Johnny Panic & the Bible of Dreams

Johnny Panic is a short story written by Plath in 1958, five years before the Bell Jar. An unnamed (A) young woman works as a Psychoanalyst’s secretary. Whilst taking down the patient’s day to day hang-ups and worries - ‘trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle’, she transcribes patient’s dreams. The clinic is a modest one: those whose dreams are too horrific to bear are sent somewhere where cosy white walls might cushion a sudden fall, nevertheless A is privy to those whose dreams, though as cold and as heavy as a ‘lead coffin on the shoulder’, can keep from setting fire to themselves. At home A clandestinely compiles a volume of the dreams she collects from work, Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams.

A’s work in service of the dreams is the ritual and worship of Johnny Panic. The dreams, betrayed in the daylight shining panic of patient’s eyes, are cold bright slivers of unalloyed wretched truth. As if a dream were a poem you wrote in your sleep. Sylvia is entranced by their iridescence, galled at the doctors stroking and soothing of great works from the minds of their authors. She herself dreams of a shoreless lake swimming with primeval demons of the deep, ‘into this lake people’s minds run at night, brooks and gutter-trickles into one borderless reservoir. ‘I already see’, she says, ‘the surface of the lake swarming with snakes, dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bottles like so many unfinished messages from the great I Am.’

The dreams of the day-crowd at the clinic do not satiate A’s hungry cataloguing and in desperation she raids the records after-hours at the clinic, only to be discovered by the Clinic Director who leads her down into the depths of the hospital.

The story is regarded as one of Plath’s more successful attempts at short fiction, and indeed strikes some of the early notes of The Bell Jar. Esther Greenwood’s voice speaks in embryo in the mouth of the nameless narrator, (‘I begin to double-quickstep so he won’t think its me he’s hustling. ‘ You can’t fire me,’ I say calmly. ‘I quit’.) and Plath’s dazzling skill with metaphor and delicate power of description are here blossoming. But it is her absolute faith in the pure truth of pain, panic and despair, a faith exacted beautifully in the apocalyptical closing scene of the story, that is the most bewitching and fascinating in her writing. In any writing. ( )

Found this book in a used bookstore and very shortly thereafter found a CD single by Tears for Fears by the same name. Both are wonderful. The title short story takes one right into a 50s era sanitarium, with a powerul nurse and her "maculae" The other stories show her studied "magazine-vocabulary" to effect, but also show her disturbing slant to detail. I'm glad I bought this book when it was available. ( )