What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
“THE MAN WATCHING”
RAINER MARIA RILKE
TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY
Just when life at 4700 College Avenue seemed to be settling into a kind of normalcy, all hell broke loose.
Helen Harrington Compton had inadvertently insulted my mother at a luncheon.
Well, it was inevitable, after all. Mrs. Compton did it to everyone. She was an equal opportunity insulter.
I don’t even remember exactly what the comment was. Something about Mom’s lack of organizational skills, or her having dropped the ball on some urgent Helen Compton project. The kind of comment I had become used to. Mom had not been toughened to it, however—toughened to MC’s arrogance, her high-handedness. I had come to see all of these things as a part of a greater package. And, I had also learned that most of it was bluster.
However, there it was: my mother had been insulted. When she told me the story, she cried. Shit.
The gauntlet had been laid down. I was quite prepared to deal with MC’s occasional shabby treatment of me; we had developed an unwritten agreement about these things. But this in no way extended to my mother. As a rule of thumb, never insult the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy. I pulled myself up to my greatest fourteen-year-old height, marched down the street, and barged in on MC, who was sitting at her desk, writing out checks.
This is one moment I will never forget.
“Do you realize that you insulted my mother in public? She’s at home right now in tears.” I was shaking with rage. “You cannot do that to her. Not to her.”
I was shocked that I had said it so straight. Where did I get the balls?
MC looked up from her work. I could tell she was bewildered by the sheer passion of my explosion. It took her a moment to comprehend what was happening.
Finally, putting the pieces together, she shot back: “Well, that’s just ridiculous. Whoever would be insulted by such a thing. For heaven’s sake, calm down and get back to work.” She looked back down at her checkbook.
Helen Compton never got used to being confronted—much less by the lawn boy. She tried to default to imperiousness (she always tried that first), but I could see that she just could not quite connect with her default mode. She sputtered for a few more seconds. (She had, in fact, insulted my mother, and even she was not going to deny it.) She sputtered some more—I actually remember spit coming out of her mouth—and repeated, as if to herself, “Well, I never heard of such a thing.”
“Never do that again,” I blurted out.
She looked at me, now entirely speechless.
After a long moment, I walked out, my heart pounding out of my chest. Having found myself in the middle of a scene, I wasn’t really sure how it should end. Should I quit? Let her weed her own damned garden?
I remember storming home, and talking with my sister Sandy about the event. I remember, too, how positively exhilarating the aftermath of my confrontation with Mrs. Compton was. I didn’t tell Sandy this, but I felt on top of the world. Invincible. I could take on anyone. I had become enraged down to the very tips of my toes. I had never felt so much energy in my body! Honestly, how can I even tell you: it felt fabulous!
Then something remarkable happened. The episode was completely over. We never mentioned it again.
The confrontation—as earth-shattering as it seemed to me in the moment—did not change anything about MC’s demeanor toward me. On my next meeting with her, she was just the same as always. (One of MC’s granddaughters later told me of a particularly nasty interchange with her grandmother, which left her reeling and in tears; Dr. Compton comforted her later that day, saying, “You’ll remember this for the rest of your life, honey. She will have forgotten it by this afternoon.”)
One thing I did notice in that fateful encounter with MC: My angry words did not kill her. My attack did not destroy her. She did not go away. She did not exile me. This, as it turned out, was absolutely essential. Two things of great import had just gone down: First, that I felt comfortable enough to let her have it, both barrels blazing. Then, the astonishing fact that she did not retaliate.
I could not have put words to it at the time, but I did notice—after about two days of frenzied weeding and hedge trimming, during which I was trying to process everything that had happened—that I had stumbled into some new kind of freedom: a power, a strength, another kind of effectiveness in the world. But I never fully understood the importance of this moment for me—and indeed the import of many subsequent such moments with MC—until I was studying D. W. Winnicott’s work in graduate school. The event with MC was a classic example of one of Winnicott’s most important insights about human development—what he came to recognize as the gift of survivability.
Simply put, Helen Compton had survived my most aggressive attack.
Why was this so important?
Dr. Winnicott describes one of the most crucial qualities of the good-enough mother as “survivability.” Winnicott observed that when the child feels safe enough in his relationship with the containing selfobject, he is compelled by his own developmental needs to occasionally—in Winnicott’s words—use the selfobject ruthlessly. Use her for what? Well, he uses the selfobject to try out his newfound aggression. As Winnicott says, the baby creates the object, exploits it, and then destroys it (or attempts to).
Here’s the catch: The good-enough mother must be willing to be used in this way. She must be willing to be as an object of attempted destruction. She must not take it personally. She must not collapse under the aggression.
And what happens if the mother does collapse under the baby’s aggression? What happens if she does fold? If she does go away—or retaliate? Simply this: The baby will be afraid to ever again exert that aspect of himself. He will become afraid of his own naturally arising aggression and assertion. (After all, he cannot afford to actually destroy the parent, can he? That would be a disaster.) If the parent is, or appears to be, destroyed at any level, the child will be forced at an early age to be more concerned about taking care of the parent than using the parent to try himself out, to practice, to exert his own efficacy.
Say Stephen Mitchell and Margaret Black, explaining Winnicott: “If the mother has trouble surviving the baby’s usage of her, if she withdraws or collapses or retaliates, the baby must prematurely attend to externality [emphasis added] at the price of a full experience of his own desire, which feels omnipotent and dangerous. The result is a child afraid to fully need and use his objects and, subsequently, an adult with neurotic inhibitions of desire.”
Uh-oh. That does not sound good. But it does sound all too familiar: neurotic inhibitions of desire.
Mitchell and Black make it clear precisely what “collapse in the face of aggression” means for the child. It means that rather than providing a protected psychic space within which the self can playfully expand and consolidate, in which the child can experiment with his full bandwidth of feeling, the not-good-enough mother forces the child to prematurely come to grips with an adult world. The child then becomes—in the words of many ego psychologists—“cramped.” The image is helpful here, and vividly accurate. Cramped.
Chronic maternal failure of this kind leads to a radical split within the self, between the genuine and often passionate wellsprings of the child’s desire and aggression, and a compliant self or a false self. In other words: there develops a split between the authentic self and a newly arising false self. When the mother appears to be destroyed by the baby’s passionate expressions, the baby has no choice but to choose the false self, the compliant self. She learns to disconnect her mind from its sources in the body and from her spontaneous experience.
It was only in graduate school, while we were studying the selfsame Winnicott, that I realized it in a moment of dramatic insight: My mother was not willing, or not able, to be used in this way. She did in fact withdraw and collapse in the face of rage, in the face the sheer destructive force of the baby (of me and my sibs). She took it all personally, just as she had taken MC’s words personally. This was a disaster for us. After too many episodes of this exercising of my aggression, I—the baby, then, or the toddler—knew that Mom would withdraw, or worse, would retaliate. So I quickly learned to shut down certain aspects of my own instinctual drives.
In point of fact, my mother would abandon me in the face of this kind of aggression every time it surfaced—even into adulthood. I vividly recall a huge fight we had when she was eighty-five, just before her death. I had confronted her about some heirloom that I deeply wanted, and that I thought she was withholding (well, she was withholding it, actually). She retaliated with what felt to me like an almost homicidal rage. Even now, I remember that my whole body literally shook at the experience of her rage. Shook not with my own anger, but with terror at her retaliation. Still. As a fifty-year-old. (Apparently, I simply could not help myself: these primitive reactions are deeply hardwired into the nervous system.)
When the mother is not able to be used as an object against which to push, the child’s psychological connection with certain aspects of his own aggressive, instinctual nature is prematurely foreclosed, and the natural development of this aspect of self-expression ceases. He—the unhappy baby, the unhappy child—remains stuck in psychological time.
This is, as you can see, a bad deal for the baby—and the adult into which he will grow. But, as always, there is a glimmer of light here—a glimmer to which Winnicott repeatedly points: This early shutdown is not the end of the game. Because, though a false self may emerge, still, as Mitchell and Black explain Winnicott’s work, a “kernel of genuine personhood is suspended . . . until a holding environment can be found that allows the emergence of a more spontaneous, authentic subjective experience” (emphasis added). The potential self is not dead. It is just awaiting the discovery of a safer container.
And now, voilà, I had found one. Yes, I had found one! In Helen Harrington Compton of all places. Suddenly, this long dormant part of my self felt lit up. Felt safe. I could express this aggressive side of myself—suspended for so long—and even enjoy it. Even thrill in it.
I was surprised at how much of a change this discovery made in my feelings about myself—and, indeed, even in my behavior. I felt it quite distinctly, despite the fact that I had no words for it in those days. And others noticed it. After my discovery that Helen Compton could survive my aggression, I was more playful. I was more alive. There was more of me available. In fact, now that I felt safer around MC, I noticed that I became more playful with her, occasionally daring to tease her in a more spirited and affectionate way, and generally showing a wider bandwidth of emotion. And you know what? I’m convinced that Mrs. Compton felt it too, because we gradually became much less formal with one another. I was becoming uncramped. And I think, perhaps, so was she. In the best of all possible worlds, these things go both ways. More on this later.
3
During his second summer, then, The Cope Boy was entrusted with a bigger role in the Compton family’s life. I went with the family to Michigan, to the summer camp that had been established by the patriarch, Elias Compton—the now-mythic dean—back in the 1920s. I took care of the cars and boats and kids and meals and houses. I was not just The Cope Boy now—not any longer just the lawn boy—but “Steve.” A member of the family. I worked from dawn to dusk up there in the woods. Painting. Gardening. Cleaning. And I lived in my own little cabin in the woods.
Now that I was a member of the family, I was allowed to see many wonderful and exotic (to me) expressions of aggression and anger fully played out in this, my new family. During the first summer, MC and I had two huge several-day-long knock-down, drag-out fights. Other members of the extended family were involved in these blowups, as well. Both fights turned around my role with the family and the cousins. Was I really an approved caretaker of the little cousins? Was I authorized to set limits with them? Was it okay for them to disobey me? Or not?
I remember these fights with a certain amount of delight. Everyone was screaming. People were swearing right out loud at one another. “Mother, you are a b-i-t-c-h,” said Kenny, MC’s daughter. I was stunned and thrilled. (I suspect that a big smile accidentally broke out on my face. Wow. I had never allowed myself to go quite that far.) This was a different kind of family from my own family back in Ohio. Everything human was on the table.
After two summers with the Comptons, I was transformed. They had been summers of intense physical work. I felt good. I felt strong. Back in Wooster, I had secretly brought weights into the garden room at 4700 College Avenue, and had worked out every afternoon after I finished my gardening.
I now see that it was, in fact, these summers of work with the Comptons, and particularly the crucible of my relationship with MC, that allowed me later on to handle aggression in my relationship with Seth and my whole painting crew, and to create the kind of self-efficacy I exhibited during the two summers of Smart Ass Painters.
Looking back on my adolescence, I could probably have been good at sports—the ordinary crucible in which boys meet the noble adversary. I had the coordination and the body intelligence. But for some reason, which had never been clear to me, I did not have the confidence. Why? Now I understood: I had been scared of aggression. I had always secretly assumed that I was afraid of others’ aggression toward me. It turned out that, no, not really. In fact, I was afraid of my own aggression toward them.
Helen Compton had goaded me, challenged me, frustrated me, and prodded me in ways I had simply never been prodded before. She had become the classic—though all too unlikely—noble adversary. She was not a perfect noble adversary, however, for there was one very crucial piece of Kohut’s ideal profile left out.
4
Let’s review Ernest Wolf’s description (in full, now) of Kohut’s theory of the need for an ideal adversarial selfobject:
We each have, he says, “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; [we each have] the need for the availability of a selfobject experience of assertive and adversarial confrontation vis-a-vis the selfobject without the loss of self-sustaining responsiveness from that selfobject.”
As I have said, no one would accuse Helen Harrington Compton of self-sustaining responsiveness. It was just not her thing. Her adversarial gifts were not really benign (to say the least). Indeed, to be perfectly honest, MC could be vicious at times. But this was not all bad for me, since I had other sources of support. Indeed, it toughened me up. I have read stunning accounts of adversaries who were harsher—much harsher—than MC.
I think for example, of one of Pat Conroy’s toe-curling accounts of male-on-male aggression: his brilliant description of his basketball coach in his memoir My Losing Season. The young Conroy’s coach could at times be vicious, shaming, and cruel. Still, even in this less-than-ideal case, Conroy’s difficult boyhood adversary forced him to pull himself together to meet the challenges he faced. In My Losing Season, he actually pays homage to this complex man—while not deluding himself or the reader about the cruelty involved.
What does not kill you makes you stronger?
5
Nonetheless, one wants to ask: what would a truly benign adversary look like, and what precisely would “self-sustaining responsiveness” add to the outcome?
Perhaps you have been fortunate enough to encounter one of these benign adversaries? To be honest, I have not. But in my study of great lives, I have found quite a few real-life examples of the power of the truly benign adversary. Let’s take a second look, for example, at the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was lucky enough to encounter just this kind of adversarial selfobject.
In review: We have seen that Eleanor Roosevelt was a lost child, the daughter of a doting but ineffective alcoholic father who died following a suicide attempt, and a withholding mother who died when she was eight. And we’ve seen how that crippled her early emotional life.
But we have seen, too, that some of young Eleanor’s early wounds and deficits were massively repaired in her relationship with her teacher, Marie Souvestre. Stunnngly well repaired, actually. And so now, we might take a second look at Souvestre as a noble and benign adversary. (Take note here that it is possible—and very common—for one and the same selfobject to play multiple selfobject roles, just as Souvestre was for a time a container, an adversary, and later, a mirror, for Roosevelt.)
The truth is that the teenage Eleanor Roosevelt would find in Souvestre a benign adversary who could survive anything Eleanor could throw at her, and who in fact relished her charge’s increasing connection with her own naturally arising aggression. We have already seen that when Eleanor took the return trip across the Atlantic to rejoin her family after a mere two years of Souvestre’s love and guidance, she had been profoundly changed. There was simply more of her present. Her story is a dramatic example of Winnicott’s teaching that aspects of self-development can be “held in suspension until an effective container comes along.”
6
The details of Souvestre’s intentionally benign adversarial stance are fascinating. It turns out she was a noble adversary for a whole generation of girls. Indeed, it was part of Souvestre’s mission to develop young women who were resilient, who could fight and defend their own vision. Souvestre wanted these “young women of purpose” to thrive—and to thrive even in the world of aggressive men. She understood that in order to achieve—indeed, even to survive in the realms ordinarily denied them—women had to learn to argue, to resist, and to be forceful themselves.
Under Souvestre’s tutelage, Eleanor had one very dramatic experience of Souvestre’s survivability—as evidenced by a story that she told and retold throughout her life, and one that obviously described an emotional crossroads for the young woman.
This is how it went: Roosevelt’s best friend, Jane, the daughter of a very wealthy South American family, was about to be expelled from their beloved boarding school, Allenswood, for throwing an ink bottle at the German teacher. Jane’s expulsion was very explicitly the decision of Souvestre.
Well, the young but increasingly emboldened Eleanor was having none of it. She was furious that her best friend, and a prize student of Souvestre—a girl who had received the same kind of special treatment afforded to Eleanor—would be, could be, expelled. This could simply not be allowed to happen.
Roosevelt pulled herself up to her tallest height—just as I had done with MC—burst into Souvestre’s library, and let the headmistress have it with everything she had. Says biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook about the explosion of passion: “She cried and shouted, cajoled and pleaded, wept bitterly and at length.” But Souvestre was adamant. She did not change her decision in the face of Roosevelt’s vehement defense of her friend. Like Mrs. Compton, Souvestre was not scared off by the outburst of emotion on the part of her young student. She responded quite evenly, and without retaliation. Unlike Mrs. Compton, however, Marie Souvestre helped Eleanor to understand what had happened, and even praised her for her resolve and her feistiness in coming to her friend’s defense.
There it is: self-sustaining responsiveness in action. Says Cook about the incident, “Although firm in her refusal to reconsider the expulsion, Marie Souvestre honored [Eleanor’s] passionate attempt to protect her friend. Souvestre never said—as Eleanor’s grandmother had, if you have to cry, cry alone.” Friendship, independence, and spirited and forthright behavior were encouraged.
Indeed, Eleanor’s spirited defense of her friend endeared her even more to Souvestre, and, soon after, Souvestre penned the following lines to Roosevelt’s grandmother back in the States: “All what you said when [Eleanor] came here of the purity of her heart, the nobleness of her thought has been verified by her conduct among people who were at first perfect strangers to her. . . . I often found she influenced others in the right direction. She is full of sympathy for all those who live with her and shows an intelligent interest in everything she comes in contact with.”
There it is: self-sustaining responsiveness at its best.
7
Winnicott coined the term good-enough mother. Well, we might here coin the term good-enough adversary. Souvestre went well beyond “good enough,” and is, I think, the exception rather than the rule.
As for me—as a thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old—I would have to look for explicit succor and support elsewhere. That I would not get from Mrs. Compton. But what I did learn from her was a tremendous amount. Indeed, what we co-created together during those summers was a kind of tour de force—for I believe she may have learned from me as well. I was always surprised by the extent to which she clearly loved and esteemed me, though she could not, of course, say this directly. (When I went away for a year to South America, as a twenty-year-old, I came back with shoulder-length hair, looking exactly like the hippies MC was seeing on the television. She embraced me in a big hug, but then in practically the same moment pushed me back and said, “Well, no member of our family has ever looked like that before. Now that you’re back in civilization you’ll want to get rid of that awful hair.” It was an admonition, yes, but an explicit recognition that I was a member of the family.)
The final year of my work with MC would be hard. Dr. Compton was at this point almost fully disabled by Parkinson’s, and the formal dining room of 4700 College Avenue had been transformed into a sickroom—a sickroom from which he could, now, in his hospital bed, look out on the flowers and trees of his garden, which I was tending with ever more care. MC counted on me heavily during that year. She depended on me to be around, and, indeed, I wanted to be there. I slept in a little basement room at the bottom of the staircase just across from the dining room—a bedroom presumably designed in the early days of the mansion for “the help”—so that I could hear Dr. Compton when he called out in the night.
I remember all too many sleepless nights awaiting his call, or his groan, or even his shout—a shout which did come from time to time, and which did both terrify me and break my heart.
8
The months dragged on in this fashion.
I was shoveling the endless sidewalk (think: the length of a football field) at 4700 early one February morning when the ambulance arrived, and I knew then that Dr. Compton had died. I went into the house and found MC sitting at her desk, quietly writing the long and eloquent obituary that would appear in the next day’s Wooster Daily Record. She looked up from her work. There were no tears in that moment. But there was knowing. She looked long into my eyes, and I looked back into hers. It was a glance of kinship I’ll never forget. She and I had shared something beyond words. She had the genius in that moment not to try to make words out of something so ineffable.
Just like that final moment, so much of our relationship was unspoken. I never really got to thank her for what she gave to me. Even to this day, I occasionally hear her talked about in the circles of people who knew her—and very often she is talked about disparagingly as a real dragon lady. Well, of course, as you’ve seen, she was way more than that. Yes, she could be snide, sarcastic, arrogant, entitled, and peremptory. But I knew her heart. She was a powerful woman, with some true greatness in her soul. She was for me the angel with whom I wrestled.
9
As I think back on the memories of this woman who haunts my dreams, there is one serious regret. It is simply this, the very unspokenness of our friendship. This unspokenness sometimes haunts me. But I have come to see that this unspokenness is, in fact, quite typical of adversarial relationships. Unlike twinship friendships, adversarial relationships are very often not entirely symmetrical, or reciprocal—or are, in fact, not symmetrical at all. I loved Helen Compton, and she helped to change my life. But I wonder: What did I do for her? Did I make a difference in her life? Would she remember me at the time of her death, as my own grandmother remembered me?
Every form of selfobject relationship has its painful or unfulfilled side—and this lack of symmetry, of explicit reciprocity, is often the most painful side of adversarial relationships.
A case in point: As writer Isak Dinesen, the celebrated Danish author of Out of Africa, is leaving her farm in the hills of Kenya—saying goodbye to her beloved Africa—she realizes that she has “a song of Africa” inside her that will never abate—a beautiful and ardent song of Africa that continually sings itself in the deepest part of her soul. But she wonders: Does Africa have a song of me? Has the relationship been at all reciprocal?
Dinesen’s is a fascinating tale. In many ways, Africa itself was Dinesen’s noble adversary. Just as with containment, where we find that institutions, schools, churches, or even towns and cities can be “holding agents,” so, too, with adversarial needs. For Dinesen, I believe that Kenya itself, and her coffee plantation, and her community of African workers, came together as her most profound noble adversary. Africa was the supreme challenge of Dinesen’s life. She pushed against it. She wrestled with it. She brought everything she had to the wrestling match. And it brought forth the best of her. But here is the pain: at the end, Dinesen did not know what Africa thought about her. Would there be an echo of her in the fields around her bungalow? Would there be a shadow of her on the driveway? Had she touched Africa’s soul?
It was reassuring to read that Dinesen wrestled with this side of the noble adversary, as I did. In deep human connections, we all long for reciprocity, for symmetry.
“If I know a song of Africa,” Dinesen wrote as she left her plantation for the last time, “of the Giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?”
If have a song of Helen Harrington Compton, did Helen Compton have a song of me? I will never really know.
I’ve come to accept that some selfobjects—Helen Compton, for example, of course, or perhaps Pat Conroy’s coach—do their work in the world almost without knowing it. Simply by being fully themselves. Unshakeable. Immovable. Determined. A force of nature. Rilke’s storm! This is their very nature and their very gift.
Rainer Maria Rilke, as is so often the case, gets it just right:
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.