The Neurosis of Containment
for Dorothy Wallace
What I am about to relate took place in the late summer of 1930 when, a woman of middle age, I was a guest at the house of Mrs. Livesday in Barrytown-on-Hudson. The house was destroyed the following year in a freak storm that lasted under an hour and yet devastated the village and woodland. No one was harmed, and Mrs. Livesday, her vigor untrammeled, simply took up housekeeping in her summer home on Block Island—not a small feat for a woman in her eighties.
A self-taught student of botany, I had spent the previous summer in Mrs. Livesday’s company on the island, hunting down rare specimens and pressing them between prepared papers. I also collected seeds—upon Mrs. Livesday’s encouragement: of field poppy, chicweed, nigella, et cetera; and pinecones, the samara of the maple and elm. Some seeds are smooth and others rough and wrinkled; the seed of the field poppy is honeycombed with alveolate depressions. I set the seeds in cotton from the pharmacy.
Although a Christian and a woman of common sense, Mrs. Livesday had been reading the Jew, Freud. Certain arcane words and phrases—cabalistic, very pagan—peppered her conversation—always lively—so that speaking with her was now more than ever like eating borscht. That summer on Block Island I heard for the first time psychical unpleasure and obsessional neurotic. And although these terms were addressed to me—“There goes Gertrude Hubble once again indulging in psychical unpleasure!” or, “May I introduce you to my friend Gertrude Hubble, one of my favorite obsessional neurotics?”—they were always said with an affectionate tone. In other words, I did not take Mrs. Livesday’s latest enthusiasm seriously. (I believe it is a mistake to take Jewish ideas seriously.) When I came down to dinner with my boxes of seeds neatly sown in sterile cotton in impeccable rows, Mrs. Livesday turned to Cobb—who at that moment had brought a large tureen of veal-bone broth to the table—and said: “Cobb, look at these latest efforts of Gertrude’s and tell me: might they be said to illustrate a neurosis of containment?”
Despite the fact that I, too, am Christian, that Mrs. Livesday was both a great deal older than myself and my hostess, my dander was up.
“These little collections,” I said, “lovingly arranged are nay more than seeds, Mrs. Livesday. I fear your gracious mind has been addled by Semitic tomfoolery!”
“No! No!” she replied with such earnest good nature that I was at once reduced to shame, “They are charming, dear—there is no doubt about that. Very prettily executed. You do everything with skill, Gertrude, and these collections are no exception to that rule. But, you see, Cobb and I were talking in the kitchen about pathological phenomena” (inwardly I rolled my eyes, my temper fraying anew) “and how anxiety is often revealed by attempts to order and to contain the world, Anxiety is the product of chaos—or, rather, of the fear of chaos—and what could be more chaotic than the natural world? So we attempt to order it: just look at Cobb’s spice rack! Yes! Yes! I know I’m being silly. But, for example, think of the way you lay out your combs and brushes as though they were schoolchildren or dead matter: bones, fossil fish on exhibit in a museum! One, two, three—run up to your dresser, Gertrude, and there they will be! Lined up: big brush, little brush, comb next—lined up as if for execution! Don’t look at me like that. So are your shoes!”
I was scandalized, How did she know about my shoes? I was outraged. Cobb offered to serve me a slice of chicken pie and despite its fragrancy I shook my head, frowning for all I was worth.
“You are wanting pleasure, Gertrude,” Mrs. Livesday prodded her butler on. “Do serve our guest some pie. It is too easy to ruffle your feathers, my dear,” she said kindly. “And so that you won’t think otherwise, I didn’t go up to your room to spy. Call it intuition!”
“I was brought up to be an orderly person,” I said next. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Yes! Yes!” She tore into her bread with such ferocity I was startled. “But suppose it all means something.” I was dumbfounded, my temples throbbing. “Suppose those shoes and those brushes in their rigorous rows, and the perfectly folded linens in the upper-left-hand drawer were the key to your inviolable soul, Gertrude. Saying more about you than anything you could possibly say about yourself?”
