When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel, who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
“THE MAN WATCHING”
RAINER MARIA RILKE
TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY
I knew her in her mid-sixties. She was a small woman. Wiry. Lean. With catlike movements and a purposeful stride. She had loosely curled, shortish brown hair, not yet gray, and never really stylishly coiffed no matter how often she visited the beauty parlor (which I believe was not often). She had an intelligent face, though not a beautiful one. Her features were, at least at that late age, perhaps, a little sharp—shaped over the years, I think, by her personality. She was stylish when she wanted to be: I remember her in rich, dark brown wool suits and a little mink beret, tilted just so on her head, and very expensive high-heeled shoes, the likes of which we saw very little in small-town Ohio. At the same time, she could throw on a pair of overalls, and pick up a shovel or a hoe right along with the hired help, and dig in. She was not afraid to get her hands dirty. Altogether, she was an exotic package. Even her name—Helen Harrington Compton—trailed behind it clouds of the rarefied and the refined. She was obviously from somewhere else. Not from Wooster, Ohio.
Helen Compton was the wife of the most prominent citizen of our small town. Wilson Martindale Compton was a gentle, warmhearted man—handsome and aristocratic, with a head of fluffy, cotton-white hair. He had had a distinguished career in government and academia, and he and his wife had now retired to Wooster, from whence, in fact (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), they had originally come.
A year before my first real encounter with this couple, the Comptons had purchased a massive tumbledown Tudor mansion just down the block from my family’s modest home. Dr. and Mrs. Compton spent a year renovating the elegant stone and gabled home, and seemed to spare no expense in restoring it to its original glory. The transformation included several acres of spectacular lawns and gardens of which Frederick Law Olmsted himself could have been proud. The whole thing was set smack in the middle of the most ordinary of small-town Ohio neighborhoods. We—the ordinary neighbors—watched the renovations. We were agog. Who were these people?
We soon found out, of course. They were, yes, the Comptons—to this day counted as Wooster, Ohio’s most illustrious family.
Helen Compton quickly became notorious in our small community. She drove around town in a mammoth, sea-foam-green Lincoln Continental (the model with the doors that opened from the middle). And if you saw her coming, you had sense enough to give her plenty of space; she liked to drive precisely in the center of the road, taking her half out of the middle.
Helen Harrington Compton was a commanding woman—indeed, a magisterial presence. Many thought she was arrogant. Whatever the case, one thing was clear: she was in charge of any room into which she walked—not just because of her social status (there was none higher), but because of her very real competence.
Mrs. Compton irritated almost everybody and offended some. But, as a thirteen-year-old boy, she fascinated me. I saw her at church, or glimpsed her strolling her grounds, or floating around town in her big green car. This was someone I wanted to know.
As soon as I heard from my mother that the Comptons were looking for a lawn boy, I jumped. “Mom, will you introduce me?” Mom made the introduction, and a brief, awkward interview with The Queen ensued. “Do you like to work?” she asked. “Do you like to work hard?” (And between the lines: “Can you come anytime I call?”)
I was hired that day.
All right, yes, I was barely even a teenager that summer, but I was in fact a very hard worker, strong and eager, and absolutely in love with the landscaping, gardening, and grooming that I had now been hired to do. I’d spent previous summers working with my older brother on a local farm, cultivating acres and acres of Ohio cucumbers, and I had already become inured to hard work in the fields. (I know, I know. Child labor, huh?) As a bonus, I had an instinct for landscape design—or thought I did (where do these notions come from?).
This was all terribly exciting for me. But heaven soon dimmed its blinding light. Within a few days of landing the coveted job as lawn boy, I began to see more clearly what I’d gotten myself into. I was now in close daily relationship with Helen Harrington Compton. This was no small thing. I had married myself to a tiger. I alluded in the last chapter to the ballbuster who had taught me to work. This was she.
I wanted to please Mrs. Compton. I wanted to please her badly. And yet, from the very get-go, so many of the things she asked me to do seemed just plain nuts. Almost from the beginning, an unspoken tension began to build between us.
As I think back on it, I believe that the infamous garden party was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Talk about nuts. Here’s a short version of the story: As a way to introduce herself to the town—rather like a dog peeing on every bush—Helen Compton had decided to throw a garden party. I learned later that this was something she and her husband had done rather routinely at their big home on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., and also on their farm on the Potomac River. It was to be an elaborate affair with linen-covered tables and silver—all set out dazzlingly on the broad stone terrace of the now-renovated mansion. The social elite of Wooster, Ohio, (were there such?) vied behind the scenes for the invitation. As I recall, only about fifty received it. And what a sight they were on the day of the event. Almost everyone was overdressed and looking, as my friend Adam would say, “like Astor’s pet horse.” Women wore pink spring suits made of silk or linen, with inappropriately large hats (think Buckingham Palace). Men wore summer blazers with white pants. Yes, and, oy, panama hats (where did they find them?). There were maids in uniform.
The party was held on a Sunday afternoon in early June. The weather at that time of year in central Ohio was notoriously unreliable. But Mrs. Compton was undaunted by mere nature. She decreed that the spring flowers, the magnificent beds of iris and peonies would be in full bloom for the event. But they were, in actual fact, not cooperating. Alas, it was, they said, “a late spring.” Mrs. Compton was convinced that if she had “the Cope boy” (I don’t remember ever in those early months hearing “Steve,” and I’m not sure she learned my Christian name at all until we were a year or so into the gig), if she had The Cope Boy pour warm water onto the wee plants, they would bloom all the faster. For two weeks before the party, she had me drenching the beds with warm water every morning and evening. “This will force them up,” she insisted, convinced by her own logic. I—even I—was dubious.
I talked to my mother about it. “Mom, she’s got me lugging these pails of warm water from the kitchen every morning and evening. What do I say?”
Mom just looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Just do it. There’s no fighting with the woman.”
Of course I was right. The flowers bloomed too late, and too sparsely. And, anyway, their eventual flowering had nothing whatever to do with their warm water bath. (I looked it up in our World Book Encyclopedia: it turns out that water temperatures between 45 and 75 have no effect whatsoever on plant growth; below 45 they kill it; above 75 likewise.) When it looked like the flowers would not indeed bloom, in spite of her attempt to meddle, Mrs. Compton had me scouring the county (driven by my mom in our old Ford Galaxie convertible), buying blooming potted plants in every garden store, and installing them in the garden. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
I told my best friend Bill about it—with some amount of glee. “The woman is crazy!” We thirteen-year-olds agreed on that fact.
Crazy? Yes, maybe. Like a fox. I was enraptured with the whole scene. I was fascinated by the bigger life the Comptons seemed to live. And the closer I got, the more tantalizingly exotic it seemed. I had brief opportunities to explore the mansion. The painting over the mantel in the living room was whispered to be a Leonardo da Vinci, and the vast silk tapestry over a sofa was given to the Comptons personally by Chiang Kai-shek. (Who? I wondered.)
Mrs. Compton dealt with The Cope Boy imperiously for about a month before The Cope Boy approached the breaking point. Just before the big garden party, we had our first fight. It turned out that it was remarkably easy to push her buttons. I simply, and for the first time, pushed back. Mildly at first.
“I don’t think the warm water thing is really gonna work,” I said offhandedly.
She was not used to back talk, apparently, and she didn’t seem to know quite how to handle it. She sputtered, discounted what I had said—her back stiffening visibly—then changed the subject completely, redirecting me to some new task. But curiously, she did not seem to attack back. Wow. Was she a paper tiger?
I would come home at night after an eight-hour workday on the property and dissect what had happened with my mom or with my brother and sisters. “. . . and then she said this, and I said that. And you won’t believe what happened next . . .” I was fascinated by MC. (My brother and I came to call her “MC,” short for “Mrs. Compton”; Wilson Compton, or Dr. Compton, became, simply, “DC.”)
I was fascinated by MC’s swagger, her charm, her supercharged self-confidence. But she was a goad for me. The tension between us gradually became a subtle power struggle over any ridiculous thing: how to trim a yew; how and when to plant tulip bulbs. And it slowly became clear that we were involved in a kind of unspoken rivalry. Over what, I was not exactly sure. But whatever it was, it was clear that we both wanted to win. (And then there was simply that thirteen-year-old part of me that loved getting under her skin.)
By the second garden party a year later, when I was a stunningly mature fourteen (as I thought), I was talking back to her, arguing with her, even having dramatic fights with her. Now, you must understand: Nothing like this happened at my own family’s house up the street. In our particular WASP family, we just did not fight—at least not out in the open. But at 4700 College Avenue, these fights were larger-than-life. Everything there was chock-full of drama, of surprises, and of hidden possibilities.
Mrs. Compton and I would fight and love our way through the next decade, all the way through my college years. She was—and I only realized this much later—my earliest and perhaps my most surprising Noble Adversary.
Noble adversary! It’s funny to think about it this way. Most boys have coaches for adversaries—or bullies, or vicious big brothers. Or drill sergeants for fathers (like American author Pat Conroy, who wrote about it so graphically in The Great Santini). I had a little old lady.
2
The noble adversary. What exactly is this? And what role does this new kind of friend play for us?
Dr. Ernest Wolf, whose work is based in Kohut’s theories, succinctly describes what he called “adversarial needs.” He believed that every developing human being has “a need to experience the selfobject as a benignly opposing force who continues to be supportive and responsive while allowing or even encouraging one to be in active opposition and thus confirming an at least partial autonomy . . .” (emphasis added).
Remember: our friend Heinz Kohut described a whole host of experiences we need to have while immersed in selfobject relationships—experiences that are essential in “evoking, affirming, developing, and sustaining the self.” We have already looked at some of these: the need for containment, and for twinship. In this chapter, we will examine what he thought to be an absolutely essential need: the need for “active opposition.”
Active opposition. Kohut believed, simply, that we need someone to push against. Someone who is solid, enduring, and most importantly persistent. Someone who keeps coming back to us; who challenges us; who is bigger, stronger, more masterful than we are; who is at least one step ahead; who pushes us to be our better selves, and who does not let us off the hook. Someone, indeed, like Helen Harrington Compton.
Why? Why do we need a damned pain-in-the-ass Soul Friend like Helen Compton? What good does this do us?
The answer is right there at the end of the Wolf quote:
It “confirm[s] an at least partial autonomy . . .”
Simply put: the opposition provided in the context of a deep selfobject relationship forces us to gather ourselves together, to rise up as a unified and autonomous being in order to meet the challenge. It forces us to unite all the non-unified shreds of our fledgling self into one thrusting force, as we push back. This experience of pushing against a steady and reliable other solidifies our sense of self, and strengthens what psychologists call “agency” (our sense that we can be a locus of skillful and meaningful action). It allows us to feel our effectiveness in the world—or (again, in psychology-speak) our “self-efficacy.”
Notice that Kohut insists that the noble adversary should be a “benignly opposing force who continues to be supportive and responsive.” Honestly, I’m not at all sure about the benign part. I did not experience Mrs. Compton as benign, nor even as particularly supportive or responsive. (To say the least.) What she did do, and what I think is essential in adversarial selfobjects, is that she stayed. She did not go away. She did not shrink from me. She did not shrink from confrontation. Indeed, this woman did not shrink from anything. She was going nowhere.
Again and again, Wolf cites “the need for the availability of a selfobject experience of assertive and adversarial confrontation vis-à-vis the selfobject without the loss of self-sustaining responsiveness from that self object.” Wolf is here describing a very special kind of adversary—one that pushes, and pushes, and pushes, but loves at the same time. Most likely, in all honesty, we have varying needs for this self-sustaining responsiveness, and I found that Mrs. Compton’s simply staying in the fight with me was all the responsiveness I really needed.
Where Mrs. Compton did supply some sustaining responsiveness was in her interest in teaching me how to work. This was the way in which she loved me the most, and I have profited from it for my entire life.
Work! Here was a domain in which Helen Compton was a master. Work was everything in her family. I should have known by the questions she asked me in our brief interview: “Do you like to work? Do you like to work hard?” Indeed, she and her whole tribe knew how to work. But something more: they knew how to work effectively. She knew how to structure her time. She knew how to systematically get things done. Indeed, in our little town, it was well known that if you wanted to accomplish some difficult task, bring in Helen Compton. Oh, there would be drama. And almost certainly someone would cry. But it would get done.
In retrospect, I see that my years with MC taught me to tolerate frustration. They taught me to stay in the fight—to come back again and again to complex tasks. She modeled this, and I absorbed her lessons. I watched rather in awe as she threw herself again and again at her large tasks until they were completed. The garden was only one of the tasks she was throwing herself into, to be sure, but it was the one we shared, and I could see that she brought this same determined energy to every other project she undertook. I’m reminded here of something a wise friend once said to me: “How you do one thing is how you do everything.”
In hooking my star to the magisterial Mrs. Compton at a crucial point in my own development, I learned to gather my determined energy and stay in the fight. I can say truly that the creation of my capacity to work smarter, and harder, and more effectively was in fact co-created by Helen Compton and myself over the course of about a decade—in a rapture of effort and energy.
There were many, many facets of the lessons I received through this unlikely friendship. In this and the next three chapters, we will look at a number of traits and abilities that are co-created in an important adversarial relationship. The most important of these are:
Have you learned these traits? Can you think where you learned them, and who taught them to you?
If you have not learned them, by all means do not despair. There is even now, even as you read this, some potential noble adversary lurking around in your life—if only you can accept the challenge he or she offers.
4
In my earliest interactions with Helen and Wilson Compton, I had no idea at all with whom I was really dealing. I had no inkling of the giant imprint these two had made on American culture at large—and especially on higher education, politics, and science in the United States. All I knew at the outset was that they seemed to me larger-than-life, and that they lived in a world that I longed to know. A big world. An important world. A world that transcended the boundaries of Wooster.
The truth slowly dawned: These new neighbors of mine were members of large and distinguished family. The chief players were four siblings born at the dawn of twentieth-century America: Wilson Compton, Karl Compton, Arthur Compton, and Mary Compton Rice. These were the four children of the quasi-mythic longtime dean of the College of Wooster, Elias Compton, and his wife Otelia Augspurger Compton (who had at one time way back in the 1930s been named American Mother of the Year—for reasons that will become obvious).
The achievements of this gaggle of four siblings, I came to learn, were mind-boggling. At one point in time they were each presidents of major American universities. Karl Compton was the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for eighteen years; Arthur Compton (who had won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering “the Compton effect” and had been a central figure in the development of the Manhattan Project) had been chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis for many years; and Wilson Compton was president of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Mary Compton Rice and her husband, Herbert Rice—Presbyterian missionaries in India—headed up for a time the then-largest university system in the world, the University of the Punjab.
So there you have it. It turns out that I had stumbled into the last chapter of the epic life of Wilson Martindale Compton and Helen Harrington Compton, who had returned home to Ohio for their retirement. What luck. As the complete story of their lives unfolded to my young mind throughout those first summers, I was in thrall to their celebrity and their personalities.
This couple authentically lived out, in their family life, the most noble of the Protestant aspirations of their forebears—and, as it turned out, of mine (my very own Presbyterian lot). In 1933, for example, Helen and Wilson sent with their annual Christmas card a description of their family code—“the Compton code”—which listed the following aspirations for their family life:
To teach our children the eternal truths which our mothers and fathers taught us.
To measure success in family life in terms of service, not achievement.
To merit the regard and good will of our friends.
Wowza!
Helen’s and Wilson’s careers had taken them to the epicenter of power in Washington, D.C., where they both had been major players, socially and politically, during the Eisenhower years. Wilson, then a powerful lobbyist for the lumber industry in America, had been a delegate to the fourth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, and a director of the Voice of America. Helen had held national offices in the YWCA and the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and was active in fund-raising and in building various social programs. She was chairman of all six USOs in the Washington, D.C., area during the Second World War.
This couple—this family—was profoundly community-minded. Helen Compton’s favorite topic for a speech (and she gave many in Washington, D.C., and around the country during the war years and after) was “What Is the World Asking of Us Today?” I would give anything to have heard her hold forth on that topic. You just know that she knocked it out of the park.
When they arrived back in their beloved Wooster, Helen and Wilson both took up roles as trustees of the College of Wooster, a Presbyterian bastion founded in 1866. But more than that, they hovered around the campus doing good in all sorts of ways—anonymously and not so anonymously.
At one point, the pair were given a joint alumni award, and I had the pleasure of being in the packed college chapel when it was presented. (I was by then a college student myself.) The words of the award said of Helen Harrington Compton: “No detail on the campus is too small to escape her sharp eye, no job too menial.” The language of the award went on about them both (Wilson had died by this time, and the award was given to him posthumously): “and as far as I know, neither of them ever said, ‘It can’t be done.’”
“I must share with you this story,” said the trustee who was presenting the award. “One of the new buildings on campus came quite close to an existing house, and there was talk of moving the house. But it was in good condition, and the owners lived in it, so no action was taken. One day, Dr. Lowry [Wooster’s president at the time] was taking some of us trustees around the campus to see the changes, and he stopped by this house and exclaimed in surprise, ‘Why Helen Compton decided last night that this house had to be moved, and I expected it to be gone by this morning!’”
Just so.
At the time, of course, Helen Compton and a thirteen-year-old Steve Cope seemed like an unlikely pairing. But in retrospect, I see that MC and I were made for each other. I was hungry to pit myself against something, someone. I was reasonably smart and ambitious myself. And for some reason, even as a six- or seven-year-old, working alongside my own grandfather in his massive backyard garden, I was profoundly attracted to working in the earth. “Lawn boy to the Comptons” at thirteen, then, was perfect for me.
Each of us needs to find a challenge against which to pit ourselves—against which to test ourselves. My ambitions to be a landscaper had already been tested. In summers past, I had transformed my family’s puny yard into a humble but surprising work of art (well, so I thought, at any rate), with no budget and little interest on the part of my parents or siblings. I grew my own geraniums from seed. I cultivated a sizeable garden of flowers and vegetables in the back end of the big field behind the house. I even managed to grow watermelons in Ohio’s short growing season. Now, at the Comptons’, I had a sizeable estate and an almost unlimited budget with which to work.
6
The Compton home was a classic American Tudor mansion built by a notorious candy manufacturer in Wooster in the 1920s when American Tudor Revival architecture was all the rage. It was, in fact, one of the finest examples of Tudor Revival in America, having been carefully modeled on a Tudor home in the Cotswold Hills of England. And its prestigious architect had appropriately surrounded it with magnificent lawns and gardens—what the English would call a park.
My charge, at least my initial charge during the first year, was to take care of the grounds and the terraces—this included trimming the hedges, weeding the beds, and mowing the lawns—and to wash the cars, and shovel the sidewalks in the winter.
The grounds, when I found them, were already a work of art. The “park” looked utterly natural. But in fact, every rise, every tree, every flower bed, every hillock had been carefully thought out. There were manicured flower gardens. Vast stretches of lawn. A gently curving drive that wound its way through large stone pillars and around the house and through the grounds. There was a large wildflower garden, replete with ferns and daisies, and in the spring bursting with daffodils. Overhead were towering oaks and maples and sycamores, and Japanese maples and other ornamental shrubs. And the entire acreage was neatly surrounded and enclosed by a barberry hedge.
I soon figured out how this would go: in every task, the regal Helen Harrington Compton would instruct me. “This is precisely how you plant the begonias. This is exactly how the flower boxes should look. I want you to edge the beds like this. The hedge should be so high.” Our training sessions often included a small lecture. There was, for example, the lecture on sweeping the terraces with an ordinary broom. There followed upon this particular lecture the inevitable demonstration on handling a broom. (Eye rolling here from this thirteen-year-old, although in fact there were some minor points on broom handling which were new to me.) This all-too-familiar lecture was always accompanied by a digression on MC’s mother, who had famously been crippled by an early hip injury, and yet could apparently sweep with the best of them—a Paralympic broom handler who never complained about her painful leg.
In almost every instance, of course, I already knew, or thought I knew, exactly how to proceed. But I listened dutifully, and feigned absorption in the lesson. Then, I very often did it exactly as I wanted to, or as I already knew how. Or knew better. Or knew faster.
Just as her alumni award had pointed out, no detail was too small for MC’s attention. She was no longer running the national USO or YWCA, or her farm on the Potomac. She was now running me. I now see that she wanted to be involved. Wanted to be useful. Well, and of course she wanted to be in charge, too. (A friend of mine often said, “She should be running GM.”) I must say that for the most part, though, I enjoyed the attention—enjoyed the contact. Indeed, much of what I was doing was designed precisely to please her. I understand now that for me, the fascination was not nearly so much about the garden as it was about her.
MC never praised me. Ever. This irritated me to no end. I could plant an almost perfect bed of begonias and impatiens. But no. She would find the one plant that had been imperfectly planted. Or she would spy the one area of lawn that was not getting the proper watering. She was exasperating in her perfectionism. I railed against it during the first summer. She was impossible to please. Her criticism was direct, stinging, and often remarkably cavalier. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she might toss off, “you go right back out there and finish that properly this time. I don’t care if you have to pull every one of those plants up again.”
But, just as Kohut said, her constant push forced me to draw myself together. To pull myself up to meet her. I was energized by some strange combination of love and hate. Later in life, I was fascinated to encounter, in my study of the contemplative traditions, the interesting fact that hate can be powerful in helping to organize us internally. Anger draws a line. It energizes. MC’s criticism often pissed me off, and I would arrive at work the next day determined to improve. I’d stay later that night, trying to get it right.
Kohut would rightly observe that this kind of adversarial relationship, if we respond well to it, forces us eventually to experience ourselves as a “center of initiative”—to develop the qualities of resolve and strong determination. (Two qualities of an enlightened mind in the contemplative traditions, by the way.)
An adversarial relationship is like any love relationship. Chemistry is important. And there was plenty of chemistry. I knew that I mattered, on some strange level, to this crazy-remarkable woman. I knew that I was seen. As we worked together on this mammoth project—the perfection of a landscape—there was some deep engagement (can I say this?) between our souls. On some level, the whole garden thing was for show, for prestige. But there was a deeper level. Underneath it all, the work was about mastery—was about the sheer joy of work well-performed. Work, for MC and her clan, had a religious, even mystical significance. It had intrinsic rewards far beyond anything outward.
So, working together on our many mutual tasks, on a daily basis, I met MC and she met me. We both learned early on that the other was not going to collapse under the strain of what was to come. I very often worked ten hour days on the property. And sometimes seven days a week.
In retrospect, I can see that MC was indeed quite skilled at all things gardening, and really had a remarkably good eye for design. Everything she did was tasteful. And apart from her irritating perfectionism, and often sour and sometimes sarcastic temperament, I learned a tremendous amount from her.
But there was one part of the MC drill that I really hated—at least at first. As much as anything else, MC was eager to teach me how to organize my tasks, to organize my time. (Her famous father-in-law, Elias Compton, dean of the College of Wooster, had been one of America’s first “efficiency experts”—her words—of which fact she never tired in reminding me. She had picked up on this theme of efficiency—a modern American virtue—and chewed it like a bone.)
This time-management stuff I found truly tiresome. Time was everything in this family—or at least as she told it—to the point of preciousness. “Do this first, and then do that. How can you get the most out of a day? Pay attention to how you do things. Don’t make an extra trip to the garden room. Remember to bring your materials, your tools, out at the beginning of a task. Remember to rest!”
Remember to rest? Right. As if she ever made room for that. (And by the way, this entirely theoretical “remember to rest” piece was sometimes accompanied with a digression about the effects of taking a shower in the middle of the day. Oh, how she reveled in this particular lecture. How positively invigorating a midday shower could be. “After taking one,” she said, referring now to their farm on the Potomac, “our farm hands could work five or six hours more.” I never once in my whole life saw, heard, or was aware of her taking a shower at any time whatsoever, day or night, and there were times when I had dearly wished she would.)
The Compton family, German in its origins, was driven by strong Protestant farm values, work being the foremost among them. Work as a character builder. Work, indeed, as salvation. And so as I plunged into the epicenter of work that summer, I pondered the question quite a bit: What is work? Is it something one does not want to do but has to do? No, that was not it. It certainly required effort, commitment, focus, and energy. More than anything I would say that under MC’s tutelage, I discovered that work was coming back again and again to a complex task, and eventually mastering it. When one penetrated the mystery of this “work,” one found, indeed, that there was a good deal of play in it.
By the middle of the first summer, I had been strangely and magically drawn into this world of hers, this strange mix of work and play. This meant that I had to give up other things, but, honestly, I did so quite willingly. By August of that first summer, I was completely absorbed in my kingdom (and by then I did indeed think of it as mine), and I showed it off proudly to all my friends and family. There were hints of mastery as I perused a newly thriving rose garden, or a line of freshly trimmed hedge, or nicely pruned lilacs. These intimations of mastery brought their own fulfillment. I realized I did not actually need MC to see my work or to praise me for it. Because now I could see it myself. And it was profoundly fulfilling. Fulfillment, as it turns out, provides its own motivation.
One of Sigmund Freud’s great, and almost entirely forgotten, peers and students was the French psychologist Pierre Janet. Janet was fascinated by what he called “the pleasure in fully completed action.” Janet was one of the first students of focus and mastery. He was, in fact, the forerunner of the great American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studies the phenomenon of so-called flow states.
And what happens in these flow states? Well, action and awareness merge in a flow of activity. Tasks feel—at times—effortless. Time disappears. There is a complete absorption and loss of self-consciousness in the task. I now realize that I was enjoying many of the characteristics of flow state in my summers working with MC.
Gradually, under her tutelage during those first summers, work turned more and more into a kind of play. This was the real magic. I do think that MC understood this, though she could never have articulated it. (Insight was not her thing. She was a woman of action. She just “knew” things from the inside out.) Self-challenge, self-efficacy, resolve, commitment: these provided real pleasure. Indeed, I look back now on these summers spent with MC as some of the most pleasurable times of my life.
7
When, in college, I read Rilke’s great poem “The Man Watching,” I realized that Helen Harrington Compton had been the first real angel with whom I had seriously wrestled. “Whoever was beaten by this Angel,” wrote Rilke, “went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape.”
Yes, she, my own crazy Angel, had changed my shape.
To this day, I dream about the house, the gardens, and always about Mrs. Compton—who never ages in my dreams. In my dreams, she is sitting quietly in the vast living room of the Tudor mansion at 4700 College Avenue, absorbed in a book. Strange, isn’t it, because I never once saw her read, or even possess, a book during my time with her.
As I think back now, so many years later, I realize that there was one person who was closely observing the entire drama between MC and me, and who understood it at depth. This was our very own “man watching,” Wilson Compton. Ailing—in fact, dying—but uncomplaining, he daily walked the beautiful grounds of his home, and poked in here or there to see what I was up to. He was uniformly kind. Quiet. Shaking now uncontrollably with the tremors of Parkinson’s. But with a tremendous sense of dignified presence. I had a sense that this man saw all. I would give anything, now, to sit and reflect with him about what exciting things were happening within me that summer.
At the end of my first summer at 4700 College Avenue, Dr. Compton (who was often out of town at one great medical center or another getting treatments for Parkinson’s) was surveying the grounds with my mother, who had dropped by for a visit. They did not know that I was nearby—within earshot, behind a hedge—weeding. I overheard him say to her, with obvious delight (though his voice shook): “That boy truly loves to work.”
I burned inside with pride and pleasure. There was no man from whom I more longed for acknowledgement.
But as I look back now, I see that he did not have it entirely right.
What he was seeing was not just a boy who loved to work. No. He and MC had introduced me to an entirely new way of living—a combustible mix of work, love, and play. And I see now that it was driven almost entirely by my admiration and love for them. They had transformed me and my very conception of work, of effort, of mastery, of true efficacy in the world, and of what Rilke refers to as “winning.”
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.