The World Is Made of Glass Read online

  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly

  (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1983

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:

  (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:

  [email protected]

  Web:

  www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: iStock

  ISBN 978 1 76029 768 8 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 852 8 (ebook)

  For

  JOY,

  with love,

  to celebrate a homecoming.

  Contents

  Author's Note

  MAGDA Berlin

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA En voyage

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA En voyage

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  JUNG Zurich

  MAGDA Zurich

  MAGDA Paris

  Fragments in Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction based upon a case recorded, very briefly, by Carl Gustav Jung in his autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The case history is undated and curiously incomplete. I have always felt that Jung, writing in his later years, was still troubled by the episode and disposed to edit rather than to record it in detail.

  I have chosen to set this story in the year 1913, the period of Jung’s historic quarrel with Freud, the beginning of his lifetime love affair with Antonia Wolff and the onset of his own protracted breakdown.

  The character of the unnamed woman is a novelist’s creation; but it conforms with the limited information provided in Jung’s version of the encounter.

  The character of Jung, his personal relationships, his professional attitudes and practices are all based on the voluminous records available. The interpretation of this material and its verbal expression are, of course, my own.

  For the rest, every novelist is a myth-maker, explained and justified by Jung himself in his Prologue to Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “I can only make direct statements, only ‘tell stories’, whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.”

  M.L.W.

  Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Some damning circumstance always transpires.

  (Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson's Essays, first series, “Compensation”, 1841)

  Jung was always very well aware of the danger of mental contagion; of the adverse effect that one personality might have upon another…Anyone who has practised psychotherapy with psychotics will confirm that delusional systems, and other features of the psychotic's world, are indeed contagious and may have a very dis
turbing effect upon the mind of the therapist.

  (Anthony Storr: Jung – Ch. 2)

  MAGDA

  Berlin

  At midnight yesterday, my whole life became a fiction: a dark Teutonic fairy tale of trolls and hob-goblins and star-crossed lovers in ruined castles full of creaks and cobwebs.

  Now I must travel, veiled like a mourning wife, because my face is known to too many people in too many places. I must register in hotels under an assumed name. At frontiers I must use a set of forged documents for which I have paid a royal ransom to Gräfin Bette – who, of course, is not a Gräfin at all, but has been bawd and pander to the Hohenzollerns and their court for twenty-five years.

  For emergency disguise – and for certain sexual encounters which still interest me – I shall carry a small wardrobe of male attire, tailored for me in a more cheerful time, by Poiret in Paris. Even this record, written for myself alone, must contain inventions and pseudonyms to protect my secrets from the prying eyes of chambermaids and male escorts.

  But the truth is here – as much of it as I can distinguish or bear to tell – and the tale begins with a sour joke. Yesterday was my birthday and I celebrated it in Gräfin Bette’s house of appointment, with a man near to death in my bed.

  The event was distressing for me, but not unusual for Gräfin Bette. Middle-aged gentlemen who indulge in violent sexual exercise are prone to heart attacks. Every brothel of quality has the means to deal promptly with such matters. The house doctor provides emergency treatment. Dead or alive, the victim is dressed and transported with all decent speed to his house, his club or a hospital. If he has no coachman or chauffeur of his own, Gräfin Bette supplies one: a close-mouthed fellow with a catalogue of convincing lies to explain his passenger’s condition. Police enquiries are rare – and police discretion is a highly negotiable commodity.

  This case, however, was not so simple. My companion and I were paying guests in the Gräfin’s establishment. He was a man of title, a colonel in the Kaiser’s Military Household. I am a known personage in society. I am also a physician and it was clear to me that the colonel had suffered a coronary occlusion and that a second incident during the night – always a possibility in such cases – would certainly kill him.

  He was married – none too happily – to a niece of the Kaiserin and he had told his wife that he was attending a conference of staff officers. That story – thank God and the Junker code! – would hold good. But finally, my colonel, living or dead, would be delivered to his spouse and there was no way of concealing either his cardiac condition or his other injuries: lacerations of the lumbar region, two cracked vertebrae and probable kidney damage.

  Gräfin Bette summed up the situation, click-clack, in the accents of a Berlin gutter girl:

  “I’ll clean up the mess. You’ll pay for it. But understand me! You’re not welcome here any more. You used to be amusing. Now you’re dangerous. There’ll be a wife and a son and the Kaiser himself and a whole regiment of cavalry baying for blood over this affair. If you take my advice, you’ll be a clever vixen and go to earth for a while. Now I need money – lots of it.”

  When I asked how much, she named exactly the sum I had been paid for the six hunters I had sold that morning to Prince Eulenberg. I didn’t ask how she knew the amount or how she had calculated the bill. I had the cash in my reticule and I paid it over without a murmur. She left me then to pack my clothes and to watch over the patient, who was fibrillating badly. Forty-five minutes later she was back with a set of personal documents in the name of Magda Hirschfeld and a first-class ticket on the midnight express to Paris. She also brought me an outer coat of shabby black serge and a black felt hat with a veil. I made a joke of it and said I looked like an English nanny. Gräfin Bette was not amused.

  “I’m doing you a favour you don’t deserve. Every time I’ve heard about you lately, it’s been a little crazier, a little nastier. Now I understand why . . .”

  I asked her what she proposed to do about the colonel. She snapped at me:

  “That’s my affair. What you don’t know can’t hurt you or me. I don’t like you; but I keep my bargains. Now get to hell out of here.”

  My colonel was unconscious but still alive when Bette hurried me out of the house and through the kitchen garden to a postern gate where a taxi-cab was waiting to take me to the station. I arrived with three minutes to spare, and paid the conductor handsomely to find me an empty compartment. Then I locked myself in and made ready for bed.

  That night, for the first time, I had the nightmare: the dream of the hunt through the black valley, the fall from my horse and then being locked naked in a glass ball which rolled over and over in a desert of blood-red sand.

  I woke tangled in the sheets, sweating with horror and shouting for Papa. But Papa was long dead and my cry was drowned by the wail of the train whistle, echoing over the farmlands of Hanover.

  JUNG

  Zurich

  I know that I am very close to madness and I am desperately afraid. At night I lurch, panic stricken, through nightmare landscapes; seas of blood and ravines between saw-toothed mountains and dead cities white under the moon. I hear the thunder of hooves and the baying of hounds and I do not know whether I am the hunter or the hunted.

  When I wake, I see in the mirror a stranger, wild-eyed and hostile. I cannot read a text-book; the words jumble themselves into gibberish. I slide into dumb depressions, explode into irrational rages which terrify my children and reduce my wife to tears or bitter recriminations. She nags me to seek medical advice or psychiatric treatment; but I know that this malady cannot be cured by a bottle of physic or the inquisitions of an analyst.

  So, to affirm my sanity, I have devised a ritual. To the stranger in the mirror I recite the litany of my life, thus:

  “My name is Carl Gustav Jung. I am a physician, a lecturer in psychiatric medicine, an analyst. I am thirty-eight years of age. I was born in the village of Kesswil, Switzerland, on the twenty-sixth day of July, 1875. My father, Paul, was a Protestant pastor. My mother was a local girl, Emilie Preiswerk. I am married, with four children and a fifth on the way. My wife’s maiden name is Emma Rauschenbach. She was born near Lake Constance – which sometimes she seems to believe is the navel of the world.”

  The recitation continues all the time that I am shaving. Its purpose is to hold me fixed in space, time and circumstance, lest I dissolve into nonentity. I breakfast alone and in silence, because I am still trailing the cobwebs of my dreams.

  After breakfast, I walk by the lake, gathering stones and pebbles to build the model village which is beginning to take shape at the bottom of my garden. It is a childish pastime; but it anchors my vagrant mind to simple physical realities: the chill water, the form and texture of the stones, the sound of the wind in the branches, the dapple of sunlight on the lawn. As this part of the ritual continues, I hear voices, and sometimes see personages from the past. Occasionally, I hear my father’s voice expounding Christian doctrine from his pulpit in Kesswil:

  “A sacrament, my dear brethren, is an outward and visible sign of an inward grace. Grace signifies a free gift from God.”

  I have long since rejected the religion my father preached. His God has no place in my life; but the grace, the free gift – oh, yes! This is given to me every morning when my ritual is completed and, promptly on the stroke of ten, my Antonia walks into my life.

  My Antonia! Yes, I can say that, even though my possession is neither complete nor perpetual, as I would wish it to be. We are lovers, but more than lovers. Sometimes I think we have celebrated a marriage more complete than the legal one which unites Emma and me. Toni has given me her body so generously, so passionately, that even when I hear her footfall or the sound of her voice, I am alive and erect with desire. My gift to her is of herself, a singleness of spirit, a health of emotion, a wholeness, a harmony between the conscious and the subconscious. When she came to me, as a patient, she was like the princess sleeping in the enchanted forest, impriso
ned by brambles and vines. I awakened her. I swept away the nightmares and confusions of her long slumber. When she was cured, I made her my pupil. Then she became my companion and collaborator.

  Now, in my own time of terror, our roles are reversed. I am the patient. She is the beloved physician whose voice calms me, whose touch transmits the healing gift.

  I grow lyrical, I know; but it is only in private that I can be so: for this secret journal, during the hours Antonia and I spend together, locked in my tower room, where no one else may enter uninvited. But, even here, our communion is not complete. We flirt, we fondle, we caress – we work, too, believe me! – but we never make love, because Toni refuses to surrender herself to climax in another woman’s house. I regret that; but I have to admit the wisdom of it. Already Emma is rabidly jealous and we dare not risk being discovered in the sexual act.

  Of course, this forced deferment of release adds to my emotional tension; but there are compensations, in that Toni is forced to observe a certain detachment which is valuable in our clinical relationship. For my part – much as I desire it – I cannot demand to stifle all my perplexities in her abundant womanhood. As well drink myself silly or stupefy myself with opiates and fall asleep mumbling that all’s well with the world.

  So, each morning we greet tenderly. She makes coffee for us both. We deal with the mail. Then we work together to analyse the psychic conflicts that are tearing me asunder.

  In spite of our clinical relationship in these sessions, I am alive, every instant, to her sexual presence. I study the curve of her breasts, the fall of the skirt about her thighs, the wisp of hair that trails at her temple. I am in high sexual excitement; but she sits calm and cool as the Snow Queen, just as I have taught her to do, and puts her questions:

  “What did you dream last night? Was it related to symbols we have discussed?”

  Today we were discussing a new sequence, unrelated, or so it seemed, to any others I had experienced. I was in a town in Italy. I knew it was somewhere in the north, because it reminded me of Basel; but definitely it was Italy and the present. The people were in modern dress. There were bicycles and autobuses and even a tramway. I was strolling down the street when I saw before me a knight in full armour – armour of the twelfth century – with a red Crusader’s cross upon his breast. He was armed with a great sword and he strode forward like a conqueror, looking neither to right nor left. The extraordinary thing was that no one took any notice. It was as if I were the only one who saw him. I felt the enormous power of his presence, a sense of impending revelation, if only I could follow him; yet I could not.