The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [120]
Then, one day, the kid says “Ma!” and the nipple does not arrive. This can happen on day five or month five of the child’s life; but whenever it happens, it’s an unimaginable shock. I know great big grown-up guys who have jumped—literally jumped—into the arms of their lady therapists and wept, hoping to be cradled at their breasts!
Like MAH-ler?
[Laughs] Why not? You know, Mahler made four appointments with Sigmund Freud, and three times he broke them because he was so scared to find out why he was impotent. His wife, Alma—who at various times carried on with [Walter] Gropius, [Oskar] Kokoschka, [Franz] Werfel and Bruno Walter, among others—sent him to see Freud. He was twenty years older than she, and she was the prettiest girl in Vienna—rich, cultured, seductive.
Didn’t you yourself once meet her?
Certainly. Many years ago she was staying at the Hotel Pierre, in New York, and she invited me for “tea”—which turned out to be aquavit—then suggested we go to look at some “memorabilia” of her composer husband in her bedroom. I spent a half hour in the living room, a minute or two less in the bedroom. She was really like a wonderful Viennese operetta.
Anyway, Mahler didn’t pay enough attention to her; he was busy writing his Sixth Symphony up in his little wood hut all night, and she was tossing around in bed. Mahler was terribly guilty about it all—when he gets to the Alma theme in the Scherzo of the Sixth Symphony, the margins of the score are filled with exclamations like “Almschi, Almschi, please don’t hate me, I’m dancing with the devil!” [Sings the Alma theme]
Mahler finally met up with Freud at the University of Utrecht, where they sat on a campus bench for a couple of hours. And Freud later commented in a letter to one of his pupils, writing something to the effect of “I have analyzed the musician Mahler”—a two-hour analysis, mind you! Freud was as crazy as his patient—“and as you will notice, Mahler’s mother was named Maria, all his sisters had Maria for their middle names, and his wife is named Alma Maria Schindler.”
“I’ve just kissed a mom named Maria!”
Indeed. Freud thought that Mahler was in love with the Madonna image and was suffering from the Latin-lover dilemma—the mother versus the whore. You worship the former and fuck the latter. Anyway, Freud considered Mahler to have had this problem in spades. But back to my point about infants who are all born with the craving to learn: having experienced the birth trauma, the denial traumas and the series of other traumas—I almost forgot about gender discovery!—that cause tantrums (the terrible threes, the fearsome fours, the frightful fives). My own granddaughter, according to her mother (who is my daughter Jamie—the first fruit of my loins), made a great confession when she was two and a half years old. Until then everything had revolved around her—she was the goddess and queen, and now a new baby was expected: Enter Evan! And she went into tantrums! Jamie stroked and caressed and calmed her down until she finally admitted: “You know what, Mommy? I don’t like the new baby.” And just to have come out and said that will probably save her a good ten years on the couch! For each time a kid learns a new trick of manipulating a parent—“I’ll scream, I won’t pay attention, I won’t speak when spoken to”—he or she becomes more cynical and turns off. And each manipulation and each trauma impairs the love of learning with which the infant is born.
Moreover, anybody who grows up—as those of my generation did not—taking the possibility of the immediate destruction of the planet for granted is going to gravitate all the more towards instant gratification. You don’t get the nipple, so you push the TV button, you drop the acid, you snort the coke, you do the needle: “Right away, right away, yeah, man!” It doesn’t matter that it makes you impotent. You’ve gone so high and then you pass out in the bed . . .