The Blazing World

Rachel Briefman (written statement)

On Sunday, February 28, 1999, Harry told me about Anton Tish. I remember the date because, after she left, I recorded the details of our exchange in my journal. I have edited those invaluable notes here.

Although it was chilly and gray outside, I had put on a fire, and we were warm. Harry was wrapped up in a dramatic hand-knit purple sweater and had removed her shoes so she could rest her feet on the sofa cushions. Ray had left the city to give a paper at a conference in Washington, and the two of us were alone with Otto, our Yorkie, who was such a nervous little beast the vet had put him on Prozac, a drug that had absolutely no effect as far as we could tell but gave us the comfortable feeling that he was being “treated.” Otto rudely and repeatedly sniffed Harry’s crotch as we sat in the living room, which made Harry joke that Otto, who had been named after Otto Rank, was merely doing further research on his “pet subject, birth trauma.”

Before that afternoon, I knew nothing about the show at the Clark Gallery or its success. Although I regularly take in museum shows, I do not follow contemporary art closely, and a great many battles are fought and banners raised in that insular world without my knowledge. Harry, however, had come armed with reviews and photographs, so I was able to see her illustrated woman, as well as the boxes that were, as she said, the “real” work, the ones that counted.

Once I had understood exactly what Harry had done, I wondered aloud what good it did to give credit to someone who didn’t deserve it. Why? Harry stubbornly insisted that the deceptive game was being played for a reason. It wasn’t merely a sleight-of-hand trick; the magic had to unfold slowly and eventually be turned into a fable that could be told and retold in the name of a higher purpose. At some as-yet-undisclosed moment, she would stride forth out of the shadows to expose and humiliate “them all.”

Their humiliation did not strike me as a higher purpose, and I told her so, but she countered that it was just a small, if inevitable, part of the plan. Harry had long talked about them. They had persecuted or ignored her for years, but someday they would regret it. After her parents and then Felix died, this monolith of adversarial forces seemed to grow rather than diminish. An enemy with a masculine, not a feminine face, it swatted the likes of Harry away like a mosquito. She had fantasized about her revenge for years, and now it had come — sort of. What did it mean that an amorphous they had celebrated her work when it arrived in a twenty-four-year-old body with a cock, to borrow Harry’s words? What were the enthusiasts actually seeing, I asked, her work or just Anton, the portrait of the artist as a young hunk? How many people really looked at art? And if they did, could they see anything in it? How did people actually judge it? Since my interests ran more in the literary direction, I mentioned to Harry that Beckett’s Murphy had been rejected forty-three times and pointed to the many stories of literary journalists typing up manuscripts of celebrated novels, sending them off to publishers, and receiving standard rejection letters (or worse) in return. Without the aura of greatness, without the imprimatur of high culture, hipness, or celebrity, what remained? What was taste? Had there ever been a work of art that wasn’t laden with the expectations and prejudices of the viewer or reader or listener, however learned and refined?

Harry and I agreed there had never been such a thing. She said that her idea was not just to expose those who fell into her trap but to investigate the complex dynamics of perception itself, how we all create what we see, in order to force people to examine their own modes of looking, and to dismantle their smug assumptions.

After this foray into the ambiguities of vision, Harry fell silent as she often did, her large eyes focused on her inward narrations. I nudged her to tell me what she was thinking about, and she began another disquisition. We are all mirrors and echo chambers of one another. What actually happens between people? In schizophrenia people lose their boundaries. Why? Because I knew Harry well, I understood that this was not a digression but a circling device to home in on a more personal confession. Finally, I said, “What is it you are really trying to tell me, Harry?”

After another minute or so of not speaking, Harry leaned toward me, put her hand on my arm, and confessed that during their adventure Anton had gone a little crazy. In the beginning, it had been fun, she said, a grand joke the two of them were going to perpetrate on shallow, preening art world types who could make or break reputations, the pompous asses who knew so much about so little. Harry and Anton had worked everything out between them. She had set him up in a studio, had offered him the proceeds from any sales, and had given him a crash course in Western art, an idiosyncratic survey of what really mattered since the Greeks, according to Harriet Burden. In Harry’s class, Duccio di Buoninsegna, the Siennese master, gets more space than Michelangelo, and the perfection of Raphael is relegated to a footnote. This was fine with Anton, of course, who knew next to nothing to begin with. As they worked on the Venus, Anton started calling Harry at all hours to ask questions about the work: Why is the graffiti on her elbow again? Tell me about David and the French Revolution again. Which one is Emil Nolde again? Before long, she said, her answers and comments became his. No one owns language. Do we remember the sources of our own ideas, our own words? They have to come from somewhere, don’t they? Anton read books and essays Harry gave him, watched films she recommended, and eagerly digested her opinions.

Although he had been sick with anxiety before the show and nearly fell apart at the opening, he had calmed down after its success. He had felt (as so many of us do) not only massaged by the compliments of his admirers, but that he richly deserved their praise, whether he had actually made the works or not. His majesty, the baby, that infant who believes he is the center of the world, still lives somewhere in all of us. Harry began to notice small alterations in Anton’s diction when he talked about the project, especially his use of pronouns. He said we and us and our repeatedly. He began to remember insights as his that weren’t his. Anton, she said, became half convinced that her art belonged to him. He knew I had done it and he didn’t know at the same time. He said to me, “I’m your mirror.”

Harry admitted that she had encouraged the idea that she and he were true collaborators. She had elevated his status to lure him into the ruse. As her pseudonym, Anton had played a vital role in the theater she had staged for a single viewer: herself. After all, the gallerygoers were not privy to the power behind the scenes. Anton was the performer. But was Anton playing Harry — or was Harry playing Anton? She said that without him there could have been no big Venus, that the hapless young man had kick-started the idea — shockingly ignorant novice makes sophisticated jokes about art history. But then, who actually believes himself to be shockingly ignorant? Least of all, the shockingly ignorant. And the boy had learned a lot during his tutelage with Harry. I couldn’t help but think that their story was an interesting reconfiguration of the Pygmalion myth with the sexes reversed. Anton was Harry’s creation, one made, to some degree anyway, out of her disenchantment with the world of men and its intractable biases against women. In the Greek myth, Pygmalion grows so disappointed with the opposite sex that he lavishes his love on his perfect sculpture, the ivory statue Galatea, who is granted life only at the very end of the story. Harry’s pretty boy had the misfortune to be made of bone and muscle and tissue from the start.

Once the show’s glory faded and the journalists had vanished, poor Anton began to fray. He wanted to return to making his own art, but what had seemed vital and alive to him before had turned flat and dull. Everything he touched shriveled in his hands. He meditated and he fasted and he read, but none of it did any good. He had once believed in himself, and now he didn’t. It was all Harry’s fault.

She told me that the last time she saw him, he buzzed her door at two in the morning, and when she opened it, he staggered inside, drunk and angry. His life as an artist was over, he declared, and it made him sick. “You have to talk to me!” he yelled at her. “You have to talk to me.” It was then that Harry had the strange sensation that she was listening to herself howling at Felix. Hadn’t she said to him many times, “You have to talk to me!”?

The two did their talking at Harry’s kitchen table after she made him drink three glasses of water. The boy had been teary and red-faced at first, but then he turned cold.

Harry’s position was that Anton had known what the deal was; that she hadn’t fooled or cheated him; that together they had experimented with a hypothesis about the importance of the artist’s persona in relation to the work shown, and that they had succeeded. Anton had been well paid and had gained a foothold in the art world, should he choose to continue to make art.

Anton agreed that he had known what the plan was from the beginning, that he, too, had been interested in the idea, but he couldn’t have been expected to understand what it would mean for him suddenly to find himself sought after, even “kind of famous.” He had posed for an advertisement for sneakers with several other up-and-coming young artists. He had been interviewed by Bomb and Black Book, had been approached for comments on other shows. He had been invited to countless parties, had slept with girls who wouldn’t have looked at him before. And, he told Harry, he was good at it.

“Good at what?” she had burst out. “Sleeping with girls? What are you talking about?”

“All of it,” he had yelled at her. “The whole thing. They wanted me. Do you think they would have wanted you? Isn’t this what it’s all about? Without me, none of this would have happened.”

Harry winced as she reported the conversation to me. Anton was right, she said. He wanted to hurt me with the truth, and he did. And he went on and on, she said, telling her that the art would have had little effect without him, that his image was what counted, a young, with-it kid who made a lot of references to this and that. “They didn’t know what I was talking about!” he had yelled at her. It had been so easy, dropping the names of works of art he had learned from Harry, but the journalists didn’t care. And, he had continued, the irony was that the only artist that really mattered in all this was Andy Warhol, who understood everything about celebrity fascination all along. “And Warhol was the one artist I really knew something about before you came along. It’s funny, really, really funny. Don’t you get it? All your learning, all your esoteric crap; it’s worth nothing out there, less than nothing!”

“That’s what he said to me, Rachel. I was sitting there, fat and old in my bathrobe, looking at him, and it made sense. Even drunk and in the middle of the night, he looked good. I had picked him, after all. It wasn’t that he was beautiful exactly, but he had an élan; he embodied an idea.”

Anton had essentially told Harry the story she had told herself all along, but rather than feel vindicated, she had felt hurt and confused. “What do you want, then? You have everything, don’t you? Why come here demanding to talk to me?”

But Anton, it seemed, did not have everything he wanted. He was miserable. He couldn’t work anymore. He had been en route to a grand discovery before he met Harry. He had felt its importance. He had been rich with ideas, fantasies, and thoughts. He had been all set to make his post-Warholian works. He had just needed a bit of time, and he would have burst through into his own solo stardom.

Harry looked at me and rubbed her chin. “I asked him why he didn’t just do it, then.” He couldn’t do it because she had gotten in the way; her ideas had intruded upon his. He didn’t recognize himself anymore. Who was he? He saw her when he looked in the mirror. He had tried to give her the money from the sales, hadn’t he? But now he understood that he was the one who had “made her.” He had contributed hugely to “the whole thing.” Celebrity is not what you do; it’s being seen. It’s making the scene. He had more than earned his commission because he was the boy who had “sold the goods,” but “somewhere along the road,” Anton said, he had lost his “purity.”

His use of the word purity had sent Harry into convulsive laughter. Apparently, she had repeated it over and over. She told me Anton had been modest about his own gifts when she first met him. He had talked about commercial art to pay the bills while he worked on his own “projects.” She had never heard him talk about either stardom or purity.

Harry looked very sad when she told me this. “I created a monster.”

But sitting with Anton in her kitchen, she had been angry, furious. She told him he had completely rewritten the past, that he seemed to have forgotten that she had made the artworks, that the boxes had come out of her body, out of years of work and thought. She had felt like slapping him. This kid, this infant, who had been asking her questions for a year, whom she had mentored and paid for, this child had turned into a smug, deluded, pompous creep.

And then Harry cried on my shoulder. I held her for a while and asked her what she was going to do. She said the experiment hadn’t worked correctly because she wasn’t sure what had happened. Maybe nobody had cared about her boxes. Maybe the boxes had sold just because Anton Tish had supposedly made them. It was too early to claim the work as hers. The ads, the hype, Anton’s face were smoke screens. She would have to wait. She would have to try again. She had another idea. I told Harry that she should think twice before she repeated her experiment. The psychological toll was too great. Whether Anton was right or wrong was less important than the fact that both he and she had suffered over the project. I also ventured that Harry’s problem might be that she had trouble owning her work, that perhaps she felt she didn’t deserve acclaim. She told me sharply not to “psychoanalyze her” and then, instantly regretful, begged me to forgive her.

When I asked how the evening with Anton had ended, she said that although he had clung persistently to the idea that he had been vital to their “success,” he had sulkily admitted that she had transformed his thinking about art. He had no choice but to take time off and plot his next move. He would take the money because he deserved it, and he would travel for a while, see the world, think, and read.

And then a mischievous smile replaced Harry’s formerly anguished expression. Anton, she said, had adopted a high Romantic mode for his farewell, one that required her to leap up from the sofa and demonstrate.

“I will never see you again!”

(Sentence accompanied by Harry enacting sweeping arm gesture from stage melodrama circa 1895, not at all plausible in young man a hundred years later, but I smiled anyway.)

“I am going away, far away, to the Himalayas, to the Sahara, to Paris, to Timbuktu, but first to Queens to get my stuff out of storage.”

(Back of Harry’s right hand moves onto her forehead as she tilts her head upward, eyelids fluttering. She sighs loudly. Lets her hand fall, turns to me, opens her arms.)

“I will rediscover my lost purity, my authenticity.”

(Harry rushes around my living room, lifting up cushions and paging through a magazine in eager search. Bursts into laughter.)

“I hope you didn’t laugh at him then,” I said to her, and she answered that she had let him have his moment of cinema or whatever it had been. When they said goodbye, they had both behaved well. I learned later that Anton did not instantly depart for the Himalayas, but stayed around for several months before he disappeared.

But then Harry returned to her fury. She had been so angry at Anton, she said, she could have punched him silly or burned him to a crisp with a single breath.

This was a reference to Bodley, Harry’s imaginary fire-breathing friend, whom I had known about for years.

She was silent for a while, and then she launched into a hesitant preamble: “I don’t know if I should tell you. No, I can tell you. Maybe I shouldn’t. I will. There’s something in me, Rachel, something I don’t understand. I felt it when I wanted to kill Anton. I’m not kidding. I hated him when he was sitting there in my apartment. I was afraid of myself. What is that? It’s old, Rachel. It’s like a memory in me, but it’s not. I feel it, and it’s been coming up. With Dr. F., I mean. It’s something horrible inside me.”

I thought of Harry’s vomiting. The body can have ideas, too, can use metaphors.

And then, with her hands gripping my wrists, she said that more and more she was haunted by a feeling that there was a hidden story somewhere inside her, something she couldn’t articulate because she didn’t know what it was, didn’t know whether it was real or imagined. “It scares me to pieces, Rachel. It’s fear alone, cold, frozen fear with no image, no pictures, no words. This is how people create false memories, out of fears and wishes, ugly dreamlike thoughts that infect them like a virus.”

Harry’s face was white.

I talked about fantasy then, which lies at the heart of my work with patients, but the inner world and the outer world can be difficult to separate, and the place where they conjoin or divide has been a blurry business in psychoanalysis from the beginning. We invent them, I said to Harry, the people we love and hate. We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us.

“Yes,” she said, “and even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.”

I had never heard anyone say it just that way: I am made of the dead.

Over ten years later, I can still see Harry in my living room performing her Anton skit, the parodic gesticulations of her protégé-pseudonym front. Time has thickened it, given it additional meaning because of the events that followed, especially her relationship with Rune. And now, as I recall her gestures in my living room and her grinning face, I feel haunted. Her melodramatic movements do not belong to the youthful hero who bids his lover (or mother) goodbye before he leaves for an adventure. They are the mincingly feminine gestures of the heroine, that creature who starred in countless plays and silent films, the golden-haired darling of heaving breast and rosebud lips, defending herself against the dastardly mustachioed villain who threatens her virtue. That day in my apartment Harry played Anton as a girl, which was in itself a form of revenge.

She projected onto him her vulnerable girl-self, the child that, I suspect, had been roaring back in her work with Adam Fertig. She had said to me that she felt only fear — without pictures or words. But she had already created figures and images from that emotion in her boxes. There is no doubt that Anton was Harry’s pawn. She had wanted an empty male vessel to fill with art, but Anton was not hollow. He was a person, and he was the one who had lived the adulation, who had been feted and touted, not Harry. He had come to her and claimed his rights as an agile performer, another kind of artist, to be sure, but an artist nevertheless. And I think Harry envied and despised him for his deftness. She had been naïve. She had imagined she could borrow the husk of a man for her revenge, but human beings aren’t disguises. If Anton had found himself caught in the net of Harry’s fantasies, she, in turn, had discovered that her protégé had his own dreams.

All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. I suffer becomes You will suffer. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time.

I told Harry a story that afternoon because it seemed somehow relevant. I once had a patient who had been brutally assaulted when she was eleven years old. The man attacked her while she was walking home from a friend’s house on the Upper West Side. It was not a mugging; he leapt at her with a knife, sliced her neck open, and left her bleeding on the sidewalk. She nearly died. My patient reported that she had had no revenge feelings against the perpetrator. But years later, when a boyfriend left her, she couldn’t stop fantasizing about her ex-lover. She manufactured car and skiing accidents, terrible falls, illnesses, and sudden explosions, all of which he survived, but disfigured and paralyzed. In this maimed state, he would inevitably come to recognize that she was the great love of his life, that without her nothing he did had any meaning. After a while, images of his broken and bloody body would intrude on her thoughts suddenly and without warning. She had bouts of depersonalization, during which she would leave cruel messages on the man’s answering machine: I hope you get run over on your way home from work. She frightened herself. We spent session after session unpacking the meanings of the compulsive fantasies.

All Harry said was, “She must have had a scar.”

Yes, I told her, I had seen my patient’s scar: a clean, terrible line that had become a fold in the skin of her neck.

That night I dreamed I was in a long, empty corridor, and I saw Harry hunched over on the floor. I walked toward her and noticed a thin, deep cut in her neck. I began to worry that her head would fall off, and I gripped her neck to keep her head on. At my feet lay a piece of scrap lumber with a few nails sticking out of it. I must have let go of Harry, because I picked it up. A pair of tiny green eyes blinked and a red mouth began to move quickly, as if it were trying to speak to me. I heard nothing but was overcome by a feeling of pity. The sun from the window shone straight into my eyes, blinding me, and then I woke up.

There are many ways to untangle and interpret the bizarre condensations and displacements of dreams. My patient’s scar returned in Harry’s sliced neck. I must have been afraid one of us would “lose her head.” Of course, the dream is more about me than about Harry, although the half-alive piece of wood might have been an image of Harry’s work, which expressed deep parts of herself that were difficult to articulate in other ways. I’m not sure. Almost every day I sit with people, and I listen to them. Sometimes, with particular patients, I worry that I don’t really hear them. They are all trying to make sense of their stories, after all, just as Harry was; Harry, who had told me she believed there was something “terrible” hidden inside her.