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Something written by Clement

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twistedcontrolOct 31, 2009
 

 
Thought this might be of interest to some of you. I will put my favourite bit up the top though just because I love that Clement mentions Paul when he really didn't have to and calls him a friend. "My friend Paul Merton once appeared on The Richard and Judy Show and was told there were two things that absolutely must not be mentioned: 1) Richard's arrest for shoplifting and 2) the fact that Judy is getting fatter. Paul began his interview by asking Richard if it wasn't time he nicked some slimming pills for his wife."

Some questions of interpretation;Interview;Jed Rubenfeld;Books
Sir Clement Freud
14 April 2007

THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER. By Jed Rubenfeld. Headline, Pounds 7.99; 529pp. Times Bookshop Pounds 7.59 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Sigmund Freud is the unlikely hero of Jed Rubenfeld's bestselling thriller. Here Sir Clement Freud meets the author and shares memories of his grandfather

Sigmund Freud died in September 1939, a few days after the outbreak of the Second World War. He was 83, had suffered from cancer of the mouth for many years, been in constant pain, chainsmoked cigars.
The headmaster of my school in Berkshire heard the news on BBC Radio and called me to his study to tell me that my grandfather had died, adding: "He was a great man."

I told him that he had been a very nice grandfather. "Have you read any of his books?" he asked.

About a year earlier, when I had gone to the Freud house for tea and to collect my 14th birthday presents -an Egyptian relic from him and a white silk night shirt from my grandmother -I had asked whether I should read his books and he had thrown up his hands and explained that he wrote for the medical profession, not schoolboys, I should read Robert Louis Stevenson.

This grieved me, for among the books on the shelf behind his desk was a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, signed "respectfully to Sigmund Freud from D. H. Lawrence".

In my youth "Freud" was not a household name in Britain, as it was in the United States. At prep school I was once called to the headmaster's study to be beaten for talking during class, told to take off my trousers "and your pants, you stupid little boy", lay across the man's knee as he fondled my bum with his gnarled hand, whereafter he said: "I am not going to smack you because your grandfather would disapprove."

When people ask whether being related to a famous man is a help or a hindrance, I think of that. Also I suppose that if your name is Freud, it is better to be related to Sigmund than not. It must be frustrating to have to keep denying family connection.

I was called up in l942. Having been born in Berlin, schooled in Devon, London and Berkshire, and lived in Suffolk, I ended up in the Highland Light Infantry. I was sent a third-class rail ticket to Glasgow, and stood in the corridor of a packed train for six hours, chatting to another 18-year-old also bound for Maryhill Barracks. On arrival we had a coffee then took a tram down the Garscube Road. At our destination we were told to hand in our call-up papers, wait until our names were called, come to attention, call out "sergeant", and move to the quartermaster's office to get our uniforms.

After a while the sergeant called "Frood". Too tired to argue, I came to attention and shuffled towards the designated location when the man called "Jung". My new friend, with whom I had travelled from London, was following and I gripped him by the shoulder and said: "This is the most amazing coincidence: you heard him call me Frood; well, my name is Freud and Freud and Jung, I mean, what an extraordinary thing."

He said: "My name is Young."

JED RUBENFELD WAS BORN in Washington DC in l959, the youngest son of a psychotherapist whose father emigrated from what is now Poland at the turn of the 20th century; Ruben means "ruby" or "beetroot", he hopes the former, although one is more likely to find root veg than precious stones in a "feld". Jed went to Princeton, where he wrote a thesis on Freud, tried acting but found that he was a lousy actor and went on to read law at Harvard. He is now professor of law and an expert on the Constitution, about which he has written learned tomes.
The book (we will refer to The Interpretation of Murder as "the book") is his first novel and deals with Sigmund Freud's only visit to the US, in l909; he was accompanied by Jung, then his pupil and friend, to lecture at Clark University.

What Rubenfeld writes is meticulously researched -only Freud's involvement in the murder is fictitious. It is not only a terrific, fiendishly clever, handsomely written, totally compulsive book but it is a Richard & Judy Book Club choice, has sold 350,000 copies here; US sales are only a seventh of that.

My friend Paul Merton once appeared on The Richard and Judy Show and was told there were two things that absolutely must not be mentioned: 1) Richard's arrest for shoplifting and 2) the fact that Judy is getting fatter. Paul began his interview by asking Richard if it wasn't time he nicked some slimming pills for his wife.

Richard and Judy sent a man over to interview Jed at New Haven, where he lives in a "large house", with his wife and two daughters. How large, I asked. He says: "Well, seven bathrooms; an old house by New Haven standards which was once a bustling industrial city and is now a quiet university town."

Jed's wife Amy Chua is Chinese; there had been a murder in her family which caused them to move to Manila before going on to the US. They met at Harvard. Their daughters are now 14 and 11.

What threw Jed when the Richard and Judy delegation set up camera in his study was the first question: "Tell me about the book." "What did they expect me to say?" I suggested mentioning the colour of the binding: fawn; the number of pages: 500-plus and the price: Pounds 7.99 He looks rueful, hadn't thought of that, but the book is his first vehicle to fame. I liked him a lot. He is modest, has a sense of humour, is taking his new-found celebrity with wonderment and both hands, can't get over meeting all those famous people and receiving invitations from his heroes such as Tom Stoppard.

FREUD HATED THE US FROM the moment he stepped off the gangplank of the SS George Washington in New York; he was unwell and Jung went to some lengths to publicise the fact that he had gone to his master's room and found him unconscious on the bed. There was also an occasion when the demands of the Freud bladder caused him to ask Jung to walk very close to him while he urinated in the street, down his trouser leg. Nicer men would have kept quiet about this. Jung did not qualify under the "nice man" appellation.

Freud feared that the world regarded psychoanalysis based on sexual awareness as "Jewish psychiatry" and believed that a Swiss Christian was a good person to lead the science forward.

Jung used his position to undermine Freudian thought, to revoke his belief in the Oedipus and castration complexes, to deny that sexuality was the animal part of human nature and to denigrate his teacher whenever he could. They fell out big time. Jung was a snake, Jed thinks, although he does not quite say so in the book.

A faction in US psychiatry attempted to stop the 1909 lectures on the grounds of prurience, but they were attended by prominent philosophers and psychologists and received considerable acclaim in the local papers. Freud continued to hate the US with renewed vigour: the food, the lifestyle, the noise... the fact that his wife's cousin, Edward Bernays, who lived in New York where he was the first PR man in the land, had agreed to meet him and did not turn up.

Then there was the presence in his retinue of A.A. Brill, who had translated his books into English with so little skill that we (to whom Freud left the copyright) had them retranslated by John Strachey -these were brilliant translations and convinced the world that Freud was a great writer as well as a great scientist. I learnt from my Aunt Anna that he had dreamt of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Anna had a house in Skibbereen, Co Cork, where she celebrated her 80th birthday.

Every couple of hours the postmistress would arrive on her bicycle with a new batch of congratulatory telegrams. At one point Anna said: "In the last lot there was one which must have been a mistake; could you have another look?"

"Would that be the one from Philadelphia; I thought it odd but there is no mistake; I checked." The message had read: "The rapists from Philadelphia send their congratulations and good wishes." There should not have been a gap between "the" and "rapists".

Jung visited brothels and was known to have had sexual relations with his patients. Not so Freud, although Jung disclosed that my grandfather -whom he had analysed -had a relationship with my great Aunt Minna, grandmother's sister. I remembered her as a tall, almost blind, angry old woman who walked with a stick and had lived with them since the death of her fiance during the First World War.

My father, an architect and the youngest Freud son (there were three boys and three girls) took me to Vienna to meet him. My eldest brother had gone two years earlier and said that it had been all right. My second brother came back from his visit to tell me that in the flat in 19 Berggasse was a waiting room full of raving lunatics, worth observing for their wild speech and insane behaviour.

When it was my turn to go I was delighted because it was about the only time that I can remember doing anything other than in the company of my two brothers. I had pillow fights with Paula, the Freud maid who followed him to London in 1938, I sat dutifully at meals and was taken for a walk by my grandfather, me holding one hand, the leash of his alsatian dog in the other.

He told me what a very smart dog the alsatian was: once he had been out for a walk and the dog had ran away and could not be found. Grandfather went home and the Freud dog is said to have gone to a taxi rank, waved the identity tag that was around his neck at a driver and was driven back towards the address. At the corner of the street, my grand-father said, the dog, knowing that there was business to be transacted at the destination that would be beyond him, jumped out of the window and raced home. The driver, deeply impressed, went to the flat to express his admiration of the dog. Even then, I did not believe his summation of events, but small boys did not argue with their elders and betters.

On that walk, we came across a man having an epileptic fit in the street. We stood and watched; the man's hat had fallen from his head and, as he twitched and salivated, people placed small sums of money into the hat as a token of sympathy.

We walked away, grandfather, the dog and I. Why did you not give him any money, I asked. Grandfather looked at me and said: "He did not do it well enough."

BACK TO JED RUBENFELD: I invited him to lunch at my London flat. He arrived as the clock struck the hour and could not have been a nicer, more forthcoming interviewee. I cooked him a Viennese meal, which seemed appropriate -not that one eats particularly well in Vienna, now or ever; one just eats a lot. Should you, in a restaurant, tell the waiter that your meal has been disgusting, he is likely to say: "Have some more."

We had a strong chicken consomme, celeriac in chervil mayonnaise, wiener schnitzel with asparagus, lyonnaise potatoes and tomato salad. I had tried to buy a Sacher torte but our Marylebone patisserie explained that it was using all its chocolate for Easter eggs...would I like apple cake? We had that, a bit heavy on cinnamon but saved by Guernsey cream spiked with calvados, and we drank a Gruner Veltliner 1985 Auslese. Then we went out for coffee, partly to talk more and get someone else to do the washing-up, mostly to give the photographer a different background from my dining room.

Jung, Jed says, first repudiated Freud in the US in 1909 and was never forgiven.

To have worked as closely as the two had, then to deny sexuality and continue to analyse patients was unforgivable. Freud continued his dislike of America and all things American throughout his life: "Americans embraced psychoanalysis but they did not understand it." I asked whether Jung was brilliant. Jed didn't think so.

He believes that Freud was one of the all-time great men, and my thoughts went to the frail, cancer-ridden old man, revered by so many, of whom I was so proud and whose name got me invited to all the right parties, even if for all the wrong reasons and by whose will -in which he bequeathed his royalties to his grandchildren -I was never completely broke and always had a little more money than my fellow scholars, fellow-soldiers, fellow-workers.

In 1978 I was on a parliamentary delegation to Japan and returned via China during the Cultural Revolution, a choice also made by young Winston Churchill, then the Conservative MP for Stretford. On my final day I was debriefed by the Minister for Information who asked if there was anything at all I would like to ask. I said: "Yes. Everything you do, you do with extreme care and precision. When I ask questions that your government does not like, my driver calls for me five minutes later than arranged. When I ask if there are any blind or handicapped children in China, I get cabbage soup for dinner.

"Now I am in your country with a colleague, than whom I am older, have been in parliament longer, have held higher positions in our respective political parties: we are both staying at the Peking Palace Hotel and his suite is bigger than mine.

Why?"

The Minister, very embarrassed, finally said: "It is because Mr Churchill had a famous grandfather."

It is the only time that I have been out-grandfathered.

 
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