Life and Its Discontents

...This "Prologue" artfully succeeds in misguiding us about the nature of the violently erotic verses comprising the journal's first section, entitled "Don Giovanni" " 1 have started an affair/with your son, on a train somewhere/ in a dark tunnel, his hand was underneath/ my dress between my thighs I could not breathe/ he took me to a white lakeside hotel " The 13 pages that follow are a monstrously rhapsodic detailing of the liaison the patient has invented between herself and "the Professor's" son "Am I too sexual7" she asks "I sometimes think I am obsessed by it " Images pile upon images, endless loving blending with endless ravaging, blood intermingling with mother's milk It seems that the unconscious itself is speaking in the middle of it all reigns...

...Freud describes a musically promising young woman he has recently treated for "a severe sexual hysteria" that produces painful physical symptoms The reader learns of an "extraordinary journal" Lisa showed to Freud upon her return from "taking the waters" at Gastein, but slight mention of its contents is given...

...the white hotel, symbol of symbols, the primal longing for fusion embodied in a vacation resort where "no one was selfish " Freud diagnoses the heart of Lisa's affliction as "an extreme of libidinous phantasy combined with an extreme of morbidity It is as if Venus looked in her mirror and saw the face of Medusa ". The next section, "The Gastein Journal," is a reworking of the same story in unadorned prose, Lisa's effort to atone for her emotional indiscretions and make them more palatable to herself and to Freud There is a small addition inserted at the beginning, a dream of running through a forest away from firing soldiers-a foreboding of Lisa's actual death that we will understand in hindsight Certain "facts" then get filled in Lisa Erdman, a widowed soprano, meets a young soldier (Freud's son) on a train They chat, she dozes off and when she awakens they drift into love-making "She had already, in a sense, slept with him, allowing him the much greater intimacy of watching her while she was asleep " The\ arrive at the white hotel with its minatory seductions, its death-m-life "The young woman felt broken in halt, and saw the end of the relationship before it had properly begun, and her return home, split open " Supernaturally ominous events abound, although the food is excellent and the hotel staff attentive Throughout the interlude Lisa sees as piercingly as a brooding ascetic into the terror of lust she put herself in the posit ion of the plum, exuding its dew \ moisture and trembling in the marriage bed as the hour tor the coming of the ox drew near She anticipated the fearsome breaking of her hymen, the horrific penetration It made her shiver and break into a sweat...

...Richard P Brickner has written two novels and an autobiographical work of startling candor, My Second Twenty Years Tickets (Simon & Schuster, 254 pp , $12 95), his new novel, is an adult romance featuring a pair of red-hot lovers who escape the appearance of inanity that condition usually entails Perhaps this is because their ardor makes at least one of them uneasy, a rarity in the literature of love Alan Hoffman, a fortyish journalist, is mad about opera, attending performances three or four times a week during the season A cultured bon vivant, never married, he leads the sort of benignly selfish life that most people envision when someone is described as a "sophisticated New Yorker " He explains his obsession with the art to Curtis and Betsy Ring, whom he has met during an intermission at the Metropolitan Opera House "You have to understand that no one who loves opera would think of denying that it's full of grotesque stupidities-Loose ends and ludicrous staging and gestures that make no sense The point is that there's so much that has to work if the whole thing's going to work that when it does work I feel so grateful that I think I must feel that I become part of the perfection I love my own admiration What we're always after, anyway, is intelligence over heavy odds, isn't if That's what opera is when it works ". Alan does not realize that he is about to bridge the gap between the idealized and the real in his own life But he soon finds himself putting his words to the test when he falls in love with Betsy, who is certainly an instance of "heavy odds," since she is both reluctant and married Betsy is 33 and has just completed her first novel (which sounds unreadable), she is very much taken with Alan's charms yet also wary of his grandstanding intensity Both Alan and Betsy are extremely conscious, searching characters, absorbed in their mutual affection Their articulateness makes them a great relief to listen to at a time when most fictional amours seem to transpire underwater, they are full of the kind of angled observations that intelligent men and women delight in trying on for size in front of each other Here is Alan describing a picturesque moment from his adolescence for Betsy's amusement "It made me feel absolutely cosmopolitan to go to this party A whole new country of people I an eligible bachelor I wore my blue suit My suit I'm sure it took me an hour and a half to dress Standing there by herself at this party was Marjone's classmate Rosamond Lewis What I remember is this Rosamond Lewis was very serious I admired people who were beyond their years People who acted their age seemed like fakers to me, as if they were merely pretending to enjoy being fifteen ". As Alan comments, however, "Fate's a bad fit "Although their love affair seems to be gaming against the odds for most of the book, the last third brings it all crashing down The dark side of the operatic ideal-unbelievable coincidences, heavily ironic, fateful deaths"-decides to show its face, leaving Alan Hoffman outside the tumult, alone in the crowd "The audience din held on He started through the lobby crowd His heart was beating outside his chest He stared at the dark beyond the glass doors, the audience bubbling onto the plaza He buttoned his coat ". Tickets is an elegantly written, deeply observed book about the difference between irony in art and in life Brickner' s prose reads like the best sort of talk, alternating between high sobriety and high jinks, and implicitly trusting the reader to understand what he is up to He is up to a lot here, for there is little of cultivated pleasure and its attendant pain that he misses...

...Up to this point we have had two histories recounted, as it were, bytheid In the subsequent chapters we are given a look at Lisa's impossible yearning shaped by chronology and reined in by the logistics of time and place First, Thomas pays homage to Freud's vision by offering, in "Frau Anna G ," a near-perfect imitation of one of the Viennese psychiatrist's sonorous case histories The "real" Lisa Erdman is somewhat masked, due to the changes Freud has made to guard her privacy, but much of her background emerges She grew up in Odessa, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother While Lisa was still young her mother died and her businessman father hired a nurse and governess to care for her She left home at 17 to pursue an artistic career, had a brief affair with a political radical and eventually married a barrister, from whom she had been separated for several years when Freud saw her in 1929...

...Finally, Thomas provides a conventional narrative, starting with the ineluctable train ride Lisa eventually remarries, this time to a Soviet opera singer, and lives in Russia, taking care of her stepson, Kolya No longer plagued by images of death, her physical symptoms fade too, she has a glimpse of happiness "For as she looked back through the clear space to her childhood, there was no blank wall, only an endless extent, like an avenue, in which she was still herself, Lisa And when she looked in the opposite direction, towards the unknown future, death, the endless extent beyond death, she was there still ". This rendition, free of overt symbolism, its interior drama constrained by the normalizing demands of everyday life, is in some ways the most powerful At one stage, Lisa thinks that "somewhere-at that very moment-someone was inflicting the worst possible horror on another human being," a premonition that turns out to be no more pathological than the climate that bred it Instead of finding solace in the phantasmagoria of the white hotel, she and Kolya perish in the mass machine gunnings carried out by the SS at Babi Yar (Although a coda that takes place in a Palestine-like heaven where Lisa is reunited with her mother does not completely work, it does not significantly detract either...

...77ie White Hotel is daunting in conception and daring in execution Despite intricate schema of interlocking myths and recurring symbols, the novel manages to sustain a clear, pure intention, always presenting Lisa in terms of her own story Her desires and the impediments to their fulfillment are never less than unique, yet within the remarkable context of their telling they acquire the weight of allegory...

...Writers &Writing LIFE AND ITS DISCONTENTS BY DAPHNE MERKIN CONTEMPORARY NOVELS tend to circumscribe the possibilities available to them D M Thomas' The White Hotel (Viking, 274 pp , $12 95), in presenting the hithertounimagined imaginable, and reminding us of what truly resourceful fiction can do, therefore comes as a pleasant shock An intentionally fractured view of one Lisa Erdman's life, the book opens obliquely A fabricated exchange of letters between Sigmund Freud and two of his colleagues quickly re-creates the haut-bourgeois world inhabited by these pioneering doctors of the mind, the atmosphere of formality and constraint surrounding their daring postulates of Eros and Thanatos...