Fatally interesting: Dr Masson

Photo / Chris Gorman

Jeffrey Masson grew up in Hollywood with a small, very strange guru, and came to New Zealand to write popular books about animals. But all he ever wanted was to be taken seriously.

One of the great characters in modern literature could be found in actual life at his amazing house in Auckland's Karaka Bay on Wednesday morning. Happy American chatterbox Dr Jeff Masson, a trim, immensely likeable old coot of 73, was unshaven, barefoot, and wore hearing aids. He was packing up things in boxes. The house, designed by Nicholas Stevens, has been sold to a gastroenterologist. Masson's family - his wife Leila, a beautiful 48-year-old pediatrician, and their two teenage sons - are leaving New Zealand. First stop, six months in Malaga, in Spain. Masson said, "We get there on January 2. What if I wake up on January 3, and think, 'What am I doing in Malaga? What happened?'"

His mother asked that question the last time she indicated she knew who he was. At 96, she has advanced Alzheimer's. She lives in the same rest home as the widow of former Prime Minister Rob Muldoon, Dame Thea Muldoon. Diana Masson once briefly emerged from her dementia and said to her son, "Jeffrey! What happened?"

The answers - the evidence of their lives - were being packed away in boxes. The family photos, of Masson's peculiar childhood in the Hollywood Hills; the books, many by Masson, some by the Masson family guru, and the very famous one about Masson. It was strange to see a thin paperback copy of Janet Malcolm's 1984 masterpiece, In The Freud Archives, in his house. Touching it was like touching a wound. The book immortalised Masson and also traumatised him, changed everything.

Malcolm, a journalist at the New Yorker, wrote about the scandal of Masson's dismissal as director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. She approached her story as a kind of psychological matrix; and the dark star of it was Masson, who moved through the pages like someone from fiction, charming and larger than life, a dazzling intellect and an indiscreet gossip, who talked in sensational and almost stream-of-consciousness monologues.

"Dashing and rather brilliant," as New Zealand novelist Emily Perkins once commented. But also, apparently, a narcissist, a crazy guy. Masson felt violated, that Malcolm stole his life and replaced it with her own version - in short, that she made him up, and put words in his mouth. He sued her for $10 million. He won the first trial, but the jury couldn't agree on damages - their figure ranged from $1, to millions. The judge ordered a second trial. Masson lost. Jurors said Malcolm could have made him look even worse.

He reclined on a white couch in his living room, and I asked him to describe Malcolm.

He said, "Very petite. European-looking, intellectual, thin. Fragile. Easy to connect to, warm, interested in gossip. Good mind. Well-read."

I said, "Do you loathe her?"

"No," he said, and reached for a weapon: "I feel she's not all that bright."

I asked how her book had damaged him, and he said, "I couldn't really be taken seriously ever again. It precluded me from being taken seriously. I could not get a job. I opened a sandwich shop! It's one of the reasons I turned to animals."

Masson made a lot of money as the author of books about animal behaviour - charming, faddish books such as Why Elephants Weep, which he talked about on Oprah, and sold a million copies.

He said, "I wound up writing a dozen books about animals. But let's face it. None of them are really deep. They're not works of any great intellectual depth."

I said, "How have you dealt with that?"

He said, "Badly! Well, until now, I dealt with it by writing book after book. But now I'm 73 and I don't make any money anymore. Finished. The books have vanished. Nobody will publish a book by me anymore. Nobody wants to hear from me.

"I had a good run. But here I am, a vital 73-year-old. What do I do with the rest of my life? I adore my wife, but she's making the money now, and I'm subservient. I'm trying to write a novel about the Holocaust, but I don't think much is going to come from that. I want to contribute something!

"My wife sees 10 patients a day. One of them came by mistake this morning when Leila was out. She had tears in her eyes and said, 'Your wife has made such a difference to our life.' I can't do that of course. But I'd like to do something."

A book by the Masson's family guru, Paul Brunton, was inscribed to Masson's father. It read: "May you experience samadhi." Enlightenment would have been nice, but Brunton was unable to teach it to the Massons, who he lived with in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He directed them to Uruguay in the late 1950s, to avoid World War III, and said he'd join them. Instead, he moved to New Zealand - Masson learned recently that Brunton lived around the corner from his house, in Mission Bay.

I asked Masson to describe him. He said, "He was a tiny little man. Very short. English. We were to call him PB; to everyone else he was Dr Paul Brunton. He had no doctorate. He did not speak Sanskrit, as he claimed. And most important, he had not been to other planets, as he told me! He was a false guru. Benign, but wrong, of course, as all gurus are.

"It was like living in a crazy household. But it was interesting! Fasting, meditating, chanting. And there was no abuse. PB was a great believer in gentle behaviour. Violence terrified PB. Partly because he was a very small man. But Benji's a huge dog, and the other day we took him to a close friend to say goodbye. Their dog was a quarter of Benji's size, and he snapped at Benji. Well! Benji was horrified. He trembled for two days! He hid in the car! He hates violence. And PB was like that ..."

Benji looked up at the mention of his name, and gave Masson a searching look. Masson talked more about the sitcom of his live-in guru, of how Brunton talked obsessively about sex - in particular, the need to avoid it. The parents were taught to abstain, and so was young Jeff. But along came Martha, a young and nubile housekeeper.

Masson said, "Martha. Well! I was going through photos yesterday and found some of her. She was really gorgeous. And I remember quite clearly one night when I was about 7. I was in her room listening to a scary radio programme while my parents were out. I was terrified and held on to her.

"And I liked it. I liked that feeling. I liked the mixture of being terrified, and of her being there. She was wearing a see-through nightie. Something happened. I don't know what exactly ... it was definitely tinged with eroticism. If that happened to my children, I would fire the person immediately. That, to me, is a form of abuse."

But did anything happen? You might say Masson has a vested interest in believing allegations of child abuse. It's essentially why he was dismissed from the Freud Archives. He discovered correspondence that convinced him that Freud ignored the truth of child abuse in preference of his theory of the Oedipal complex - that he made the cowardly decision to turn away from real or alleged abuse to imagined traumas.

Masson said, "The Oedipal complex is just an idea."

I said, "It's a brilliant idea. But do you think it's plain wrong?"

He said, "Freud talked about what he called screen memories. Very clever term; he meant we have memories that screen off something much more traumatic. But what I'm saying is the Oedipal complex is a screen theory, that it screens off the reality of trauma, of child abuse. Psychoanalysis believes the world is as you make it in your mind. Fantasy rules everything."

Masson would have lived at Freud's house in Hampstead, London, but his accusations cost him the job. The head of the archives, Dr Kurt Eissler, felt personally betrayed. The two men had been close.

I asked Masson to describe Eissler. He said, "He was a very austere-looking Austrian Jew. Tall, distinguished, a man of very few words. Terrified everyone who met him. He was considered the pope of psychoanalysis. He wrote remarkable, crazy books. He had a brilliant mind."

I said, "Does Masson?"

"No," he said. "But I was good at research. I regret to this day that I don't have access to material of that kind at the Freud Archives. You know, opening the drawers of his desk, or finding letters in his huge, dark closet - it was incredible! And you only get that once in a lifetime.

"Everyone was like, 'Why didn't you just shut up, Masson?' Sure, looking back on it, it would have been better for my life. But I got captivated by this question of child abuse. People don't like the Nicky Hagers of the world. They don't want people searching for the truth. They say they have to have a motivation."

I said, "But your psychology, who you are, your character, is fascinating."

He said, "Would you do that to Nicky Hager? Would you say, 'What's your psychological motivation?'"

I said, "I doubt his answers would be terribly interesting. But you - it's like you're unfortunately interesting, fatally interesting. Look at your childhood with a small guru."

He said, "I can remember very clearly talking to Victor Caleb, a very prominent analyst in San Francisco, and saying, 'Vic, this child abuse angle is so interesting!' And he said, 'No. You're interesting.' They weren't interested in what I found, but why I found it."

"Perhaps being interesting has been your curse," I said. "And maybe it's meant your story is one of unfulfilled intellect."

"Well, yeah," he said. "I thought it would be fulfilled by psychoanalysis. It wasn't, but it seemed to me at the beginning that it was a perfect fit. Secrets. Memory. Sexuality. Gossip! You know, I believe that gossip is fundamental to our evolutionary history. It's partly what makes us human, because we've got a language for it. Benji doesn't gossip with other dogs. Although maybe dogs do gossip. After all, they meet each other, and look at each other, they sniff ... "

Benji looked up again. He had such kind, gentle eyes. In the lovely seaside house, with its pale cedar wood and its kitchen cupboards stocked with many herbal teas, it seemed possible that Benji was wishing Masson the gift of samadhi.