Taken from the New Statesman archive, 30 September 1966
Levin (1928-2004) wrote only rarely for the New Statesman; he is most closely associated with the Times, which he joined five years after this appeared. In 1966 he was probably best known for his provocative interviews on That Was The Week That Was, though he was also the Daily Mail theatre critic – a job which surely carried the risk of encountering the odd spider. By the way, the verse at the end (I looked it up) is from G K Chesterton.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
A year or so ago, staying with some friends in France, I was reading in bed, in a room separate from the main house, when something caught my eye as I turned the page. Whereupon I got out of bed and set about wrecking the room, with considerable success. I dragged and hurled the furniture about; I tore down the curtains; I threw jugs of water in every direction; I flung the rugs into the bathroom; I found a carpet-sweeper and produced an ocean of mud by emptying the dust out of it on to the soaking floor. Then I went back to bed; but not to sleep. In the morning, I crept up to the house under the necessity of telling my hosts that their guest-room was virtually a total write-off, and of explaining my appalling conduct. This, in the circumstances, might seem a formidable task; but they are old friends and know me, and I only had to produce one word for everything to be understood and forgiven.
A few of my readers will already have arrived at the solution to the mystery; these are my fellow-sufferers. The rest are presumably wondering what on earth I am talking about and concluding that at the time of the episode I have described I must have been temporarily deranged; and as a matter of fact they are not far wrong. For what ails me and the minority who suffer with me is acute arachnophobia; the word I said to my friends in France was 'spider'. Berserk with panic, I had smashed up the room in an effort to kill one without having to go near it. And above all without letting it come near me.
Here we approach a paradox. I know that there is nothing I would not do, in the way of, say, trampling old ladies to the ground, to get away from a spider. Yet at the same time I am capable, in the presence of one, of behaving in a manner which, given the irrational and uncontrollable basis of my panic, is nevertheless perfectly directed, with all possible economy of effort, to removing the spider from my presence, or my presence from its. I had hurled the furniture and rugs about to deny the enemy a hiding-place (the ultimate horror is the knowledge that a spider is lurking out of sight), I had torn down the curtains because I had seen it scuttle behind them, I had flung the jugs of water in an effort to drown it, which is in many ways the best method of all, for it relieves the victim of the necessity of making even the indirect contact involved in hitting it with a weapon (such as the carpet-sweeper with which I eventually beat it to death).
That is to say, though my impulse is irrational in the extreme, it does not drive me to behaviour in itself irrational, as would be the action of someone trapped in a fire who in panic rushes into the flames instead of through the door to safety. Indeed, spider-phobia seems to sharpen the ingenuity to a remarkable degree; I once found one in the hand-basin in my bathroom, and after turning the tap on and leaving it running for some time, found that the spider, though drowned, was stuck in the cross-bars of the plug-hole. I got a pencil to dislodge it with; but my arm refused to obey the orders from my brain, and I stood there paralysed. Then I had an idea; and just before the second soda-syphon spluttered empty, I squirted it loose.
Tee-hee; the spectacle of an adult unable to go within two feet of a dead spider, and compelled instead to Schweppesorcise it, must indeed cause hilarity. Not to me it doesn't; at the end of that episode I was weeping with fear and humiliation; and I trembled uncontrollably for an hour.
Very well; I have a horror of spiders, you of mice, he of enclosed spaces , she of birds, they of cats. I know people who believe in astrology, in ghosts, in the banshee, in leprechauns, in the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. We all are more or less crazy; what's so special about a man who is reduced to a gibbering idiot at the sight of eight hairy and harmless legs? Nothing, of course; but I want to know why. (I also want to be cured, but although I am sure that the good Doc Eysenck could remove my spider-phobia and replace it with a fine upstanding boot-fetishism at the drop of a reflex, I have no real hopes of ever being rid of my secret dread.) Let us consider.
I believe that orthodox psychiatric opinion offers me the choice of two basic explanations. The general one – that my horror is the irrational defence I have build around a real, buried horror (did I try as a child to murder my sister?); and the particular one – that the hairy spider suggests subconsciously the forbidden mysteries of the private parts, and that a lack of naturalness about proffered explanations of such things in childhood has somehow got mixed up and come out in this way since. Perhaps; but then it would psycho-analysis to provide even a chance of finding out for sure, and the attendant risks seem to me greater than those of my being driven to jump out of a high window in an effort to get away from Tegenaria domestica. Come not psychiatry. Entomology, I may say in passing, is no help either. My spiderphobia extends to many other creepy-crawlies, too, with different degrees of intensity, but I can trace no pattern sufficiently logical to provide any help. The daddy-longlegs, for instance, arouses only a very mild horror, and the very tiny 'money-spiders' just do not excite any kind of feelings at all. Beatles I fear in exact proportion to their size; moths I don't care for, but do not actively dislike; caterpillars – small ones, anyway – I find positively attractive. On the other hand, I could not bring myself to touch a live crab, and if I had been the chef I read of who opened the refrigerator door to find that someone had presented him with an Alaskan King Crab (two feet across) I would have dropped dead on the spot. (he looked it.)
The mythology of spiders has an astonishingly long lineage, but it is no help to me. Spiders have been venerated as repositories of wisdom ( Bruce's spider is presumably a late stirring of this attitude) and rejected as demoniac; I find no trace of spider- revulsion in folk-lore, however, though it occurs in history, of course (the Cardinal spider is so nick-named because Wolsey very nearly died of shock at the sight of a large one scuttling from beneath his chair). Appearances I cannot disentangle from my feelings; a geometrically-composed web strung between bushes and glistening with hoar-frost I find very beautiful, but only if the tenant is out. If he is in, the whole thing becomes unbearably loathsome. (Spiders always strike me as dirty, incidentally, an admission which may perhaps strengthen the psychiatrists' case against me; I am anyway beginning to think that I have already said enough to get myself certified.) Similarly, the power of words and images – suggestive or mystical – is very strong on me in this area, but I am unable to distinguish with certainty between cause and effect; the word 'spider' (and 'scuttle', for that matter) sounds horrible in my ears, and although I can read books about them I cannot without discomfort look at drawings or photographs.
Psychology, mythology, history, entomology, aesthetics, philology – all of these I have ransacked for the clue to my behaviour, and an end to it; in vain. I fall back, of course, on philosophy, which never fails. I use my weakness as Montaigne used his (the kidney-stone, and a variety of others); to remind myself that the perennial philosophy is the true one, and the materialist versions false. 'Men are unwise, and curiously planned'; they are irrational, immeasurable, unpredictable, uncontrollable. Rousseau was right, Hume was right, Heisenberg was right; Pope was wrong, Jefferson was wrong, Stalin was wrong. It is tiresome for a grown man to be afraid of spiders, but I am; it is inconvenient for men to act irrationally, but they do.
This is not just a quibble. That an area of my behaviour is not subject to the control of my mind, that even my body, in certain circumstances, refuses its subjection – this is at first sight dismaying; we all like to pretend , even if we are not judges or schoolmasters, who are inordinately given to the habit, that we act only according to the evidence and the appropriate balancing of interests. My spider-phobia is there to remind me that we lie; that our actions are dictated by eternally inexplicable impulses. Dismay turns to relief and gratitude, as failures, depressions, actions bitterly regretted, all loom less large, less awful and inevitable.
And on the other hand, fresh hope is engendered in all sorts of places where it might be thought to have died for ever. You have no idea how useful a morbid horror of spiders can be, for instance, to a man contemplating the political scene. For it teaches the contemplator that anything can happen , and probably will; if we spider-phobes can behave the way we do, and yet survive and thrive, the world will survive its apparently implacable determination, governed by the most rationally-ordered motives, to come to an abrupt end. Go to the spider, Mao Tse-Tung; consider her ways and be foolish. Why, even Mr. Crossman, viewed between from between the legs of Aranea cucurbitina, takes on a harmless aspect. Nay:
H.G. Wells has found that children play
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational,
And through deep woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small
I think I will not hang myself today.
Not, at any rate, unless I meet a very large spider.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
