Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath

Lytton Strachey wrote in his preface to Eminent Victorians (1918) that the serious biographer must “attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing search light into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.”In his new book Parallel Lives, Jeffrey Meyers shines his searchlight on twinned portraits of literary, artistic, and political giants of the twentieth century. The model, of course, is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (second century AD), wherein the ancient sage paired 48 biographies of such giants as Alexander the Great with Julius Caesar and Demosthenes with Cicero (one Greek to one Roman). Meyers gives us 18 pairings, with many surprises.The German word doppelgänger means not so much “look-alike” as “double-walker” or, one might say, “fellow time-traveler.” Meyers audaciously begins by pairing the most famous Austrian “odd couple”—Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud. “The two men were profoundly influenced by Viennese culture and politics, rejected rationalism and recognized the importance of subconscious forces,” Meyers writes. “But while Freud attempted to understand and control the forces from the deep, Hitler unleashed and exploited them—with tragic consequences for Freud . . . as well as for all Jews of Europe.”How different they were: Freud came from a well-to-do, educated family, while lower-class Hitler served in World War I and then lived in a homeless shelter while applying to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, which rejected him. As a poor street sweeper, Hitler came to envy and loathe educated Jews, who made up 9 percent (170,000 people) of Vienna’s population.Freud himself would write, “I hate Vienna almost personally . . . It is a misery to live here: this is no atmosphere in which one can maintain the hope of achieving anything difficult.” And yet, he would concede, “I feel an unrestrained affection for Vienna and Austria, although I know her abysses.”From 1933 to 1934, Hitler rose to power in Germany as a member of von Hindenburg’s government. The Nazis immediately attacked Sigmund Freud’s theories and, as Meyers notes, they began to burn his books in Germany as early as May 1933. By 1938, Hitler and the Nazi Party were in full control, and the annexation of Austria was inevitable. On March 11, 1938, Nazi troops entered Austria, with Hitler himself waving to the cheering crowds in Linz. As Meyers so aptly notes: “The extraordinary transformation of Hitler from the young tramp of Vienna to the conqueror of Europe suggests the demonic possibilities of mediocrity.”Hitler, who once said, “The Jew is always within us,” was troubled by the fear that he might be partly Jewish. After taking power in 1938, he commandeered the Austrian cemetery where his ancestors were buried and turned it into an artillery range, obliterating any questionable tombstones.Before fleeing Vienna, Freud was forced to sign an absurd statement on June 4, 1938, saying he had been well-treated. Then, as Meyers notes, the psychoanalyst added this superb postscript, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” Gallows humor, indeed; though Freud was lucky to escape, his four aged sisters in Vienna were sent to concentration camps, where they were killed in 1943.In the second chapter, Meyers pairs Freud with novelist Thomas Mann, who had satirized Freud’s theories in his novel Magic Mountain; later Mann would acknowledge that illness could result from the repression of desire. Mann’s wife was Jewish, and Freud would call his friend Thomas Mann a “noble goy,” but he clearly did not know Mann very well. Meyers notes that Mann’s personal diaries eventually revealed that he had sexual relations with his eldest son. Indeed, both of Mann’s sons and his daughter Erika would emerge as homosexuals. Meyers clinically yet sympathetically concludes this chapter with a (somewhat) upbeat note: “Mann’s repressed homosexuality led not to neurosis and death, but to his greatest work: his portrayal of the secret emotions of Tonio and Hans Hensen in ‘Tonio Kroger,’ Aschenbach and Tadzio in ‘Death in Venice,’ as well as the masterpieces The Magic Mountain, ‘Mario and the Magician,’ and Doctor Faustus.”One reason I like this book is the absence of footnotes. This is no PhD thesis, but a grand celebration of personalities, tragedies, and passions. The writing is fast-paced, alternately laugh-making, heart-breaking, and enlightening.Meyers is like a wise sommelier curating a cellar of twentieth-century spirits (some good, some bad), but he couldn’t resist uncorking a gnarly turn-of-the-century tale of les poètes maudits. In 1891, the 16-year-old country bumpkin Arthur Rimbaud boldly stated that the poet must challenge himself through a long derangement of all the senses. Shortly after this wayward genius arrived in Paris, he collided with the older poet Paul Verlaine, who, while drinking vast quantities of absinthe, beat his poor wife and sexually dominated Rimbaud. Meyers brilliantly catalogues their deranged behavior along with Verlaine’s startling poems, some of which elegized anal sex, etcetera. Bad lives, good art? The poetry of both men transcends the cursed urges of les poêtes maudits.In Chapter 5, Meyers pairs the legendary T. E. Lawrence with André Malraux, who was entranced by the mythomania surrounding Lawrence of Arabia. Malraux claimed to have met the legendary desert warrior at the bar of a grand hotel in Paris circa 1933. In fact, Lawrence never frequented fancy hotel bars, and for some reason Malraux could not even cite the name of that hotel. Nor could he place the month or year. It was patently a wishful fantasy. And yet, as Meyers wrote, “Throughout his life Malraux imitated, transformed, and absorbed Lawrence. By the end of World War II their legends had merged and, in the French mind, ‘André Malraux and T.E. Lawrence became inseparable.’” (Talk about “cultural appropriation.”)The chapter on Evelyn Waugh and the eccentric twerp Robert Byron at Oxford reads like a Monty Python script juiced with steroids and whiskey. While Byron and Waugh were in their madcap “homosexualist” period at Oxford, the rather nasty Byron once exclaimed that he wished “To be an incredibly beautiful male prostitute with a sharp sting in his bottom.” Ah, the aesthetes of Brideshead Revisited. Waugh managed to give up buggery in order to marry a woman named Evelyn Gardner, who soon left him for the Irish baronet and journalist Sir John Heygate. Distraught, Waugh converted to Catholicism and bounced back in 1936 to marry Laura Herbert, a strict Catholic from an aristocratic family. They quickly produced six children (among them the future writer Auberon Waugh).World War II did not have a sobering effect on Waugh. During military service in Yugoslavia, he spent months with Sir Winston Churchill’s charming blowhard-of-a-son, Randolph, as they swilled gallons of whiskey. Waugh expressed his hostility to the communists by constantly referring to their leader, Marshal Tito, as a “woman,” “lesbian,” or “Auntie.” When Waugh was eventually introduced to Tito, the quite macho leader growled, “Ask Captain Waugh why he thinks I am a woman.” The novelist was silent. Days later, Waugh and Randolph Churchill were flying in a Dakota transport plane when it crash-landed in a cornfield at night. Ten passengers died, and nine survived. Both of Randolph’s legs were broken, and Waugh was badly burned on his arms, legs, and head, yet he oddly felt little pain. Medically treated and eventually flown to their base in Topola, they convalesced in a farmhouse, where Waugh drank heavily while diligently correcting the proofs to his novel Brideshead Revisited.There Randolph forced Waugh to read his father Winston’s massive biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. After slogging through Life of Marlborough, Waugh judged it harshly: “As history it is beneath contempt, the special pleading of a defence (sic) lawyer. As literature it is worthless.” Dismayed, Randolph shot back, “Have you ever noticed that it is always the people who are most religious who are most mean and cruel?” Waugh replied, “But, my dear Randolph, you have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”Churchill and Waugh remained distant friends in peacetime. In 1964, when Randolph had a tumor removed that turned out to be benign, Waugh remarked that the doctors had found “the only part of Randolph that was not malignant.”Meyers’s book is full of surprises, both tragic and comic. I always think of Robert Frost as an old man in a horse-drawn sleigh, trotting through the dark New England woods on a snowy evening. Yet, after the death of his wife, Elinor, in 1938, Frost boarded a Pan Am Clipper seaplane down to Cuba with fellow poet Paul Engle in February 1939. “To me the best part of the excursion was the flight both ways in the big Pan American plane and especially the swoop and mighty splash into the bays on arrival.” The widowed Frost would have more adventures back home: in bed with the married Kay Morrison. There is something tawdry, perhaps sad, about Frost’s affair. Meyers has done the best one can with this chapter, but it is not a pleasant tale. (But who wants to read a pleasant tale?) And so we move on.Three chapters revolve around Edmund Wilson, a great literary mind whose books are rarely read today. For a time, however, Wilson’s novel Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), banned as “obscene” (always good for sales!), was the most talked-about book in America. Meyers portrays Wilson coaching and browbeating the young Scott Fitzgerald (who always revered “Bunny” Wilson); then he describes Wilson attacking the Southern poet Allen Tate for his right-wing views and his Catholicism; and finally, we follow Wilson bullying Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian genius whose scandalous novel Lolita changed world literature.Wilson, who flirted with Communism, read Russian well. “Your conception of Russian history is all wrong,” he loftily lectured Nabokov, “being based on the stale Bolshevist propaganda you imbibed in your youth.” He then mailed the Russian aristocrat a copy of his own novel, To the Finland Station, with the condescending and delusional inscription “to Vladimir Nabokov with the hope that this may make him think better of Lenin.” Suffice it to say, more readers today favor books by Fitzgerald, Tate, and Nabokov than by Wilson. So it goes.In a perfect segue, Meyers links Nabokov, creator of Lolita, to the artist Balthazar Klossowski (1908–2001), better known as “Balthus,” who painted elegant nudes of young girls—“nymphets”—with the skill of a Renaissance master. Born in Paris, Balthus was a pan-European aristocrat of murky lineage whose early work was promoted by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Adopting the almost-legitimate title “Comte de Rola,” Balthus painted in a grand château in Switzerland. André Derain and Joan Miró posed for him, while Picasso bought Balthus’s masterpiece The Children (1937). Meyers notes that Nabokov and Balthus both detested Sigmund Freud and were fascinated by Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe (who both were obsessed with young girls). While at Cambridge, Nabokov had translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian and would later describe Lolita as “a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair.” A Cheshire-like cat appears in several of Balthus’ paintings, perhaps a feline alter ego for the artist himself.Over the years Meyers has written (separate) full-length biographies of Ernest (“Papa”) Hemingway, director John Huston, and actor Gary Cooper, so it is natural that he should devote two chapters pairing Papa with Huston, then Papa with Cooper, who starred in the film version of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Huston and Hemingway were both amateur boxers and avid hunters and got along well. Cooper was the son of a judge from Helena, Montana, and also loved to hunt and fish. Hemingway once told a friend that “if you made up a character like Coop, nobody would believe it. He’s too good to be true.” But Cooper was no saint; he had an affair with his co-star Ingrid Bergman and eventually with actress Patricia Neal.An interesting detail: Hemingway tried to support Cooper when the actor discussed his intention to convert to Catholicism, partly to please Coop’s wife (Rocky) and their daughter, and partly to heal the wounds caused by Coop’s extramarital affair with Patricia Neal. Hemingway, writes Meyers, “felt especially bitter about Cooper’s conversion to Catholicism to please his wealthy wife because he [EH] had done precisely the same thing when he married [Catholic] Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927.” (That is, after divorcing his first wife, Hadley.) Hemingway himself was failing health-wise when Cooper, sick with cancer, telephoned to say, “I bet I make it to the barn before you.” And he was right. (Hemingway would later blow his brains out in Sun Valley with a shotgun.)There are so many intriguing “parallel lives” in this book, including Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank hiding in separate basements during the German Occupation of Amsterdam; then Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell, Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, and freak-obsessed photographer Diane Arbus with novelist-poet Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar. (Meyers deftly summed up the suicidal writer thusly: “Hospitals to Plath were like daffodils to Wordsworth.”) This lively scrapbook of twentieth-century genius is more than entertaining; it is humane and brilliant. Though we come this way but once, I’ll be reading this book twice.