Yearning

By Melvin Maddocks

A GUARD WITHIN

by SARAH FERGUSON 195 pages. Pantheon. $6.95.

"Have we not, in the face of universal dilettantism, the consolation of possessing, with regard to pain, a professional competence?" asks the Rumanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, no mean student of suffering himself. The answer is an emphatic yes, as every publisher's list of autobiographies proves.

In the crowded presence of such experts, what keeps this remarkable little confessional from being just one more 3-o'clock-in-the-morning scream? The events themselves are unexceptional, almost classically banal as middle-class pain goes. Sarah Ferguson is a poor little rich English girl, given to pills and a bit too much drink. Her husband has left her, and she simply isn't up to loving her adopted daughter, age three.

Sarah's own mother died when she was three. Much later her father died. Then her nanny died. Everybody seems to die on Sarah, even her beloved Abyssinian cat, leaving her pretty much alone with a house in London, a house in Scotland and a frantic sense of emptiness that keeps her asking: "What is it that I must do?" In this mood she meets an unnamed psychiatrist and executes a textbook case of transference. When, in less than three years, her analyst dies too, Sarah attempts suicide (as she had done more than once before), then withdraws to a Zurich clinic to write this account of her relationship with him.

What should have been, at best, an act of therapy turns out to be a minor work of art. Sarah Ferguson is as intelligent as she is neurotic: educated by governesses until she was 15, an Oxford product, a quoter of the currently quotable -- from William Blake to Hermann Hesse. She is also a religious woman who speaks about her "sins" and, in a chillingly matter-of-fact tone, refers to divorce as "a broken promise to God."

It is neither her literary style -- classically chaste in the presence of agony -- nor her Christian conscience that gives this book its delicately fierce power. What makes A Guard Within a rarity of its genre is this: in her consuming (but unconsummated) affection for her analyst, Sarah Ferguson expresses a gift for life as intense as her gift for pain.

"I Want." What a curious pair Sarah and her doctor must have made! Two "very English" people sitting in his slightly shabby London study every evening at 5. The doctor was a sixtyish man with white hair, "really quite a cross person." But where she was concerned, he had the patience to endure tantrums during which she might bite his drinking glasses, break his furniture or tear up a favorite book. Once she stripped. Englishman and Englishwoman both agreed the performance was "boring."

She describes him as a Chekhovian figure, but in truth he is a little vague to the reader, and perhaps to her. She doesn't even know whether he is Freudian, Jungian or Adlerian. He is the name of what she clings to. Sarah understands her problem with merciless clarity: she yearns. "Yearn," she writes. "That is a word of such strength it makes me afraid." The specialty of the mediocre neurotic writer is to frighten a reader with his act. Sarah Ferguson does something far more subtle, far more relentless. She makes a reader enter not so much into her fears as her needs, forcing him to confess his humanity as she confesses hers, in words as spare as a prayer: "I want, and I am difficult."

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