A King Without a Crown

I hardly noticed when my father disappeared from our home life in the spring of 1957. Almost nothing was said about it at the time, and even though I was the analytical and father-centered eldest child, I asked him no questions and gave him no particular thought. Which may seem curious, and yet there it was, a fait accompli without further explanation.

It was many decades later that I began to work out the reasons for his absence and discovered how little about that disappearance had been what you might think of as voluntary. He had essentially caused a major crisis in his life with my mother and, through his own bad behavior, managed to erase much of his good standing within the entire extended family.

The particular irony of what had taken place out of sight of the rest of the family is now worth consideration. The occasions in which we may become our own worst enemies are, psychoanalytically speaking, greatly worthy of our attention. Sometimes we grow from such experiences, and our lives are enriched by new understanding. Sometimes we find ourselves all but destroyed. Most often, however—at least for people with a reasonably healthy ego—what happens is some combination of both.

Nevada was in the midst of a heat wave, and Ethan (my father), found himself alone, with a high fever, inside a mobile home on the edge of the desert. For the first time in his 44 years of life, he was not attached to a living soul—not to his family of origin; nor to the zealous and uncompromising Charlotte, my mother; nor to the two children that he had begotten with her. And not even to his new wife, Marie, who was the reason he found himself where he was.

Broken, sick, and helpless, he nonetheless remained clear-minded enough to know that this state of affairs was not merely a bad dream—that drowning in sweat inside a trailer seemed to be a new reality, that his analytical mind was mostly (though not entirely) submerged in irrationality, and that his ego was swamped in self-pity and his body racked with fear and uncertainty—but that he had, in fact, done this to himself, and thus he was still himself!

And yet he felt largely baffled by what had taken place. “How can this be?” he repeated frequently to himself. To which the correct answer was that Charlotte had asked him for a divorce, and if Charlotte asked him for any little thing, he would—no, he must—endeavor to give it to her; always, no matter the cost. Even though, on the occasion of her most recent request, that “little thing” was “a trial separation,” and the cost of it turned out to be ... everything! And even though he was forced to acknowledge a further, related truth: that he had acted far too hastily in giving in to her request, the rationale for such haste being the “I’ll show her” fallback play of many a man.

Nothing between them had prepared him for a request like that. Yet he must always accede to his wife’s wishes! Even on this, the most unfair and unnatural request conceivable (a separation? impossible!), even on this he must demonstrate his willingness to give Charlotte what she asked for—although it meant establishing a Las Vegas residency in order to file for a divorce that he did not and still does not want and, in effect, to (as he frequently put it to himself) “cut off my right arm.”

Not that he has for one single moment been unaware of the uncomfortable rationale that, in acceding to her request with as much dispatch as was humanly possible, he had become the means of demonstrating to the woman who had asked it of him (the woman whom he loved!) the consequence of such a request! That vindication of himself had been in view the whole time.

For those reasons—certainly not because he is a fool; he will never accept being judged as such—he had driven directly to Las Vegas and filed for a divorce precisely as Charlotte had asked. To show her!

And yet, even that explanation was not in every respect full and accurate. For there was, in fact, a not-unattractive second woman involved in the creation of this disaster as well: that woman named Marie who happened to have regularly attended the therapy group of which he was a member, and who declared one day in the presence of the entire group that she knew she was destined to marry him!

And thus it was that after a remarkably harmonious 20-year marriage to his chosen bride from Brooklyn, he obediently got a Nevada divorce and—in a kind of silent panic—married Marie two days later, a woman whom he did not love. Nor was he able to take her particularly seriously, although he admits (to himself) that he did find her physically attractive for the first of those weeks, after which—in a clear sign of the hitherto invisible mental imbalance and lack of ethics that he had failed to take account of—she set off in a taxi at the beginning of his illness and did not bother to return.

In short, he had been struck down by no less than a monstrously bizarre chain reaction.

But now?

Now he is ill.

He needs fluids.

He needs sleep!

Yet he is certain that once he can manage to free himself from this wretched coughing, he will rise and find some remedy.

After a number of days of this perturbation, it became apparent to him that, once his mind was again clear, he must begin to think the matter through in logical fashion and do something to fix it. Which would necessarily entail (1) trying to make sense of Charlotte’s request to end the 20-year marriage that meant everything in the world to him; and then (2) to take a close look at whatever aspects of himself had brought about this disaster. After which (3) he could climb out of his damp and smelly bed and advance toward straightening the entire confusing matter out with her face-to-face.

He scribbled the first two of these three points on a scrap of paper for further consideration. And then, after carefully tucking the scrap inside the book he had placed at the head of the bed for future reading, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

And lo, the remedy to his situation turned up the next day in the very book beneath which he had placed his note to himself the night before! The book, famous for its difficulty, bore the German title of Also Sprach Zarathustra. In reaching for his notes to himself that morning, Ethan picked up the entire book and found himself reading this: “An eagle swept through the air in wide circles, and on it hung a serpent, not like a prey, but like a friend: for it kept itself coiled round the eagle’s neck. The eagle is my pride and the snake is my wisdom. Would that I were wise from the very heart, like my serpent!” Nietzsche had written. “And if my wisdom should someday forsake me—alas! it loveth to fly away!—may my pride then fly with my folly!”

Ethan immediately recognized that something had indeed flown away with his own wisdom and that he could find no further indication within him of any emotion resembling pride. For as foolish as he had shown himself to be, it would be impossible for a man of his intellect to fail to recognize how thoroughly his pride had all-too-recently flown with his folly!

So he went on reading. A few pages further on, this line jumped out at him: “They want to know whether Zarathustra still liveth. Verily, do I still live?”

Ethan stubbornly responded, “I do live!” Yet at the same time, he recognized that he was not in the least prepared to return as a living man to the real world, and that he could as yet do nothing to alter any significant aspect of the hellish crater into which he had allowed himself to fall. A tortured reacquaintance with himself followed, persisting for several days; a prolonged session of disorganized yet dutiful self-analysis prompted by Zarathustra’s obscure dialogue with his own self.

Ethan’s mental and physical illness did not require that he lie in an icy bath, which had been the preferred treatment of the old alienists. Rather, he remained stretched out atop a damp, smelly sheet within the body of a sizzling metal trailer. Moreover, the treatment of his particular malady was being conducted from beginning to end without the relatively companionable presence of mental-ward attendants. “But just think,” proclaimed Ethan almost proudly to himself. “I did this to myself in the first place! I stranded my own self like an upside-down tortoise and am therefore neither eagle nor serpent.” But he knew—he had always known!—that he was destined for great things. And although he may appear to have all but completely written himself out of existence in the course of a great many years of posturing and self-aggrandizement, never seeing the near-fatal blow that would be coming, and (as it turned out) without even sufficient self-knowledge to begin to balance the sheer quantity of regret (for his blind ego, his own miscalculations, his own judgment, his own mistake), he still had the power to put things right.

Hour by hour, line by line, as he pondered the possible meaning of dozens of obscure Nietzschean sentences, my father must certainly have turned his thoughts toward the gravely ill German philosopher who had put those sentences in the mouth of Zarathustra. And, gradually, he surely came to recognize that there was something important to be gained from his own suffering, just as the 40-year-old Nietzsche had gained great insight from his own intense suffering. At that point, Ethan concluded that it was of the utmost importance that he get physically well, accept his responsibility for what had happened to him, and—emulating the great philosopher who was now his hero and his guide—return to work. This new beginning, he concluded, would begin in New York, the city where his life had begun.

Some weeks later—fever-free and stable on his feet at last (and considerably thinner than he had been in years)—he sold the trailer, rented a car, and drove to Los Angeles. Taking a final chance, he tried to talk to Charlotte to determine if she was still serious about her wish for their marriage to end.

Alas. His ex-wife made it crystal clear that his hasty remarriage to another woman had killed off any further interest she might have had in him. And so Ethan packed up and boarded a flight to New York, where he moved into the garage apartment at his sister’s house. From that safe shelter, he got in touch with his former professors at NYU and, with their endorsement, gained a license to practice as a psychotherapist in the state of New York.

Soon enough, Ethan’s customary optimism returned. Optimism comes easily to people who are by nature convinced that they are right even when they are profoundly wrong. Without difficulty or self-doubt, he convinced himself that he was on the proper course and would overcome his near defeat. Giving silent thanks to Friedrich Nietzsche for his example in brave response to illness and misfortune, he borrowed money from his sister’s husband, rented an apartment in Manhattan, and set up to practice in his field again.

Children don’t normally know what their parents are going through.

During all that time of Ethan suffering his losses and defeats, I was a typically self-absorbed adolescent who knew almost none of what had happened to my dad. What I did know was that from my birth until I was in eighth grade, Ethan lived with us, and then he and my mom got divorced. Divorced parents were a regular fact of life in Hollywood, where we lived, though it goes without saying that knowing about the broken marriages of the parents of my school friends did not give the adolescent me even a hint of who my own particular father was or what he was going through.

Naturally enough, therefore, I did what all the other kids of broken marriages in Southern California did: I completed junior high and high school and then applied to college. I subsequently spent an unfulfilling freshman year at UCLA. At the end of that year, uncertain about what path I was going to take—English literature (my first love) or psychology (that option could not be excluded; it was in the DNA)?—I flew east to New York in an effort to leave uncertainty behind. In the absence of better choices, it seemed obvious that I might benefit from time with my dad.

By then, Ethan had become a man with no wife, no girlfriend, and no evidence even of friends. He had experienced a trauma I knew almost nothing about beyond the undeniable fact of the divorce, and I scarcely sensed the presence of its devastating influence. I didn’t realize that he was an injured man, though he did seem hollowed out in some way. He was a man who did his best to hide his grievous, self-inflicted injuries from his daughter.

In short, although I had no knowledge of it at the time, he had become a broken king. Yet (there was no doubt about it) he was a king who still had the power to break me.