Where Three Roads Meet

20 Maresfield Gardens, 30 September 1938

—I hope you've not taken cold with the doors open, Doctor. The wind was blowing harsh on the heath. I'd forgotten how mortally cold wind can make you.

—Come in quickly, please, and shut the door. Autumn is upon us and to prove it, like an old woman, I have on my shawl. My daughter insists. For all its creature comforts this house is diabolically draughty. Will you take the couch?

—I prefer not.

—At least if I continue to lie here I'll be able to look my daughter in the eye when I am put through the inquisition about my rest. Tell me, what has been in your mind since we met?

—My feet almost begin to know the way here: up and over the rise, then a choice between an avenue of trees, or over the bridge and up to the ponds then down. Today as I walked I was puzzling over my own part in this story. I need to tease out how far I was to blame. You'll understand that, Dr Freud. Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

—In reparation? I should say so. Excuse me while I go through the absurd pantomime with my cigar. My mouth is an abominable rat trap today. It would be a kindness if you would allow me just to lie here and smoke while you continue your story.

—If it won't tire you.

—My dear man. Your visits are the most diverting events in my poor life at present. I wouldn't miss them for the world.

—I should tell you how I first met one of the chief players in this story. I don't know if you are aware that the shrine at Delphi was shared with a very different god, Dionysos, Apollo's brother who died and returned to life again, our deity of blood and wine? For four months of the year Dionysos ruled at Delphi, while Apollo wintered abroad. I became priest for both these contrary gods, but I was pledged to Apollo first, and during the last of his months away I'd been visiting Thebes to see my grandmother, who was dying.

I was making my way back to Delphi for the start of the Apolline year and I was recalling my grandma as the tough old bird who whipped me good and hard, long before the priests ever beat me. And now, swaddled in her shabby woollen shawl…

—Like me!

—Unlike you, Doctor, she was afraid. She, who had beaten the daylight out of me as a boy, clutched my hand with her tiny pathetic shrivelled paw and begged me to tell her what was going to happen to her.

—Afraid to die?

—Scared stiff.

—The abiding terror and longing of our own extinction. Well, we shall see.

—I’d reached the point in my journey where the road divides and the going gets tough, and I was standing, as I had stood as a boy with my uncle, at the fork of the junction. As I listened to the birds' spring mating calls, musing on how frail we are and how we see this most in those who have appeared most powerful, I heard a rumble of wheels. Glancing back, I saw a wagon being driven hard, so that I had to step aside smartly to avoid being knocked down.

I cried out, "Hey! Mind how you go!" or some such protest and a man thrust his head down from his seat, a red-bearded man with a big broken nose, who waved his stick and yelled curses after me for being in the way. Crossroads are uncanny places.

—Das unheimlich! I've had a thing or two to say about the uncanny. Tell me, why crossroads?

—They mark the routes to the underworld.

—Ah, so they are presages of death, our ultimate home.

—Country people set honey at crossroads for the sly nymphs who run wild on Parnassus and reared our Lord Apollo as a boy. In the noonday heat they can appear as bees, and lacking sweet sustenance they will steal away a man's reason. Whether or not it was they or some other power at work I don't know, but when the wagon and its uncouth passenger had passed, I fell by the roadside in a dead faint; and when I came to I was deathly cold and weeping.

—An understandable abreaction caused by your visit home and the repressed memories of loss.

—Whatever it was, I lay helpless at that crossroads unable to move. I made my way back to Delphi by the stars and by the time I got there I was too worn out to eat. But I limped over to the dining area and sat by myself, and probably chewed some bread and drank a little water and wine.

I remember waking the following morning in an unsettled frame of mind. As you say, the leave-taking of my grandmother and all it had recalled—my father's crime against my mother, my loss of home and family, and the brutal encounter on my way back to Delphi—had perturbed me. The routine at Delphi was tough, but there was stability. I knew my place and my talents were accepted, and my visit to my old home had rattled me. I felt, or I believe now that I must have felt, somewhat unhinged.

I must have entered the temple as usual by the side door and descended to the area forbidden to all but sanctuary officials. The fire of bay and myrrh would already have been damped to a smoulder, giving off those heady fumes alleged to prompt the Priestess's trance—though given your scepticism, Doctor, you might be amused to hear that the Pythia and I agreed that its chief purpose was to inculcate an atmosphere of fitting mystery for the pilgrims.

Descending to the place of consultation with the list of the day's questions in my hand, it seems to me now that I had a sense of foreboding.

You recall I said that there was a curtain across the holy of holies. There was a concealed parting, constructed so that one could observe, unseen, the petitioners' faces. The priests who had taken bribes were able to fine-tune their answers according to the expressions of the questioners. It had a use for me too, since it allowed me to pick up any resonance between the supplicant's mind and my own, and then I could phrase the question to the god more accurately. No doubt you read your petitioners' faces.

—Certainly the physiognomy will often reflect the patient's inner position.

—Looking through, I received a jolt. As a rule, the first petitioner of the day was a Delphian, especially at the start of the new year. But Thebes had lately donated funds to the sanctuary to build a handsome treasury. And, as I read that day, a pair of finely worked bronze tripods and a solid silver statue of Apollo with a golden lyre and a crown of gold laurel into the bargain. Money talked!

—When has it not?

—By fair means or foul a Theban had contrived to reach the head of the queue and, to my dismay, the face I observed through the gap in the curtain was that of the red-bearded man with the broken nose who had threatened to flatten me at the crossroads.

I looked down and saw: First Petition: Laios, King of Thebes: tripods bronze, two; statue Apollo, silver with gold finish. As I read the question before my eyes, I had an instinct that the man was mouthing the words under his breath: "If I should have a child what will the outcome be?"

And then, clear as day, I saw it: a lone foot traveller facing a wagon, and its passenger, the self same man who stood before me, at a place where three roads meet.

—Another vision?

—Dr Freud, you should be more respectful of visions. They are close cousins of dreams. Those lucid dreams, with an authority of...what? Let's say another dimension.

—And what transpired in this "other dimension”?

—What happened next? It was as if two dramas were playing simultaneously in the theatre of my mind. In one, the foot traveller stepped on to the Daulian road, out of the wagon's way, and the train passed on unchallenged; in the other, the traveller stood his ground, the man in the wagon attacked him, viciously lashing him about the head with his ugly pronged goad. At which the other, younger man wrestled the weapon from his assailant's hand and with his own staff toppled the old man from his perch in the wagon to the ground.

Now, you may pour scorn on this but I was as sure as the stars which guided me back to Delphi that the victim turned vanquisher I saw in my mind's eye was connected to the petitioner. And the notion came crashing through me that it would be better not to be born than be born to such a father. And as this feeling-thought ran like fire through my head, these words came unchecked from my lips: "Father a son, King Laios, and he will surely kill you”.

—Ah!

—Let me finish, Doctor. Jumbo is stirring, so the high priestess of the tea is on her way.

Of course by rights I should have put the King of Thebes' question straight to the Pythia. But she said nothing. She sat behind us, still as Parnassus, holding the branch of laurel, which was shaking violently in her fist. From my place behind the curtain I continued to scrutinise the petitioner. He was a low-sized, barrel-chested man. I must have topped him by a head but judging by the build of him he would have bested me in any fight. A bruiser, in looks and character both. As I stared, I observed two distinct emotions race across his broken-nosed face: naked rage and, at the same time, an almost palpable relief. Then he turned and walked from the chamber. And I took a cup of the holy spring water and the Pythia, without a sign between us, took on her trance. Business was resumed as normal and I was not alone again with my thoughts till much later.

—And the thoughts, before you go…?

—Dr Freud, those two encounters with King Laios of Thebes laid a mark on me that will be with me till the end of time.

© Salley Vickers 2007

This is an excerpt from the book Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers, Canongate Books 2007.

Narrated by Tom Newton.

POST RECITAL

TALK

BR: Hi Salley, welcome to The Strange Recital. It’s great to have you here.

SV: Thank you for inviting me.

TN: We just listened to an excerpt from your book—Where Three Roads Meet—chapter seven in fact. Interestingly, the whole book is written as a conversation. Could you tell us a little more about it, beyond just this excerpt? Situate it perhaps. What are those three roads?

SV: The phrase “at the place where three roads meet” recurs—in Ancient Greek, obviously—throughout Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King. It is the site where Oedipus meets King Laius, the man who he is unaware is his natural father and when he refuses to get out of the way of the king’s chariot, Laius strikes him. The furious Oedipus strikes him back, killing both the king and one of his servants. From here Oedipus goes on to Thebes where he meets and marries the recently widowed queen Jocasta, who is in fact his own mother. This is the awful fulfillment of the Delphic oracle’s’ prediction that Laius and Jocasta will have a son who commits both these dreadful taboo-breaking impieties—in the hope of evading which they have exposed their infant son in the expectation that he would perish. The moral of which is you cannot outwit the Delphic oracle, which of course was the mouthpiece of Apollo, a god with very ambiguous qualities

BR: Hmm, I wonder if anyone has ever written the inner life of Tiresias before you did. Seems unlikely.

SV: Not as far as I know. It was not an Ancient Greek practice, or not in literature anyway, to write from an introspective point of view. I’m not a classicist but one of the things I note about Ancient Greek literature is it tends to externalize what we nowadays tend to locate as internal. So, characters meet what we might present as psychological phenomena in outward form—as gods, goddesses, oracles etc. I would include Oedipus’s fatal meeting with his father in this category.

TN: In the introduction, you describe how Freud was still smoking about twenty cigars a day, even as he lay dying of cancer. It’s quite shocking really, though I like that about him—and I hear that he was also afraid of the telephone. These things make him more human. Not just the formidable thinker.

SV: The story about him I like best is that for many years the Pantheon in Rome was his favourite building. When he finally saw it, he fainted away. There’s also an interesting fragment of his about his first visit to the Acropolis. I slightly misrepresent him in the book—he only ever took morphine while in hospital because he didn’t want any dulling of his wits. I kind of imply that Tiresias might be conjured up through use of morphine—which could only have been the case for Tiresias’ first appearance in the book when Freud is first in the hospital. So, I also admire his fortitude in the face of great pain and the fact that he makes the decision to die (he had a pact with his physician) when his beloved dog will no longer come near him because he smelled bad. Dogs of course as we know now can smell Covid-19.

BR: I gather that you were once a Jungian analyst. How did your career as a psychotherapist influence this novel in particular, and was it an influence on your other novels as well?

SV: Well when I trained it was not simply in Jungian psychology, we also studied Freud. I felt from the first that Freud had hijacked the myth of Oedipus and shoe-horned it into his theory of infantile sexuality. In fact, it always appeared to me that a far more sinister meaning was discernible in the myth, the impulse to murder one’s own child for fear of how the child might impinge on the parents’ own future. I think that impulse is possibly universal if not often recognised and happily only very rarely acted out.

There are mythic themes in several of my novels, which will often take an old story as a kind of blueprint for a modern plot.

TN: I wonder… do you think the qualities someone must have to be a good analyst lend themselves to novel writing? Or could it be the other way round—a knowledge, and appreciation of literature makes for a good analyst? Or is it both?

SV: I certainly relied far more on works of literature as an analyst than I did on psychological theory. In fact, I often recommended certain books to patients because I felt the characters’ fears, anguishes and dilemmas might shed light on their own.

BR: In Freud’s interpretation of the myth, as I understand it, men have repressed desires to murder their fathers and have sex with their mothers. But in the telling of the myth, Oedipus doesn’t murder his father—he kills him in self-defense—what do you make of that?

SV: Well, I refer you back to my previous answer. The causal murderous impulse lies with the parents not their child. And this is further reflected in the fact that Laius strikes first at the crossroads, the mythic place where three roads meet.

TN: I like the fact that Freud’s conversation with Tiresias is also a conversation with himself. It makes the book more than just a retelling of the myth.

SV: I think what I had in mind is that Tiresias represents some unassimilated aspect of Freud—I hesitate to call this a religious aspect, but maybe something akin. Freud was a very assertive, belligerent even, atheist. Although he was obviously a proponent of the reality of the unconscious, I have a feeling this made him overlook certain irrational elements in the human experience and maybe the conversations with Tiresias explore some inner reconsiderations of this. These will often arise when people approach death.

BR: Hmm… and writing almost an entire novel in dialogue must have presented some unique challenges—no tags, no description. Can you tell us something about that?

SV: I can only say I enjoyed it. It’s good to try out different styles of writing.

BR: Yeah.

TN: Now just out of the blue… do you think literature, as storytelling, could be an evolutionary adaptation, perhaps by encouraging empathy, which might aid survival?

SV: I have a thing about ‘empathy’ which is nowadays often described as desirable but has no special moral valency. For example, Iago, has tremendous empathy—he reads Othello’s mind like a book and thus knows just how to torment him. Orwell’s 1984 has a terrible scene in which O’Brien, who is torturing the protagonist Winston Smith, tells him exactly what he is fearing because O’Brien’s empathy is so highly tuned. So I wouldn’t rate empathy as necessarily encouraging survival. What I think literature and storytelling can do is expose us to others’ consciousnesses in a sense far more acutely than any other means and this may be used for good or ill, I would say. It may also provide solace because it offers, or can offer, a sense of being understood. And in an age which is seeking greater diversity it allows us to encounter people, places, countries, religious faiths, political outlooks, social classes which we might otherwise never encounter. So it is, or can be an expansive medium.

BR: Not that it’s apparent in an audio interview, but I notice there’s an ‘E’ in your name ‘Salley’, which is quite unusual. Is there a story behind that?

SV: Well my dad was a lover of W. B. Yeats and also a keen supporter of Irish republicanism (we used to holiday in Connemara where he tutored me in the iniquities of the Black and Tans). My mother loved the Britten version of the song from the Yeats poem Down by the Salley Gardens so that is how I got my name. Salleys in Irish are willows from the latin salix. When I’ve been in Australia people always get this as they still refer to cricket bats, which are made of willow, as salleys

TN: That’s interesting. Maybe they understand your name in Australia because of all those Irish political prisoners who were transported there.

SV: I think it’s their love of cricket. But it’s true there’s a healthy strain of Irish in Australia, which by the way has the best reading population I have ever encountered. Really cultivated Australians are the very best company.

BR: Well, thank you Salley for talking with us today.

SV: It was a pleasure.

TN: Yes thank you Salley. It was great talking to you. Now… we only have a couple of seconds before I turn into a mouse and then Brent becomes a pumpkin. I presume you found your shoe?

SV I ran away long before midnight.

BR: Ha…Okay. Tell me something Salley. I thought you were English but you don’t have an English accent. Were you raised in the States?

SV: Well yes, I was raised in the States but actually... I’m not Salley Vickers.

TN: What? Well who are you then?

SV: I’m Erin, and I’m just standing in for Salley. She said it was okay.

TN: Hmm… I see. Well, I suppose I should have guessed really. Salley would have said: King ‘Lie-us’ and not ‘Lay-us’, but how do we know you’re giving her answers and not your own?

SV: Well, you’ll just have to trust me on that, won’t you?”

Salley Vickers was played by Erin Standlee.

Music on this episode:

Violin Sonata in E flat major, Opus 18 by Richard Strauss

License Public Domain Mark 1.0

Sound Effects used under License:

Clothing, rustle, cotton by Leonelmail

License CC BY 3.0

THE STRANGE RECITAL

Episode 20121

Back to Episodes »

Archives »