Jack Foley

FOLEY: This is Jack Foley with the second half of my interview with Brenda Webster. I want to open today's show with two quotations. One is from Brenda Webster's mother, Ethel Schwabacher:

Storms of the heart. Furious anger. Clash. Opposition. Much like the storms of nature when trees crash, when boughs splinter off and are wind- tossed, hopping over the ground, brittle leaves clacking against each other.

That's from Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher, edited by Brenda S. Webster and Judith Emlyn Johnson (Indiana University Press, 1993). And this is from Brenda Webster's's autobiography, written for the Gale Research series:

I don't remember who said that anyone who has had a childhood has enough material for a lifetime. It has certainly been the case with me. Every time I think I have exhausted the vein, I find it again.

Brenda, you wrote a book, a novel, Paradise Farm, dealing with your mother's childhood. It had many of the same events that this memoir deals with. What made you go back to that whole subject, that whole burden of childhood, of the past?

WEBSTER:: I just hadn't had enough of it. I was going to write another novel, in fact, about my childhood. This is a funny story! I told a friend I was planning to write a novel with a series of scenes. Each one would have a locale, like the swimming pool where I tried to drown my brother, the barn where Connie, my childhood friend, killed some kittens. It would be like that. I said to my friend, Jane, "What do you think of that?" She said, "Boring. Static. You can't have a novel made up of scenes like that, with no plot. Why don't you write a memoir?" I thought, "Well, that's not a bad idea." And I did.

FOLEY: The material is covered a little bit differently. Also, you're able to deal with your adulthood. I think that in Paradise Farm, which is a very interesting novel, you're dealing really with your mother, whereas in this book you're trying to deal with your own growth--and growth is an issue of the book. You go from being a 90-pound weakling, a "wimp," as you say, to being a successful mother and writer, but not without pain and not without a lot of problems. You feel even at the end of the book that "family"--which is defined in one way at the beginning of the book and at the beginning of your childhood--has transformed itself. But The Last Good Freudian is the name of the book. Isn't going back to childhood what psychoanalysis is all about? That, and an attempt to redefine your childhood until it becomes something you can live with.

WEBSTER:: Or to make sense of it. I for instance had been so inward directed, probably because of all the psychoanalysis I'd had, I didn't really put myself in the context either of what was going on in psychoanalysis at that time, or of my family background: Jewish, assimilated, liberal. I had no idea how interconnected everything was. How, for instance, my progressive schooling fed into the Freudian thing. All these things were linked and produced the creature who is me.

FOLEY: There were social aspects to your personal autobiography. You mentioned at your reading at Black Oak Books that it was that realization that allowed the book to come together.

WEBSTER:: Yes, it did bring it together. It sort of brought me together too because I had a mirror of how it all happened.

FOLEY: There is this kind of split aspect to you in the book. You show your daughter Rebecca your reviews at one point and she remarks, "Gee, these are wonderful reviews and I'm so surprised, Mom, you acted so ditzy!" That's a split: yourself as ditzy mother and as serious artist. You talk about the ditziness as a defense that isn't working too well, but it's one you needed to keep propagating.

WEBSTER:: I wasn't aware of it until I was writing for instance the scene you're talking about where I imagine myself, like Yeats, wearing a mask. The mask of the good mother. I was a good mother, but I imagined that as a mask you can take off and then you can be a powerful writer--underneath. But you have to hide it because you're not supposed to be doing that.

FOLEY: That's another split. I guess it's a version of the mind/body split. Especially with women not supposed to be able to think and so not supposed to be able to write. It's also a little like Eurydice or Kore, who are "underground," hidden figures. One of the analysts you talk about, Muriel Gardiner, had written about the "Wolfman," a famous case of Freud's. And your father's name was "Wolf." And at one point you're worried about your first husband, Richard, afraid that he'll turn into a monster--and the word that you use is "wolf."

WEBSTER:: Oh! Sometimes I don't notice these things!

FOLEY: I wanted to begin today's show with an account of your first real psychiatrist, Berta Bornstein, the one your mother sent you to. You're beginning to be interested in sexuality and various things like that, and it's about time for you to have your own analyst and not share Mom's.

WEBSTER:: I was fourteen.

FOLEY: It's a rite of passage, quite clearly. You also talk about the situation of analysts themselves, the history of that, in this little passage.

WEBSTER: (reading):

The analytic community had grown during the 1930s and 1940s with an influx of refugees from Nazi Europe, among them Heinz Hartman, Rudolph Loewenstein, the Krises, Berta Bornstein, Gustav Bychowski. Lawrence Kubie, a wealthy analyst friend of ours, helped many of the immigrants set up new homes and practices. Most of them, like Drs. Kris and Eissler, lived on Central Park West. Some, like Gustav Bychowski, lived on the Upper East Side. The places they lived coincided with the boundaries of my childhood world, whereas most of the artists lived in the Village.

Yet there was a strong connection between analysts and artists. The artists went into analysis for relief of their problems--and many wrote novels or scripts using Freudian themes--while the analysts probed the mysteries of the creative process. Kubie wrote a book on genius and analyzed Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman's collaborator. Eissler, also obsessed with genius, wrote on Goethe and Hamlet. Gregory Zilboorg analyzed Elia Kazan, father of a Dalton [the "progressive school," based on the ideas of John Dewey,

WEBSTER: was attending] friend. Marianne Kris analyzed Marilyn Monroe. Even Mother's interminable analysis was written about for the Psychoanalytic Quarterly by a literary critic, Jeffrey Berman, who felt that despite the thirty-year sequel with Kris, Deutsch's earlier work with Mother was a great success.

I knew many of the analysts through their children. One of my best friends was Bychowski's daughter Monica, an intense black-eyed girl who arrived at Dalton from Poland during the war. She told us how her father, not believing in the danger, practically had to be dragged out of Poland at the last minute by her mother. They lost everything--their beautiful house, his art collection, books. I spent a great deal of time at their Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park, and through Monica met her best friend, Lizzie Loewenstein, analyst Rudolph Lowenstein's daughter. When I was a freshman in high school, I dated Heinz Hartmann's son Ernest, who took me to Kiss Me, Kate and then tried to kiss me, fleeing in panic after we bumped noses. He was terribly Germanic, clicking his heels and bowing over my hand, and even then clearly an intellectual. I only saw Tony Kris, Dr. Kris's son, once, but I thought he was dreamy and was dying to go out with him.

I wasn't aware when I visited their children that Loewenstein, Hartmann and Kris were responsible for an important new development in psychoanalysis, ego psychology, which emphasized the ego's ability to master reality. There was a shift away from earlier ideas of freeing the instincts. Given what had just happened in Nazi Germany, perhaps too much permissiveness was dangerous. By that time, failures were also being reported in the area of permissive child rearing. It appeared that permitting expression of violent hostility, such as death wishes against a sibling, vastly increased a child's insecurity. The conclusion of many analysts, including Anna Freud, was that people needed some protection against the force of their drives.

It's one of the ironies of my situation that the famous child analyst whom Muriel Gardiner suggested for me, Berta Bornstein, acted as if she had never heard of ego mastery and continually encouraged me to express my sexuality. Bornstein was Muriel's closest friend among the analysts. It was she who had warned Muriel to get out of Vienna after the Anschluss, and Muriel referred to her affectionately as Bertele. However, Bornstein had seen Connie [Muriel Gardiner's daughter] as a very young child--Muriel was worrying about raising her without a father--and Connie hadn't liked her.

Berta Bornstein was certainly one of the scariest-looking people I'd ever seen. She was short and dumpy with wispy gray hair and a red birthmark covering a large part of one side of her face. Besides this, she had a nervous mannerism of putting a cold glass or something else to her forehead as though she were suffering from terrible headaches.

In the first sessions, Bornstein made me lie down on her couch and free- associate. All I could think of was how ugly her birthmark was and whether her husband, if she had one, could possible sleep with her. When I wasn't thinking that, I would compulsively imagine sucking a penis. I would have died rather than tell her either of these thoughts, so eventually she let me sit up, and asked me about my masturbation fantasies. "Don't worry," she told me, when I said I'd never masturbated, "you did it just like everyone else. Only you feel too guilty to admit it." When I told her about riding bareback, she almost jumped out of her seat. "But of course that's how you got gratification," she said. Eventually she confined herself to giving me practical advice. She wanted to have me fitted with a diaphragm, but she was afraid that if she did I'd tell everyone at school. Certainly her talk about masturbation and encouragement to get a diaphragm only confused me. Though I clearly needed attention and nurturing more than sex, I also needed to develop some independence. The fact that my sexuality was being managed by my shrink only made me feel more like a baby.

Bornstein might profitably have asked me how I felt having a mother who, though she spoke brilliantly about literature, couldn't talk to me about my feelings and had to dump me on a stranger. If my father had lived, we would certainly have fought over sex, but not only was my mother in such fragile shape, she was also so damned sympathetic. I couldn't get any distance, not to speak of mounting a rebellion.

FOLEY: That's a wonderful passage! In a moment I'll ask you to read another as well: the account of your mother's suicide attempt. (Continued)

Jack Foley