The Echo Chamber

Pieces of myself are scattered like shards throughout my work. Here they are brought together, others added, made into a mosaic. Not yet a self-portrait, more a self-sketch, this is what I see in the darkening mirror.

-- Allen Wheelis, Foreword to “The Listener”

*

Allen Wheelis, born in 1915 in a Louisiana hamlet and reared in Dust Bowl Texas, eventually studied medicine, became a psychoanalyst, settled in San Francisco and found his voice in meditative essays and introspective novels. Now old, grappling with death from an ever-closer vantage point, he has written “The Listener,” a gloomy and despairing memoir and yet one filled with human warmth and occasional flashes of sheer exultation.

What characterizes Wheelis’ message is his relentless drive toward, as he phrases it, ruthless honesty. This is sometimes very hard to take, as he himself knows well: “Several people love me. Many think highly of me. Were you to ask, they would tell you of my kindness, intelligence, generosity, empathy. . . .

“Viewing myself, I see a different person, find no ground for love. Anxious, self-centered, tormented, weak. Too bad. I would have it otherwise, would wish for the noble features others ascribe to me. But I know myself better. . . . Even those closest to me can know but a fraction of what I know. I’ve really got the dirt on me.

“Since I intend in this work the utmost honesty, the reader, if I am successful, cannot in the end think well of me. If he or she does, I will have failed.”

Throughout his own writings, Wheelis is preoccupied with the intimate complementarity of sexuality and death. And he confesses that whenever he opens someone else’s novel, he seeks the pages of sexual passion:

“Art . . . is always a quest for the real, it seeks to grasp the way things are. And when an author persuades me that he is honestly and ruthlessly in pursuit of the real, then I am intensely interested in what he has found out about love.

“I seek out the sexual passages because it is here, in these restless, intimate touchings, that the hidden longing is most likely to surface, here that I may see its face. And here that it may be fulfilled. But rarely! rarely! and only for a moment--while what we want is deep, deep eternity.”

“I have come to a strange land. I do not understand the language. The customs are peculiar. . . .

“I am powerfully attracted by the girls of this strange land. I watch the dark, swinging curls as they bend over their work, the delicate features, the mysteriously swelling bosoms. Longing sinks into me like a knife, senses sicken, madness is not far away. . . .

“Yet with all this craving, this jungle of fantasy, I don’t really know what I want. To touch and to hold, to possess, to enter . . . but something more. The universe swings in the balance, and all hope of meaning, but whatever it is, I know I’m never to have it. My gaze locks on arched lips, on eyes in which for a breathtaking moment invitation flickers, on dark lashes that sweep down over glimpsed secrets. An abyss opens within me, sucks dry my throat. Heels click by on the pavement, skirt sways, brown eyes glance my way--suddenly she turns the corner and is gone, and I see, reflected in a store window, a face of hollow anguish.”

When Wheelis was only 10, his sadistically tyrannical father died of tuberculosis, and from then on he was in the care of his gentle, long-suffering mother, who lived to a horribly decrepit 100 and about whom he wrote an entire book some years ago.

“It was getting dark. There was a strong and cold wind. I was whimpering. Maybe crying.

“Then there was my mother standing before me in her long brown coat. ‘A norther has come up,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘All of a sudden. That’s why it’s so dark and cold.’ I looked up. Black clouds were rushing across the sky. . . . My teeth were chattering, the skin of my arms and legs became gooseflesh.

“My mother stopped, opened her coat. ‘Come inside,’ she said. She folded me into the coat, buttoned it in front of me. . . . My teeth stopped chattering, my knees stopped shaking. . . . Occasionally she stumbled. And just then, for the first time, I became aware of goodness. . . .

“The meaning of life is in that coat: it is the home to which one belonged as a child.”

*

A recurrent theme in “The Listener” is brutality; the cruelty and sadism are illustrated by his father’s harsh treatment of his son, then by a traumatic event that took place when Allen was a little boy in San Antonio, which is recalled several times in the book. The scene takes place at a sausage vendor’s cart:

“Amid a flutter of wings, a pigeon alights on the cart. With a snakelike sweep of his left hand, the old man scoops up the bird, forces the legs into extension, lowers it to the chopping board. Glancing at me with a mischievous grin, he whacks off the pigeon’s feet. With his left hand he throws aloft the shocked bird as, with his right, holding the knife, he brushes to the ground the twitching feet.

“My mother utters an anguished cry, clutches me to her, trembles, pulls me away.”

Several chapters later, Wheelis unexpectedly returns to brood and in a disturbingly lyrical voice, over the mutilated pigeon’s inevitable fate:

“The astonished bird flies upward, high, high, away from its strangely burning feet. Alights on a telephone wire, falls forward, with spread wings catches itself, flies to the branch of a tree, falls forward, tries again, falls, and again, again. Now it flutters motionless in air, hovers like an osprey above a branch, lowers itself vertically, with a beating of wings, touches down, falls backward, flutters to another branch, falls forward. Presently it alights on a shelf of leaves, finds itself resting, but not on its feet; the legs without feet have dropped between the twigs. The wings beat helplessly against the leaves. Presently it falls clear, again is airborne, alights on a branch, falls forward, to another, falls, falls, falls. . . . [I]f one could follow the path of this desperate bird through the darkening afternoon one would find hundreds of branches marked with two tiny red dots.

“It is weak now, cannot fly up, alights on the bar of a children’s turnabout, falls, hits the platform with a thud, rolls to the sand. It flutters this way and that, zigzag, out of the sand, gains the air, but cannot rise. It flies a foot or so above the ground, alights on a concrete walk, falls forward, beak hitting the stone. Again and again it flies and alights, again and again the beak striking the stone. The eyes are glazed; a trickle of blood runs from the beak. The flutter of wings subsides, is finally still. It is night. A rising wind stirs the feathers.”

Indeed, falling, or perhaps “falling away,” as he often describes it, is one of the most ubiquitous themes in Wheelis’ ruminations:

“We struggle to hold the world in our grasp, but without our knowing we fall away. What is this world we’re always wanting, always trying to grasp, always losing? . . . .

“The world slips away, we’re falling outward, but the view becomes ever more grand. Shining and bright, like a blue jewel, the world spins there before us, seemingly within our grasp, while we . . . see the world with increasing comprehension, but remain unaware of the void behind us into which we are falling. . . .

“I’m falling, falling, and the farther I fall, the faster, and it’s long been clear that no view is final, that all of us are falling, that senses fail, vision dims, sound is muffled, and all that is left of that too solid earth and its cloud-capped towers is that ephemeral blue dream reeling away in the void.”

To Wheelis, admired as a font of wisdom by so many of his patients, not to mention by his readers, life is not clear at all but rather an impenetrable fog swarming with secrets that elude him; he is baffled by the ability of so many others to “know how to live,” to glide effortlessly and gracefully through life’s treacherous currents. It is not coincidental that his shortest and most intense book was titled “On Not Knowing How to Live”:

“When I die I want my body to be cremated, the ashes buried in the orchard on the island in Puget Sound, the site marked by a flat stone of green marble bearing my name and dates, and a small distance below, my paradox.

“How to live?

“Who knows the question knows not how,

“Who knows not the question cannot tell.”

This is grim stuff, no denying. Here is a man who for his whole life has striven to relieve other people’s suffering and yet who seems incapable of applying his own maxims to bring a balm to his own life:

“He who has a message, who deals in salvation, writes a book of structured argument, of hierarchic order, of reasons in sequence. Not I. My life is all searching, never finding. I bear witness to what I have seen--a maze of roads, conflicting signs, freeways that end on nowhere, angelic maidens who fall under a spell and turn drab, far-reaching insights that become inert and explain nothing, blueprints of reason that twist out of shape and vanish with a twang in a minor key.

“My whole life has been given over to this search and I have found nothing. I’m growing old and still know not how to live. It’s already too late to do much with the answer, which, in any event, seems still remote.”

And yet in the midst of frustration and agony, in the midst of horror and pessimism, staring death straight in the face, seeing it as clearly as it can be seen and yet not understanding it at all, Wheelis still finds moments of sublimity and transcendence:

“I smell my death on the wind, want to see something of beauty and nobility in the time that is left. . . . There in the big top a man is hanging by his teeth, twisting, spinning, spotlights playing over him, the drums beginning to roll. He’s going to fall and nothing can be done, no net, but in the moments remaining he may yet achieve something remarkable, a glittering gesture, a movement perhaps of breathtaking beauty. . . .”

Many people will not like the bleakness of Wheelis’ ruthless honesty. Some will find it repellent, some will find it too bitter. I, however, warm up to the craggy honesty because I have long grappled with many of the same intangibles and have come up with much the same sense of confusion and puzzlement before the world. But I have never been able to phrase my troubled musings in as eloquent a way as does Wheelis.

When all is said and done, Allen Wheelis will in all probability be remembered by the world less as a doctor who healed than as a gentle but mournful philosopher-poet with a uniquely pungent and terse writing style, who ever sought and once in a while fell upon that which makes life worth living:

“Sometimes I--even I!--feel a wild and deep joyousness, the exaltation of cold wind on one’s face when one is young.”