“They haven’t been fluffed up!” he said, in a voice of command.
Immediately several young analysts left their wives in the hall, dropped their coats, and rushed back to “fluff.”
The whole action was so unexpected and infantile that the blood rushed to my head and for a moment I was dizzy and unable to focus. And I had let myself in for this sort of thing! Jennie and I left without saying goodnight.
“There is a time when one goes toward Lionel and another time when one goes away from him,” an analyst who had once been part of the inner circle remarked. This indeed seemed to be the case, but my inner conflict[conflict] remained unresolved. I was ashamed of living in a midnight of fear. At the same time I felt privileged to know this gifted and, so often, generous man, who understood the human soul as few others have. I respected and loved him and wanted to befriend him in every way that was not a violation of my own being.
As a group, I found analysts the most sensitive and intelligent to be found in the professions. But there were those I could not tolerate, no matter how much they spent at the shop; the shock artists who fed off the agony and terror of the bewildered, and the culturally illiterate who viewed anything dealing with the creative as their province. The atmosphere would begin to sizzle at the Seven Stairs the moment any of the latter started analyzing Mann, Gide, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Kafka, Homer, anybody and everybody. I had read Freud’s essay on Leonardo Da Vinci and Ernest Jones’ on Hamlet with great interest and decided that the whole approach was one of intellectual gibberish, regardless of the serious intent of these great men. But the young and unread analysts were not even serious. When you cross-examined them, you found they had never read the plays or books in question: they were merely quoting an authority and taking his word for it. Of course, it is a nasty thing to expose anyone and it is sacrilegious to do it to an analyst. The change in my relations with some of the psychoanalysts became increasingly less subtle.
To offset some of the business losses attendant on this turn of affairs, I hit on the idea of giving a series of lectures in the store after closing hours. I offered a course of five lectures on great men of literature at a subscription price of ten dollars and was surprised to find I was talking to standing room only. After a month’s respite, I tried it again with similar success. Emmet Dedmon, then literary editor of the Chicago Sun-Times heard one of the sessions and was responsible for recommending me as a replacement for the eminent Rabbi Solomon Goldman, when he was taken sick before a lecture engagement. The success of that one lecture was such that I was booked for thirteen more. It seemed as though all was not lost.
“It’s a big world,” I assured myself, sitting alone in the shop before the fire. “The sun does not rise and set with a handful of analysts.” It was a cool October night. Business that day had been particularly good. My debts were not pressing. I took heart.
In apparent response to this cheerful frame of mind, a smartly dressed customer entered the shop, a man of medium build with blond hair parted in the middle and a pair of the bluest eyes I had ever seen.
“I am looking for an out-of-print recording, the Variations on a Nursery Theme by Dohnanyi,” he said. “Perhaps you may have it?” The accent was unmistakably British.
It was obviously my day—I did have it! “I have something else, also out-of-print, that might interest you,” I said. “It’s the Dohnanyi Trio, played by Heifetz, Primrose, and Feurmann.”