242
PARTISAN REVIEW
as something of a rebuff and could never write easily to him again.
Perhaps the difference between them, as correspondents, could be
seen in the fact that Lucy wrote her letters in many revisions and
first drafts, as if she were doing a paper on
Phedre
for Plaut, while
Craven threw those missives into the litter on his desk where they
were lost among the bills.
Once Lucy wrote down one of her dreams for him, in those
diary pages, and Craven analyzed it: she had come home one night
to find her mother preparing a wedding for her; the guests, music,
flowers, dress, and cake were all arranged. Only Lucy and the bride–
groom were missing, and when Lucy arrived, her mother pounced.
Donald Craven did not, of course, find it hard to tell Lucy just why
she had dreamed this dream.
In some of their restaurant conversations, he .also liked to point
out how Lucy must resemble her mother (Craven had not yet met
Mrs. Doob), or her father, how she figured in the family romance,
how she showed the typical traits of an only child, and a girl at that.
He explained why she had liked the Seventeenth Century so much,
when Plaut was teaching it, .and he revealed that Lucy's frequent
colds came not from germs but from guilt. Donald Craven liked to
have this closeness to her unconscious life. Everything Lucy said or
did, her thoughts, her writings, the unspoken contorted desires he
discerned in her-in short, all her manners exhibited for him the
vast variety of reactions to a projective test which was himself. It
was a test he had invented.
Craven got Lucy to play chess one evening. Lucy was not a
good player, she couldn't prepare strategy, so Craven, fairly knowing,
could keep one part of
his
mind on the usual Capablanca technique,
and with the rest of it observe the psychology of Lucy's game. She
was both aggressive and stupid, she settled for momentary gains, let
herself be .almost checkmated and then refused to admit it. He
watched how she looked over the board, how she guarded her king,
how she reacted when the game turned; he saw her blanch at the
swift diagonal flights of his queen.
"You want to
get
the queen, don't you, Lucy?" he remarked,
puffing on a Turkish cigarette. Then he began to speak about her
mother.
Of course she didn't tell him anything, because by that time
even Lucy caught on a little and thought he was attacking her.
