Secrets of Creative Nightmares

By R. Z. Sheppard

STUFF OF SLEEP AND DREAMS: EXPERIMENTS IN LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY by Leon Edel; Harper & Row; 352 pages; $20

In the Age of Analysis, we all plead innocent with an explanation. Literary critics have remained productively blameless by fitting books and authors to psychoanalytic theory. Leon Edel, 74, knows the limits of this approach. In his new work, the teacher, critic and prizewinning biographer of Henry James explains: "We take from Freud perhaps the richest part of his work, his insights into man's ways of thinking, dreaming, imagining--those elements which have also an influence on motivations and behavior."

The premise is safe and sound. The unconscious breeds symbols and images; art is the unconscious made visible, and dreams are the bedtime stories we tell ourselves before we wake. Who then could feign indifference to the dreams of artists? Virginia Woolf recalled a nightmare in A Sketch of the Past: "I dreamt I was looking in a glass when a horrible face--the face of an animal--suddenly showed over my shoulder." The visitation was, she said, her persistent "looking glass shame," and in a fantasy of a haunted house she later wrote, "Death was the glass! Death was between us!"

It could happen to anyone, except that Woolf's well-documented life is an open invitation to the avid psychospeculator. The intermittently mad author tells how, as a young girl, she was sexually used by an older half Leon brother. Her emotional ties to her father were so strong that a few weeks after his death, Woolf asserted manhood by starting to smoke a pipe. Reflections of beasts have been provoked by far less.

Edel's search for meaning in the sleep life of other literary figures turns up some choice curiosities. A Henry James dream begins in fear and ends in exhilaration as the author of The Turn of the Screw and other ghost stories chases a terrified phantom down a great hall that resembles a gallery in the Louvre. The unconscious of most writers remains a dark nursery of anxiety and chaos. But James, one of the most controlled novelists in history, can symbolize discipline and order in his sleep. This is the triumph of art at its most intimidating.

W.H. Auden is a textbook case drawn largely from the poet's autobiography-of-sorts, A Certain World. The book is an alphabetical listing of subjects close to Auden's heart, and the psychological evidence is so blatant that one should expect an ambush. Edel plunges ahead. Under "Castration Complex," he finds a reference to "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," whose mother warns him that he will lose his favorite fingers if he does not stop his infantile habit. He does not, and in comes "the great, long, red-legged scissors-man" to carry out the sentence.

Under D, Auden describes a dream in which his appendix is to be removed. Instead, the doctor cuts off "the arm of an old lady who was going to do me an injury." Mommy dearest? Of course, and Edel does not fail to evoke the emasculating female. How much weight Auden, a homosexual, gave to primal imagery is open to question. An artist must care more about what he makes than what he is. Auden put it right when he told a friend, "I am a poet first and a queen second."

Where no dreams appear to whet his analytical appetite, Edel proves to be a literary journalist of great skill. His chapter on Henry David Thoreau as Mamma's boy and great American freeloader is a model of concision and balance. So are his pieces on James Joyce as "injustice collector" and "unfinished genius," Tolstoy as a "prodigy of self-inhibitions" and "self-indulgence," Yeats as a hero of "creative aging," and T.S. Eliot as a successful battler against will-sapping depression.

But the chapter on Edmund Wilson, "The Critic as Wound-Dresser," is overblown and a bit self-serving. Edel refers to the Greek myth of Philoctetes, a great archer who was banished because a septic injury offended the noses of his countrymen. Wilson himself read this as an allegory of the artist as outcast. As embellished by Edel, Wilson the critic is like Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who endured the stench and nursed the archer. Wound-dresser is a limited and benign definition of a critic who laid open many a reputation with one stroke.

When authors gather to analyze critics, they frequently speak of pencil envy. The diagnosis hardly applies to Edel, a man with many distinguished books to his credit. If anything, he is a professional who knows how to cover his bets. He can argue the obvious: that literature is not a patient and he is no therapist. He can then go on to examine writers and their work along orthodox lines laid down by Viennese mind-science nearly a century ago. He is wary enough to disarm those who would argue that literary psychology diminishes its subject. The fact remains that Edel is incapable of being reductive, even when he tries. Stuff of Sleep and Dreams is continuously energetic and expansive. Its variety includes anecdotes, information and even Edel's eyewitness account of James Joyce leading a claque for Tenor John Sullivan at the Paris Opera in 1929. One is simply carried along despite the assertions of theory. The methodology in the literary madness still leaves plenty to the imagination. --By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Yeats sang. He sang the tatters in a kind of revenge upon the indignities heaped upon the body. Wherever we turn in those last immortal poems in The Tower and The Winding Stair we find the old man surpassing anything he had written in his younger years. We encounter the symbols of his old age and the images of his old age; they are not repetitions of images called up by his younger self. They speak out of awareness of the past, his deep national feeling, his sense of himself within his race and as seer and singer. He writes of spirals, gyres, staircases to be climbed, a freedom and loftiness that defy horizontal decay."

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