Page 204 - tender-is-the-night

Zurich. He had arranged his pamphlets and what work he
had done in the Service into a pattern from which he in-
tended to make his revise of ‘A Psychology for Psychiatrists.’
He thought he had a publisher; he had established contact
with a poor student who would iron out his errors in Ger-
man. Franz considered it a rash business, but Dick pointed
out the disarming modesty of the theme.
‘This is stuff I’ll never know so well again,’ he insisted. ‘I
have a hunch it’s a thing that only fails to be basic because
it’s never had material recognition. The weakness of this
profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and
broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates
by tending toward the clinical, the ‘practical’—he has won
his battle without a struggle.
‘On the contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because
fate selected you for your profession before you were born.
You better thank God you had no ‘bent’—I got to be a psy-
chiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda’s in Oxford
that went to the same lectures. Maybe I’m getting trite but
I don’t want to let my current ideas slide away with a few
dozen glasses of beer.’
‘All right,’ Franz answered. ‘You are an American. You
can do this without professional harm. I do not like these
generalities. Soon you will be writing little books called
‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman,’ so simplified that they are
positively guaranteed not to cause thinking. If my father
were alive he would look at you and grunt, Dick. He would
take his napkin and fold it so, and hold his napkin ring, this
very one—‘ he held it up, a boar’s head was carved in the

204 Tender is the Night