Book Review : Glimpses Into Yet Another Tortured Mind and Soul

Julia Paradise by Rod Jones (Summit: $12.95; 98 pp.)

Ask Kenneth Ayers what he cares about--as he drinks away afternoons at the Long Bar in Shanghai in 1927, or gobbles up enormous meals at the restaurant of the Astor Hotel--and chances are he’ll speak to you on one of three topics: The City of Edinburgh, where he had spent his childhood and attended university; Sigmund Freud, under whose aegis Ayers had studied for a year in Vienna, and to whom, with his beard Ayers bore a vague resemblance, and finally, Ayers loved to talk about his countrymen, J. M. Barrie; whose play “Peter Pan” Ayers had seen in its premiere season as a lad of 11 up in London.

It sounds harmless enough, except why is a man who loves Edinburgh spending long, gluttonous days in Shanghai, where he has no family or friends? And when this author at least), thinks about Freud, he and Rod Jones wonder about that beard , that paternalism, the complacent insistence that one mind--the analyst is entitled somehow to think itself better than another mind; entitled, indeed, to examine another human mind, another human soul.

Peter Pan Complex

And why is Ayers so obsessed with Barrie? Now, in the late 20th Century, we have thought to name that preference some men have for never growing up--to say that someone has a Peter Pan complex. But Ayers simply remembers that he fell in love with Wendy when he was 11.

Ayers, taking up “his allotted station halfway down the Long Bar in the ill-defined ‘professional’ ranks between the managers of businesses and the chief clerks,” never really thinks of any of this--why should he? He’s away somewhere, out here in nowhere. He’s house doctor at the Astor Hotel, waiting for the next nice neurosis to come within his purview. Ayers is serenely convinced of the superiority of his own country while hanging out in another one. And, because he is away, he’s able to follow his own sexual proclivities with a minimum of muss and fuss.

A ‘Perverse Trait’

Ayers supports a fellow Scot, a starving artist, so that he can work his trade. The artist prefers to draw from life: “These models were invariably Chinese girls barely out of childhood. . . . They were prostitutes whom Ayers himself procured from a house in the Bubbling Well Road. After the painter had made use of her all day, sometimes Ayers went to make use of her at night. As these girls were always thin and small, the sexual contrast with his own gross size was a painful one to contemplate, and what he preferred. . . . All such girls were in his mental notation, ‘Wendies,’ with their wispy boy-like figures, unformed breasts, bony hips and slender arms. Ayers recognized this in himself indulgently. He knew well Freud’s remark that ‘some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people.’ ”

So glidingly written is all this, so casual in its tone, that the reader almost doesn’t notice Kenneth Ayers is purchasing Chinese orphans, ignoring their identity, enjoying their suffering and casting them off to rot in the streets, to become part of the inarticulate misery of this debauched city:

“A legless beggar sitting on a foot path outside the entrance of a bank; police carrying huge bales on either ends of bamboo poles bent over their backs; the girl-prostitutes, scarely 12 or 13, lifting their skirts to expose themselves, hungry eyes grotesque above their mannequin figure; a man wearing a gas mask, and behind him an open tray truck piled with corpses.”

Goliath Syndrome

No, all this--the infliction of terrible suffering by the powerful upon the weak is normal, even . . . admirable, because it shows such thoughtless, inarguable strength. (A little like Americans excursioning in Central America, or Russia pigging about in Afghanistan, or China itself punishing Vietnam or Cambodia for a few weeks, Rod Jones is reminding us, but he keeps his metaphorical landscape strictly to Shanghai, to the International Concession--where every lustful Western country lines up for a turn at Oriental riches, and then, reluctantly, turns the ravished and exhausted city over to the Japanese.)

Into this landscape comes a missionary’s wife, a certain Julia Paradise, as frail and vulnerable as any of Ayers child-prostitutes. She’s crazy and delusional; convinced that any room out here in China is inhabited by bloated toads and twisting red snakes. At the request of the Rev. Mr. Paradise, Dr. Ayers takes Julia on as a patient, administering morphine, and soon turning their regular Tuesday afternoon sessions into adulterous trysts.

Strange, after his year with Dr. Freud, Ayers has forgotten the meaning of snakes in Freudian mythology, and neglects to notice that his own pale, soft belly and vile ways make him a dead ringer for a bloated toad.

The Rev. Mr. Paradise and his wife run a girls school some 20 miles in-country. Some of these girls have turned up missing. Julia is not nearly as sick as she pretends to be. Somewhere very soon in this compressed narrative it turns out that there are plenty of Communists, both Chinese and foreign (as well as Freudian psychologists) crossing this landscape.