Case study, p.18
Case Study, page 18
Over the next year, the book sold a few hundred copies, a respectable enough number for an obscure work by an unknown author. To Seers, and anyone else that would listen, Braithwaite railed against an Establishment conspiracy to suppress his ideas, but in private he was devastated by the world’s indifference. Zelda had never seen him so morose. At weekends, he would lie in bed chain-smoking until late afternoon. In the evenings, if the couple went out, he would drink even more heavily than usual and pick fights with anyone foolhardy enough to engage him in argument. More than once he ended up trading blows on the pavement outside the Moreton Arms. Zelda’s visits became less and less frequent, but she could not bring herself to end the relationship. For the first time she felt that Braithwaite needed her for more than sex.
In his memoir, Braithwaite entirely glosses over this period. In a flagrant misrepresentation of reality, he writes: ‘I had dared to say what no one had said before, at a moment when the world was ready to listen.’ Whether this was the product of his talent for self-mythologising or a genuine misremembering is impossible to say, but, certainly, he had a flexible relationship with the truth.
In any case, this fallow period was not destined to last.
In September 1961, at a party at the home of the film producer Michael Relph, a friend of Seers, Braithwaite was introduced to Dirk Bogarde. Bogarde had recently starred in the film Victim, in which he played a barrister being blackmailed on account of his homosexuality. It was an important, campaigning film and Bogarde, until that time a lightweight matinee idol, was praised for his courage in taking on such a role.
Bogarde was a complex character. Born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, he was brought up in London before being sent as a teenager to live with an aunt and uncle in Bishopbriggs near Glasgow. He served in World War II and, at least by his own account, witnessed the horrors of Belsen first hand. Like most upper-middle class children of the period, he was raised under the credo of ‘never explain, never complain’. Bogarde was an intensely private man. His biographer, John Coldstream, describes the ‘tough outer skin which he had begun to develop in his teens; and which [in later life] hardened into a formidable carapace […] Dirk constructed a persona for public consumption.’
Bogarde lived for forty years with his partner, Tony Forwood, but always denied that he was gay. This was understandable in the 1960s when, as Coldstream puts it, the possibility of ‘exposure’ as a homosexual was to live with the ‘very real fear of state-initiated disgrace’. Even after homosexual activity was decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, public opinion languished a long way behind the law. So Bogarde learned to live a compartmentalised life, oscillating between his public and private selves. Arthur Braithwaite, the ironmonger’s son from Darlington, might have reinvented himself as Collins Braithwaite, but Bogarde’s public profile meant that maintaining the carapace was a necessity in a way that it never could be for Braithwaite. The stakes for Bogarde were considerably higher.
According to his own account, Braithwaite introduced himself to Bogarde with the words ‘You’re a very good actor.’ Bogarde thanked him in a perfunctory way—he must have heard the sentiment expressed a thousand times—but Braithwaite persisted: he was not referring to Bogarde’s professional work. He had been observing his interactions with various guests at the party. ‘Everything you say and do is false,’ he said. ‘It’s an act.’ At this point, Bogarde looked at him with the supercilious smile familiar to anyone who had seen him on screen. Before he could reply, Braithwaite continued: ‘See, even now, you’re acting. You’re smiling, but your smile is a mask.’
There is no mention of Braithwaite in Bogarde’s seven volumes of memoirs, but he spoke privately to one or two friends about the meeting and his later relationship with him, describing him as an ‘extraordinary fellow’. Something, it seemed, in Braithwaite’s ‘gargoyle-like’ features and the brazenness of his approach caused his guard to drop. Perhaps it was simply a case of one poseur recognising another.
The two men retreated to an alcove conveniently situated next to the sideboard set out with booze. Bogarde began to question Braithwaite about who he was, a strategy the latter interpreted not as genuine curiosity but as a means of deflecting the conversation from himself. Bogarde had not heard of Kill Your Self, but Braithwaite outlined its main ideas. Bogarde, he reports, ‘listened attentively, his eyes lowered. It was clear that he recognised himself in what I said. For a few minutes, the veneer fell away, and I was speaking not to Dirk Bogarde, film star, but to Derek van den Bogaerde.’ The moment did not last long. The conversation was interrupted by the party’s hostess, who dragged Bogarde off to say hello to another guest. Before he left, however, Bogarde—public persona restored—told Braithwaite that he must send him a copy of his book. Braithwaite did so, and a few days later received a note inviting him to the actor’s sprawling home, Drummers Yard, near Amersham, twenty miles north-west of London.
Braithwaite arrived an hour late, but Bogarde did not seem to mind or notice. ‘He feigned indifference,’ Braithwaite wrote, ‘as if he had forgotten he had invited me.’ It was a type of affected absent-mindedness he recognised from the upper-class types he had rubbed shoulders with at Oxford, for whom it was ‘important to always appear that one had higher things on one’s mind than the plebeian business of punctuality’. The house was vast, but Bogarde showed Braithwaite into a small study, his ‘wee den’ as the Glasgow-educated actor called it. It felt like a sanctum.
Braithwaite’s portrait of Bogarde in My Self and Other Strangers is acidly funny and minute in its attention to the actor’s mannerisms and foibles. The Bogarde he describes is at once vain, evasive, charming, generous, acerbic and vulnerable. He was, in Braithwaite’s blunt taxonomy of the human species, a ‘fuck-up’. What Braithwaite appeared to do for Bogarde was to rid him of the guilt he felt for pretending to be someone he was not; to convince him that the self he was simulating was as real as the self he was concealing. He explained his interpretation of The Double. Who is to say which is the original and which is the imposter? The two men’s acquaintance does not appear to have lasted more than a few weeks, but it was to have a lasting impact on both of them. ‘It was a relief,’ Bogarde told a friend, ‘to be told it was all right not to constantly “be yourself ”; that it was fine to be your own doppelganger.’
In the weeks that followed, Braithwaite received a number of calls from other actors and people connected to the film and theatre business. Braithwaite loved actors. They were the living embodiment of his ideas. Actors were revered for pretending to be someone they were not. In Kill Your Self, he quotes Camus:
‘[The actor] demonstrates to what degree appearing creates being. For that is his art – to simulate absolutely, to project himself as deeply as possible into lives that are not his own … his vocation becomes clear: to apply himself wholeheartedly to being nothing or to being several.’
Braithwaite goes on:
At the end of each performance, we rise to our feet to applaud. ‘Bravo!’ we cry, ‘Encore!’ The more convincing the illusion, the louder the applause. And yet, as soon as we step out of the theatre, people are derided for being fake, for not ‘being themselves’. The quest to ‘be oneself’ is idolatry. Instead we should treat the world as a stage and perform whatever version of ourself we want to be. Only by inventing and re-inventing ourselves— by ‘being several’—can we escape the tyranny of the fixed, immutable Self.
This, for Braithwaite, was the route to happiness, and his newfound theatrical clientele proved a receptive audience. Actors, by the nature of their vocation, were misfits. From an early age they understood that they had to play-act in order to fit. ‘It is not,’ Braithwaite wrote in the argot of the time, ‘that queers make better actors. It is that the persecution of this kink demands that all queers be actors.’
At first, Braithwaite visited his clients at their own homes, but by the autumn of 1962 he was able to give up his job and rent the house on Ainger Road. He lived on the ground floor and used the upper floor to receive his ‘visitors’. If people were willing to pay Braithwaite five guineas an hour, there was no question of him turning them away. He was soon making his weekly salary at Methuen in three hours.
Zelda, who had now completed her own doctorate, moved in at the end of the year. For a while, the arrangement was relatively harmonious. Zelda had an income of her own and was never in thrall to Braithwaite, in the way that Sara Chisholm or other girlfriends had been. She spent the winter writing what would become Another Woman’s Face.
At the beginning Braithwaite took his accidental role as therapist seriously. He spent his evenings reading volumes of case studies. Nothing, however, altered the views he had expressed in Kill Your Self. He was dismissive of the psychoanalytic model, and even sceptical about the existence of the unconscious. Dream analysis was ‘mumbo-jumbo, practised by pseudo-shamans’. Still, whatever he was doing in the upstairs room of Ainger Road seemed to have an effect. His diary was soon full. He had a partition wall built to create an anteroom and employed a secretary to manage his appointments and billing. The first of these, Phyllis Lamb, remembers a ‘cavalcade of beautiful girls and bohemians’. People often turned up at Ainger Road without an appointment and had to be turned away, or would just sit and wait until Braithwaite was free. Between sessions, Braithwaite would often go downstairs to smoke a joint or gulp down a bottle of beer.
Zelda’s novel was published in late 1963. The Observer called it ‘an astute and intimate portrait of the new womanhood’. The Times Literary Supplement compared it to Virginia Woolf. Now, when the telephone on the ground floor rang, it was more often than not for Zelda. ‘Of course he was jealous,’ she recalled. ‘Collins didn’t have it in him to be happy for anyone else’s success.’ Braithwaite scoured articles about her for mention of his own name and, when he didn’t find any, would throw the newspaper or magazine across the room. ‘He seemed to think that I somehow owed my achievements to him.’ The couple spent the weekends throwing parties or attending other people’s. The carousing at Ainger Road often spilled into the next day, ending only when the last guest had slumped unconscious on the floor. More than once, the police were called, and it would be up to Zelda to persuade them that nothing untoward was going on.
Sales of Kill Your Self had picked up and Edward Seers invited Braithwaite for lunch, to ask him to write a follow-up. Braithwaite was reluctant. He was making far more money from his clients than he ever had from the publication of his book. ‘Yes,’ Seers retorted, ‘but if you hadn’t written a book, your clients wouldn’t be coming to see you.’ The world moved quickly these days, he went on. If Braithwaite didn’t produce more work, his clientele would move on to the next nine-day wonder. Cannily, he pointed out that in the intervening period Laing had produced a further two volumes‡. Braithwaite remained unconvinced. He didn’t have time to write another book. He’d said what he had to say in Kill Your Self. Why repeat himself? Seers’ real concern was not for his former employee’s career, but to exploit the growing market for books on psychiatry. He suggested that Braithwaite produce a volume of case histories as a kind of companion to Kill Your Self. There were those, he reminded him, who called him a fraud. This would be an opportunity to prove them wrong. ‘But they’re not wrong,’ Braithwaite had replied. ‘I am a fraud.’ Seers knew it would be futile to try to persuade him to change his mind, but before the meal was over he mentioned the considerable advance he would be willing to pay.
A week or so later, Braithwaite telephoned Seers and told him he had an idea for a new book. It would be a series of case studies that would form a kind of counterpoint to Kill Your Self. The studies would, he said, ‘perform the same function as the parables in the Bible’. No mention was made of the previous conversation. Seers told him it was a splendid idea and a contract was quickly drawn up.
Untherapy was written in the final months of 1964 and published in spring 1965. It was an immediate success. Aside from the abstruse preface, it is highly readable, salacious and often insightful. The portraits of his clients are acutely observed and droll. The book is also shamelessly self-serving. Braithwaite never misses an opportunity to repeat a compliment paid to him by one of his ‘visitors’. Naturally, each of the cases ends triumphantly, with the client in question leaving Braithwaite’s office relieved of whatever psychological burdens he or she had been carrying. Gone are the bewildering discussions of Kierkegaard and Camus of Kill Your Self; in their place, a parade of human foibles and eccentricities, liberally seasoned with prurient descriptions of the subjects’ sexual peccadilloes and masturbatory habits. Braithwaite dismissed it as a pot-boiler: ‘People just like to read about those more fucked up than themselves.’ But the press lapped it up. Julie Christie was forced to deny a rumour, cunningly started by Edward Seers, that she was ‘Jane’, the sexually promiscuous, valium-addicted starlet of the book’s opening chapter. John Osborne issued a statement insisting that he had neither met nor consulted Collins Braithwaite. The Right Reverend Robert Stopford, Bishop of London, declared the book to be blasphemous (one client admits to being aroused by images of Christ on the cross) and called for it to be banned. A leader in The Times sniffily averred that while the book might indeed be a ‘clarion of the permissiveness era in which we find ourselves … that does not justify the publication of such material’. Needless to say, all this merely had the effect of bringing more clients flocking to Ainger Road.
It was only now that Ronnie Laing began to pay any heed to Braithwaite. Until this point, it had been Laing who had been the go-to shrink of London’s bohemian set. Now his position was being usurped by an unqualified charlatan. According to his colleague Joseph Berke, the mere mention of Braithwaite’s name was enough to send Laing into a tirade of Glaswegian invective, but he shrewdly refused to enter into a public feud, calculating that this would only fuel Braithwaite’s notoriety.
The division between the two floors of Ainger Road began to blur. Braithwaite started inviting certain clients downstairs to share a joint after their session. At other times he would continue to smoke and drink through sessions. Appointments with different clients began to meld into one another. One client recalls turning up to find three other people already present. Braithwaite began to question her about intimate matters she had previously discussed with him and invited responses from the other visitors. She left and did not return.
Zelda did not approve of any of this. Apart from anything else, she was working on her second novel and did not welcome the constant intrusions. She had also become uneasy about Braithwaite’s role and how he treated it. ‘He had no concept of confidentiality. He gleefully repeated the most lurid details of what he was told upstairs.’ But when he started holding his sessions downstairs she realised that the whole thing was a circus. ‘It was,’ she says, ‘grotesque.’
The final straw came in October of that year, when a journalist, Rita Marshall, came to the house to interview Zelda for the Sunday Times§. Braithwaite had been ordered to stay upstairs, but of course he could not bring himself to comply. He burst into the living room with a cheery ‘Don’t mind me’, before fetching a bottle of beer from the kitchen. He then proceeded to hijack the interview, launching into a long description of his own work. Marshall nodded politely, before attempting to resume her conversation with Zelda. Braithwaite began to answer on her behalf. Zelda reminded him that he had promised to leave them in peace. ‘It’s my house,’ Braithwaite replied. ‘Can’t I even get a beer in my own fucking house?’ The journalist made her excuses and left. That evening, Zelda did the same.
* Prior to 1965, when it was reprinted by Penguin with its iconic cover, it had sold only around 1,500 copies.
† Throughout the book, Braithwaite indicates this latter idea of the self as an independently existing entity by capitalising it, while the present-in-the-moment self remains in lower case.
‡ These were Self and Others (1961) and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1963).
§ This incident is described in Marshall’s article ‘Zelda Ogilvie: Woman of the Age’, published in the Sunday Times magazine on 24th October 1965.
The Fourth Notebook
Miss Kepler’s words have haunted me these last few days. There is nothing silly about suicide. Of course, she is right. Her tone had not been one of rebuke, but I experienced it as such and regretted having expressed myself that way. Indeed, the whole encounter left me feeling like a dreadful chump. Miss Kepler must have thought me quite unhinged. I consoled myself with the thought that, as she was also visiting Dr Braithwaite, there must be a stain of madness on her too. Nevertheless, our conversation has led me to consider afresh my sister’s demise.
Strange though it may seem, I have never given much thought to the details—to the reality—of Veronica’s death. And if I had reflected on it at all, I had indeed been guilty of thinking she had done something silly; that rather than reaching the conclusion that she could no longer tolerate her existence, she had been overtaken by a momentary impulse. I now understood that this could not have been the case and that choosing to think of her act as a passing fancy was merely a way of making it bearable. It was what Braithwaite would call a ‘defence mechanism’.
A few months before her death, Veronica came home from Cambridge for reasons that were not altogether clear. There was some muttered talk of ‘exhaustion’, but she did not strike me as being in the least bit fatigued. She appeared to have a great deal more energy than I ever had. In any case, Father was delighted to have her home. Over supper, Veronica would chat animatedly about intellectual matters while Father gazed adoringly at her. One evening, she explained something called the Red Shift Effect, using pieces of fruit as a model of the universe. The sun was an orange. The Earth was a grape. Many of the stars visible in the night sky, Veronica told us, had been dead for millions of years. She slowly moved an apple (I forget what this represented) towards the outer reaches of the dining table, prattling about wavelengths and frequencies as she did so. Even Mrs Llewelyn paused to listen, before shaking her head and muttering something about girls these days getting mixed up with things that didn’t concern them. For once, I concurred.
