It was Saturday afternoon, and my wife and I decided to go to the mall to pick up a pair of pants I’d bought there and had altered. We couldn’t find a parking space outside so we drove into one of those high-rise parking garages and wound around in circles until we eventually found a spot. Too many stairs, so we took the elevator down after making note of the floor we were on. We didn’t want to be looking for the car until we reported it stolen, then a week later have the police find the car where we’d parked it. We walked into the department store where I’d bought the pants, and we agreed to meet at the ground-floor escalator in half an hour. My wife could go to the cosmetics area to look for special offers and hit them up for samples, and I could get my pants and browse for a while on my own. We parted, and I headed for the men’s department. My wife had found the pants two weeks before on a sale table. Half price, camel colored, neutral, versatile, only the length needed to be altered. A salesman greeted me, and I got my claim ticket from my wallet and told him I’d come for the pants. He gave me a practiced smile, took the ticket, and said he’d be right back with them. I started to look around and I noticed that things had changed since I’d been there before. In the rear of the department, where the dressing rooms used to be, there was now a wide stairway going down. Wooden handrails, dark green carpet on the steps, the whole thing looking as if it had been there for years. I asked myself how they could have pulled off a construction project like this in less than two weeks with no sign of dust or rough edges. I went on browsing, looking at ties, and it began to worry me that the salesman had been in the back room for so long. Finally he appeared empty-handed and said he’d been unable to find my pants, but he was going to check on the other side of the sales floor. He kept the smile coming at me and hurried through a doorway. Again he was gone longer than I expected, and when he returned his smile was showing some wear. I’ll try on this side again, he said, and as he walked away I looked back at the stairway. I was thinking that if they could put those stairs through the wall and floor within two weeks they should be able to find my pants. The next time the salesman appeared he still didn’t have the pants and his focus seemed to have switched to the claim ticket. You know what, he said, I’ve just noticed that this ticket has the store number written on it for our location at the other mall. Could you have bought the pants there? I answered that I’d been to that mall recently but I’d never set foot in their other store. Let me give them a call, he said, and see if we can find your pants over there. I told him I didn’t see how that was possible, but I couldn’t fault him for trying to find my pants. So I stood at the service counter while he called. He apologized for taking so much of my time and said he couldn’t understand why the claim ticket would have the other store number on it. He shrugged at me as I fidgeted, but soon I could tell by the look on his face that someone had come on the line. Great, he said, let me tell the customer. They have your pants at our other store, sir, would you like them to be sent here or do you want to go pick them up? I asked him how they could have gotten there, but he had no explanation, and I said I’d drive over for them today. He told the person that I was coming by for the pants, hung up, again apologized, and then asked if I was sure I hadn’t been in their other store. I told him I didn’t even know they had a store in the other mall. He told me the name of the salesman to ask for and I shook his hand. When I met my wife at the escalator she noticed right away that I wasn’t carrying the pants. Did something go wrong? she asked, and I told her that my pants were at their other store. We’ve never been to the other store, she said. We then discussed how we’d been together when I bought the pants and wondered how they could have ended up at the other mall, pants couldn’t walk without a person in them. They must have taken
Suggested Reading
The Matter of Martin
By Lora Kelley“Salman Rushdie, who closed out the evening, recounted the cheeky word games they used to play; in one, they replaced the word Love in titles with the words Hysterical Sex, to get to ‘Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera’ and things like that.
The Daily
Dispatch
The Art of Nonfiction No. 7
By Adam Phillips
In his analysands' chair, 2000.
Adam Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1954. He was educated at Oxford, where he read English. Later he trained as a child psychotherapist and would become the principal at Charing Cross Hospital, in London. He also worked for seventeen years in the National Health Service; his one stated professional regret is leaving the public sector. His current private practice consists mainly of adults who see him at hourly intervals, mostly for fifty minutes each.
Phillips does not e-mail. He uses the phone to stay in touch, making calls between patients. The time constraints and tight schedule are deliberate calculations: for two and half decades, he has devoted every Wednesday to his writing. He is the author of nineteen books, among them: Winnicott (1988), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), Monogamy (1996), Houdini’s Box (2001), Missing Out (2012), One Way and Another (2013), and, with his partner, Judith Clark, The Concise Dictionary of Dress (2010). A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, Raritan, and The Threepenny Review, Phillips is also the general editor of new translations of Freud’s work published by the Penguin Press.
The following interview took place over several years and across two continents. Some sessions were conducted before large audiences at the New York Public Library; the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, in Idaho; Les Assises Internationales du Roman, in Lyon; and the Serpentine Gallery, in London. Private sessions were conducted at his offices in Notting Hill, a leisurely five-minute walk from his home. The space in which he sees patients is large and furnished with a couch and a straight-backed chair: Phillips sits at an angle across from his patients, looking mostly out the window, at a point in the distance, while he listens. It helps him focus, he says. At the far end of the office sits a CD player with rock-and-roll classics. Down the adjoining corridor is a much smaller study where he does all his writing; here, his desk looks over rooftops. Both rooms are book lined: British and American poetry, essays, and novels lie piled on shelves and floor, in some places three or four layers deep. On the days he sees patients, Phillips arrives at the office as early as six in the morning in order to read for an hour or two before his first appointment. (He claims to require very little sleep.) He also reads between consultations, whenever he can. As he puts it, “I need to hear other voices.”
During our conversations, in public and private, Phillips spoke in whole paragraphs, but did not hesitate to take pause or to digress. “Digression,” he has written, “is secular revelation.”
—Paul Holdengräber
INTERVIEWER
How did you choose to become a psychoanalyst?
PHILLIPS
When I was seventeen, I read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and I thought it was an interesting, exciting life. And then I read D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality when it came out, and I had a tremendous feeling of affinity for the book. I don’t exactly know what I thought of it—I can’t remember exactly—but I felt that I completely understood it, and I knew then that I wanted to be a child psychotherapist. I don’t know what that knowing was a knowing about. It wasn’t a revelation, it was a conviction. I read the book and I knew what I wanted to do. It collected me.
Then I read Freud, who seemed to me a version of the Jewish family life that I knew. Here was a voice that felt very familiar to me—not that my parents spoke psychoanalysis at all. But there was something familiar about the voice. And so that bridged the gap, because Winnicott is chronically English, and obviously my family are not.
INTERVIEWER
I want to ask what you mean by that, but already I’m struck by the centrality of books in this story.
PHILLIPS
When I went to school as an adolescent, I had an English teacher who talked about literature with the same kind of passion that my family talked about each other. In other words, there was an intensity in this engagement that I’d never heard before. It was contagious and inspiring. My teacher had been taught by F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. Leavis was a literary critic who treated English literature as a secular religion, a kind of answer to what he thought was a post-Christian society. He had a fanatical assurance about literature that made you intrigued about the writers he didn’t like. And my teacher at school felt something comparably zealous. It wasn’t zealous in that we were told exactly what to read and what to think about the books, but it was conveyed to us that certain books really did matter and that you were involved in some rearguard action for the profound human values in these books. This was conveyed very powerfully—that the way to learn how to live and to live properly was to read English literature—and it worked for me. I was taught close, attentive reading, and to ironize the ambitions of grand theory. I was educated to believe that A.E. Housman was more interesting than Hegel, and I do. Marianne Moore, the philosopher J.L. Austin, and William Empson were key figures for me then.
INTERVIEWER
Do you still feel that?
PHILLIPS
Yes, but not in the same way. Fortunately, I never recovered from my education, I’ve just carried on with it. If you happen to like reading, it can have a very powerful effect on you, an evocative effect, at least on me. It’s not as though when I read I’m gathering information, or indeed can remember much of what I read. I know the books that grip me, as everybody does, but their effect is indiscernible. I don’t quite know what it is. The Leavisite position, more or less, is that reading certain sentences makes you more alive and a morally better person, and that those two things go together. It seems to me that that isn’t necessarily so, but what is clear is that there are powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves. There’s something about these books that we want to go on thinking about, that matters to us. They’re not just fetishes that we use to fill gaps. They are like recurring dreams we can’t help thinking about.
INTERVIEWER
When you said “the Jewish family life that I knew,” what did you mean?
PHILLIPS
My parents were second-generation émigré Jews from Russian Poland. My father’s parents were given the Welsh name Phillips because no one could understand the name Pinkus-Levy. My grandfather was a tailor and a traveling salesman. I grew up in an extended family in Cardiff, and the extended family consisted of my parents, my sister, my father’s parents, my aunts and uncle, and my two girl cousins, from that side of the family. These were the people I saw three or four times a week.
INTERVIEWER
What did you talk about?
PHILLIPS
My parents were very left-wing, so there was a lot of talk about politics. There was a lot of talk among the men about sport. There was a lot of talk about sex and food and money and relationships. And there was a lot of ... just sort of hilarity. I don’t want to give too pastoral a view of this—everyone was anxious all the time—but there were a lot of laughs. And we were encouraged to do jobs that contributed something good to the culture, to be a doctor or lawyer, probably. This was a combination of acquiring social legitimacy and prestige— to be safe—and doing something that contributed to the common good.
INTERVIEWER
And you think that has something to do with being Jewish?
PHILLIPS
I think it has something to do with it, in the sense that my parents were keen to assimilate. They never remotely denied being Jewish, but they did want to be British. That was unequivocal. And, they were not religious. I did have a bar mitzvah, but it was for my grandparents. That was the story, anyway. So I didn’t grow up in a religious culture, but I did grow up in a very Jewish culture. And when I read Freud, I thought, Freud’s talking about the things they talked about in my family. Now, they didn’t talk about it like that, but the issues were the same. I think that Freudian psychoanalysis recycles something for me about a Jewish past and a Jewish sensibility.
INTERVIEWER
Some things you knew and some things you were not really able to recognize.
PHILLIPS
Yes, because occasionally I would think it odd that my family had only properly been in England for one generation, and it was English literature I was learning about. I should be reading Dostoyevsky or Kafka, not Gawain and the Green Knight. So when I discovered Bellow and Roth and Mailer and Malamud, it seemed closer to my heart in some way. When I read Bellow and Roth, and heard the tones and phrases in Bob Dylan’s voice, I knew that was how I felt, even though I could not be more English. It was confusing but I wasn’t at all confused.
From the Archive, Issue 208
Interview
Robert Glück
About Ed
“We needed erotic touch to tell us what we were.” Robert Glück reads from About Ed, a memoir about his relationship with his former partner Ed Aulerich-Sugai. The performance is paired with excerpts from his Art of Fiction interview with Lucy Ives.
This episode was produced by Helena de Groot and John DeLore, and was mixed and sound-designed by Helena de Groot. Our theme song this season is “Shadow,” composed and performed by Ernst Reijseger.
This episode was produced by Helena de Groot and John DeLore, and was mixed and sound-designed by Helena de Groot. Our theme song this season is “Shadow,” composed and performed by Ernst Reijseger.
Subscribe for free: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music