Houdini's Box
Adam Phillips
Faber £9.99, pp160
Buy it at a discount at BOL
One man makes a living out of escaping. Before unprecedentedly large audiences he slips out of handcuffs or straitjackets or ice; he emerges from boxes or trunks filled with water; he jumps from tall buildings or bridges, hangs upside down and survives. He is against confinements literal and metaphorical - his physical escapes are often staged where the establishment is strongest: prisons, insane asylums, banks, newspaper offices. On each of these occasions he courts and escapes death, and yet, once he has survived, there is nowhere for him to go but on to the next escape.
Another man is afraid of his own desire. Every time he senses its onset, he runs away. If he goes to a restaurant he knows what he wants before he has looked at the menu, before he has had time to actually want it. If a woman he is attracted to speaks to him, he has to go home, yet he is constantly, as his analyst puts it, 'finding women to flee from'. This man too is an 'escape artist'.
These are the twin heroes - if a book of ideas can be said to have heroes - of Adam Phillips's Houdini's Box. The first is the famous escapologist of the book's title; the second is an anonymous patient, who has come to see Phillips (the analyst rather than the author). If Houdini's purpose was to continuously and spectacularly defy death, nowhere was his fear more lucid than when his mother died. 'I who have laughed at the terrors of death,' he wrote of that event, 'who have smilingly leaped from high bridges, received a shock from which I do not think recovery is possible.'
And yet, as the man on the couch shows, it is possible to fear life just as much. When the man abruptly ends his analysis it becomes clear to Phillips that they were operating at cross-purposes: while Phillips was encouraging him to embrace possibility, the man wanted to become more decisive, more closed off. 'He wanted me to turn him into a better choice-maker,' Phillips writes, 'I wanted to turn him into a better risk-taker.' The story of Houdini and the story of the analysand illuminate each other.
Escape, Phillips suggests, is an end in itself, and more of a foundation myth for our lives than we might suppose. In classical mythology Icarus is so taken with 'the ecstasy of flight', as Phillips puts it, that he forgets where he is going, and succumbs fatally to the flight itself. Even Adam and Eve, in Phillips's interpretation, were part of 'a great escape story; the story of a failed breakout'.
'Perhaps one can define the times,' he writes, 'and the individual people who live through them, by their exits... Every modern person has their own repertoire of elsewheres... to make their actual, lived lives more than bearable.'
More fond of questions than he is of answers, Phillips often writes in poetic, oracular riddles. Unlike Freud's case histories, Phillips's don't offer much in the way of explanation or diagnosis - they are encounters, fables, exchanges related as if they were scenes in a novel. He will not tell you about men and Mars or women and Venus, because finite conclusions are foreign to his method. There must always be an escape clause, as it were, for ideas; minds must be allowed to change.
Every story Phillips tells, from the detailed analytical sessions to the one-line epigraphs, is a parable of some sort - it stands for something, becomes a cryptic guide to life. In The Beast in the Nursery he began with a wonderfully puzzling quote from Kafka. Here he offers Wittgenstein: 'The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that makes the problem disappear.' From the man who brought us a drawing that could either be a duck or a rabbit, depending on which way you looked at it, comes this double meaning. How can you make the problem disappear? By solving it or by ignoring it? Living in the way Wittgenstein suggests could either mean confronting the problem or the opposite, skirting around it - the problem 'disappears' only because you cannot see it.
Wittgenstein's riddle is a perfect introduction to Phillips's project, and his idiom. The epigraph seems to be about psychoanalysis, how people's imaginations work and what they hide from themselves, and it comes from a philosopher. Houdini's Box, like many of Phillips's essays, begins like a detective story, offering clues to the varying patterns of minds, and ends up, unsolved, as a scattered philosophy.
As in the writings of Kafka, Walter Benjamin or the stories within stories of Milan Kundera, Phillips's wisdom comes at you from unexpected corners. Phrases you read some time ago seem to mean something different on rereading, and the most profound statements are often embedded in a tiny subclause: 'I felt much freer to speak my so-called mind,' Phillips writes at one point; earlier he describes the impatience of a young girl's parents as 'verging on indifference, as impatience always does'. Suddenly you are struck by this throwaway truth, or possibility: that, if they were left to get impatient enough, the girl's parents would stop caring what happened to her.
Though Phillips's territory is complication, he reports back from his travels in the simplest of words. He is perhaps single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists, yet there is nothing arch or highfalutin about his writing. I would recommend it to anyone who ever liked to entertain a thought.
