Despite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patients. After a tumultuous first trip, Sid ends up at Conolly House, a radical hospital for young schizophrenics where he serves as a “barefoot doctor.” From there, Sigal launches readers on a sardonic, rambling journey through a fantastic breed of insanity.
With his freewheeling, ecstatic prose, Sigal spins a manic psychological quest into a telling portrait of a society in the grips of a turbulent decade. Zone of the Interior is a subversive and uproarious search for clarity and comfort in an increasingly mad world, grounded by an unforgettable narrator.
Despite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patients. After a tumultuous first trip, Sid ends up at Conolly House, a radical hospital for young schizophrenics where he serves as a “barefoot doctor.” From there, Sigal launches readers on a sardonic, rambling journey through a fantastic breed of insanity.
With his freewheeling, ecstatic prose, Sigal spins a manic psychological quest into a telling portrait of a society in the grips of a turbulent decade. Zone of the Interior is a subversive and uproarious search for clarity and comfort in an increasingly mad world, grounded by an unforgettable narrator.
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Overview
Despite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patients. After a tumultuous first trip, Sid ends up at Conolly House, a radical hospital for young schizophrenics where he serves as a “barefoot doctor.” From there, Sigal launches readers on a sardonic, rambling journey through a fantastic breed of insanity.
With his freewheeling, ecstatic prose, Sigal spins a manic psychological quest into a telling portrait of a society in the grips of a turbulent decade. Zone of the Interior is a subversive and uproarious search for clarity and comfort in an increasingly mad world, grounded by an unforgettable narrator.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480437074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 359 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Sigal moved to London in the 1950s and stayed in the UK for thirty years, writing and broadcasting regularly from the same BBC studios that George Orwell had used. During the Vietnam War, he was the “stationmaster” of a London safe house for American GI deserters and draft dodgers. For several years, he collaborated with the radical “anti-psychiatrists” R. D. Laing and David Cooper, with whom he founded Kingsley Hall in London’s East End, a halfway house for so-called incurable cases.
Sigal’s most recent book was the memoir Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal, and Raging Egos (Soft Skull Press, 2016).
Read an Excerpt
Zone of the Interior
A Novel
By Clancy Sigal
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2005 Clancy SigalAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3707-4
CHAPTER 1
I thought the world had exploded or been blown apart by something. A gigantic spasm had occurred that shrivelled and exposed people, made ideas obsolete, tore the mask from institutions. Perhaps too well I knew that I over-identified a social cosmos with my personal problems, the sexual-political frustrations following the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution and the deflation of the English new left.
Until it all fell apart I'd regarded myself as mainstream and normal. Straight. Dope made me sneeze, and I fell asleep during orgies. Growing up on the streets of Chicago, Detroit and Chattanooga, I'd somehow managed to sidestep the far out and nutty; even in Hollywood I had an ordinary life, that is for a political operative by night and a film studio dealer by day. I was pretty optimistic about life because, after years of failure and frustration, I'd hit the mark and was writing well. The life I'd left in the USA was in my hip pocket in London.
Then 'it' began to happen again.
Head and stomach-aches, vertigo, cold sweats, unexplained fevers, a rising anxiety: all the discomforts I'd suffered prior to my first book. "Oh, those are just writing pains," Coral had pronounced before shipping me off to the first of many psychiatrists she hoped would take a little pressure off me. (And because I woke her at 3:00a.m. to talk, which she said wrecked her for the next day's writing.) On the day my second novel won a literary prize in America I was due to see yet another trick cyclist. Dr. Willie Last.
I'd gotten his name from Coral—my 'connection'— who'd heard it from Fred Bradshaw, an ex-coal miner novelist. I checked with Fred.
"Willie's okay," he said over the phone. "A working-class Scot, about our age, Marxist of sorts. I don't go to him but a couple of my friends do. He's supposed to be great with artistic layabouts like us." Since I was very high on Bradshaw's latest book, North Country Blues, I rang for an immediate appointment.
Last was the umpteenth doctor I'd seen in the past few months. Freudians, Jungians, Freudo-Jungians, neuro-psychiatrists, a faith healer (Coral's idea), a herbalist, two won't tells and an LSD therapist. Most of them confirmed my worst fears about psychiatry. I hated their smug superiority, the middle-class philistinism behind a pose of scientific detachment. In Eisenhower's America I'd learned to steer clear of psychotherapists when I saw how they influenced comrades to 'adjust'—that is, drop out of radical politics and occasionally to inform. Some California doctors encouraged patients to turn stoolpigeon during the blacklist purges and in one or two cases even acted as FBI spies. So the blinkered Toryism of English shrinks came as no surprise. Almost unanimously they urged me to drop writing if it caused me so much pain. I'd stayed longest with the LSD man. A Harley Street hustler with a deathbed manner, he mainlined me on a mixture of lysergic acid and pethedrin in a gloomily anti-septic room with oxygen tanks and a female nurse who looked horribly like Mrs Danvers, the mad housekeeper in Hitchcock's Rebecca. Every hour he'd pop his bald head in to see if I was still alive: "Out go the bad thoughts, in come the good thoughts—right-ee-o, Mr. Bell?' Then he'd bundle me into a taxi in a semi-delirious state to dry out at various friends' houses. Once, when I collapsed with shakes, he grudgingly let me sleep over—paying extra, of course. He fired me when I started doing handstands on his desk under the influence. Also LSD wasn't helping my theatre reviews for the New Statesman and Vogue. I wept and sobbed in all the wrong places and laughed uproariously in the middle of Ralph Richardson's big speeches.
It was spring, Friday the thirteenth, when I rang Dr. Willie Last's bell.
He came to the front door himself. All my previous shrinks had had snooty housekeepers. "Och, Sidney Bell, is it? Come in, mon. It's a pleasure tae meet ye. I've read yir wurk." He sounded like a younger version of Dr. Angus Cameron, Tannochbrae's kindly old country doctor in the BBC-TV series, Dr. Finlay's Casebook.
He warmly shook my hand and took me up a dark musty-smelling staircase to his office, on the top floor of a shabby building on North Gower Street, beside Euston Station at the unfashionable end of Bloomsbury. I preferred its flaked, peeling paint and broken pillars to the elegantly sterile façades of Harley, Wimpole and Cavendish streets where my other doctors had practised. There was a bookie ('turf accountant') on the ground floor, a barbershop above it. Camden Town hereabouts was full of dingy little hotels, trade union headquarters and in Tolmer Square the cheapest, friendliest cinema in town. (You can't find it now. Like so much of London's lovely muddle the place has been bulldozed and the square hardly exists anymore.)
Last's office was different, too. The carpet was threadbare. Everything looked beat-up and secondhand. The only furniture was a rolltop desk and swivel chair where Last sat; patients had a choice either of a moth-eaten easy chair or a leather couch so decrepit it looked ready for the junk heap (and that's just where he found it, he said). The high-ceilinged room was badly lit by a single overhead bulb, its one soot-blackened window faced the brick wall of an adjoining warehouse. Dr. Last apologised for the poor view. "Th' landlord tried tae unload a street-facin' window on me fer an extra fiver a week but I tol' th' thievin' bastid where tae shove it."
What a pleasure to hear plain working-class talk after all these months of oily upper-crust medical accents.
When I defiantly settled in the overstuffed easy chair, Dr. Last didn't blink an eye. Most shrinks spent whole sessions arguing over my refusal to lie on their couch. Instead he pulled out a long black cigar from a silver case, nonchalantly lit it, drew and puffed with almost fierce concentration. As the blue smoke curled around his softly aquiline features, I studied him.
Last was the youngest doctor I'd seen so far. Two years my junior—I'd looked him up in the Medical Register—he looked like the kid brother I'd always wanted and never had. With his long Teddy Boy sideburns and rather artistic-looking 'wings' of thick, dishevelled, curly brown hair swept back from his broad forehead, he was more like a Bill Haley rocker than a stiff-necked doctor. This impression was curiously reinforced by his simple single-breasted black suit, slim-Jim tie and old- fashioned ankle-high boots, an outfit he wore all rumpled and scuffed as if he'd just slept off a hangover on Brighton Beach. He had a doctor's delicate hands, which constantly played with his cigar or kept inserting a phallic-looking Vicks inhaler up his nose to clear up a breathing difficulty he seemed to have. Watching me watch him he arched his eyebrows and grinned conspiratorially. He fingered the lapel of his jacket. "It's er, um, my medical disguise. But at heart I'm really a civilian." He had a slight, charming stutter that, at moments, rose like a cry of pain.
The most compelling thing about Last was his eyes. Gelid, grey and hooded, they habitually stared into infinity, batting up and down every few seconds with an almost hypnotic, stroboscopic effect. There was so much sorrow in them. At times his young-old severely sensual face clouded over, as if he'd seen the Dark Angel, or the person he confronted was obscurely injuring him. Later it became all too easy to translate this into: "I've done something bad to him" and want to set him free of all my terrible, boring secrets. It only made it worse when he flashed a radiantly forgiving 'us humans are such shitpots' grin and said, "Man, tha' was a stuipid thing tu'h've done!"
For openers I did my usual stunt of outsilencing the shrink. But Dr. Last seemed to enjoy the absence of words. We sat together without speaking in the semi-darkness for what seemed like ages, then he leaned forward in his anciently creaking chair. "How's Freddie Bradshaw, then? Haven't seen him since Harold Pinter's party."
Ah. He'd read my books and knew my friends.
Seeing how gun-shy I was, Dr. Last gently broke the silence. "That slummy Chicago of yours wasn't such a picnic fer ye, was it?" (He pronounced it 'Chick'-ago.) He said that parts of my novel Running, reminded him of his own childhood in Dundee, and in his faint stutter he told me about growing up poor in pre-war Scotland. The Tayside tenements, Saturday night punch ups, stand-up sex in hallways and gas oven suicides could have come out of Chicago's 24th Ward in the 1930s. "Of course," he boasted, "we'd've regarded yir Yankee depression as fantastic prosperity."
Unlike my other shrinks, Dr. Last wasn't afraid to talk about himself. Though he wasn't too specific about his parents, I got a strong feeling he'd had an overprotective mother and an absent cipher father. That, too, sounded familiar. A fantasy-ridden, sickly stammerer (like me), he'd literally read his way up from squalor (ditto). A spinster teacher had been so impressed with his precocious appetite for Darwin, Marx and Schopenhauer that she wangled him a prized Grammar School scholarship, which smoothed his way to Aberdeen University. There he stumbled across A.J. Cronin's novel The Citadel, about a poor Scottish lad who becomes a rich society doctor. "I thought, 'Tha's th' ticket, Willie.'" He enrolled in medicine as an insurance policy against poverty, he admitted. But the higher reaches of philosophy—"birth, death, who guards th' Portals, does Gawd exist an' all that metaphysical jive"—continued to obsess him. "Books on th' great 'Why?' of life turned me on like a James Bond." He specialised in psychiatry. "It seemed as good a way as any to combine head an' heart, airthly an' spiritual—an' still make a decent wage."
Internship for Last-the-young-philosopher proved traumatic. Qualified psychiatrists were so scarce that he was appointed head of several mental wards in Ayrshire immediately after graduating. "They gave me this hunk of parchment to stick up on my wall, an' th' next thing I was in th' madhoose shit up to my neck." With controlled fury he described his early days in Scottish asylums, where the standard treatment was insulin injection. By comparison, 'shock boxes,'—electro-convulsive therapy, ECT—had been almost merciful. His gruesome tales of how patients' bodies bloated and nearly exploded turned my stomach. "We butchered them in droves, in th' firm Calvinist conviction we were savin' their minds."
In the greatest detail Last told me how he'd gone south to work in a Dorset hospital while undergoing training analysis.
"Tryin' to do eggistainshul psychiatry in a National Health loony bin was pretty spooky. Th' staff thought I was crazier'n th' patients."
For the first time in almost fifty minutes I spoke up. What, I asked, was existential psychiatry?
He took a long thoughtful puff on his cigar. "Talkin' to a bloke an' listenin' to what he says."
At two pounds ten shillings (about $7 then) per hour, Dr. Last was the cheapest shrink I'd found. "I do Freddie's friends at a trade discount," he cracked in his soft Scottish burr. (England was super for breakdowns. The Stelazine, Librium, Parstelin, Valium, Nardil, Tofranil and Equanil I lived on cost next to nothing on the National Health.)
First we tried "th' formal route," as Last called it. Three afternoons a week, face to face, talking. I was unhappy, I said. I'd come from America a radical Marxist. England had almost ruined my socialism, my sex life and my self-image. I was depressed, anxious, insomniac and had enough physical symptoms to fill a Diagnostic Manual. Most ominously, I didn't enjoy flea pit movies anymore. Almost overnight a whole generation of my father—and mother-figures—Hemingway, Gary Cooper, Mrs. Roosevelt—had died. And at Ascot races last month a stranger at the rail next to me had crumpled with a heart attack and died in my arms. A growing agoraphobia crippled my work, and I was sick of X-rays, barium meals and conflicting diagnoses. Only lysergic acid diethylamide took me out of myself, but it was illegal in England except under strict medical control.
For a few sessions we desultorily talked about the Freudian roots of my aches and pains. "You've done this neat li'l trick on yirself Dr. Last said. "Internalised yir maw's fear an' hatred of you, treatin' yirself as yir maw treated ye. Ye're nae bein' so guid tae yir own li'l bairn, th'yew within yew. Take more pity on yirself, mon." My guilt over not having a regular nine to five job but working at my own speed at home he lightly jeered away. "Aw hell, Sid. What's so all-fired noble about addin' surplus value tae th' capitalist system. An' yew a socialist, too!"
With the aid of diagrams in his book The Unhealed Heart—I'd started carrying it with me—Last explained my tortured relationship with Coral. "It's so obvious. Ye're engulfed by her depersonalised fantasy of yir perception of her collusion with yir imploded false self system." He dismissed the affair as "bad faith," closing the subject.
At last. A shrink who played it straight. Who didn't sandbag me with value judgments behind a wall of therapeutic 'objectivity.' And who didn't try to impose his ideas on me.
My silences deepened. To 'demystify' our sessions and make progress, Dr. Last filled in the gaps with more data about himself. He was married to an Edinburgh property developer's daughter, had a five-year-old daughter named Rabbie (after Scottish poet Robert Burns), owned a 1955 Bentley, shared a house in north London with another psychiatrist and smoked an endless supply of rare imported Havanas—a grateful patient's gift, he said. With little else to talk about we soon discovered a common passion for Bessie Smith records and old war movies. Several times we played hookey from sessions by sneaking off to John Wayne revivals Sands of Iwo Jima, Flying Tigers at the Tolmer cinema around the corner from his office. ("It's as good a catharsis as ye're gointa get on th' couch, Sid.") We cried at a British Film Institute showing of John Huston's combat documentary, Let There Be Light, and afterward agreed that madness was merely a type of civilian shell shock. Dr. Last, who'd never been in military service, doted on my army stories. He could sit for a whole fifty minutes absorbed in my tales of mock assaults and simulated river crossings. Though I'd never fired a shot in anger he envied my "sojer's reflexes."
Come again?
For radicals, he explained, the army could be as much of a university as prison. Military discipline broke down those twin curses of Western civilisation: sanctity of the individual ego and petty bourgeois concepts of privacy. As examples, he cited the Algerian and Vietnamese n.c.o.'s who learned their anti-imperialist trade in the French army and then had gone home to lead the liberation struggle.
This appealed to my unslaked guilt about having been just too young for combat in World War II. "Don't worry," Dr. Last said, "there's another war for ye to go to." Behind the puny shadowboxing of parliaments and parties shaped up a rather different sort of conflict, truly global in dimension if not yet visible to the ignorant eye. Sooner rather than later a new "revolutionary cadre"—bereft of guns, power or even self-consciousness would take on the responsibility for changing society wholesale. Like an old warhorse hearing political alarm bells, I pricked up my ears. Who ... what was he talking about?
His eyes took on that faraway, flittering cast. "I hope ye never find oot," he murmured mysteriously.
I never could resist a dare. What secret treasure was he challenging me to dig up? Whatever it was, it must be more important than my petty personal problems that made him look so bored. So I stopped even trying to talk about myself. (Anyway, remembering was hard work, and he lacked enthusiasm for digging into painful areas.) By unspoken agreement we detoured around the formalities. And just sat there, staring at each other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zone of the Interior by Clancy Sigal. Copyright © 2005 Clancy Sigal. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
]preface[,]one[,
Days and nights in Connoly House: ]winter[,
Late Saturday A.M.,
A Geography Lesson,
A Recon,
Six P.M.,
Sunday,
Eight A.M.,
Visi-Tears,
A Twilight Jog,
Monday,
Con House Game (1),
Ten A.M.,
No Biz Like Show Biz,
Les Talks,
Eleven P.M.,
Tuesday,
America, America,
Patients,
Eleven A.M.,
Con House Game (2),
Lantern Slide: Clement Attlee Watford,
The Village,
Class Notes,
Wednesday,
Sheep May Safely Craze,
Thursday,
Lantern Slide: Gareth de Walden,
A Shell of Himself,
Les Talks,
Two A.M.,
Friday,
The Good Citizen,
]two[,
Days and Nights in Conolly House: ]spring[,
A Clean Well-Lighted Place,
Praise God, She Will Protect You,
Bull Session,
Brass,
Les Talks,
It's a Barnum & Bailey World,
Soldiers' Talk,
]three[,
Days and Nights in Conolly House: ]summer[,
The Florence Nightingale Caper,
Lantern Slide: A.C. Corrigan,
Les Talks,
]four[,
Days and Nights in Conolly House: ]fall[,
Lantern Slide: Gerald Jackon,
Les Talks,
Lantern Slide: Abraham Clewes,
]five[,
Weirdsville,
About the Author,