We sometimes fall in love with people for the very things about them that will eventually drive us mad, or at least drive us away. It can seem, in retrospect, that quite unwittingly we had been doing a kind of psychic alchemy; there were things about this particular person that we were so freaked out by, that so disturbed us, we turned them into enchantments. The once charming became utterly irritating. We had come across someone—or something: a novel, a poem, a piece of music—so appalling to us that we had to get over ourselves and we called it, at the time, falling in love. Later, in the aftermath as it were, we might think of this kind of falling in love as, say, counter-phobic, strangely self-destructive, and so, strangely self-revealing. These are the times when falling out of love seems more interesting than falling in love, because we are not simply bereft, we are baffled; we seem to have lost something we never really wanted; we seem to have been misled.
There is of course always the pressure to avoid the lurking disillusionments, the bad faith of having to keep faith with oneself, of wanting to believe that all our relationships have some valuable necessity about them. These self-betrayals, if that’s what they are—the loves we really regret—are tempered when we fall out of love with writers, or rather, with their work. What were we like if we liked this? is a less daunting, more easily interesting question about writing that has absorbed us in the past than about lovers or friends whom we have fallen out of love with, or just lost interest in. And yet clearly our aesthetic passions are somehow of a piece with, not substitutes for or alternatives to, lovers and friends and family. The patent difference, though, is that in relationships with other people everyone is changing all the time; with writing, we change, but the words on the page don’t. In this sense art never betrays us; we can only betray ourselves. Sons and Lovers is exactly the same book we read when we were sixteen, but we are not exactly the same person when we reread it.
Nothing reveals our resistance to giving up on past pleasures, our unwillingness to notice that we are not getting the pleasure we wanted, more than rereading the writers we loved in adolescence. These are the writers that are like lost loves, the writers who made us feel so promising, the writers who conspired with us to love our own excesses. And by the same token they are the most perilous writers to return to. “You’re the one I’ve been looking for / you’re the one who’s got the key / but I can’t figure out whether I’m too good for you / or you’re too good for me,” Bob Dylan sings on Street Legal. When a writer just doesn’t work for you anymore, Dylan’s questions are among the questions you’re left with.
So when I was invited to contribute to this symposium, I was dismayed that the writer who came to mind was Dylan Thomas. A writer, it seems, I have become too good for. The poem that came immediately to mind, perhaps appropriately in the circumstances, was “Do not go gentle into that good night,” a poem that, if you grew up in Wales in the Sixties, was everywhere. I remember the revelation of reading it—or rather, hearing it as I read it—as a fourteen-year-old; the fact that it was a poem about death wasn’t a problem for me then, because I thought it was a poem about going out in the dark, something I particularly liked. I couldn’t wait to go out at night, and Thomas was giving me his strange bardic encouragement. When I learned later at school what the poem was supposedly really about, it seemed even better: better as in deeper, graver, more portentous, more grand. And Thomas’s poetry was inextricable from the legends and stories about him. Welshness was so alien to us as second-generation émigré Eastern European Jews, and Thomas made it seem all rather alluring in his slap-dash, slapstick, and apparently naively sophisticated Celtic fluency. If you thought, as I did then, that the Visionary Company was the only company worth keeping, Thomas was the bard of choice. Partly because he wasn’t T. S. Eliot, and partly because he seemed to be the apotheosis of “having a voice.” And also because he clearly had no idea what his poetry was about: his was an obscurity immune from academic interpretation. His seriousness, I thought then, was even greater than Arnold’s, his on-the-side-of-lifeness even profounder than Lawrence’s. Reading the poetry, or hearing him read it in his plummy upper-class English accent, was powerfully and obscurely moving, and left you nothing to think about.
Virtually everything that I valued as an adolescent—other than his face in Augustus John’s great portrait—annoys or bores me now. His poetry seems, more often than not, like a calculated self-parody, with the joke being on us when we are moved by it. It would be more realistic to say that I let myself be tricked by Thomas’s poetry; not that he, in any sense, wanted to do this to me—how could I know?—but that a sense of being tricked is what I have been left with. It is as though, in retrospect, I would like to have been more foolproof, a terrible thing to want. Our disillusionments must be the key to our tastes. The mystery is why such vehement unmaskings are required. Why we can’t just move on.
Adam Phillips, a practicing psychoanalyst who lives in London, is the author of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Terrors and Experts, Darwin’s Worms, and numerous other works. His new book is On Kindness, written with Barbara Taylor.
