Writings and Drawings

  I had gone out to the barn of my country place, a barn which was used both as a garage and a kennel, to quiet some large black poodles. It was 1 A.M. of a pitch-dark night in winter and the poodles had apparently been terrified by some kind of a prowler, a tramp, a turtle, or perhaps a fiend of some sort. Both my poodles and I myself believed, at the time, in fiends, and still do. Fiends who materialize out of nothing and nowhere, like winged pigweed or Russian thistle. I had quite a time quieting the dogs, because their panic spread to me and mine spread back to them again, in a kind of vicious circle. Finally, a hush as ominous as their uproar fell upon them, but they kept looking over their shoulders, in a kind of apprehensive way. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I told them as firmly as I could, and just at that moment the klaxon of my car, which was just behind me, began to shriek. Everybody has heard a klaxon on a car suddenly begin to sound; I understand it is a short circuit that causes it. But very few people have heard one scream behind them while they were quieting six or eight alarmed poodles in the middle of the night in an old barn. I jump now whenever I hear a klaxon, even the klaxon on my own car when I push the button intentionally. The experience has left its mark. Everybody, from the day of the jumping card table to the day of the screaming klaxon, has had similar shocks. You can see the result, entirely unsuperinduced by sex, in the strained faces and muttering lips of people who pass you on the streets of great, highly mechanized cities. There goes a man who picked up one of those trick matchboxes that whir in your hands; there goes a woman who tried to change a fuse without turning off the current; and yonder toddles an ancient who cranked an old Reo with the spark advanced. Every person carries in his consciousness the old scar, or the fresh wound, of some harrowing misadventure with a contraption of some sort. I know people who would not deposit a nickel and a dime in a cigarette-vending machine and push the lever even if a diamond necklace came out. I know dozens who would not climb into an airplane even if it didn’t move off the ground. In none of these people have I discerned what I would call a neurosis, an “exaggerated” fear; I have discerned only a natural caution in a world made up of gadgets that whir and whine and whiz and shriek and sometimes explode.

  I should like to end with the case history of a friend of mine in Ohio named Harvey Lake. When he was only nineteen, the steering bar of an old electric runabout broke off in his hand, causing the machine to carry him through a fence and into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls. He developed a fear of automobiles, trains, and every other kind of vehicle that was not pulled by a horse. Now, the psychologists would call this a complex and represent the fear as abnormal, but I see it as a purely reasonable apprehension. If Harvey Lake had, because he was catapulted into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls, developed a fear of girls, I would call that a complex; but I don’t call his normal fear of machines a complex. Harvey Lake never in his life got into a plane (he died in a fall from a porch), but I do not regard that as neurotic, either, but only sensible.

  I have, to be sure, encountered men with complexes. There was, for example, Marvin Belt. He had a complex about airplanes that was quite interesting. He was not afraid of machinery, or of high places, or of crashes. He was simply afraid that the pilot of any plane he got into might lose his mind. “I imagine myself high over Montana,” he once said to me, “in a huge, perfectly safe tri-motored plane. Several of the passengers are dozing, others are reading, but I am keeping my eyes glued on the door to the cockpit. Suddenly the pilot steps out of it, a wild light in his eyes, and in a falsetto like that of a little girl he says to me, ‘Conductor, will you please let me off at One-Hundred-and-Twenty-fifth Street?’ ” “But,” I said to Belt, “even if the pilot does go crazy, there is still the co-pilot.” “No, there isn’t,” said Belt. “The pilot has hit the co-pilot over the head with something and killed him.” Yes, the psychoanalysts can have Marvin Belt. But they can’t have Harvey Lake, or Mr. C, or Mr. S, or Mr. F, or, while I have my strength, me.

  9. Sample Intelligence Test

  THE FUZZINESS that creeps into the thought processes of those inspirationalists who seek to clarify the human scene reaches an interesting point in Chapter XIV of “How to Develop Your Personality,” by Sadie Myers Shellow, Ph.D. Dr. Shellow was formerly psychologist with the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company. These things happen in a world of endless permutations. I myself was once connected with the Central Ohio Optical Company. I was hired because I had a bicycle, although why an optical company would want a bicycle might appear on the face of it as inexplicable as why a railway-and-light company would want a psychologist. My experience of motormen leads me to believe that they are inarticulate to the point of never saying anything at all, and I doubt if there is a motorman in all Wisconsin who would reveal the story of his early childhood to a psychologist. Dr. Shellow, of course, may have proceeded along some other line, but most psychologists start with your childhood. Or with your sex life. I somehow have never thought of motormen as having sex lives, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have them. I feel that this speculation is not getting us anywhere.

  Let us return to Dr. Shellow’s book. It was first published five years ago, but her publishers have just brought out a dollar edition, which puts the confusion in Chapter XIV within reach of everyone. In 1932, the book went into six printings. The present edition was printed from the original plates, which means that the mistakes which appear in it have gone on and on through the years. The book begins with a prefatory note by Albert Edward Wiggam, a foreword by Morris S. Viteles, and an introduction by Dr. Shellow herself. In Chapter I, first paragraph, Dr. Shellow gives the dictionary definition of “personality” as follows: “The sum total of traits necessary to describe what is to be a person.” Unless I have gone crazy reading all these books, and I think I have, that sentence defines personality as the sum total of traits necessary to describe an unborn child. If Dr. Shellow’s error here is typographical, it looms especially large in a book containing a chapter that tells how to acquire reading skill and gives tests for efficiency in reading. Dr. Shellow tells of a young woman who “was able to take in a whole page at a glance, and through concentrated attention relate in detail what she had read as the words flashed by.” If Dr. Shellow used this system in reading the proofs of her book, the system is apparently no good. It certainly sounds as if it were no good. I have started out with an admittedly minor confusion—the definition of personality—but let us go on to something so mixed up that it becomes almost magnificent.

  Motorman Concealing His Sex Life from a Woman Psychologist

  Chapter XIV is called “Intelligence Tests,” and under the heading “Sample Intelligence Test” twelve problems are posed. There are some pretty fuzzy goings-on in the explanation of No. 11, but it is No. 12 that interests me most; what the Milwaukee motormen made of it I can’t imagine. No. 12 is stated as follows: “Cross out the one word which makes this sentence absurd and substitute one that is correct: A pound of feathers is lighter than a pound of lead.” Let us now proceed to Dr. Shellow’s explanation of how to arrive at the solution of this toughy. She writes, “In 12 we get at the critical ability of the mind. Our first impulse is to agree that a pound of feathers is lighter than a pound of lead, since feathers are lighter than lead, but if we look back, we will see that a pound of feathers could be no lighter than a pound of lead since a pound is always the same. What one word, then, makes the whole sentence absurd? We might cross out the second pound and substitute ounce, in which case we would have: A pound of feathers is heavier than an ounce of lead, and that would be correct. Or we might cross out the word heavier and substitute bulkier, in which case we would have eliminated the absurdity.”

  We have here what I can only call a paradise of errors. I find, in Dr. Shellow’s presentation of the problem and her solution of it, Transference, Wishful Thinking, Unconscious Substitution, Psychological Dissociation, Gordian Knot Cutting, Cursory Enumeration, Distortion of Focus, Abandonment of Specific
Gravity, Falsification of Premise, Divergence from Consistency, Overemphasis on Italics, Rhetorical Escapism, and Disregard of the Indefinite Article. Her major error—the conjuring up of the word “heavier” out of nowhere—is enough to gum up any problem beyond repair, but there are other interesting pieces of woolly reasoning in No. 12. Dr. Shellow gets off on the wrong foot in her very presentation of the problem. She begins, “Cross out the one word which makes this sentence absurd.” That means there is only one word which can be changed and restricts the person taking the test to that one word, but Dr. Shellow goes on, in her explanation, to change first one and then another. As a matter of fact, there are five words in the sentence any one of which can be changed to give the sentence meaning. Thus we are all balled up at the start. If Dr. Shellow had written, “Cross out one word which makes this sentence absurd,” that would have been all right. I think I know how she got into trouble. I imagine that she originally began, “Cross out one of the words,” and found herself face to face with that ancient stumbling block in English composition, whether to say “which makes this sentence absurd” or “which make this sentence absurd.” (I don’t like to go into italics, but to straighten Dr. Shellow out you got to go into italics.) I have a notion that Dr. Shellow decided that “make” was right, which of course it is, but that she was dissatisfied with “Cross out one of the words which make this sentence absurd” because here “words” dominates “one.” Since she wanted to emphasize “one,” she italicized it and then, for good measure, put the definite article “the” in front of it. That would have given her “Cross out the one of the words which make this sentence absurd.” From there she finally arrived at what she arrived at, and the problem began slowly to close in on her.

  I wouldn’t dwell on this at such length if Dr. Shellow’s publishers had not set her up as a paragon of lucidity, precision, and logical thought. (Come to think that over, I believe I would dwell on it at the same length even if they hadn’t.) Some poor fellows may have got inferiority complexes out of being unable to see through Dr. Shellow’s authoritative explanation of No. 12, and I would like to restore their confidence in their own minds. You can’t just go batting off any old sort of answer to an intelligence test in this day when every third person who reads these books has a pretty firm idea that his mind is cracking up.

  Let us go on to another interesting fuzziness in the Doctor’s explanation. Take her immortal sentence: “We might cross out the second pound and substitute ounce,” etc. What anybody who followed those instructions would arrive at is: “A pound of feathers is lighter than a ounce of lead.” Even leaving the matter of weight out of it (which I am reluctant to do, since weight is the main point), you can’t substitute “ounce” for “pound” without substituting “an” for “a,” thus changing two words. If “an” and “a” are the same word, then things have come to a pretty pass, indeed. If such slip-shoddery were allowed, you could solve the problem with “A pound of feathers is lighter than two pound of lead.” My own way out was to change “is” to “ain’t,” if anybody is interested.

  Let us close this excursion into the wonderland of psychology with a paragraph of Dr. Shellow’s which immediately follows her explanation of No. 12: “If the reader went through this test quickly before reading the explanation, he may have discovered some things about himself. A more detailed test would be even more revealing. Everyone should at some time or other take a good comprehensive intelligence test and analyze his own defects so that he may know into what errors his reasoning takes him and of what faulty habits of thought he must be aware.” I want everybody to file out quietly, now, without any wisecracks.

  10. Miscellaneous Mentation

  IN GOING back over the well-thumbed pages of my library of recent books on mental technique, I have come upon a number of provocative passages which I marked with a pencil but, for one reason or another, was unable to fit into any of my preceding chapters. I have decided to take up this group of miscellaneous matters here, treating the various passages in the order in which I come to them. First, then, there is a paragraph from Dr. Louis E. (“Be Glad You’re Neurotic”) Bisch, on Overcompensation. He writes, “To overcome a handicap and overcompensate is much the same as consciously and deliberately setting out to overcome a superstition. We will say that you are afraid to pass under a ladder. But suppose you defy the superstition and do it anyway? You may feel uneasy for a few hours or a few days. To your surprise, perhaps, nothing dreadful happens to you. This gives you courage. You try the ladder stunt again. Still you find yourself unharmed. After a while you look for ladders; you delight in walking under them; your ego has been pepped up and you defy all the demons that may be!”

  Of course, the most obvious comment to be made here is that if you keep looking for and walking under ladders long enough, something is going to happen to you, in the very nature of things. Then, since your defiance of “all the demons that may be” proves you still believe in them, you will be right back where you were, afraid to walk under a ladder again. But what interests me most in Dr. Bisch’s study of how to “pep up the ego” is its intensification of the very kind of superstition which the person in this case sets out to defy and destroy. To substitute walking under ladders for not walking under ladders is a distinction without a difference. For here we have, in effect, a person who was afraid to walk under ladders, and is now afraid not to. In the first place he avoided ladders because he feared the very fear that that would put into him. This the psychologists call phobophobia (they really do). But now he is afraid of the very fear he had of being afraid and hence is a victim of what I can only call phobophobophobia, and is in even deeper than he was before. Let us leave him in this perfectly frightful mess and turn to our old authority, Mr. David Seabury, and a quite different kind of problem.

  Ladder Phobia

  “A young woman,” writes Mr. Seabury, “remarked recently that she had not continued her literary career because she found her work commonplace. ‘And,’ she went on, ‘I don’t want to fill the world with more mediocre writing.’ ‘What sort of finished product do you expect a girl of twenty-two to produce?’ I asked. ‘You are judging what you can be in the future by what you are doing in the present. Would you have a little elm tree a year old compare itself with a giant tree and get an inferiority feeling? An elm tree of one year is a measly little thing, but given time it shades a whole house.’ ” Mr. Seabury does not take into consideration that, given time, a lady writer shades a whole house, too, and that whereas a little elm tree is bound to grow up to be a giant elm tree, a lady writer who at twenty-two is commonplace and mediocre is bound to grow to be a giant of commonplaceness and mediocrity. I think that this young woman is the only young woman writer in the history of the United States who thought that she ought not to go on with her writing because it was mediocre. If ever a psychologist had it in his power to pluck a brand from the burning, Mr. Seabury had it here. But what did he do? He made the young writer of commonplace things believe she would grow to be a veritable elm in the literary world. I hope she didn’t listen to him, but I am afraid she probably did. Still, she sounds like a smart girl, and maybe she saw the weakness in Mr. Seabury’s “You are judging what you can be in the future by what you are doing in the present.” I can think of no sounder judgment to make.

  Let us now look at something from Dr. James L. (“Streamline Your Mind”) Mursell. In a chapter on “Mastering and Using Language,” he brings out that most people do not know how to read. Dr. Mursell would have them get a precise and dogmatic meaning out of everything they read, thus leaving nothing to the fantasy and the imagination. This is particularly unfortunate, it seems to me, when applied to poetry, as Dr. Mursell applies it. He writes, “A large group of persons seemed to read the celebrated stanza beginning

  The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold

  And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,

  and ending

  Where the blue wave rolls nightly on deep G
alilee.

  “But when a suspicious-minded investigator tested them, quite a number turned out to suppose that the Assyrian’s cohorts were an article of wearing apparel and that the last line referred to the astronomical discoveries of Galileo. Is this reading?”

  Well, yes. What the second line means is simply that the cohorts’ articles of wearing apparel were gleaming in purple and gold, so nothing much is distorted except the number of people who came down like the wolf on the fold. The readers who got it wrong had, it seems to me, as deep a poetic feeling (which is the main thing) as those who knew that a cohort was originally one of the ten divisions of a Roman legion and had, to begin with, three hundred soldiers, later five hundred to six hundred. Furthermore, those who got it wrong had a fine flaring image of one Assyrian coming down valiantly all alone, instead of with a couple of thousand soldiers to help him, the big coward. As for “Where the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee,” the reading into this of some vague association with the far, lonely figure of Galileo lends it a misty poetic enchantment which, to my way of thinking, the line can very well put up with. Dr. Mursell should be glad that some of the readers didn’t think “the blue wave” meant the Yale football team. And even if they had, it would be all right with me. There is no person whose spirit hasn’t at one time or another been enriched by some cherished transfiguring of meanings. Everybody is familiar with the youngster who thought the first line of the Lord’s Prayer was “Our Father, who art in heaven, Halloween be thy Name.” There must have been for him, in that reading, a thrill, a delight, and an exaltation that the exact sense of the line could not possibly have created. I once knew of a high-school teacher in a small town in Ohio who for years had read to his classes a line that actually went “She was playing coquette in the garden below” as if it were “She was playing croquet in the garden below.” When, one day, a bright young scholar raised his hand and pointed out the mistake, the teacher said, grimly, “I have read that line my way for seventeen years and I intend to go on reading it my way.” I am all for this point of view. I remember that, as a boy of eight, I thought “Post No Bills” meant that the walls on which it appeared belonged to one Post No Bill, a man of the same heroic proportions as Buffalo Bill. Some suspicious-minded investigator cleared this up for me, and a part of the glamour of life was gone.