AFTERTHOUGHT
The Inside Story
By ALAN BRIEN
THE difficulty about writ- ing a column like this is not where to begin but where to stop. What- ever the official subject of the piece, I begin with my- self, with my Ego, with ,•••••". that part of Me which makes me know I am alive. I visualise the Ego as a kind of chauffeur, sitting in a driving seat somewhere just above and behind the eyes, with the pineal gland (that mysterious, vestigial organ in the centre of the forehead which seems to grow into a rubbery shield if you approach the spot with any dangerously pointed weapon such as a knife or a red-hot poker) as the bonnet of his vehicle. Sometimes I can almost convince myself that I feel him tapping his foot up there, impatiently waiting for orders to go, and on the point of slid- ing down through a manhole in the back of my throat to peer out of my mouth with some com- plaint about his working conditions.
The Id and the Super-ego I usually forget about. Though sometimes I get a vivid picture of the Id as an incoherent, drunken, lecherous, thrill- hungry slob, thrashing about in the boot at the back of the brain, shouting out contradictory orders to the Ego, and threatening to cut off the fuel if he is not instantly obeyed. The Super-ego is the epitome of all back-seat drivers, holding on to the arms of his chair, ludicrously cautious and timid, forever exhorting the Ego at the wheel to go slow and follow wherever all the other Egos are going, occasionally jamming on the hand-brake without warning. As I understand the system up there, only the Id can get the machine rolling, only the Suger-ego can stop it, and the Ego has to steer as best he can under these restrictions, with the added complication that the other two have no common language and communicate only through him.
Now this may not be how the division of labour worked out in Freud's cranial laboratory but that's how we do it chez Brien and I'm inside so I ought to know. Every now and then, when the music-hall cross-talk act of Ego, Super-ego and Iddy falls silent, the brain itself begins to hum— a grey, cauliflower-shaped wodge with a computer in every knob—and an attempt is made to arrive at some objective assessment of the conditions outside on the basis of the rather vague evidence reported to base by that ageing, inefficient team, The Five Senses. Fortunately nobody is obliged to navigate an aeroplane, sign an Act of Parlia- ment, choose a career or lay the foundations of a house on the sort of information my brain pro- cesses and publishes. The first three paragraphs of this column are a characteristic example of the instrument in action. All that about the Ego and his colleagues was intended to be squashed into one sentence. But they all got so worked up about being described to the public in such an in- accurate and unflattering way that they inflated it wildly beyond its merits as a whimsical aside. Now readers are going to think I'm insane— which was possibly the intention of the Tiresome Trio all along. Still it does illustrate my point about the difficulty of deciding where to stop.
Admittedly this column is basically about me under some disguise or other. But how much do
I tell? I see no point whatever in writing it un- less I make a continual and conscious attempt to be honest and not set up a kind of professional humorist's dummy which is always getting its finger caught in the lawn-mower. Naturally, the occasional anecdote will be stretched to take on a more aesthetically pleasing shape while memory itself edits and rewrites its reports to give them an artistic gloss. But I do try to chart accurately my doubts as well as my dogmas, to produce a true map of my fears and failures and insecurities and obsessions. I only wish more of my corres- pondents would credit me with the self-awareness of realising that I usually know when I am reveal- ing my weak points and not write in gleefully telling me the news that I have exposed myself as a neurotic or a coward or a snob or a crypto- Communist or a fellow-traveller of homosexuals. After all, the great majority of them have only my word for anything they know about me. One or two find that situation intolerable, like the agonised man who wrote me after what seemed to me a tediously meticulous chunk of documentary =Damn you, Brien, How can I tell what is true and what is just WRITING?'
My friends, especially those I rarely see, find these columns an acceptable substitute for the letters I never get round to writing. And when I do see them, I am amazed at the amount of detail they have gleaned about the children, the garden, my new suit, what I did on my holiday and what books I have had out of the library. Total strangers, as far I can tell, tend to regard me as a fictional character based on a real-life model rather like Sir Roger de Coverley. Where the con- fusion sprouts is in contact with people who know me by sight, or as nodding acquaintances, but who see more of my writing than of me. I really felt as if I had been observed for a long period through a one-way mirror when an attractive young woman said to me at a party—'You see, I know almost everything about you and you know nothing about me.'
My own relationship with the column is partly therapeutic—it is a substitute for smoking or heavy drinking. A great deal of my nervous pre- occupations, my free-floating anxieties, my fan- tasy wishes flow into it as into the grille of a confessional. But the relationship is also parasitic. I often re-infect myself by writing when I think I am disinfecting myself.
I wondered at the time whether I was tempting my It (a different creature from the Id—see Grod- deck) to show its power when I wrote so con- fidently about my ability to throw off diseases by the power of the thought—rather like getting the stigmata in reverse. And when I combined that boast with a little paragraph instancing, along the tell-tale signs of homosexuality, a ten- dency to superficial skin ailments I was asking for trouble. All those who wrote in hoping that I would soon catch some minor but persistent disease so that I could practice thinking it away, and all those who wrote accusing me of being a secret 'homosexual who was betraying his kith and kin for money, have now achieved their revenge. A week ago I broke out in a scaly rash on the backs of my hands, on one thigh and less thickly across my chest and back. I am consulting a specialist tomorrow, but I suspect he suspects a psychosomatic origin. I swear I am as relaxed as ever I have been. I cannot unearth any secret desire that the rash would prevent my consum- mating except that it is impossible for me to carry on with my exercises at my Health Club—I would not believe it was not contagious on anybody else. It is all the result of showing off to you here. Even columnists have their occupational hazards. I hope this revelation breaks the spell.
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