Tribute to Freud

1

March 2, 1933

I cried too hard. . went to the old wooden restaurant with the paintings, like the pictures that my mother did, Swiss scenes, mountains, chalet halfway up a hill, torrent under a bridge. As in her sequence, there were several mid-Victorian snow-scenes here, too. The old plates of the saw-mills, the Lehigh River, summer-house with trellis, deer-park of the Seminary where her father was principal for many years, suggest some near-affiliation with these weathered oils. There are a few still-life studies, apples with a brown jug and the usual bunched full double-peonies with a stalk of blue delphinium, such as we see in the Galleries, but these pictures are homely or home-y, of no intrinsic value.

My mother and I visited an Austrian village, like these pictures; it was in the early summer of 1913 after we had left Italy. My father had returned to America, he said, “to buy a pair of shoes.” There was a Passion Play; I remember my mother talking on a wooden bridge to one of the village women who said Judas was the fish-man. My mother spoke perfect German. We stayed at an inn; all I remember is the waitress calling me a backfisch and our delight in framed color-prints of the old Austrian emperor and the empress in blue décolleté with pearls. That was probably Innsbruck. The village — I don’t remember its name — took the visitors into their own homes, wooden cottages or chalets (like these in the weathered paintings), and there was a rather overwhelming feeling of the wood-carved Christ at corners of the village and at the entrance to the old bridge.

I wandered alone across the bridge but did not get far. The forest seemed menacing.

At Christmas time, we had deer on the moss under the tree. Our grandfather made us clay sheep.

I cried too hard. . I do not know what I remembered: the hurt of the cold, nun-like nurses at the time of my first London confinement, spring 1915; the shock of the Lusitania going down just before the child was still-born; fear of drowning; young men on park benches in blue hospital uniform; my father’s anti-war sentiments and his violent volte-face in 1918; my broken marriage; a short period with friends in Cornwall in 1918; my father’s telescope, my grandfather’s microscope. If I let go (I, this one drop, this one ego under the microscope-telescope of Sigmund Freud) I fear to be dissolved utterly.

I had what Bryher called the “jelly-fish” experience of double ego; bell-jar or half-globe as of transparent glass spread over my head like a diving-bell and another manifested from my feet, so enclosed I was for a short space in St. Mary’s, Scilly Isles, July 1918, immunized or insulated from the war disaster. But I could not stay in it; I re-materialized and Bryher took me to Greece in the spring of 1920.

My older brother and I took our father’s magnifying glass, and he showed me how to “burn paper.” Our father stopped us as he found it dangerous, “playing with fire.”

When I told Professor Freud I was married in 1913, he said, “Ah, twenty years ago.”

Sigmund Freud is like a curator in a museum, surrounded by his priceless collection of Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese treasures; he is “Lazarus stand forth”; he is like D. H. Lawrence, grown old but matured and with astute perception. His hands are sensitive and frail. He is midwife to the soul. He is himself the soul. Thought of him bashes across my forehead, like a death-head moth; he is not the sphinx but the sphinx-moth, the death-head moth.

No wonder I am frightened. I let death in at the window. If I do not let ice-thin window-glass intellect protect my soul or my emotion, I let death in.

But perhaps I will be treated with a psychic drug, will take away a nameless precious phial from his cavern. Perhaps I will learn the secret, be priestess with power over life and death.

He beat on my pillow or the head-piece of the old couch I lie on. He was annoyed with me. His small chow, Yofi, sits at his feet. We make an ancient cycle or circle, wise-man, woman, lioness (as he calls his chow)!

He is a Jew; like the last Prophet, he would break down the old law of Leviticus: death by stoning for the vagrant, and unimaginable punishment for the lawless. The old Victorian law is hard; Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud tempered it for my generation.

Kenneth Macpherson called me “recording angel.” I will endeavor to record the grain in the painted apple, in the painted basket, hanging to the left of the wooden dresser, directly in line with my eyes, as I glance up from my notebook. The painting is dimmed by smoke and winter damp, but there must be black seeds in the painted apples, there must be white wine in the painted jug. I wanted to paint like my mother, though she laughed at her pictures we admired so.

My father went out of doors; the stars commanded him. Human souls command Sigmund Freud.

In Corfu, spring 1920, among my many fantasies, I imagined a figure came in sack-cloth; he was not in appearance the conventional Messiah, though his words made me think he was Christ. He said, “You were once kind to one of my people.” To whom was I kind?

There was a Russian-American Jew, John Cournos or Ivan Ivanovitch Korshun, as he said his name was. I don’t think Korshun is the right spelling, but he pronounced it like that and as I remember, he said Korshun meant a hawk.

There was another, a Mr. Brashaer, a famous lens-maker who fitted the lenses to my father’s Zenith telescope. Was this the lens I imagined in the Scilly Isles, or the two convex lenses that I called bell-jars?

I came back from Aegina, from the Hellenic Cruise trip of spring 1932. My daughter was with me; she was just thirteen. I came back from Egypt, 1923, at the time of the Tutankhamen excavations; I came back from the Ionian Islands in 1920.

I saw the world through my double-lens; it seemed everything had broken but that. I watched snow-flakes through a magnified pane of glass.

Who was this that I had been kind to? Mr. Brashaer was small, dark, vivid. He was a famous lens-maker, the most famous in America, perhaps the most famous in the world. He is small in my imagination, this person I was kind to. Is this the magic homunculus of the alchemists?

2

Freud took me into the other room and showed me the things on his table. He took the ivory Vishnu with the upright serpents and canopy of snake heads, and put it into my hands. He selected a tiny Athené from near the end of the semicircle, he said, “This is my favorite.” The Vishnu was set in the center with the statues arranged either side; there is an engraving of the Professor somewhere, seated at this desk behind or within the circle. He opened the case against the wall and displayed his treasures, antique rings.

We spoke of fees; he said, “Do not worry about that, that is my concern.” He went on, “I want you to feel at home.” Then he said he thought my voice was “delicate” and added, as if there might be danger of my letting outside matters intrude, “I am, after all, seventy-seven.”

I found I was not so shy. I told him of Miss Chadwick and of how I had suffered, during my preliminary sessions with her, spring 1931. I would deliberately assemble all the sorry memories in my effort to get at the truth. He said, “We never know what is important or what is unimportant until after.” He said, “We must be impartial, see fair play to ourselves.”

I told him how the first impression of his room had overwhelmed and upset me. I had not expected to find him surrounded by these treasures, in a museum, a temple. We talked of Egypt. I spoke of the yellow sand, the blue sky, the beetle-scarabs. Then I said that Egypt was a series of living Bible illustrations and I told him of my delight in our Gustave Doré, as a child.

He said how fortunate I had been to discover reality “superimposed” (his word) on the pictures.

I had told him in my last sessions of the Princess and the baby in the basket.

He asked me again if I was Miriam or saw Miriam, and did I think the Princess was actually my mother?

He said a dream sometimes showed a “corner,” but I argued that this dream was a finality, an absolute, or a synthesis. Nor was I, as he had suggested in the first instance, the baby, the “founder of a new religion.” Obviously it was he, who was that light out of Egypt.

But it is true that we play puss-in-a-corner, find one angle and another or see things from different corners or sides of a room. Yes, we play hide-and-seek, hunt-the-slipper, and hunt-the-thimble and patiently and meticulously patch together odds and ends of our picture-puzzle. We spell words upside down and backward and crosswise, for our crossword puzzle, and then again we run away and hide in the cellar or the attic or in our mother’s clothes-closet. We play magnificent charades.

But the Professor insisted I myself wanted to be Moses; not only did I want to be a boy but I wanted to be a hero. He suggested my reading Otto Rank’s Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden.

March 3, Friday

Remembering Vishnu, I think the ivory is like a half-lily.

I do not know if the white lily was a fantasy, dream, or reality.

I stood looking through the iron railing of the garden, surrounded by a crowd of small boys of assorted ages, brothers no doubt, smaller cousins and the neighboring bandits.

A very old, tall old man is wandering in the garden. With him, there is a younger edition of himself, but the tall young man is the gardener.

The grandfather, godfather, god-the-father sees the children. He summons them to the iron fence. He looks them over. But only one is chosen.

The very small girl staggers forward, overcome, shy yet bold. She crosses the threshold. She stands on the garden path. It is a “real” garden, with sandy path like our grandfather’s garden; it is shut in, however; it is not a very large garden, it is more like a long unroofed room between the house walls. There are trees in the garden, ordinary trees, real trees.

She can only distinguish trees at this time by their fruit or blossom. But these are ordinary trees, in the ordinary time of summer-leaf.

The old gentleman says that she must choose what she wants. Actually, there is no pansy border to “pick” from and no fruit on the trees. But she must choose what she wants.

She sees what she wants. Is it the only flower in this garden?

It is not a flower she would have chosen, for she would never have been allowed to choose it. It is an Easter-lily or Madonna-lily, growing by the path.

She points to it, overwhelmed by her audacity.

The gardener unclasps a knife, cuts off the flower for her.

But this is rather overwhelming; what does one do with one huge Easter-lily? She races down the now empty street to their front door on Church Street.

She rushes into their front sitting room or parlor. It seems emptier than usual, with light falling from the apparently uncurtained windows. There is mama sewing, there is mamalie sewing.

My Easter-lily!

“Ah,” says mama or says mamalie (our grandmother), “that will look beautiful on your grandfather’s new grave.”

She is alone at Nisky Hill, where her grandfather has recently been buried. There is just this one mound, like a flower-bed. She “plants” the lily.

Obviously, this is my inheritance. I derive my imaginative faculties through my musician-artist mother, through her part-Celtic mother, through the grandfather of English and middle-European extraction. My father was pure New England, a one-remove pioneer to Indiana, who returned “back east.” My father is here too, but dissolved or resolved into the “other grandfather,” whom we had never known. My mother’s father was the first “dead” person I had ever known. I do not at the time actually associate the godfather or god-the-father with a recognizable personality. He is a stranger. He is a General from the Old South. I later ask my mother where he has gone? But there is no such person, no General from the Old South, no such house with a narrow walled-in garden, she says, on Church Street. She knows everyone on Church Street.

I do not accept this, but I cannot not find the house, opposite what had been the College; they are tearing down the College and putting up new buildings but anyhow, the old godfather’s house was the other side of the street. It does not quite work out, but it is only afterwards, long afterwards, that I find this out.

The trees were very leafy. He gives me an Easter-lily. Easter-lilies come at Easter time, spring or early spring; the trees are summer trees in full leaf. But worse than that. It was after he gave her the lily, only a day or two later, that he sends his sleigh. It is a beautiful sleigh with sleigh-bells. The gardener is the coachman. There is a thick fur rug. We drive across the untrodden snow; there is no one in the streets.

He sent a message with the coachman. He said he had sent the sleigh because of the little girl. “When will he come again?” I ask my mother. Is it winter, summer? “Why — what?” “The sleigh, of course, he said he would send it whenever I wanted, it is for you and me and Gilbert and Harold, but he said it was because of me that we could all ride in his sleigh.”

We were all tucked up together under the fur rug.

But no one had sent us a sleigh, my mother told me.

Anyhow, the seasons are all wrong.

In Corfu, someone placed two white lilies and one red tulip on my table. Bryher probably. But there seemed mystery about it. I did not ask Bryher about it. I had learned long ago not to inquire too deeply into the mystery.

The ivory Vishnu sits upright in his snake-hood, like the piston of a calla-lily, or a jack-in-the-pulpit.

My grandfather was the jack-in-the-pulpit, a pastor or clergyman.

Church Street was our street, the Church was our Church. It was founded by Count Zinzendorf who named our town Bethlehem.

People tell one things, and other children laugh at one’s ignorance. “But Jesus was not born here.”

That may be true. We will not discuss the matter. Only after some forty years, we approach it. “I don’t know if I dreamed this or if I just imagined it, or if later I imagined that I dreamed it.” “It does not matter,” he said, “whether you dreamed it or imagined it or whether you just made it up, this moment. I do not think you would deliberately falsify your findings. The important thing is that it shows the trend of your fantasy or imagination.”

He goes on, “You were born in Bethlehem? It is inevitable that the Christian myth —” He paused. “This does not offend you?” “Offend me?” “My speaking of your religion in terms of myth,” he said. I said, “How could I be offended?” “Bethlehem is the town of Mary,” he said.

3

March 4

I was cold and I found difficulty in starting. I went on talking about the Doré pictures, the dead baby in the Judgment of Solomon. I told him of the graves of my two sisters. I had never known these sisters; one was a half-sister and really belonged to the two grown half-brothers, Eric and Alfred. Their mother was there too. We went on with the lily-fantasy. The old man was obviously, he said, God.

The lily was the Annunciation-lily. I said it was the ivory Vishnu that had prompted me to tell the anecdote. He asked me about my early religious background. I said it was not that they were strict, we were not often punished. I remembered, however, terrible compulsions or premonitions of punishment. Hell from the Bible stories seemed a real place. But I did not speak of this. I went on to tell him of our Christmas candles.

“An atmosphere. .” he said.

He said, “There is no more significant symbol than a lighted candle. You say you remember your grandfather’s Christmas-Eve service? The girls as well as the boys had candles?” It seemed odd that he should ask this.

Sigmund Freud got up from his chair at the back of the couch, and came and stood beside me. He said, “If every child had a lighted candle given, as you say they were given at your grandfather’s Christmas Eve service, by the grace of God, we would have no more problems. . That is the true heart of all religion.”

Later at home, in bed, I was stricken and frightened, thinking of all the things that I wanted or rather felt impelled to tell him. I think of Sigmund Freud as this little-papa, Papalie, the grandfather. Talking half-asleep to myself, or rather to the Professor, I realize I am using the rhythm or language I use only for cats and children. There is my daughter’s cat, Peter, that, she tells me, “I have left to you in my will.”

“It’s an old, old cat,” I say, talking to the Professor, and then it occurs to me that the jerk of his elbow as he orders or summons me from his waiting room to the consulting room is like the angular flap of a bird-wing. I have lately been watching these great crows or rooks here in the gardens off the Ringstrasse.

Yes, there is a singular finality about his least remark, his most insignificant gesture. There is the Pallas Athené on his desk, beyond the double door, leading from the consulting room to the inner sanctum. Just above my chamber door — that was a bust of Pallas, if I am not mistaken, from Poe’s Raven. There is a quoth-the-Raven mystery about his every utterance, though he seems to huddle rather than to perch, more like an old owl, hibou sacré in the corner back of the couch.

I remember a special gift from my father: this time the gift is not from little-papa, Papalie. The wretched and fascinating creature stared and stared at me, from the top of his bookshelf. The bookshelf ran the length of the wall opposite his table, or rather there were bookcases along all the walls that were not broken by windows. I must have been indeed the child of heroes and a hero from Geburt des Helden, for I asked him, “May I have that white owl?”

It was an extremely large owl. It was very white. It lived under a bell-jar, it had large unblinking gold or amber eyes. I was suddenly reminded of the golden fur of the little Yofi lioness. If my grandfather gave me a lighted candle, my father gave me a snow-owl.

True, there was a qualification about this miracle, as there so often is in a true fairy tale. Yes, the owl was mine; it was mine for ever, he would not ask me to give it back to him. He had reproved one of us one day for being an “Indian-giver.” Someone rashly gave away a bag of marbles, a cock-a-doodle-do trumpet (a rooster of papier mâché whose head was like a Halloween false-face), or Joey from the Punch and Judy. Though individually the dolls were divided, the “show” was common property. There was a snag about some gift. “What is an Indian-giver?” “It is someone who gives something and asks for it back again.” But he wasn’t an Indian-giver. I could keep the snow-owl.

There was, however, this condition. I had told the Professor of the snow-owl. I told him there was one condition, and paused as if to emphasize the drama.

But perhaps it is an old trick.

The Professor said before I had time to tell him, “Ah — yes — he gave the owl to you, on the condition that it stayed where it was.”

But as I lie here, in my comfortable bed, in the Hotel Regina, I go on with my reverie. I am not preparing for tomorrow’s session, I am simply going on with today’s. By some curious freak of luck, a gardener brought me the tip of a cactus plant, to plant in a flower pot, in pebbles and sand. “Do not water it, it will grow best, right out in the sun; I have a huge plant, a tree really,” he told me. The gardener explained that he had grown his cactus tree from a slip just like the one he brought me. I was proud of my cactus plant and moved it about in the sun. It would grow into a tree.

It really wasn’t fair.

My three-inch strip of tough cactus fiber began to glow, it did not grow, it simply burst into a huge flower. It was like a red water-lily. Its petals were smooth and cold, though they should have been blazing. Well, perhaps they were. I thought the gardener would be so pleased. He said, “I have had my plant now for years and not a sign of a blossom.”

It wasn’t fair.

There was no rivalry about the butterfly, but that wasn’t fair either. For some reason, this giant worm had chosen a rather fragile stalk from my garden plot to build on. It may have been that the packets of our “cheap seeds” had been badly sifted or assorted and that some strange exotic had got in among them. But how did the worm get there? There was only one of the nicotiana plants. I broke off the stem and put it with what tobacco-flower leaves were left and placed the cocoon where I felt it would be safest, on the top of my father’s bookcase. The owl was one end, the other end was the Indian skull, at least we called it an Indian skull. It had been dug up or plowed up by him or by his father when our father was a boy in Indiana.

I know that I am in bed in the Regina Hotel, Freiheitsplatz, Vienna. I know that it is March 4, 1933. I am not sure but I think that this is my father’s birthday. He never wanted a “birthday” in our house, that seemed every other week to mark some festivity in mama’s or Mamalie’s Birthday Book or Text Book. I think this is my father’s birthday. He was younger than the Professor when he died, so perhaps it is natural, one way and another, to give the Professor the role of grand- or great-father, for all he is little-father or Papalie.

If I tell the Professor about the cactus and the butterfly, he will think I have made up one or the other, or both.

As I say, it was not quite fair, for I had had some slight converse with amateur experts, though I myself knew the name of not one butterfly. The thing that hatched out was a moth. It was exotic and enormous. It was literally the size of a not-so-small bird. It crawled or fluttered the length of the top shelf and settled on the Indian skull that my father or my grandfather had dug or plowed up when my father was a boy in Indiana.

My father and I agreed there was nothing to be done about it but to open the window and hope that it would fly out.

There is a bed-lamp, on the stand at my elbow. There is, I remember, a flattering soft-rose lamp-shade. If I switch on the light, I will see the length of green curtains, the comfortable green-upholstered arm-chair, glass-topped dressing-table, and the ordinary table with my books and papers.

I will have to switch on the light soon, for my eyes, staring into darkness, wonder if again I crossed the threshold. No, I am sure about the cactus. I am not quite sure about the butterfly.

I was wrong about the butterfly. I did not break off a heavy cocoon, but I gathered the enormous green caterpillar with the tobacco-flower stalk and placed the stalk and worm in a cardboard box. Did I cut holes in the box? There was ventilation somewhere. This was my own worm.

In the box, among the fresh green tobacco leaves, and the old brown tobacco leaves, he wove his huge cocoon.

How did he get out of the box? Did I hear him scratching?

Did he flutter and beat his wings against the box?

How did I get the cardboard box onto the top of the tall bookcase? Did I climb up on a chair? I was not tall enough to reach the top shelf, even with a chair.

Did I make it all up? Did I dream it? And if I dreamt it, did I dream it forty years ago, or did I dream it last night?

It was the huge green caterpillar that I gathered with the blossoming nicotiana.

I am wrong about my father’s birthday. My father’s birthday is in November.

Why did I say today, March 4th, is my father’s birthday?

4

Hibou sacré! I asked him how he was and he smiled a charming, wrinkled smile that reminded me of D. H. Lawrence. He told me (in French) how Napoleon’s mother used to say, even at the height of his fame, “That is all right as long as it lasts.” I spoke of the last war-year. He said he had reason to remember the epidemic, as he lost his favorite daughter. “She is here,” he said, and he showed me a tiny locket that he wore, fastened to his watch-chain. She had died of the epidemic in Hamburg, though the baby she had just had survived. I remembered Dr. Sachs speaking of this girl, “the beautiful Sophie.”

So the beautiful Sophie died, having her child about the same time as I was having mine, early spring 1919. I had the same Spanish influenza and though it was common knowledge that in no instance did both child and mother live after the depletion of pneumonia, yet I was the miraculous exception. It was not the child nor my critical physical condition that caused the final collapse.

But there was so much to tell. I dodged the actual details of my desolation and told the Professor how kind Havelock Ellis had been to me when I saw him in his flat in Brixton, those few times before the birth of my child. I had written to Dr. Ellis, although Daphne Bax who had arranged for me to stay in a cottage near her in Buckinghamshire, during the winter of 1919, had tried to discourage any idea of my meeting Havelock Ellis whom I so greatly admired. Mrs. Ellis had had a house at one time in Buckinghamshire, near Daphne. Daphne said, “Oh, Havelock — no one ever manages to meet Havelock. He is remote, apart, a recluse, a Titan, a giant.” Perhaps Daphne’s so taking things for granted spurred me to approach this Titan. I received a courteous note in answer to my letter to him, and the next time I made the trip from Princes Risborough to London, I went to see this Titan. He served China tea, with a plate of salted pecans and peanuts. There was an unexpected charm and authenticity in his artist décor. He wore a brown velvet smoking-jacket and showed me some of his treasures, a Buddha that his father, a sea captain, had brought back from China, a copy of a famous bust of himself done by — I forget who. There were various autographed photographs of people I had never met but heard of; Walt Whitman among others looked down from the wall. There were Russian cigarettes and Dr. Ellis served lemon, in the Russian or American manner, with the tea. I went on talking to the Professor of the effect that Dr. Ellis had on me; I had expected to meet the rather remote, detached, and much-abused scientist, I found the artist. Sigmund Freud said, “Ah, you tell this all so beautifully.”

Dr. Ellis was in my fantasies when I went, July 1919, with Bryher to the Scilly Isles. He knew Cornwall and had lived there off and on, for many years in “retreat” as Daphne would have said, working on his famous volumes. The Scilly Isles, in the flow of the Gulf Stream, suggested the Mediterranean to me. There were great birds; they perched there in “retreat,” at certain seasons, both from the tropic zones and from the Arctic. It was here at this time I had my “jelly-fish” experience, as Bryher called it. There were palm-trees, coral-plants, mesambeanthum, opened like water-lilies the length of the grey walls; the sort of fibrous under-water leaf and these open sea-flowers gave one the impression of being submerged.

We were in the little room that Bryher had taken for our study when I felt this impulse to “let go” into a sort of balloon, or diving-bell, as I have explained it, that seemed to hover over me. There was an old-fashioned sideboard and I remember thinking, “I must really ask for another jar to put those flowers in.” They had stuck a great bundle of calla-lilies, wedged tight into a jam pot. Two or three of the flower-stalks would have been more effective, with a few of the spear-like leaves. There was an engraving of the inevitable Landseer’s Stag at Bay over the fireplace, screened now with a ruffle or fan of red paper. When I tried to explain this to Bryher and told her it might be something sinister or dangerous, she said, “No, no, it is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of. Let it come.”

I tried to write a rough account of this singular adventure, Notes on Thought and Vision. There was, I explained to Bryher, a second globe or bell-jar rising as if it were from my feet. I was enclosed. I felt I was safe but seeing things as through water. I felt the double globe come and go and I could have dismissed it at once and probably would have if I had been alone. But it would not have happened, I imagine, if I had been alone. It was being with Bryher that projected the fantasy, and all the time I was thinking that this would be an interesting bit of psychological data for Dr. Havelock Ellis.

When I returned to London, I sent my Notes to Dr. Ellis. I thought he would be so interested. But he appeared unsympathetic, or else he did not understand or else he may have thought it was a danger signal.

Dr. Ellis did not understand but the Professor understood perfectly.

As I was leaving, the Professor asked me, “Are you lonely?” I said, “Oh — no.”

No, I was not lonely. There were museums, galleries, the walks in the Stadtpark, visiting old churches. I scribbled in my notebook, and leafed over magazines and books sent me from London and America. It did not occur to me, until I was back in my bed, that I had omitted to tell the Professor the story of the caterpillar that had so concerned me last night before falling to sleep. Now, I must assemble the picture again.

Where had I left off? There was some snag somewhere. There were, now I recalled, several snags. To begin with, I had got my father’s birthday all wrong. Why substitute March for November, but the four was right; yes, I was certain that November 4 was my father’s birthday.

That caterpillar? No, it would not scratch and beat with its wings inside the box, for surely when it had woven its shell, I would have left the box-lid off altogether. Why this box and box-lid? There is that rather gruesome old print in the Professor’s waiting room, called “Buried Alive.”

I must have taken fresh leaves one day and found the spun sheath. But how long did it take a caterpillar to weave its elaborate vestment? Why did I forget the caterpillar? Why did I remember it?

There it is on my table, that last volume that I disliked so. It was sent to me from London, another fanatical woman writing her story of D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence? It was in March he died.

Then I substituted my father’s birthday for the death-day of D. H. Lawrence.

5

March 5

I had said, in the beginning, that I only wanted to tell the story, it was like the Ancient Mariner, but he did not know or pretended not to know the poem. I had connected the Ancient Mariner with the Bible as an uncle had a Doré illustrated edition that we laid flat on the floor, in my grandmother’s house, as we did at home our own illustrated Bible, before we could read. I connect Poe and Coleridge in my sequence, as they were both alleged drug-addicts, Poe with his Lenores and haunted Ushers, and Coleridge with his Xanadu, his Kubla Khan. I was publicly reproved at Miss Gordon’s school in West Philadelphia, when I was fifteen, because I firmly stated that Edgar Allan Poe was my favorite among American writers. I was told by Miss Pitcher who had otherwise encouraged me, even at that age, in my literary aspirations, that Poe was not a good influence, he was “unwholesome, morbid.”

Today, lying on the famous psychoanalytical couch, I have a feeling of evaporating cold menthol, some form of ether, laid on my “morbid” brow. Wherever my fantasies may take me now, I have a center, security, aim. I am centralized or reoriented here in this mysterious lion’s den or Aladdin’s cave of treasures.

I am salvaged, saved; ship-wrecked like the Mariner, I have sensed bell-notes from the hermit’s chapel. There is Baudelaire too and his Fleurs du Mal, but there is no evil in Sigmund Freud. Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange, I whisper under my breath, in one of those pregnant pauses, while the fumes of the aromatic cigar waft above me, from the nook in the corner behind my head.

Are we psychic coral-polyps? Do we build one upon another? Did I (sub-aqueous) in the Scilly Isles, put out a feeler? Did I die in my polyp manifestation and will I leave a polyp skeleton of coral to blend with this entire myriad-minded coral chaplet or entire coral island? My psychic experiences were sub-aqueous.

I must remember to tell Sigmund Freud of Norman Douglas’ epigram on Havelock Ellis, “He is a man with one eye in the country of the blind.”

I do not want to talk today. I am drifting out to sea. But I know I am safe, can return at any moment to terra firma. Yes, there was a dream last night but the ramifications are too elaborate. I dreamt I sent my book Hedylus to Peter Van Eck, whom I met on the boat going to Athens, spring 1920. I will have to tell him about the book, Hedylus the Alexandrian poet who is mentioned in the Garland of Meleager, and Hedyle his mother.

I will have to tell him that Bryher came into this dream, disguised at a Halloween party, as a black cat, actually as Peter whom my daughter says she has left me in her will. Puss-in-boots?

No, I could not tell him about Hedylus. What had I told him? I had not told him of the caterpillar, that is certain.

I was annoyed with that last book on Lawrence, but it gave me that date. It was March 2nd, not far removed from 4, and 2 × 2 is 4, and will we ever lay a four-square foundation?

Why lay a foundation?

I wasn’t fair but I could hardly cope with his enormous novels. They didn’t seem to ring true. That is, I was not susceptible to the frenzy in them. In them? Or in the choros of Maenids? I do not like that last book. I have not liked any of these books that have come out since his death. What do they know of Lawrence?

I should talk to the Professor about Lawrence, but I was particularly annoyed by his supercilious references to psychoanalysis and, by implication or inference, to the Professor himself.

The Man Who Died?

I don’t remember it, I don’t think of it. Only it was a restatement of his philosophy, but it came too late.

I don’t mean that.

I have carefully avoided coming to terms with Lawrence, the Lawrence of Women in Love and Lady Chatterley.

But there was this last Lawrence.

He did not accept Sigmund Freud, or implied it in his essay.

I don’t want to think of Lawrence.

“I hope never to see you again,” he wrote in that last letter.

Then after the death of Lawrence, Stephen Guest brought me the book and said, “Lawrence wrote this for you.”

Lawrence was imprisoned in his tomb; like the print hanging in the waiting room, he was “Buried Alive.”

We are all buried alive.

The story comes back automatically when I switch off the bed-lamp.

I do not seem to be able to face the story in the daytime.

Yes, it was abomination. I could see it writhing. “It’s only a caterpillar.” Perhaps I cannot really talk yet. I am seated at one remove from a doll-chair, on the porch. I look down the wide wooden steps. There is the grapevine, as we called it, and leaf-shadows. They are crouched under the grape arbor. I can scream, I can cry. It is not a thing that the mind could possibly assimilate. They are putting salt on the caterpillar and it writhes, huge like an object seen under a microscope, or looming up it is a later film-abstraction.

No, how can I talk about the crucified Worm? I have been leafing over papers in the café, there are fresh atrocity stories. I cannot talk about the thing that actually concerns me, I cannot talk to Sigmund Freud in Vienna, 1933, about Jewish atrocities in Berlin.

March 6, Monday

I dream Joan and Dorothy are arguing. Joan possesses herself of some boxes and jewel-cases of mine: she treates my dream treasures as common property, spreads them out on a table. I am angry at her casual appropriation of my personal belongings. I take up one red-velvet-lined box (actually Bryher had got this for me in Florence) and say passionately, “Can you understand nothing?” Joan is a tall girl, we stand level, challenging each other. I say, “Can’t you understand? My mother gave me this box.” I press this red-velvet-lined red-leather Florentine box against my heart. Actually, physically, my heart is surcharged and beating wildly at the vehemence of my passion.

I recall the Phoenix symbol of D. H. Lawrence and of how I had thought of the Professor as an owl, hawk, or sphinx-moth. Are these substitutions for the scripture hen gathering her chicks?

My daughter was born the last day of March with daffodils that come before the swallow dares out of The Winter’s Tale. Richard had brought me many daffodils, that English Lent-lily.

I have been reading James Jeans’s Stars in Their Courses, and am reminded of my bitter disappointment when a well-meaning young uncle called me to the nursery window. “Look,” he said, “there is the Bear in the sky.” I blinked from the frosty winter-window. I had been shown the frost-flowers, like stars, in kindergarten. That satisfied me. But here was another wonder. I gazed and blinked but there was no Bear to be seen. When I told this to Dr. Sachs, he said, “Such a small child would hardly register such a disappointment.” Perhaps I explained it badly. I was shocked that my uncle should deceive me. Surely, a small child would feel the hurt, or the practical joke, feel that a grown-up was playing some trick. I don’t know what sort of a Bear I expected to find there, but a white bear, a polar-bear, a snow-bear might not be impossible, as there was (and I knew that) Santa Claus with his reindeer who sped over the roofs of our town on Christmas Eve. We did not see him, of course, for he liked to give us our presents secretly. But the uncle assured me that the Bear was there and he would show me a picture of it.

The Professor has found me a thick rug now, for the couch. He always seems interested when I tell him of my animal findings and fairy-tale associations. At least, it was not my father who deceived me. The Professor said I had not made the conventional transference from mother to father, as is usual with a girl at adolescence. He said he thought my father was a cold man.

But our father took us out one evening in the snow and bought us a box of animals. He divided them afterwards, as we had done with the Punch and Judy dolls. There seemed no friction among the three of us, as to the choice of dolls or later of the animals. My older brother took the elephant of course, I had the elk, the small boy had the polar-bear. I should have liked the bear but we had first choice in order of age, then second choice. I don’t remember what our second and our third choice was.

The big boy of course took Punch and I had Judy and the little boy loved Joey. That was all right. Then Gilbert took the policeman of course, I had the beadle, the little boy had — surely there was another doll, I know it worked out. I can’t remember the sixth doll — or did we compromise and give him Toby the dog?

The Professor had first written me that he would be ready to see me “next year, January or February.” This is next year, but we decided to wait, as he said he feared the “polar-bear weather” might upset me. I remember writing him that I wanted to come in March, whatever the weather might be. Yes — it was in London in March that I heard from America of the death of my father, though he must have died in February. My mother died too in March but eight years later. The word reached me at Riant Château, Territet, where she had been with us, on the first day of spring, 1927.

Again, I feel, lying on this couch that a sort of phosphorescence is evaporating from my forehead and I can almost breathe this anodyne, this ether.

Am I reminded of happy release from pain and the fortunate auspices, predicted for my daughter who arrived in the vernal equinox, and at the high tide of the sun, at noon exactly?

Surely the high tide of her stars brought fortune to me.

Some of these things I touched on with the Professor. I cannot classify the living content of our talks together by recounting them in a logical or textbook manner. It was, as he had said of my grandfather, “an atmosphere. . ”

I don’t know why I pick on Joan and Dorothy, two devoted friends in London. That is, they are devoted to each other; I am really only an acquaintance. Do I associate them with my aunts? Poor Aunt Laura was so happy when my mother told her, when she visited us in Switzerland, that she could have all her clothes. Joan and Dorothy are substitutes, rivals for my mother’s love. It does not matter who they are. We were together in Florence, too. My modest jewels are precious to me, for their association, a string of smoke-sapphires or star-sapphires and a bracelet (from a shop where at one time Cellini had been master silversmith), some leather frames and old paperbacked Tauchnitz editions, rebound in the patterned red-lily parchment paper.

When I switch off my bed-light, I realize that I might have seen Lawrence there.

March 7

I dream of Havelock Ellis with his white beard. We had once talked of old English public houses or pubs as they call them. We go on with this conversation. I don’t remember what it led up to, but he talks about the “doors.” I finally think in my dream, “He has forgotten I am a woman and do not go into pubs or saloons — men evidently discuss various pubs and pub-doors like this among themselves.” But it is Havelock Ellis, propped up in bed, who has the role of the invalid or analysand while I who sit beside him am the analyst.

Then Havelock Ellis becomes the analyst in the Professor’s place but, reclining on the couch, I think, “Havelock Ellis will be bored, he doesn’t really care for psychoanalysis nor really know much about it; how can I expect him to be interested or to understand me?” We then seem to go on with the conversation in an ordinary way; he wants to find a French girl “with a perfect accent.” I say, “My daughter has a perfect accent.” I wake to realize that someone is rapping — a letter is slipped under my door.

I have been frightened, I do not want to mention blood to the Professor. I opened the front door, ran out to welcome my father in the dark and found blood on his head, dripping. . This was soon after we moved from Bethlehem to the Flower Observatory, outside Philadelphia. The cause of my father’s accident always remained a mystery. He might have slipped off the old-fashioned steam tram or the local train engine might have backfired. We were not allowed to see our father for some days. We were afraid he might be dead. When we finally went to his room he was propped up, as I had imagined Havelock Ellis in the dream, but his hair and beard had turned white. It was another father, wax-pale, a ghost.

I think I was ten years old at that time. I had “forgotten” this until I began my work with Miss Chadwick.

I had “forgotten” my father’s accident for thirty-five years.

I try to outline in a detached way the story of the three children finding their father. I qualify my terror of death by saying, “We overheard Mr. Evans, one of our father’s assistants at the Observatory, say it was concussion of the brain.” The Professor waved this aside. “It could not have been concussion,” he said. I did not know whether he was trying to spare me distress, or if he felt I had in some way forced this recital.

Sigmund Freud said at our next session that he saw “from signs” that I did not want to be analyzed.

I had seen a beautiful etching of him in an art-shop, on the Ring.

Today, I went and ordered a copy.

I am sick today, shaken, unnerved, disoriented.

I feel I should discuss my father’s accident and the discovery of this submerged, long-delayed shock.

Yes, it is true, he must see my conflict “from signs.”

How can I tell him of my constant pre-vision of disaster?

It is better to have an unsuccessful or “delayed” analysis than to bring my actual terror of the lurking Nazi menace into the open.

Yes, I was “Buried Alive.”

Is this why my thoughts return to Lawrence?

I can only remember that last book he wrote. The Man Who Died was buried alive.

March 8, Wednesday

I dream of a photograph of an unbearded D. H. Lawrence. I had such a photograph of my father, taken when he was sixteen or seventeen before he went with his brother to the war. There were daguerreotypes of these two brothers, taken when they were a little younger. The older brother was by far the more attractive. But I looked into the reflecting surface of the silver plate of the younger, and I looked out at myself.

I first met Lawrence in August 1914 at the time of the actual outbreak of war; he looked taller in evening-dress. It was the only time I saw this unbearded manifestation of Lawrence. Richard Aldington said afterwards that Lawrence looked like a soldier in mufti.

In my dream, there is a neat “professional” woman with Lawrence and there is a group of children. Is the “professional” woman a sort of secretary? I acted for a short time as secretary to my father.

Lawrence at one time was a school-master and I always had a longing to teach. The children in this dream “class” or family are of assorted sizes; they stand back of Lawrence and the young woman, grouped round a piano.

My mother taught music and painting at one time, at the old Seminary.

Now the children resolve or dissolve into a picture of a number of models of full-rigged ships.

Havelock Ellis’ father was a sea captain and one of my father’s textbooks was Practical Astronomy Applied to Navigation.

I think, “Of course, in England, these children would have the advantage of all those ships.”

But in my dream, I take out a volume from a shelf of Lawrence novels. I open it; disappointed, I say, “But his psychology is nonsense.”

I envied these women who have written memoirs of D. H. Lawrence, feeling that they had found him some sort of guide or master. I envied Bryher her hero-worship of the psychoanalyst Dr. Hanns Sachs. I cannot be disappointed in Sigmund Freud, only I have this constant obsession that the analysis will be broken by death. I cannot discuss this with the Professor. When he first greeted me, he reminded me of Lawrence.

The Professor said to me today, when I entered the consulting room, “I was thinking about what you said, about its not being worthwhile to love an old man of seventy-seven.” I had said no such thing and told him so. He smiled his ironical crooked smile. I said, “I did not say it was not worthwhile, I said I was afraid.”

But he confused me. He said, “In analysis, the person is dead after the analysis is over.” Which person? He said, “It would not matter if I were seventy-seven or forty-seven.” I now remember that I will be forty-seven on my next birthday. On my birthday, for that one day, Lawrence would be forty-seven.

The Professor had said, “In analysis, the person is dead after the analysis is over — as dead as your father.”

I remember Norman Douglas saying, “Just as we’re all getting over this Jesus Christ business, trust another Jew to come along and upset all our calculations.”

For one day in the year, H. D. and D. H. Lawrence were twins. But I had not actually realized this until after his death. He was born September 11, 1885: I was born September 10, 1886.

Stephen Guest brought me a copy of The Man Who Died. He said, “Did you know that you are the priestess of Isis in this book?”

Perhaps I would never have read the book if Stephen had not brought it to me. Actually, I might have had at first a slight feeling of annoyance. I had told friends of a book that I wanted to write, actually did write. I called it Pilate’s Wife. It is the story of the wounded but living Christ, waking up in the rock-tomb. I was certain that my friends had told Lawrence that I was at work on this theme. My first sudden reaction was, “Now he has taken my story.”

It was not my story. George Moore, among others, had already written it. There is the old myth or tradition that Christ did not die on the Cross.

March 8, 3:15 P.M.

My first week with the Professor began on Wednesday, March 1, a Holy Day, Ash Wednesday, March 1933.

Bryher has arranged for three months, twelve weeks. So, measured by the clock dial, I have moved from the XII to the I. Or I should say, I suppose, counting the hours rather than the minutes, that I have moved from I to II. This is my second week with Sigmund Freud.

I concentrate on the minutes, the minutiae of these hours.

This is March, astrologically the House of Sorrow. It is traditionally the House of the Crucifixion. The astrological months however are not divided exactly as the calendar months. The last week roughly of each calendar month overlaps or begins the new astrological month. So the end of March sometimes coincides with the spiritual vernal equinox, the resurrection.

My father studied or observed the variable orbit of the track of the earth round the sun, variation of latitude, he called it. He spent thirty years on this problem, adding a graph on a map started by Ptolemy in Egypt. The Professor continues a graph started by the ancestors of Ptolemy.

Some call this house, Pisces or the Fishes, the House of Secret Enemies, but I have seen reference to it as the House of Mysteries.

But we must not talk astrology. In that, at least, my father and Sigmund Freud agree. Nevertheless, in spite of them, or to spite them, I find enchanting parallels in the Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins. We have Yofi, Leo certainly.

We have other minutiae, the images on his table, Osiris the sun in his twelve manifestations, as he journeys through the sky, as well as the bronze Isis that he showed me — his companion.

Those two were twins in the old fairy story.

My findings are important to me and have an atmosphere.

Before I could walk properly, I could tell time. Long before I learned my alphabet, I knew the three clock letters.

I would be sent out by my nurse to find out what time it was. There was the grandfather clock on the landing. But surely I could walk there? Perhaps it was easier or pleasanter to slide down the shallow steps, for I always seem to be looking up from the floor at the clock-face. Yes, I could walk. I returned to the nursery with my findings. “The little hand is at the V.” I could not remember both hands at the same time or else I wanted fresh adventure. The big hand would keep me busy. “It is at the I, it is at the II,” or much later, “It has nearly got to the X.”

So I am back again in the mysteries; the childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race, wrote our Professor.

6

My half-brother Eric and my father talked of time in different dimensions, mean-time or siderial-time (whatever that was) and some other time whose name I can’t remember. My interest in “numbers” was checked at the time of my father’s accident and though I did not remember the accident, I remembered how long-division had blocked me or set a wall between my happy and most unhappy school-days. It is significant that my half-brother came to live with us, about this time. He was known generally as the “young Professor.” It was Eric who finally nursed me over my “resistance” to long-division. He brought me a copy of Jane Eyre and a Little Women with the original illustrations. The Little Women wore the bell-skirts that so fascinated me in the old pictures of the Seminary.

I do not know where or how I actually made this transference. But today’s transference or yesterday’s is explicit in the little green phial of smelling-salts that I carry in my handbag and that I “accidentally” let fall on the Professor’s carpet or left under the pillow of the couch. I do not ask the Professor where he found the little bottle. His air is mock-triumphant as he returns it to me, “Ah — you forgot this.” He knows that I know the symbolism of the “lost” umbrella.

And now that this transference is understood between us, I go on to talk of Lawrence. The Professor said that Lawrence had impressed him in the ending of one book. I did not ask him which book. The Professor said that Lawrence impressed him as “being unsatisfied but a man of real power.”

Freud says there are always a number of explanations for every finding, two or a multiple. In interpreting my own dreams, he said that I showed much more knowledge of psychoanalysis than he had expected of me. Perhaps he meant me to contradict him when he said that my looking at my watch meant that I was bored and wanted the session to end. I did not think that he meant me to take him piedde la lettre when he said that I might be impatient with life, desiring even his death, so as to avoid analysis. Or did he mean me to contradict this? What should I say?

There were those statues in the cottage in Cornwall. There was a row of them along the mantelpiece of an empty room. The house was only partly furnished. I went there in March 1918. It was D. H. Lawrence who had told me of the old house, it was called Rosigran. Lawrence said it was haunted. Was I afraid of ghosts? I said I had never met one.

Here in the semicircle on the table in the other room, is the same or somewhat the same array of images, Osiris, Isis. Perhaps I am afraid of ghosts. But when the Professor said, “Perhaps you are not happy,” I had no words with which to explain. It is difficult to explain it to myself or to find words to scribble in my note-book. It is not a question of happiness, in the usual sense of the word. It is happiness of the quest.

I am on the fringes or in the penumbra of the light of my father’s science and my mother’s art — the psychology or philosophy of Sigmund Freud.

I must find new words as the Professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet unrecorded states of mind or being.

He is Faust, surely.

We retreat from the so-called sciences and go backward or go forward into alchemy. He said, I was impatient with him. He was turning a heavy seal-ring on his finger.

I said that I could not lose him, I had had his books before I met him and would have them again when I left Vienna. There is a formula for Time that has not yet been computed.

7

March 9

I dream of a Cathedral. I walk through Stephens dom almost daily and, as well, I had been interested in some pictures of Chartres that I had seen in one of the café’s illustrated papers. Two boys are with me in this dream, the older one was showing me around, I felt the little one was de trop. I had for some reason tipped the big one, now I must give something to the little one. This annoyed me. (I had been concerned the day before as to the exact tip to give the two page-boys in the hotel.)

I seem to have lost the big boy, so I regretfully annex the smaller.

My two brothers? Or my father and his attractive older brother? My older brother and my father’s older brother were both lost in the wars.

The boys in the dream are not recognizably the hotel page-boys. They are ghosts. They are, that is, “ghosting” for another or others; when the ghosts take form as brothers or as uncle-father, it will no doubt be seen that they again are ghosting. Or rather if we pursue the dream content, the intermediate ghosts, should they manifest, would be seen to be a step between brothers or uncle-father. We are all haunted houses.

It is really the Cathedral that is all-important. Inside the Cathedral we find regeneration or reintegration. This room is the Cathedral.

The Professor said, “But you are very clever.” It is not I who am clever. I am only applying certain of his own findings to my personal equation. The house is home, the house is the Cathedral. He said he wanted me to feel at home here.

The house in some indescribable way depends on father-mother. At the point of integration or regeneration, there is no conflict over rival loyalties. The Professor’s surroundings and interests seem to derive from my mother rather than from my father, and yet to say the “transference” is to Freud as mother does not altogether satisfy me. He had said, “And — I must tell you (you were frank with me and I will be frank with you), I do not like to be the mother in transference — it always surprises and shocks me a little. I feel so very masculine.” I asked him if others had what he called this mother-transference on him. He said ironically and I thought a little wistfully, “O, very many.”

But now he said he would show me a little new toy. He is delighted with a Coptic clay figure, sent him by a former student. The little image is startlingly like Yofi. Yofi sits as usual on the floor, emblematic, heraldic. The little clay dog looks like Yofi and I cannot help wondering if the donor of the figure on the shelf opposite the couch had noted the striking resemblance of this Etruscan image, with the pointed beard and the thin etched smile, to our Professor.

Today there are red tulips on the famous table with the row or semicircle, Osiris, Isis, Athené, and the others, with the ivory Vishnu in the center.

The Professor has gone into the other room to find another dog to show me. He brings back a broken wooden dog. It is a toy from a tomb in Egypt.

I tell him the only Egyptian dog I remember is one in the Louvre; was the jackal on the standard a dog? The only Egyptian dog that I remember was exactly like his daughter Anna’s Wulf.

Yes (I repeated), the Cathedral of my dream was Sigmund Freud. “No,” he said, “not me — but analysis.”

It is, as he had said of my grandfather, “an atmosphere. . ” The gnomes or gargoyles, the Gothic dragons, bird, beast, and fish of the inner and outer motives, the images of saints and heroes all find their replicas or their “ghosts” in this room or in these two rooms.

March 10

I had spoken of my disappointment in Havelock Ellis. He had not been interested in my experience in the Scilly Isles when Bryher took me there, July 1919. It had really been a great shock to me as I had visualized Dr. Ellis, during the time of writing my Notes on Thought and Vision, as a saint as well as a savant. The Professor said he had always wondered why a man so situated and not dependent on outside criticism should spend his enormous energy on a superficial documentation of sex. Now the Professor said he felt from my reactions that his own opinion was not unjustified. He said he had been puzzled. “He records so many funny things that people do but never seems to want to know why they do them. You see I lose him a little, but I always thought there was something immature about his Psychology of Sex.”

I had a dream about my little bottle of smelling-salts, the tell-tale transference symbol. In my dream, I am salting my typewriter. So I presume I would salt my savorless writing with the salt of the earth, Sigmund Freud’s least utterance.

I have tried to write the story or the novel of my war experience, my first, still-born child and the second, born so fortunately with Leo rising in the vernal equinox, Aries or the Ram. I have rewritten this story and others that “ghosted” for it, as in the case of Pilate’s Wife and Hedylus, both historical or classic reconstructions. Hedylus had the usual succès d’estime that had followed the publication of Heliodora, a short volume of poetry, and Palimpsest, a rather loosely written long-short-story volume. I feel, too, that the latest volume, Red Roses for Bronze, is not altogether satisfactory. I have never been completely satisfied with any of my books, published or unpublished.

Little things, seemingly unimportant, take precedence. I remember how the Professor said that you never know until the analysis is over what is important and what is unimportant. With my memories of Chartres, I recall an illustration in the same paper of a child at a birthday party. It was not an attractive picture, the child was devouring a cream-cake with the cream oozing out onto its frock or pinafore. But children don’t wear pinafores nowadays, do they? Birthday memories come back.

My books are not so much still-born as born from the detached intellect. Someone spoke of Hedylus as being “hallucinated writing.”

Yet if I become more “human” I seem to lose my sense of direction, or my prose style. The poetry is another matter. Yes, the poems are satisfactory but unlike most poets of my acquaintance (and I have known many) I am no longer interested in a poem once it is written, projected, or materialized. There is a feeling that it is only a part of myself there.

Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that I lost the early companions of my first writing-period in London, you might say of my “success,” small and rather specialized as it was. I was rather annoyed with the Professor in one of his volumes. He said (as I remember) that women did not creatively amount to anything or amount to much, unless they had a male counterpart or a male companion from whom they drew their inspiration. Perhaps he is right and my dream of “salting” my typewriter with the tell-tale transference symbol is further proof of his infallibility.

There were the two chief companions, as there were in the Cathedral dream. Richard Aldington and D. H. Lawrence had both seemed to like my writing. But I was unhappily separated from Aldington and it was impossible at that time to continue my friendship with Lawrence.

But Lawrence returns after his death, though I have not had the courage or the strength to realize this fully.

Lawrence came back with The Man Who Died. Whether or not he meant me as the priestess of Isis in that book does not alter the fact that his last book reconciled me to him. Isis is incomplete without Osiris, Judy is meaningless without Punch.

I am certain that I never mentioned Lawrence in my three months’ preliminary work with Mary Chadwick at Tavistock Square, in Bloomsbury. I felt that Miss Chadwick could not follow the workings of my creative mind. Talking this over with Dr. Hanns Sachs in Berlin, winter 1931, he agreed that it would be better to continue the work, if possible with a man and preferably one superior to myself. “The Professor?” he asked me. Of course, I would work with the Professor if he would take me.

Curiously in fantasy I think of a tiger. Myself as a tiger? This tiger may pounce out. Suppose it should attack the frail and delicate old Professor? Do I fear my own terrors of the present situation, the lurking “beast” may or might destroy him? I mention this tiger as a past nursery fantasy. Suppose it should actually materialize? The Professor says, “I have my protector.”

He indicates Yofi, the little lioness curled at his feet.

Protector?

I remember the mob scene outside Buckingham Palace, August 4, 1914.

March 11, 9:10 A.M.

I had a dream of an old mirror. The original was set in velvet; sprays of goldenrod were painted on it. I had particularly admired this early creation of my mother’s, but the mirror had been banished from downstairs when we moved from Bethlehem, and hung in a small room upstairs at the Flower Observatory house outside Philadelphia. In my dream the long-vanished mirror reappears in our flat at Riant Château, Territet, where my mother had stayed with us in the twenties. I am very happy with this mirror and touched that my mother should have brought it with her from America.

I re-examine the mirror; there are other flowers but I can only recall the narcissus, some association possibly with the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection in a pool.

Perhaps the books I last wrote of were too self-centered or “narcissistic” to satisfy my heart. I want a fusion or a transfusion of my mother’s art. Though she discarded the velvet with the realistic sprays of goldenrod and other treasures of the same period, there is nothing of da Vinci’s nor of Dürer’s that can now fire my very entrails with adoration as did those apple-blossoms, daisies, hare-bells, wild roses on her set of “wedding plates.” It is true, there was a bowl that she brought back from Dresden, from her honeymoon, painted with tulips and other flowers, that I admired almost as much.

Here is the catch. It is easy enough to discard out-moded fashions. The critical faculty can guide and direct us but it is not easy to be critical and at the same time recapture the flame that glowed with unreserved abandon.

The glow returns in the dream. I am happy reviewing my dream and making these notes of them. To continue this last dream, Frances Josepha appears; she with her mother sailed with me in the summer of 1911, on my (and their) first trip to Europe. She was a few years older and we were at that time taken for sisters. Frances found new friends and circumstances separated us. She came in my dream and said, “Do you remember. . so-and-so. . and so-and-so. .?”— as if to hurt or humiliate me. I say, “Nothing I remember matters now except in relation to my telling it or not telling it to Freud.” In my dreams, it seems to me that there is no argument or counterargument to spoil my delight in this word Freud. The Professor has himself pointed out the correspondence of his name Freud with the German Freude or joy.

I had known Ezra Pound in America at the same time; now Ezra comes as if to join forces with Frances. He says ironically, “Since when have you been so happy as this — since yesterday?”

They seemed banded against me; so many people had tried to break my faith. I said to Ezra, “I couldn’t believe Freud would take me — and I am going now every day.” Bryher seems to appear, as she did in actual life, to take the place of Frances. We discuss someone — who? Perhaps it was Ezra or it may possibly have been Lawrence, whose fiery diatribes sometimes reminded me of the early Ezra. In my dream, the Professor restores my faith. “If I had known Ezra, I could have made him all right,” he says.

In my dream I suddenly associate the Professor’s semicircle of little images with bottles. I remembered how, when he returned my smelling-salts, he said that he believed “this belongs to you — a little green bottle?”

When I told the Professor that I had been infatuated with Frances Josepha and might have been happy with her, he said, “No — biologically, no.” For some reason, though I had been so happy with the Professor (Freud — Freude), my head hurt and I felt unnerved. Perhaps it was because at the end I tried to tell him of one special air-raid when the windows of our room in Mecklenburgh Square were shattered.

8

6:30

The Professor had said, when I told him of Frances and Ezra and their apparent lack of sympathy or understanding of my delight in the analysis, that I was escaping from unwonted memories or putting them aside; he said I was leaving the situation or the solution to psychoanalysis.

For the time being, I leave my conflicts, trusting they will be solved or resolved in the dream.

In the dream we wander along the Nile in Egypt or the Lehigh or the Delaware Rivers in Pennsylvania, or we find some portion of the “lost” home or the “lost” love by the Danube, the Thames, or Tiber. The dream in that sense is itself Osiris, the world beyond, death or the world across the threshold of waking life, sleep. We do not always know when we are dreaming.

I tried to outline several experiences I had had on my first trip to Greece. I have tried to write of these experiences. I fact, it is the fear of losing them, forgetting them, or just giving them up as neurotic fantasies, residue of the war, confinement and the epidemic, that drives me on to begin again and again a fresh outline of the “novel.” It is obviously Penelope’s web that I am weaving.

I can decide that my experiences were the logical outcome of illness, separation from my husband, and loss of the friendship of Lawrence; but even so I have no technique with which to deal with the vision. It was as if a curtain had dropped, what Stephen Guest once referred to as an “asbestos curtain” between the ten years of my life away from America, and the then (spring 1920) present. I had sailed from New York, as I remember in summer 1911, but I believe I met Frances the year before, 1910, the comet-year.

The first decade of my adventure opened with the Argo, Floride, a small French-line steamer, sailing for Havre. The second decade of my adventure with the Argo, Borodino, a boat belonging to “one of the lines,” Bryher’s phrase for her father’s shipping. The third decade of my cruise or quest may be said to have begun in London with my decision to undertake a serious course of psychoanalysis, for my own immediate benefit and also to fortify me for the future.

We cruised about my childhood. Miss Chadwick was most helpful. She could not follow the later developments. We cruised back and forth, Switzerland and a short visit to Berlin. Dr. Sachs was going on to see his family in Vienna so I preceded him there, via Prague. I had only a few talks with Dr. Sachs in Vienna, but it was there I decided that the best thing, if possible, was to work direct with the Professor. Sorting books, manuscripts, note-books, I felt as if I were indeed making ready for a last voyage out. But in the general house-cleaning, I did not get on any further with the “novel,” though I could not bring myself to destroy the last rough copies. There it is hanging over me, that “novel.” The man on the Borodino, a certain Mr. Van Eck (we will call him for convenience) was a man on the Borodino, but the Man was not Mr. Van Eck.

I did not encounter him often. We were three weeks at sea, that is counting time put in at Malta and Gibraltar. There was a terrific storm, there had been nearly a gale crossing the Atlantic that first time, but it amounted to more than a gale if you take into consideration the size and condition of the Floride, then on its last crossing. The Borodino was more than seaworthy, it was metal-lined, had been used as a mailship in the navy during the war. It had been selected for us for this reason by Bryher’s father. There were still floating mines everywhere.

I tell the Professor in detail of how I met the Man who was not Mr. Van Eck. It is true I thought he was Mr. Van Eck but there was a catch. I knew that from the beginning. Mr. Van Eck had a startling heavy scar above his left eyebrow; it was noted in his passport, under any noticeable marks. The captain I remember spoke of it. The Man on the boat had no scar above his left eyebrow.

So far, so good.

I have written or so often tried to write of my experience of the Man on the boat that it is not difficult to tell the story to the Professor. The chief “meeting” was in February, a few days out from the port of London. There had been rough weather and I was told that the Bay (I had not heard the Bay of Biscay referred to as the Bay before) was always rough, anyway. I had been trudging round the deck with Bryher and Dr. Ellis, who was with us. I wore an old blue jacket, a beret as they now call our old tam-o’-shanter, and low deck-shoes. The costume is homely but suitable to the occasion and as I slip and slide on my unusually sea-worthy legs, I am indeed in a new element. I am in an old element too; I am adolescent and a fresh strength has come to me even in these few days at sea, out from London.

I could not have invented a costume that would have been more suitable, that would better have expressed my state of renewed girlhood or youth. I was surprised that the deck was completely deserted and that the wind had fallen. It was, by clock time, before dinner as I had gone to the stateroom to change as usual. Perhaps in the stateroom I had thrown myself down on my bunk to rest for a few minutes before undertaking the arduous task of unearthing fresh clothes from the suitcase. It was a small cabin but the best on the boat. But the boat was not officially a traveling vessel. There had been double rows of partitioned bunks run up, one imagined, for convenience of the few travelers taken on as a special privilege (at that time, sailing accommodations had to be booked months or even years in advance). There was, as I remember, perhaps one hook on the door. In any case, it was very rough. Perhaps I had thrown myself down on the bunk for a few minutes’ rest before changing.

Perhaps I was there in the bunk, normally resting, when I climbed the now level flight of steps to the upper deck. Well, it was quiet. But the fresh air was stimulating, a fresh tang, a fresh taste though it had all been a sort of breath of resurrection anyway, since we sailed down the river on that late afternoon of early February 1920.

Still the deck was, considering all things, in some special way swept you might say and garnished. There were no odd deck chairs about, no boy stooping to rescue cushions or assemble forgotten rugs. To be sure, there had not been many people on deck when we had parted with Dr. Ellis, that few minutes ago.

Perhaps it was more than a few minutes, but we were crossing something, “the line”? What line? We were coasting along in the Bay, along the shore of Europe, but Europe was out of sight, to one’s left as one faced the prow. I had laughed at Dr. Ellis with his inherited ship-captain language, starboard, larboard, though as a school-girl I had been meticulous enough myself and knew my port and starboard, hard alee and all the rest. All that had left me. I was satisfied with right and left, front and back. “Shall we go forward?” Bryher would say. Well — shall we go forward?

The wind must have fallen very suddenly. Perhaps too, here nearing Portugal, the night would come with that un-Nordic balm and suavity that I sometimes missed in the close sky of winter England. Anyway, there was a violet light over the sea.

I must get Bryher, I thought; Bryher must not miss this, but as I am about to turn back I see Mr. Van Eck standing by the deck rail, to my right, as I stand there at the head of the ship stairs.

Well — he sees me. I must at least say good-evening. I notice to my surprise that he is somewhat taller than myself. I had not thought he was quite so tall, though he stood a good military height, with broad shoulders, rather square in build though not over-heavy. He is taller than I thought him. I must not stare at Mr. Van Eck. I am always afraid he will catch my eyes focused, in some sort of uncontrollable fascination, on that curious deep scar over his left eyebrow. All the same, one cannot in decency not meet the eyes of the person one is greeting. His eyes are uncovered; Mr. Van Eck wore thick-rimmed glasses.

His eyes are more blue than I had thought, it is mist-blue, sea-blue.

His hair at his temples is not so thin as I had imagined. Mr. Van Eck had told me he was forty-four or would be on the 1oth of March. I am September 10, so we were, as the astrological charts show, not in opposition, the Fishes being opposite Virgo. But we are in the straight line of affinity. I did not tell him the date of my birthday, but I worked it out; I was thirty-three, and when Peter Van Eck was forty-four in March, I would still be thirty-three until the following September.

He is taller. He is older — no, he must be younger. It is near evening, it is this strange light. But the light is not strange.

One cannot stare. But it is certain the scar is not there.

On his right as he stands now facing me, there is the coast of Europe — Portugal? On his right as he stands there, there is an indented coastline. “Land,” I said. I did not in my thought realize that land, were there land, would be on the other side of the boat. Or had the boat turned round? Or were these some off-lying islands of which I in my ignorance knew nothing? There were dolphins.

Yes, there were dolphins. But there had been talk of dolphins, sea-pigs someone called them, perhaps the engineer on his way to Euboea, who sat next to Dr. Ellis at table. The four of us sat, right, left: Bryher and myself were next to the captain at the one long table. Next to Bryher was Dr. Ellis; to my left at table was Mr. Van Eck.

The dolphins are joined by other dolphins; they make a curiously unconvincing pattern, leaping in rhythmic order like crescent moons or half-moons out of the water, a flight or a dance of dolphins. Yet, they are dolphins. Didn’t the engineer on the way to Euboea say he had been looking for a sea-pig?

We are in March, Pisces, the Fishes, but I don’t think I thought that.

I don’t know what I thought. I thought, Mr. Van Eck for some reason (perhaps he is a secret agent) “makes up.” Could he rub in or put on that scar? Well, perhaps it wasn’t Mr. Van Eck who “made up” as a secret agent; perhaps the secret agent made up as Mr. Van Eck.

No, I did not know this, think all of this out, at that exact moment, in February. Yes, it was February. It was not yet March; February is Aquarius, the house of friends. .

March 13

The Professor said he was curious to see how the story would proceed, now we had the frame.

I too was curious. If the Professor could not solve my problem, no one could. I told him how the first evening out I was very upset as I had on my left a deaf old Canadian lady who was on her way to Athens to visit a niece who had married a Greek lawyer. I am particularly unhappy when I have to raise my voice in speaking and I visualized having to carry on polite table talk in this strained and unnatural manner, the whole voyage out. Even so, it would not have mattered so much if the whole table had not appeared to stop their buzz of conversation every time I lifted my voice to make some inane remark or in politeness tried my best to answer noncommittally when the old lady asked me about my plans and why was I on this boat and how had I managed to get on it?

I had not then distinguished the Alexandrian family, or I did not know that they were on the way to Alexandria — “Alex” the big boy called it. It was “Alex” and “Gib” too, with the engineer and a missionary (I later gathered) who sat within, as it were, hailing distance. But neither the missionary nor the Alexandrian tobacco merchant (as I afterwards found he was) nor the engineer bound for Euboea helped me in the least in my predicament.

It seemed a miracle, after two nights in this anguish, to find I had another companion.

It was Mr. Van Eck. I don’t know how he got there. The old lady, it is true, had retired to her cabin for the rest of the trip. I suppose seasoned travelers, as all these seemed to be, know how to arrange these things. To me it was little less than a miracle to find, the third day, instead of the deaf old lady, a sympathetic, slightly middle-aged man-of-the-world, easy and affable, making witty remarks sotto voce about our fellow passengers.

I was fascinated with Peter Van Eck. He had traveled widely, had lived in Greece for some time, had worked on excavations in Crete, was an architect by profession and he said an artist by choice but he had had little choice in the matter. He had been in Egypt at one time, helping to restore some Caliph’s or Khedive’s shrine or tomb. These words were new to me. He said something was “Khedival” to Bryher across the table; I don’t remember what. I only remember hearing the word for the first time.

But I had my reservations. An asbestos curtain had dropped between me and my past, my not-so-far-past bitter severance from love and friendship.

I repeated, “We were three weeks on the way.” The Professor said, “So-o slow?”

We ran away from Dr. Ellis at Algeciras and went with Mr. Van Eck for a walk through a cork forest; the ground was starry with February narcissus. This was Mr. Van Eck, it was not the Man on the boat, but I had then neither the wit, the temerity, nor the courage to work this all out. If Mr. Van Eck was the Man on the boat, then I lost something. If Mr. Van Eck was not the Man on the boat, then I lost something. I don’t know why, but at Malta I told Bryher that I did not want the four of us to drive out to the old town as Mr. Van Eck suggested. I think I wanted to be alone with Bryher, to think out something that I did not question, or that I did not put into a question. To answer the question meant loss of one or the other, Mr. Van Eck or the Man on the boat.

Sometimes Mr. Van Eck was the Man on the boat but he was not the Man on the boat that I met the first time in the Bay. I should have known. I did know, though I could not yet admit it, that not only were the dolphins unconvincing but the sea itself was impossible. That is, it was all right at the time but you do not have a quiet sea and a boat moving with no tremor, with no quiver or pulse of engine, on a sea that is level yet broken in a thousand perfectly peaked wavelets like the waves in the background of a Botticelli. No, it was all wrong.

Yet it was so supremely natural that I turned to Mr. Van Eck, at the table. “It was beautiful watching the dolphins,” I said. “If only Bryher had been with us.” Bryher said, I thought a little sullenly, “Where were you anyway?” I said, “I was on deck. I dashed up for a breath of air and to see the sunset. I was on deck watching the dolphins with Mr. Van Eck.” I turned to Mr. Van Eck for confirmation.

He smiled at Bryher across the table. He had an engaging manner. The captain said, “Dolphins? The wireless-operator is our dolphin expert. He reported no dolphins.” “But there were dolphins.” I turned to Mr. Van Eck again for confirmation. “Which way were they swimming?” said the captain. I indicated above the table the direction of the frieze of flying dolphins. “They were swimming this way,” I said, indicating a line “forward,” past Mr. Van Eck down the table. “That’s right,” said the captain, “that’s how they would be swimming. They swim with the wind. I must ask the wireless-operator.”

But now I said to the Professor, “Where was I, if Bryher couldn’t find me?”

Perhaps this is an old conundrum. Perhaps there is no answer to it or it may be dangerous to ask it, for the wrong answer (as with the Sphinx in Egypt) may bring death. At least, I could record the details of my experience, could note them down, could weave and re-weave the threads, the tapestry on this frame. It did not really matter where I was. Perhaps it was a story like the erlking. Perhaps, as is more likely, it was a story like Algernon Blackwood’s Centaur.

I had read The Centaur a number of times, first in America. There was that same theme, that same absolute and exact minute when everything changed on a small passenger boat (as I remember) on the way to Greece. At an exact moment, the boat slipped into enchantment. So here, at an exact moment, by clock time, on an exact map, on the way to the Pillars of Hercules, on a boat that was bound for the port of Athens, there was a “crossing the line.” I think in The Centaur, the narrator or hero knew the minute, the second that the line was crossed. I, the narrator of this story, did not know I had crossed the line.

When I did realize it, it was too late, I could not approach Mr. Van Eck. He was on his way to Delhi.

Delhi, Delphi?

They arrange things that way, I suppose. If I had realized the story at the time of our parting in Athens, perhaps there would have been no parting. In which case, I would have lost the story.

At that table in the long salon, names were batted about to and fro, up and down, like old-fashioned table-tennis balls. London, Gibraltar, Algeciras, Malta, Athens, Delhi, Alexandria, Cairo. . I said to Mr. Van Eck that last morning at breakfast, “I suppose I’ll run across you in one of the capitals of Europe.” I did not want to make any definite arrangement for meeting him in Athens. “I’ll meet you in the Propylae,” he said.

Bryher and I met him in the Propylae with Dr. Ellis. But he let us go on alone through the gates, to the Parthenon.

8 P.M.

I feel limp and frustrated. I was annoyed at the end of my session as Yofi would wander about and I felt that the Professor was more interested in Yofi than he was in my story. I was annoyed because I heard someone laughing outside the door. I seldom hear or register what is going on in the waiting room or the hall. The Professor said, “So the memories are faded?” Perhaps he felt that I was really trying too hard to make a dramatic sequence of this story that was all “an atmosphere. . ”

I snapped at him rather, “No — not faded.”

The Professor asked me if I had seen this man again. I said, “Twice in London.” Perhaps the tone of my voice conveyed to him what I felt. Mr. Van Eck in London was not the Man on the boat.

March 14, 2:40 P.M.

A familiar nightmare last night. I was in one hotel or pension, Bryher and my mother were in another. I return to my room to find an irate landlady has removed all my clothes and belongings to another room, without consulting me. I am annoyed but in my dream too frightened to be other than polite. There are several children playing about. The children are indifferent but apparently not inimical. The landlady glares at me, “But we have no room here; you must get right out.”

I manage somehow to get my clothes, I am overburdened with them and with a number of awkward packages but I manage finally to reach Bryher and my mother. We are in Florence along the Arno but the Arno is only a riverbed with a few footprints. My mother says, “You are only safe on this side of the river.”

I am still overburdened and lost. My mother died just six years ago, in March. We had stayed in a hotel in Florence, Lungarno, along the Arno. I had first visited Florence in 1912 with both my parents. At this time too, fourteen years ago, I was waiting for the arrival of my child. I had been taken with what the Professor called the epidemic, in a pension in Ealing waiting to go into Saint Faith’s Nursing Home. There had been death in the house. Afterwards, I learned how shocked Bryher had been when she came to see me. The landlady had said, “But who is to see to the funeral if she dies?”

The dream content is commonplace. But I wake with heartache — heartache, yes, in the conventional romantic sense, and heartache or actual physical pain that frightens me.

I recover over my breakfast tray, Vienna coffee and rolls, and I go out and get the Sigmund Freud engraving that I had ordered a few days ago in the shop on the Ringstrasse.

9

7 P.M.

I told the Professor of the shock after my nightmare, as of a blow on my heart. He asked first of Van Eck — was it an Austrian name? He said, “I have an idea.” He rushed off and brought back a leather case, and showed me the name, stamped inside the folder. It was Vaneck.

He was interested to hear that Mr. Van Eck was the adopted son of the Victorian painter. He asked of the nationality. I explained that I thought it was a nom-de-guerre; they were a Dutch family, settled in London. I said painting reminded me of my mother. I told him how as children we had admired her painting and boasted to visitors, “My mother painted that.” My mother was morbidly self-effacing.

I went on to say how difficult it had been to reassemble the story of Peter Van Eck, when after all it was a conventional meeting or voyage-out romance. The Professor asked me to interpret my dream of the two rooms in the hotel or pension. I told him I thought it was fear of being moved, at the time of my pregnancy; perhaps it was fear of death. He asked me for more “historical detail.” I told him of various incidents during the war years when I had stayed in small rooms to be near my husband at his various training units. How difficult it was to get in anywhere at that time and of how once, coming from Buckinghamshire to see the doctor and being caught late in the fog, I had to find a room for the night. Wandering around Bloomsbury, a perfect stranger spoke to me. “I have a room you can have,” he said. It seemed impossible, but he opened one of those green doors in a row of green doors and introduced me to the landlady. “This lady is taking my room for the night,” he said. This did happen. Telling it, it seems part of a dream.

The Professor said, “But I know who the bad landlady is.” I asked innocently, “Who?” He said, “Myself.” I repudiated this and then remembered how upset I had been with Mary Chadwick of Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, when she said at the end of our three months’ session, “You do like to talk, don’t you?” I told this to the Professor; he said, “But Miss Chadwick and your work with her is only a forerunner of myself.” I said, “No. She was a competent nurse, but not a doctor.”

The Professor said, there must be other “historical data” to do with my fear of being turned out. Yes, there were many actual associations. I remembered once, staying in Rome with my parents, running up to my room after a tired day’s excursion and finding the cupboard empty and nothing belonging to me on the dressing table. I had been moved downstairs to another bedroom. It was not the annoyance of not being consulted that so much concerned me as the shock of rushing upstairs and finding my clothes, shoes, and so on had disappeared mysteriously. I tell the Professor that when I go back to my room at the Regina, I seem to brace myself before unlocking the door, lest I find I have been moved out. I am reminded of the hotels we stayed in, in Florence, Rome, and Naples. I feel here that I am in an Italian or near-Italian city.

3:30 P.M.

Now having my early tea, I remember how the Professor asked me why I was so happy to have the hour 5 P.M. for my sessions. I told him how I had associated my happiest memories of early London with the inevitable four o’clock or five o’clock tea and that here I could dream over my note-book, preparing myself for the happiness of talking with him afterwards. He said again that he did not want me to prepare. I could not explain adequately that I did not. He does not, apparently, want me to take notes, but I must do that.

I remember how happy I was with the children across the street, playing at tea parties. We had our intermediate set of dishes for these occasions. My mother got me a set as I was so excited about the Williams’ “real tea set.” It was intermediate between the grown-ups and the dolls.

I think it was my seventh birthday that my mother got me this set. There was a gilt edge to the cups and saucers and the bread-and-butter-sized plates. There were knots of violets.

10

6:40 P.M.

The Professor found me reading in the waiting room. He said that I must borrow any books of his that I wanted. We talked again of Yofi. I asked of Yofi’s father. Yofi is to be a mother. He told me that Yofi’s first husband was a black chow and Yofi had one black baby, “as black as the devil.” It died when it was three-quarters of a year old. Now the new father is lion-gold and the Professor hopes that Yofi’s children will survive, this time. He said, if there are two puppies, the father’s people have one, but if only one, “it stays a Freud.”

The Professor asked me if I had noticed “trouble in walking.” I did not know what he meant. I said I was feeling well and enjoyed going about. But he said, “I mean, on the streets.” I did not even then quite realize what he meant; I said that I felt at home here and never frightened. I said, “The people in the shops are so courteous.” The Professor said, “Yes. . to a lady.”

The Professor asked me again of “historical associations” of moving or being moved. I told him of some of my findings.

I said that there were no doubt infantile associations about “leaving the room” or being sent out of the room because one had been naughty. He said, “Yes, the infantile memory or association is often unhappy.”

But leaving home was not always an unhappy matter. I was sent to stay with a young childless aunt at one time, and will never forget the giant rag doll, a treasure from her childhood that she gave me to play with. She it was who first gave me little gauze bags of assorted beads and helped me to string them. I had had a dream with Miss Chadwick that my uncle’s name was Vaneck; it was really Frederick.

I spoke again of our toy animals and he reminded me of my tiger fantasy. Wasn’t there a story, “the woman and the tiger,” he asked. I remembered “The Lady or the Tiger.”

Today, I entered my third week.

11

March 16, 7 P.M.

I saw a volume of Arthur Waley’s on the shelf, and asked the Professor if he knew him. He said no. I started to tell the Professor how I had met Waley in London in the very early days, at the British Museum where I was reading and how he asked me to tea in the Museum Tea Room. We discussed an umbrella I was carrying, en-tout-cas they had called it, at the shop, to my amusement. Later, during the war, I met Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s flat in Chelsea. I said I thought Waley was a Jew, Freud said he thought so, but “he has tampered with his name.”

I went on to tell Freud why I had kept away from psychoanalysis in London, had read practically nothing until recent years, how Waley in our Buckingham Mansions, Kensington, flat, about 1920, had suggested that a friend of his might help Bryher, how Dr. Ellis discouraged it, but how finally Bryher went for a few sessions to_____.

(At this moment, writing on a marble-topped café table, a tiny bunch of violets is placed on my note-book. I want to cry. In my embarrassment, I only gave thirty groschen; but the beggar with the shoe-box seemed pleased and vanished. In the same way, violets were laid on the pages of a paperbound copy of Euripides’ Ion, open on the table of my Corfu Hotel Belle Venise bedroom. It seemed a “mystery” but Bryher must have left them.)

I went on to tell how I parted from Van Eck, in the drawing room of the Hotel Grand Bretagne in Athens. I said I was frozen.

Dr. Ellis, who was with us on the boat but in another hotel in Athens, went back to London after a few weeks. How cold it was — wind from Siberia — there was a stove in the corner of our elegant drawing room, everything was ormolu and gilded mirror frames — no sticks, no coal. Spanish influenza was raging there again.

Freud asked if Bryher had had it. Not dangerously, I explained. One of her father’s business associates there suggested that we leave Athens. We went up the Gulf of Corinth on the advice of this Mr. Crowe. In the night we stopped at Itea, below the landing or port for Delphi.

I tell the Professor how happy I was at Corfu — flowers, spring, orange trees, lead-pencil cypresses, Mouse Island or Böcklein’s Toteninsel. I told him of Bryher’s care of me, our walks and drives, and said the friendship seemed to have adjusted me to normal conditions of life. Freud qualified, “Not normal, so much as ideal.”

He wanted to know of the pictures, that I called Writing on the Wall, but the time was almost up so I simply stated that Van Eck all this time was in my mind. Bryher knew of this. The Professor said the problem was more subtle, more intricate than he had first imagined.

He said he did not wish me to prepare for my sessions with him. I said I did not. I spoke of my delight in the idea of resolving old problems.

When I told him of the Scilly Isles experience, the transcendental feeling of the two globes or the two transparent half-globes enclosing me, I said I supposed it was some form of prenatal fantasy. Freud said, “Yes, obviously; you have found the answer, good — good.”

March 17, 2:25 P.M.

Had strange dream of huge blackbirds. (Mr. Crowe of yesterday?) They peck or bite at my ankles with their great beaks. I am terrified. In some way, I am rescued by a youth or young man, and the polished black beaks of the birds turn to ebony anklets above my bare feet.

A friend of my school-days comes. She is looking for rooms. Rooms again. There is a confused sequence of a house or mansion with many rooms — my father’s house? I like Matilda and am glad to see her — but there is the old predicament! Will she interfere with my room or rooms? Is this a birth-anxiety? Bryher writes of joining me here later, with my daughter.

6:40 P.M.

The Professor asked me to interpret the dream of the blackbirds.

Freud said the man in the dream had given me womanhood, so he charmed the birds.

12

6:40 P.M.

Today I told the Professor of the picture-writing, or the Writing on the Wall as I called it. He wanted to know particulars of the exact size of the projected pictures that I saw in the bed-room of the Hotel Belle Venise in Corfu, the actual time it took for the series to materialize, what time of day was it? I looked round the room and found what I was looking for; on one of his Greek vases there was an image of Victory, or the Niké as I called her, of the picture sequence. I said, “Ah, there she is.”

The Professor and I went over to the glass case. Some of the pictures as I saw and described them might have been Greek vase silhouettes.

7:40 P.M.

I had taken a photograph of Bryher to show the Professor. He said it might have been a page in an Italian fresco.

The Professor said, “She is only a boy.” Then he said, “It is very clear.” Of another photograph, he said, “She looks like an Arctic explorer.” He liked another snapshot of my daughter with Bryher on the terrace of the house at La Tour. I told the Professor that they both might be coming later to Vienna. He said, “I would so like to see them.” This made me very happy.

He said Bryher’s letters were “very kind, very pliable,” though she herself looked in the pictures “so decisive, so unyielding.” I told him how staunch Bryher had been and loyal, and how she arranged everything on our numerous journeys. When I told him of the Writing on the Wall he asked me if I was frightened. I said I was not, but I was afraid that Bryher was frightened for me. He asked again about the lighting of the room, of possible reflections or shadows. I described the room again, the communicating door, the door out to the hall and the one window. He asked if it was a French window. I said, “No — one like that,” indicating the one window in his room.

8:10 P.M.

I sit in the Café Victoria, on a cushioned corner-bench, under an immense chandelier. I think of Venice when I look at the reflecting glass crystals.

March 18, 10:40 A.M.

I dream of my young mother. We are on the porch of our first house at Bethlehem. My brother is only a year younger, but I feel immensely superior as I watch him crawl over the floor. He creeps, crawls, or walks very swiftly on all four legs. I think he is very clever, this “little dog.” I try to indicate this to my mother. She says, “But he will get his arms dirty and spoil his dress.” The baby dodges into the open hall door. I say to my mother, very wise and tolerant, “But what does it matter? It is good for him to crawl about, it will make a difference to his whole life, it will strengthen his back, his arms, and legs.” He crawls out of the house again and I stand him on his feet and fling my arms about him in a delirium of devotion.

I connect this dream with the Professor’s remark about Bryher, “She is only a boy,” and with the fact that Bryher writes of coming with my child to visit me here in Vienna.

I had a later dream. Bryher’s pet name for Dr. Hanns Sachs is “the turtle.” A friend, an American resident in England, turns up here for some odd reason. The turtle-pond is high up in the hills, Switzerland, no doubt. I myself confront George Plank by this turtle-pond, bearing proudly a hen’s egg. There is a woman writing. She says, “You girls — you show off in your Elizabethan doublets.” I have a feeling of vast superiority to George, who is actually an artist and a sympathetic friend. I have a feeling, however, that he would not respond to psychoanalysis, though not inimical as I felt Frances and Ezra to be in the early dream sequence.

4 P.M.

The Professor told me a few days ago that if he lived another fifty years, he would still be fascinated and curious about the vagaries and variations of the human mind or soul.

13

7 P.M.

I was five minutes late as Alice Modern had popped in about 4:30. The Professor met me at once, said my story of the picture-writing or the Writing on the Wall, “has made me think very hard.”

I asked him about the dogs; both go away over the weekend. He does not like cats; he finds monkeys are too near. “We have not the satisfaction of their being like us, nor the satisfaction of their being enemies.”

I told him about the little statues or images in the house that Lawrence had first spoken of in Cornwall. He asked me what the images were? I said that there was a painted Osiris on the shelf; seated at the end was a bronze Isis — there was I thought an egg-shaped mummy-owl.

The Professor said, “Come and see if we can find them.”

We went into the other room; he brought out various treasures from behind the glass doors. We spoke of a Sekmet that he showed me. I told the Professor of the cat-headed image in the little temple off the great temple of Karnak. He was amused to hear of the iron grille they had had to place at the temple entrance, because of the hysterical moonlight visitors. I said that the Arabs held the image in special awe, they were terrified to this day of the cat- or lion-headed goddess.

We looked over the images in one of the other cases; there was a winged Greek figure — tanagra? The Professor brought out a wooden Osiris (or Osiris-like image) blackened by time or else deliberately painted, as if with a sort of tar or pitch. There was another green-blue stone Osiris. The Professor said, “They are called the answerers, as their doubles or ka-s come when called.”

We went back to the couch.

I told him of the scenes or pictures that I myself had conjured up or acted out for Bryher, one of our last evenings in the Belle Venise. Bryher had seemed unhappy or remote; her mood frightened and saddened me. To amuse her, really, I began to act out what I called Indian dance-pictures. There was a girl in the mountains, there was a medicine man seeking for plants in the woods, there was another laughing, singing — our old friend Minnehaha; there were others as well: a Spanish woman, South-Sea Islanders, a Japanese girl, and a young priest from Tibet. The Professor said, “It was a poem-series the acting was drama, half-motivated by desire to comfort Bryher and neither “delirium” nor “magic” I had suggested that this might be some form of possession.

The Professor repeated, “You see, after all, you are a poet.” He dismissed my suggestion of some connection with the old mysteries, magic or second-sight. But he came back to the Writing on the Wall. The drama, as he called it, he said held no secret from him; but the projected pictures, seen in daylight, puzzled him.

He went on with it, could I now with my eyes closed still see the pictures? I said, “Yes, and with my eyes open.” He said this was possibly a “symptom of importance.” I said that I wished I had asked an artist friend to sketch the series for me, so that I could have shown it to him direct. He said that would have been no use. “There would be value in the pictures only if you yourself drew them.”

9:10

We talked a little of ghosts. I wanted to tell him of the many curious legends of Cornwall and of how I myself had heard the famous “knockers” when I was there in 1918. They were believed by the inhabitants to come out of the disused mine-shafts. They are the exact counterpart, though I did not have time to speak of this, of the gnomes or dwarfs of the old German legends. The “knockers,” however, were not ghostly presences, they knocked forcibly, almost violently, and often.

I did tell the Professor of a great-grandmother who heard her son calling to her. She ran out in the garden to meet him (in Pennsylvania). Her son was in the West Indies. It was some time after that news reached them that her son had died at the exact moment she had rushed into the garden to welcome him home.

March 20, Monday

I spent a happy Sunday at the galleries; I found Tiziano Vec., Jacopa da Strada, 1477–1576, and Palma Gioime, 1544–1628, with statues. . and Giov. Batt. Moroni, 1520–1578. One of the paintings of a fine, intellectually weathered renaissance Italian, standing by a table, with small statues, suggested to me the portrait of Sigmund Freud with his row of little images before him on the table.

14

6:40 P.M.

I went up to Mrs. Burlingham’s apartment at 4:20. She was quiet, slim, and pretty in her art-craft simple consulting room or sitting room that Freud’s architect son had decorated for her. Like the Professor, she had a few Greek treasures. Her little grey Bedlingham scurried under the couch but crawled out later to make friends with me. I met her daughter, my own child’s age, and a boy of seventeen. Another child was having a music lesson in the next room. I was a little disconcerted by Mrs. Burlingham’s reserved, shy manner, and her reminding me that I was due at five, downstairs with the Professor.

Then down to Freud. . I told him of the visit. Then I felt a little lost. Perhaps that was partly because of the dream I had last had. I tried desperately to get back to my flat in Sloane Street, London. The flat is at the top of the house. As I enter the downstairs hall, a man and then a rough boy barred my way to the staircase and seemed to threaten me. I did not dare challenge them. . (I could not tell the Professor that this terror was associated in my mind with news of fresh Nazi atrocities.) As I stood threatened and terrified I call, loudly, “Mother.” I am out on the pavement now. I look up at the window of my flat. It has different curtains or a suggestion of Venetian blinds. A figure is standing there, holding a lighted candle. It is my mother.

I was overpowered with happiness and all trace of terror

vanished.

8:20 P.M.

We talked of Crete. I told him how disappointed I was on the cruise last spring. It was too rough to land. There were dolphins playing about the boat, anchored off the rocky shore; there was a permanent rainbow from the sea spray. We saw the chapel high on the slopes where it was reputed Zeus had been born, or nursed. We spoke of Sir Arthur Evans and his work there. The Professor said that we two met in our love of antiquity. He said his little statues and images helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether. I asked if he had a Cretan serpent-goddess. He said, “No.” I said that I had known people in London who had had some connection with Crete at one time, and that I might move heaven and earth, and get him a serpent-goddess. He said, “I doubt if even you could do that.”

The Professor speaks of the mother-layer of fixation being the same in girls and boys, but the girl usually transfers her affection or (if it happens) her fixation to her father. Not always. The Crete mother-goddess is associated with the boy or youth in the wall-painting of the crocus fields. We talk of Aegina too. The Professor went on about the growth of psychoanalysis and how mistakes were made in the beginning, as it was not sufficiently understood that the girl did not invariably transfer her emotions to her father.

He asked, “Was your father a little cold, a little stiff?” I explained again that he was what is known as “typically New England,” though he was one remove from New England, his father having moved to the west. The Professor said he thought my dance-dramas at Corfu were really a sort of display or entertainment for my mother. Did your mother sing to you? I said she had a resonant beautiful voice but that she had some sort of block or repression about singing. Our grandmother loved me to sing to her, old-fashioned hymns for the most part. My older brother and I sang little nursery songs to our mother’s accompaniment. The Professor said this held together. “It will simplify out, even more.” I told him again that my mother died in spring, at this very time, and again I remember that Lawrence died too, in March.

15

March 21, Tuesday

The beautiful engraving that I have of the Professor is propped up on my dressing table. It becomes the “answerer,” like the particular Osiris-image that he showed me.

6:30 P.M.

The Professor was touched with Bryher’s note and her gift to the Society. We talked of the political situation.

There are no frontiers of the spirit.

Yet I am torn by intense emotions of antipathy.

Last night, I had my old train-nightmare. I am going somewhere vaguely undefined with my daughter and Alice, who was at one time her governess. A uniformed official searches our bags. He finds my traveling-flask. Cognac? I attempt no explanation nor apology. The official (“censor,” the Professor?) finds another bottle hidden under the seat. There are more bottles. He collects the lot in an empty suitcase and orders us to follow him.

My daughter and Alice and I are lost somewhere, on some dangerous way, down some steps.

The Professor asked me my association; I said I had no precise association, I was just afraid of being found out. He said, “Maybe, some scruple.” Conscience?

There are so many associations with trains. I recall one in particular when I arrived on the boat train, just after dawn in Paris. My French coffee and rolls at the station buffet were indescribably France. Again, I had got away. Loving England, there was yet, always, that almost hysterical sense of escape, once across the channel. I could even recall the wall-paintings of the Gare — du Nord? Normandy with apple trees, a sea wall and blue sky broken by a foreground of — olives? orange trees? While I was having my coffee in the almost empty buffet, a boy arrived with a huge market basket piled with roses. The manager or waiter selected a handful of roses and laid them by my plate.

Then I remember an incident that preceded the train dream. I am being fitted for a green gown. I stand before a mirror and extend my foot. I wear a beautifully cut classic, yet suitably modern, Greek sandal.

The Professor said, “You tell it so beautifully.”

Before I leave, I fold the silver-grey rug. I have been caterpillar, worm, snug in the chrysalis.

The Professor touches the little bell to warn the maid that this last analysand is about to leave. His elbow concludes its bird-wing dismissing gesture. The Professor says, “We have gone into deep matters.”

They called my father the Professor and my half-brother the young Professor. Our Professor was right, they do not resemble this Viennese Herr Professor Sigmund Freud. He is nearer to the grandfather and that religion, “an atmosphere. . ”

They were North-of-England people. We children were the ninth generation to inherit a quaint English name. Six generations were weathered and shaped by the rock and flint of New England. Our father’s father, the seventh, was lured with that covered wagon generation to the west. His young wife was not happy. They intended to get to California but they settled in Indiana. They began all over again, where the first Puritans of their name had started.

There were still a few Indians in the district. Our grandfather had his law books. Our father helped in the fields but he found plowing difficult. His idea of a straight line was more abstract; he had his father’s Euclid.

They were hunting runaway slaves. Our young father missed the “surge and thunder” of the New England odyssey. He looked to the heavens; mariners steer ships by stars.

He worked with lathe and saw, he was apprenticed to a carpenter. He learned his trade; his thin fingers had a “feel” for pine, tulip-tree, and cedar. His sister Rosa appropriated the Virgil and translated for him. He did not know what he wanted when he picked out, with his far-sighted grey eyes, the ten stars of the Dipper or the eight of Orion’s sword-belt. But he knew this satisfied him. He found Algol.

His brother Alvan was two years older. Alvan called to his brother, loitering as usual, in the darkness. There was a new call from Lincoln. Alvan said, “I’m going.”

Charles went with him.

The younger of the two boys came back. He had no words with which to tell his mother of those last scenes, when she asked him. He had never laughed much. Now he tried to laugh it off, a raw imitation of Alvan’s contagious laughter.

Alvan was dead. He hadn’t been shot through with a bullet. They were rotting. . they were. . it was typhoid. “It was quick,” he told his mother. He tried to remember something from Lincoln’s last speech, he could only remember “a great battlefield of this war,” but it wasn’t a battlefield of war, not of this war. . he knew that his mother felt now that a million free emancipated darkies weren’t worth Alvan. Or didn’t she? It was better not to know what she was thinking. He knew his mother was trying to love him, he had made that effort to come back to tell her. . what he never told her.

He hadn’t got a single reb, he told his father. Celia wished he wouldn’t laugh in that way, so unlike Alvan, she felt he would choke. The elder Charles felt something of it. He asked Celia to fetch the Bible. “Sweeter than honey in the honeycomb,” he read, opening it anywhere. Celia wished the boy wouldn’t stare so. How could he tell his mother of the makeshift camp-hospital. . at the end, there wasn’t anyone left. . He crawled through some trees. He remembered juniper, birch, balm, and hickory. He muttered these clean words under his breath like a prayer. Alvan was dead. He must get back home somehow, to tell them. . “The rebs left just as we got there, the camp —” His father went on reading, “Yea, than much fine gold.”

He was shaken with the after-effects of the malaria and could scarcely stand up. Every time his eyes met Celia’s he saw Alvan. He knew Celia saw Alvan too. Why had he come back? Why did we ever come west, thought Celia. That knocking? It was some friendly neighbor, they were all too friendly. She almost dropped the pan of corncake; it was the thud-thud of a hoe or maybe that colt loose again from the meadow. It might even be the kitchen clock; its tick was so loud she never noticed the clock back home. Slow now, if you stopped to listen. Time was so slow now. She could scream when she saw, through the open window, Charles sprawled out on the porch steps. He couldn’t yet drag his shambling length after the plow.

He had taken his grandfather’s old bubble-watch and laid it on the floorboards. What was he doing, chalking a clock-face round the bubble-watch? A stick was dangling from a string. It was fastened to the hook in the ceiling where Mercy had had her swing. Rosa was off, upstate to learn to be a teacher. Mercy was dead. There was no one here to help her. What was he doing marking along the shadow where the sun fell, with that chalk? Had he gone mad?

How old was Charles now? He was seventeen when he went with Alvan and lied about it, so they took him. Mercy and he had paired off together. Alvan and Rosa. She remembered how she had had to reprove Mercy for sing-songing, when it came her turn for reading.

The Bible was for decorum.

16

March 22, Wednesday, 6:30 P.M.

I gave the Professor Bryher’s books. He seemed rather professional and aloof after using half my session yesterday in gossip. I tell him last night’s dream: hotel, stranger, dark (or in-the-dark) young man in the hall, he passes the open door and sees me. I wear a rose-colored picture-gown or ball-gown. I am pleased that he sees me and pose or sway as if forward to a dance. In a moment, he has caught me, I am lost (found?), we sway together like butterflies. He says, “You do know how to dance.”

Now we go out together but I am in evening-dress, that is, I wear clothes like his. (I had been looking at some new pictures of Marlene Dietrich, in one of the café picture-papers.) I am not quite comfortable, not quite myself, my trouser-band does not fit very well; I realize that I have on, underneath the trousers, my ordinary underclothes, or rather I was wearing the long party-slip that apparently belonged to the ballgown. The dream ends on a note of frustration and bewilderment.

This dream seems to have some association with Ezra; though he danced so badly, I did go to school-girl dances with him. The Professor knew the name, Ezra Pound. He said he had seen an article, but could not pretend to follow it. I told the Professor how Ezra had been more or less “forbidden the house,” and the conflict at that time with my parents.

8:20 P.M.

I feel old. When I told the Professor of a much younger admirer of mine who had flattered and mildly “courted” me, the Professor said, “Was that only two years ago,” as if at my age (forty-six) I should be well over that sort of trifling. But I remembered the novel Wagadoo that Dr. Sachs brought us to read. As I remember, the woman in the book began her analysis at forty-seven. . and she was at that age deeply involved in various love experiences or experiments. But that was French. Vienna, too, develops differently. The Professor seemed to be surprised when I told him that my first serious love-conflict or encounter was with Ezra when I was nineteen; he said then, “As late as nineteen?” Perhaps, this is some technical mannerism or façon de parler.

Ezra and I took long walks; I remember the hepaticas, the spring is late in America, at least compared with England. I was triumphant if I found my first cluster of blue flowers or a frail stalk of wood anemone or bloodroot, the last day or one of the last days of March. To find flowers in March was a great triumph for us there.

I had not time to speak of my dream of the two Japanese-like dwarfs. Their surname is Anemone. (Japanese anemones. . Bryher brought them to me several times a week at St. Faith’s Nursing Home before my child was born; they are associated particularly with that time.) I discuss the dwarfs with my mother and we are both annoyed that they should have that flower-name.

17

March 23, 8:45 P.M.

I started to hold forth on Frazer and The Golden Bough. The Professor waved me to the couch, “More confession?” I said, no, I wanted to go over some of the old ground again. “I will go back to Van Eck, do you remember Van Eck?” He said, “Of course.” I told him that I felt reticent and shy coming back to all this. I told him of the crystal arriving in the State Express Cigarette box and a letter that I received, sent by Van Eck from Alexandria. I was then at Mullion Cove, Cornwall, with Bryher. The box had come to the new furnished flat we had found at Buckingham Mansions, Kensington, the preceding summer. It was the summer before this, July 1919, that we had gone first to the Scilly Isles together. The crystal seemed to carry out my vision or state of transcendental imagination when I had felt myself surrounded, as it were, with the two halves of the bell-jar.

I told the Professor how after some years I had met the cousin of Van Eck, or rather her sister, to whom he had written a letter, enclosed in this Mullion Cove note to me. I presented the letter, or sent it rather with a small book of my poems, but Miss Van Eck never answered. Then, I met her sister in the Hotel Washington, Curzon Street, where I stayed when I went over to London.

I was now under the impression that Van Eck had been a total illusion or figment of my imagination, but when I mentioned him, and his helping Bryher on the boat with her Greek, to the younger Miss Van Eck, she said, “Yes, he always was very good at languages.” So, there actually was a Van Eck and this lady and the elder, whom I had not met, were in fact his cousins.

Now there is a Van Eck. In my Hotel Washington bedroom, I pick up the telephone book. It did not occur to me before this that he might be back in England. But there was the odd distinguished and unusual name. I asked for the number and in no time at all a voice answered. It was a Belsize Park telephone number. The strange voice said, rather curtly I felt, “Do you want Mr. or Mrs. Van Eck?”

This was a great shock to me. I was due to leave for Paris the next day. I managed somehow to get away. I met Bryher there. She said the shock was really a secondary one; that is, she felt I had superimposed it on the first shock of the parting from Aldington before we went to Greece.

But the Van Eck mystery still continues to obsess me. Again in London, from my Sloane Street flat, I consult a telephone book; there is Van Eck again, with another number.

It appears to be a City number, I judge an office. I will be ready now for any shock, but a pleasant young voice answers; he will give my number to Mr. Van Eck when he gets back to the office. Van Eck rings me. He comes to see me. I have other people in, Kenneth and Bryher, a strange girl who was sent to me from New York, a writer of sorts, pretty, in summer frock. This must be Van Eck, but I doubt if I would have known him had we met on the street.

18

March 25

Then I go on with the Van Eck saga. I receive a card, spring 1931, when I am staying near Miss Chadwick in a big room in Tavistock Square. We get the connection with the maternal uncle, the gifted younger musician brother of my mother’s Frederick. . Van Eck.

This card is a notification or invitation to attend the church service at which Mr. Van Eck is to be ordained — I believe that is the word. It seemed an odd volte-face.

However, there was the name, the card, the statement of his new choice of career, the words, Tray for me.”

When I go back to my flat again in Sloane Street, I write again. Mr. Van Eck comes to call, a friend is with me, the Dorothy of the earlier Joan and Dorothy dream.

Now Mr. Van Eck disappears but I am at least informed of his intention. He is going for a time into “retreat” in a High Church or Anglo-Catholic St. Francis of Assisi foundation in Dorset.

The Professor said these details only confirmed him in his first impression, or opinion, that the Van Eck episode or fixation was to be referred back to my mother. The maternal uncle, church, art.

The Professor asked me if I had ever wanted to go on the stage. He said he felt I narrated these incidents so dramatically, as if I had “acted them out” or “prepared” before coming to him. I told the Professor how I loved “dressing up,” but most children do. There were some old stage properties in our first home, left to my mother by a retired prima donna who had taught singing at the old school where my grandfather was. The Professor said he felt some sort of “resistance.”

I felt exhausted and restless. I made myself a hot lemon drink in my bedroom and took cibalgine. . a good night’s rest. It was blighting cold but I got out later in the morning in the sun.

19

Again, the Professor asked me if I “prepared” for my sessions with him. I said I had been writing letters up to the last. I had had a dream of the sea, fear. . and this connected with my youngest brother, who had been “the baby.”

Yes, we had had school entertainments if that was “acting.” There was a Kate Greenaway pageant or sequence and I had a poem to recite, “My Garden is Under the Window.” There was (the next year) Mother Goose but I was disappointed in my Miss Muffet spider rôle. The younger brother wore the Boy Blue costume that I afterwards appropriated. The older one was rather magnificent as King Cole.

I mentioned the circus “lady” who was “dressed up” in tights, taming the lions.

At school, when I was fifteen, one of the girls, half-French, whose name Moffat rather, now, recalls that other Miss Muffet disappointment. But with Renée I was featured as the hero in most of the plays or charades she arranged for us. Renée had seen Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon and would act out whole scenes. The Professor suggested that I visit Schönbrun, and see for myself the apartments of the Duc de Reichstadt.

The Professor repeated that he wanted the work to be spontaneous. He does not encourage me to take notes, in fact, would rather I did not.

I went on with Renée. Her name was Renée Athené, she had been born in Athens where her father was in one of the services. It was at her house that I had my first (and last) experience with table-tapping. I must say very little came of it. But this period, early adolescence, was a return to happy childhood. My mother had Halloween games, fortune telling “for fun,” and various games such as telling the future from a small candle-end stuck in a nutshell that was set afloat on a tub of water. These games were only played at Halloween. Renée pretended to see a ghost — perhaps she did see one — that Halloween when I first went to Miss Gordon’s school. Her name of course fascinated me; very soon after this, I saw my first real Greek play, done by students at the university. Still later, my friend Frances Josepha, with whom I first came to Europe, showed me beautiful photographs of herself in Greek costume; she had been a boy or youth in some play.

Now I remember Anny Ahlers and how I heard her sing, with Dorothy (of the dream) in London. She stepped from a window. I read this in my usual café picture-paper. It was du Barry she was playing. She might, too, have been in L’Aiglon.

The only actual experience I had with “ghosts” was in Cornwall, the last war-year. But these presences, these “knockers” were famous, everybody heard them.

I recall, for some reason, the Siena wolf. Remus was the legendary founder of Siena. Perhaps, I am thinking of the lost companion, the sister that I never had, a twin sister best of all.

We discussed Greek names, commonly used; Helen, my mother, Ida our nurse, now this Renée Athené.

Renée’s mother taught the smaller children French at Miss Gordon’s. Frances’ mother was supervisor of kindergartens in Philadelphia. My own mother taught music and drawing at the old Seminary in Bethlehem.

The Greek came most vividly to me when I was seven; it was a Miss Helen who read us Tanglewood Tales, Friday afternoon at school. Those stories are my foundation or background, Pandora, Midas, the Gorgon-head — that particular story of Perseus and the guardian, Athené.

The miracle of the fairy tale is incontrovertible; Sigmund Freud would apply, rationalize it.

Wednesday, June 12, 1933

I leave Vienna, Saturday of this week.

I discontinued the notes, at the Professor’s suggestion.

We repeated and worked through more of the detail of the first Greek trip and my dream of hallucination of the dolphins and the “double” Van Eck.

We went over the Egyptian trip too, the opening of the tomb, Luxor and Philae.

I dream of two books; I have written them. “I have this book coming out,” I say; then, “I have a second book to follow.”

The Professor says that Athené is the veiled Isis, or Neith the warrior-goddess. He found and placed the small statue of Athené in my hands. There is another Athené, or winged Niké, on the vase that we looked at, when I was describing my Writing on the Wall.

I remembered again the lion-headed Sekmet and spoke of a cat-carving we found on the Acropolis.

June 15

Continued rumors are perhaps responsible for last night’s dream, a nightmare. An enormous black buffalo, bison, or bull is pursuing a cart or carriage in which we are all crowded.

Had the car plunged over a cliff? Were we in it?

Some of us, a group of six or eight, now seated on a mountain slope, ask, are we dead?