by Irving B. Harrison, M.D.

Chapter Three

"Double Dare" : Hide and Seek

"Double Dare" (BBC, 1976)

Producer: Kenith Trodd, Director: John Mackenzie

"Double Dare" is a playful play on the double. Helen is an aspiring actress; Martin is a playwright. His hands are painfully afflicted with arthritis, and he suffers from depression. In the hope of relieving writer's block, he has had his agent induce Helen to meet him at a London hotel. When she arrives, a ruddy, brisk businessman assumes that she is his date from a professional escort service. His insistence and persistence disturb and annoy her. Later, the professional escort, Carol, (played by the same actress), arrives; she takes Martin to be the man whom she is to meet. He is at that moment looking hopefully for the actress. He cautions her, inexplicably, to be careful. He believes that he has written a script which he is living out, as are those around him. That he does in fact know more than one can account for - Carol's name, for instance - adds a Potteresque touch of the uncanny.

Soon Martin and Helen find each other. The businessman claims Carol, his rental-for-the-evening, and takes her to the lobby bar, thence to dinner, and finally, of course, to his hotel bed-room, which proves to be adjacent to Martin's. His almost constant false smile is frequently interrupted by bursts of vicious rage.

Martin asks Helen if she can play a prostitute? She responds, "Of course. Is that what the play's about?" and he retorts: "Whaddya mean, about?" He points out that she does "that chocolate thing." Cut to a TV ad: The camera centers on Helen's almost angelic face and exquisite eyes. She takes a phallic-shaped `Fraggie Bar,' from its wrapper, and, after licking her lips voraciously, she lies down, allows her head to fall back, and mouths the end of it. The effect is as suggestive of coprophagia as of fellatio. Cut back to their conversation. Helen, amused and teasing slightly, says in justification: "All I did was suck a bit off (16)."

Martin speaks of a film in which she had sex with a man. Another cut, to a torrid scene depicting Helen engaged in passionate sexual activity. A handsome and virile man caresses and kisses her breasts and sucks at her nipples. Back to the bar: She retorts that it was a detail of her work as an actress, and she emphasizes that the man was an actor.

Martin tells her that he wants her to be the part; she objects: "I'm not a puppet!" She agrees, however, that she can be the "vessel" (music: "The Best things in Life Are Free.") She tells him that in real life he can't call all the shots - he: "No? Well, we'll see!"

His mouth is dry at a result of anti-depressive medication, and he goes to the bathroom. Ben, his agent, arrives and tells Helen that Martin is in love with her. That possibility arouses no interest in her. She continues to feel acutely uncomfortable and to suspect that Martin is crazy. Ben cannot believe that. He reminds her that he has known Martin since they were together at Oxford. As it occurs to her that she has been set up to earn her part on the casting couch, she gets furious, and calls Ben a filthy pimp.

He tries to explain the innocence of his intentions and, in his view, Martin's. Martin returns and Ben hurries off to theatre. Helen is seen again in the torrid cinematic sex - clearly a depiction of what is going on in his mind, and perhaps in hers.

Had Helen offered herself? Was she willing to prostitute herself with the understanding that what she would do in that hotel room was only what she was to perform in his play as actress? Is the suggestion of the actress as vessel a pretense, or a self-deception: that sex isn't sex if the action merely flows through her body, without involving her soul? Has she taken offense at his too-obvious selfish and lecherous intent, and then, as a result, withdrawn the offer? Or has it all been his wishful fantasy?

Noises coming through the wall from the adjacent bed-room suggest violence. The businessman hadn't been able to perform sexually. Carol has heaped scorn on him. He strangles her. The last scene shows Helen lying sprawled on the bed, one breast exposed, apparently dead. Is this the culmination of Martin's fantasy? Or has he, too, committed a murder?

At the end of the play, the businessman and his not-previously-seen wife emerge from a neighboring room looking proper, happy and sexually satisfied. Apparently the playwright hallucinated the violence.

Potter deals here with the double as split-off parts of the principal characters. The escort is a double of the actress. Helen's motivations are quite similar to Carol's. The lustful businessman is a double of the writer. Violence is the split-off aspect of sexual arousal. The sexually predatory woman is a double of the lustful man. Martin is as eager to get something out of his wished-for partner for the evening as Carol and Helen are about getting what they can out of theirs.

Potter's "double dare" seems very much like the challenge which children hurl. Potter had in fact sought a meeting with Trodd's friend Kika Markham to discuss the play. It was arranged, and must have been uncomfortable for her, because she 'phoned Trodd to come over. Trodd alleges that nothing resembling the scenes in the play happened at the hotel. Kika did get the star role, and Potter was fully aware that at the very least two persons besides himself knew about that meeting. He went even further than to suggest that the neurotic playwright was himself. In selecting the name "Ben" for the friend since Oxford days, he all but labeled Ken's effort on his behalf to be pimping.

Markham later disclosed to Carpenter (p. 309-317) the specific details of the actual hotel interview, in a chapter entitled "I gave him half his lines." She related that Potter had in fact asked Trodd to arrange the meeting, explaining that Potter was suffering a writer's block and hoped that talking with her might help. She concluded that Potter, knowing about her left-wing dedication, wanted to determine just how far she would prostitute herself for choice acting roles. Their meeting became very uncomfortable for her and she did in fact 'phone Trodd for help. Carpenter quotes her about the demands of Potter's script: "It was quite a mortifying process, much more explicit than anything I'd ever done before-it meant stripping and making love with a total stranger, which was very cold-hearted and distressing. So Dennis got his way there, I suppose." The actor who played Ben described Kika (Carpenter, p. 15) as "a very beautiful woman shrouded in a kind of mystery, with a gentle, madonna-like sweetness, and you might imagine there were raging fires underneath." I believe that it was her special, "madonna-like" beauty which fired Potter's perverse and sadistic need to exploit her.

Hide and Seek (1973), was published when Potter's physical suffering was at its worst. A novel, it is the sick and confused work of a desperately ill man whose thinking was disturbed by the effects of toxicity (14). The novel centers on a psychotic writer, Daniel Miller, and his creator - or Creator, or Author. The employment of these capitalizations and the fact that Miller has Potter's physical handicaps as well as a cognate cognomen identify for the reader not only that the book is quasi-autobiographical but also that this double's double is also, as Creator, God's double or God Himself. Miller's complaint is expressed to a psychiatrist: he is but a character on a page who has been written into a fetid world by the nameless Author; in that writer-created world, he is forced to be steeped in evil. Among the manifestations of evil is a compulsion to scream such epithets at his wife as "dirty fucking whore."

Innumerable Potter fans and critics have sought to make sense of it, and the most successful may possibly be those theological scholars who could find a way through its tortuous ambiguities. What was revealed to them almost always depended to some extent on their selection of the equivocal words which came out of alternate sides of Potter's mouth. Toward the end of ten pages devoted to the novel, Carpenter, the most eminent critic, summed up (p.291) :

"Hide and Seek seems to have been devised as a trap for Potter's biographers. . . . But this is itself a manipulation: to take the most private facts in ones life-knowing that one day they will certainly be discovered-and present them as if they were a series of deceptions. . . . disguising confession as fiction, [Potter] may have practiced the same type of manipulative deception on his wife, in presenting her with this novel."

Many details of Potter's life find almost undisguised expression, with explicit denials. As an example, Miller tells the psychiatrist that he does not have psoriatic arthropathy, as he claims that others have implied .

The novel's readers are informed that Miller appeared to confess to Robert that he had had joyless sex with a record number of prostitutes. The subject of the writer's sadism also claims that many sins attributed to him were in fact Robert's. Facts are thrown in which clearly identify Robert as a clone of Trodd, such as his being charmed by the music of Al Bowlly and a supportive and collaborative role assigned to him with respect to the protagonist's life and work.

As a child, the protagonist had come down from a tree longing for love of a very special kind: bestowal of a gift from God. A man promised him candy and the boy's longing was so intense he took the man to be God. Raped, the boy suffers all its disastrous consequences. There are, however, also benefits: Potter enables the boy, now grown, to become a writer, who writes his way out of his horrible reality. By becoming an author - that is, a creator - he can, up to a point, reconcile with his God-father: as Author, he too becomes a Creator.

Although Potter almost never alluded to his mother, as has been noted, Miller makes several references to his mother: touching her dead body figures prominently, along with the touching of his own cheek, touching his wife, and touching prostitutes. He has intercourse with a black whore while her child lies asleep in the room. At the moment of his orgasm, he cries out. The sound wakes the child, who begins to scream. Miller's concern for the child is eclipsed by the impact on himself of the scream. He suffers the reawakened memory of having been raped. Later, he bursts out at his wife in disgusted and disgusting self-reproach: "Did you expect me to tell you that, Lucy? You, who wanted me to enter you on the same night, with the same sound still in my head . . ." Miller's rebuke of Lucy is for being so perversely carnal that she wanted sex under those circumstances, of which, as he knows, she was ignorant.

Hide and Seek is a study of psychopathology. The ultimate source and origin of all human evil rose upward in Potter's novel, first from the psychotic protagonist to the fictional author, thence by implication to the actual author, and finally, by way of "Author" and finally "Creator" to God himself. The connection between Potter's obsession with the evil innate in lust and his insatiable yearnings for compassionate solace and for the bestowal of giftedness are further discussed with "Only Make Believe." It is there that an image of God as feeder and comforter as well as inseminator comes closest to direct expression.

As man construes God as Him and imbues Him with impulses and behavior according to man's own, God ranges from a raging despot to the sought-for, not-there Provider, thence to the gratifying inseminator, thence to a glorified old Santa Claus surrounded by a heavenly host including those souls who ascend, after death, to find stars on their crowns and to share God's glory at His feet. When man embodies God as Her, God's maternal inclinations range from depriving, rejecting and ignoring, through salving and comforting, to the gratifying, satiating and fulfilling, the oral analogue to the male god's inseminating.

Miller is an expression of Potter's effort to cleanse himself - "empty" himself, in his words. The entire world, neatly packaged in Miller's novel, is the result of Creation by the elusive Him, the source of evil and horror from which Miller seeks to escape. Potter demands that we understand this character's projection of obscene images of his repressed self onto wives and mothers. He is changed into a creative writer. All of the whores and wives who are ready to be violated are embodiments of his passive desires. These females are doubles in part - split-off and projected elements of himself, totally banned as such from consciousness. Potter cannot endure the idea of wanting to be entered sexually; he overcame his horror of "a fate worse than death" by transfiguration.

Hiding behind these degraded women is the primal Mother. Rebutting Fuller's assertion that one's first allegiance is to one's mother, Potter claimed that that allegiance cannot be sustained, and then, in effect, dismissed the importance of the mother altogether: "Our first allegiances are based upon Eden," he declared, "The whole story of human culture is based upon the original sin. It's an inescapable fact of our mortality." His abrupt change of subject is startling, and the apparent basis for his retort is even more so. The sin was of course Eve's doing, in that she tempted Adam. Eve had been herself tempted, by the serpent, a classic phallic symbol. It was, accordingly, the penis, Adam's penis) which tempted Eve. What she then offered was her sexually excited genital; Adam's biting of the apple is a delicate symbolic allusion to intercourse represented on an oral level. This Freudian interpretation of the Eden myth may explain Potter's leap from the issue of sustaining allegiance to one's mother. Perhaps Potter here disclosed a deep, unsettling root of his misogyny: he found in Eve's primal-sin seductiveness a means of denying the insistent pressure from his unconscious to play the feminine role.

Every mother provides some degree of comfort, reassurance, solace and warmth. Without some provision of maternal solicitude-which need not be provided by the mother herself - the child would of course perish. For Potter, that solicitude seems to have been experienced as paternal. No other explanation has as yet emerged to account for the striking disparity in Potter's profuse expressions of affection for his father and almost total absence of these for his mother. It is plausible psychologically that any youngster faithDennis Potter lying in the same room while his parents engage in sex will conclude that both mother and father prefer each other to him. Dennis Pottersexual conflicts In "The Singing Detective" Potter achieves a remarkable transformation of the Oedipal experience: the boy witnesses his mother in adulterous sex. The concomitant reversal of the usual Oedipal ambivalence is replaced by an unambivalent hatred of mother's lover.

Bernard Levin (1980), struck by Potter's religiosity, elicited some remarkable responses in the course of a televised interview, when he challenged Potter about his religious feelings. Levin asked: "Why do you put quotes around `spiritual'? Even `God'?" Potter responded that it is prudent not to talk glibly about spirituality:

The worst thing that could happen in that mine field [would happen] by using other peoples' easy words! . . . Religion is not a bandage Religion is not a bandage! It is the wound! The ache! No one will prove to me the need for mercy or justice or pity! (15) What IS God without the quotes? . . . Inevitably you work out of . . . the complexity of your feelings. . . ..metaphors . . . about the kind of journey I'm making. The plays are not remotely autobiographical. They deal rather, with the way people grapple with their concerns. That concern is for what one is and what one will become - the quest is not for explanation but for what one is holding in care."

Potter's concept of holding in care links his early leftist determination to do battle against the forces which erode social humanism with his aspiration to impart a path for personal salvation. Much that he has written suggests that he was unable to integrate this understanding and sensitivity into his own life. His final works suggest and his personal disclosures verify that he continued to be buffeted about by shame and guilt, and that he alternated between attacking himself and attacking the world he lived in. It would seem that Potter, rather than practicing his precept of holding in care, sometimes faulted God, Who failed to hold him in care.

* * *

As disturbed and disturbing as was Hide and Seek as a thinly-disguised exhibitionistic narrative, so captivating and lyrical was an essay, "Some sort of Preface", which he wrote more than ten years later. "Some sort of Preface" introduces, in Waiting for the Boat (1984), a collection of three plays: "Blue Remembered Hills", "Joe's Ark" and "Cream in My Coffee". The essay is a masterpiece. It scintillates and glows, and the humor is captivating. He reviews most adroitly his past experiences as writer, some of his neurotic conflicts and psychological struggles, and his religious and political views. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Potter explains his attitude toward "revelation":

I have grown wry and patient in not-really-waiting for what is supposed to be an instantaneous revelation which I am of course sure (reasonably sure) will never come. The road to Damascus does not pass by my house." Soon, he indicates, with heavy irony about the contemptible aspects of autobiography, he will dare to write his life story, "once the never-to-be-revealed S-s-significance of My Journey has been revealed to me." As he also wrote in his Preface, the need to impart "s-s-`significant" "revelations" Revelation can lead either to the pulpit or to the cuckoo house. Potter there beautifully illustrated the link of Revelation (literally, a drawing back of a veil: to a transcendent, ineffable experience of childhood,) when he "knew" that he was in the Presence of God.

A common corollary to the yearning is the longing to attain that transcendent moment when, suddenly, out of a maze and morass of incomprehensible elements, somehow all becomes clear, or when, out of despair and anguish, one suddenly surmounts the distress and experiences a surpassing peace. The specialness of having experienced revelation can be regarded as an exalted example of the feeling which attends lesser, mundane discoveries: a sudden burst of excitement - a Eureka! feeling - when an ill-assorted jumble of facts or perceptions suddenly coalesces into a new and meaningful pattern. The other aspect implies that the yearning has already been satisfied the urge is now active, that is, to reveal. Convinced that one is inspired, one takes on the role of God. He who can do so is imbued with radiance. The sense of having achieved that state of grace makes the active role so urgent and so satisfying. Most of us who publish are probably seeking to recapture the gratification of imparting our new-found insight. Potter reveals his drive to impart "Revelations" in confessions like the one above. His style enabled him to allow this wish, and with it the liberation of his creativity, to find their artful way into "The Singing Detective".

I see Potter's yearning as equivalent to the quest for a chalice, or Holy Grail. There, also, via "The Singing Detective", is to be found the reason this wish had to be frustrated: he had suffered a fall from grace, from the favor of God. Marlow finally succeeded in extricating himself from the depths of disease and despair. In contrast to the bitter anger he had felt at falling short of his earlier longings, he accepted with grace and gratitude his new-found ability to function, albeit on a much lower level than that to which he had aspired.

Potter began the Preface in a meditative manner, telling us the thoughts that came to him while on at non-stop train ride from Swindon to London. He was finding it difficult to keep his mind on a book. Reminiscences of his childhood sprang to his mind: he admitted some degree of complicity in the sexual abuse he suffered. Speculating about the origins of his early isolation, he suggested:

". . . with a kind if cunning shame, I grew for long into someone too wary, too cut off, too introspective, too reclusive, until, finally, as though out of the blue, or the black, too ill to function properly."

He turned again to his trip: "The train was . . . bisecting damp grey fields and leafless valleys . . . Fortunately there was nobody in the opposite seat, unless it were the momentary phantasm of my younger, more priggish and much more disdainful self: the creature who too often tries to pin me down to his rhetoric, his intensity, and his shame-ridden intolerance. On the way, though, (and this is relevant) there was a not altogether uncommon passage through murkier lands. The ash trees through the train window remind me of them. So does many an old play of mine - such as "Follow the Yellow Brick Road," broadcast in the summer of 1972. I didn't actually see its first transmission, because I was in a bed at the London Hospital, unable to move much else besides my left arm and maybe my penis, in an occasional erection which imperiously seemed to take no account of my collapsed hands, caked and cracked skin and feverishly swollen joints." Earlier, he had written: "Amazing how quickly the brain atrophies after the age of - what? Ten years old." Brain atrophy as a consequence of masturbation had long been one of folklore's bogeymen; for Dennis, ten was the black-magic number.

One other stated purpose of "Some Sort of Preface" was to indicate Jack Black's (of "Follow the Yellow Brick Road") revulsion and Potter's own, stemming from dismay at the corruption of the world. Like Jack Black, Potter retained an image of a real radiant world, somewhere, like that pictured in television commercials. In one of his attacks on these, ("twenty second inserts as pure as the blue speckles in the detergent, full of happy families gamboling about in the golden buttercups" 1984, p. 17), Potter admitted that they reminded him none the less "of the radiance radiance of the religious sense of the world once glimpsed as a child - a theme from which I can never wholly escape" (ibid). Those glimpses, which are closely related to moments of awe, augmented both his literary gifts and his idealistic, almost missionary zeal.

Potter interjects at that point another of his caveats: he is carefully avoiding disclosures, he claims, with the sole exception of what he experiences while writing. Everything else is his own affair. This is a curious idiosyncrasy, linked with his persistent exhibitionism. Even after his death, this becomes evident in the plays which he wrote while dying, intended for posthumous presentation.

Potter was indeed serious - fervid - but his demand is one impossible to fulfill. He had already been driven (in 1973, "Hide and Seek") to pour out in scarcely disguised transpositions the tale of his suffering, and he tried to make certain that the reader understood his confession and his agony. At the same time, by the very fact of containing it within literary works, he kept himself afloat. He externalized his conflicts and tried to live as if they were no longer his own. Potter deluged critics and public with explicit personal details and confessions, praising himself with faint damns. He never acknowledged, however, that the explicit evils incorporated in his plays, such as attacking ones wife with extremes of verbal abuse, whoring, boozing and paranoia, were confessions of any behavior of his own, Sifting through this verbal account of indecency and Potter's denials, one is left with his tale of suffering.

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© Irving Harrison, M.D. 2001