The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer by Dempsey James;

Author:Dempsey, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2014-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

There are at least two varieties of Jew—those who tip too little and those who tip too much.

Jews have one advantage over all other peoples: they presumably do not suffer so much in the presence of Jews as do all other peoples.

The Jews were Nomads and remain so in absence of Natural Magic, humour, and other emotional impediments. They travel light. This is one reason why they often arrive first—and a reason resented by more heavily-laden, more attached peoples.

Al Jolson, this greasy mixing of Jew and nigger. We go by turns hot and cold. We comprehend the passion of Voodooism—and of the pogrom also.14

By undergoing psychoanalysis with a Jewish doctor whose ideas he revered, and by living in Vienna where many members of the large Jewish population were active in literature and the arts, Thayer was forced to reconsider this kind of unthinking, offhand anti-Semitism. He wrote to his mother:

Last night I was at Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” a rather serious problem play in regard to the relationship between the Jew and the Christian in Vienna. As you know, the Jews in Vienna are even more in evidence than in other parts of the world. Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, the two most distinguished living men of letters in Austria, are both Jews and Freud and Adlon, perhaps the two greatest living scientists in Austria, are also Jews.15

Another letter to his mother takes up the matter again.

Dr. Schnitzler sent me tickets for the opening of his play “Regien” on Tuesday evening. . . . This play, written a great many years ago, was put on here last winter and was then withdrawn because of the anger and indeed rioting of the Catholics, incensed over what they considered its indecency. The fact that Dr. Schnitzler is a Jew was perhaps the reason for their excitement over the play. Jews in Vienna are more influential than anywhere else in the world and indeed the intellectual life of Austria is chiefly Jewish. Perhaps for this very reason the Christian population is in part at least violently antisemitic.16

Thayer was spending a great deal of money in Vienna. He wrote long letters to his mother explaining his purchases of art and insisting that they were all sound investments. Interestingly, he never once mentioned to his mother his sessions with Freud, which were costing one hundred dollars a week. Since arriving in Vienna, he had twice written to Herman Riccius in Worcester, his personal business manager and family advisor, asking for letters of credit to buy more art. It may well have been that Thayer’s family was beginning to worry about him, and perhaps that is why, in October, Florence boarded the Aquitania for Europe. Thayer wrote to her:

I just received your telegram saying that you were coming on the ‘Aquitania’ and indeed that you were sailing today. . . . I had received no definite information that you were coming abroad until a few days ago when I received simultaneously letters from yourself and Mr. Riccius and from Elaine all of them giving me this information as though it were something that I knew already.

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