Books: The Doctor Looks*

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The Analyses the Analytics— Lawrence Damned Most

The Story. Here Dr. Joseph Collins, psychiatrist and neurologist of high rank, sets down his personal and professional reactions to and criticisms of the so-called psychoanalytic trend of modern fiction. James Joyce, Dostoievsky, Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, Barbellion, Duhamel, D. H. Lawrence and so on—one by one he gums his literary specimens on their little glass slides, observes them through the long eye of his microscope, jots down his observations. The result is an entertaining, opinionated, vivid, loquacious, contradictory book, often shallow and frequently amusing—a book to set by the ears all worthy young Freudians who will persist in analyzing their relatives' dreams.

James Joyce Dr. Collins characterizes as one of Ireland's rebellious sons, who has been violently rocking the boat of literature—a master artificer—a genius—but a genius who has devoted his forces to making only a chaotic world " in which no decent person wants to live." Dostoievsky he calls the greatest of subjective writers—a rare example of dual personality—in whom he seems to see the prophet of a new religion or a revivified Christianity. Dorothy Richardson he sees as a finished technician whose performance lacks meaning because " she reveals life without drama and without comedy . . . and such life does not exist."

On Lawrence he is curiously rabid. " Salacious romances," " erotic poetry," " sex-tortured men and hyper-sexed women," " the most obscene narrative I have ever encountered in the English language." " The Britishers have not deserved D. H. Lawrence. Pity it is that they do not annihilate every trace of him," are but a few of his comments. ("Methinks the doctor doth protest too much," wrote one reviewer.)

Katherine Mansfield he treats superficially, though of her he says: " She was like pure white glass, reflecting fearlessly the part of life that was held before her, but never coloring it with her own personality."

The Significance. The Doctor Looks at Literature is neither as startling, as profound or as original as its jacket would have us believe. As the record of the individual literary prejudices of a copious, volatile, interesting mind it deserves attention. As a vivisection from the scientific angle of the inhibitions and complexes of various leading lights of recent or contemporary literature—while not particularly thorough or searching— it should prove of interest to those ,who still want to know what makes the wild young novelist so wild and whether to use a fork or the fingers while dealing with a fricasseed inferiority complex.

The Critics. The New York Times : " Dr. Collins enables people to talk about either (Marcel Proust or James Joyce) intelligently without the trouble of reading them—anybody can do it after reading his fascinating chapters on them. . . . How about looks at Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, etc.?"