to work through any system.
Take prostitution, for example. A woman might no longer need to sell her body to pay the bills, but the market for her body would still exist. On this matter Dad and I agreed.
Reading my notes again I felt quite pleased that I’d worked out the fundamental flaw in Marx’s thinking by age nineteen. The Manuscripts had summed up his almost religious appeal, I thought.
§
The Vietnam War kept the collectivist mindset alive in me for a few more years, partly by drawing a distinction between the Chinese and Russian Revolutions as the good and bad sides of the Marxist coin.
And I did buy a handful of Marxist-Leninist books — bound in gloomy dark blue from memory — but I never read them, and can’t remember where, or when — still pristine, but with that stuffy Soviet smell — I dumped them.
§
But the book that grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me was Fritz Künkel’s What It Means to Grow Up.
Künkel was an Adlerian psychotherapist who moved from Germany to the US in 1936. How on earth did I come across a book first published in German in 1930? There is little in it from a female point of view, and it describe homosexuality as one “refuge from reality”, but that aside it had real power for me then, and it still makes sense…
In brief, Künkel says that a fundamental question to ask of our behaviour is whether it is objective or egocentric.
A boy who makes something because he enjoys it, or because he needs it, is acting objectively. If he does it to earn the admiration of others he’s acting egocentrically.
Is a man’s conduct predominantly objective, or predominantly egocentric? On this question… depends almost all that his future destiny holds in store for him, both good and bad.
An egocentric individual will avoid danger, pain, failure and non-fulfilment of his wishes. He’ll react to frustration either by cheating (winning by hook or by crook) or by teaching himself not to want anything. Wanting nothing is better than frustrated desire.
Pampering can induce egocentricity and faint-heartedness in a child, but too much toughening up can too — by forcing him to rely on his own resources and become independent, even distrustful, of others. Such people can be courageous in pursuing external goals but are timid when it comes to their inner feelings.
Egocentric people need control. True friendship, companionship or love are fantasies.
And egocentrism is a vicious circle:
The egocentric person wants to maintain his superiority. Therefore there will be activities he will not attempt because of fear of failure. Because he does not attempt them, he becomes ever less capable of performing them. Because he becomes less and less capable, he has less and less courage to attempt them. And even if he does make up his mind to try, he is so terrified and upset that from very nervousness and strain he behaves in the clumsiest way possible. Thus every attempt ends in failure.
Something that distinguishes adults from children is tension capacity — courage, or the ability to postpone the need for immediate relief from discomfort or even pain.
Courage and objectivity don’t necessarily go together, as we can bring considerable “tension capacity” to bear in defence of our own ego. But an objective personality can increase his capacity for tension, whereas it will diminish in an egocentric individual because of that vicious circle.
Whoever as adult could still stay so thoroughly with the matter at hand … as he was while a child at play … would excel all his fellow men in presence of mind and in productivity.
Why do we not carry this aptitude into adulthood? Because “we lose our objectivity and our courage”. When a child becomes egocentric, he learns the difference between play and earnest. Play becomes trivial and irresponsible, work dull and meaningless.
The genius is the man who works as the child plays.
Problems in memorisation, arithmetic, athletics are all a question of tension capacity.
Everyone has a good memory for the things that truly interest him. The person who is never truly interested in anything never has a good memory.
The “dreamer” may develop philosophic or poetic tendencies, but these will always be egocentric:
…the fact that his behaviour is fundamentally egocentric in nature and has little to do with objectivity will be proved by his timid shrinking from all the raw experiences that pertain to his years. He does not dare to come to terms with reality, but prefers to escape into the realm of ideas, where fewer bitter experiences are to be met with than in the outer everyday world.
§
“He does not dare come to terms with reality, but prefers to escape into the realm of ideas.” He might as well have looked me in the eye as he said it — as Gordon had, when he challenged me.
At about the time I was reading Künkel, I saw the movie Zorba the Greek. Zorba is another character who believed that life is to be lived, not avoided. I can’t imagine him reading Künkel, though.
Strangely, I’d completely forgotten both the man Künkel and his book until I re-read the diary.