54
With precise Jewish instinct for the particular in the general, for the personal in the impersonal or universal, for the material in the abstract, he had dared to plunge into the unexplored depth, first of his own unconscious or subconscious being. From it, he dredged, as samples of his theories, his own dreams, exposing them as serious discoveries, facts, with cause and effect, beginning and end, often showing from even the most trivial dream sequence the powerful dramatic impact that projected it. He took the events of the day preceding the night of the dream, the dream-day as he called it; he unravelled from the mixed conditions and contacts of the ordinary affairs of life the particular thread that went on spinning its length through the substance of the mind, the buried mind, the sleeping, the unconscious or subconscious mind. The thread so eagerly identified as part of the pattern, part of some commonplace or some intricate or intimate matter of the waking life, would as likely as not be lost, at the precise moment when, identified, it showed its shimmering or its drab dream-substance. The sleeping mind was not one, not all equally sleeping; part of the unconscious mind would become conscious at a least expected moment; this part of the dreaming mind that laid traps or tricked the watcher or slammed doors on the scene or the unravelling tapestry of the dream sequence he called the Censor; it was guardian at the gates of the underworld, like the dog Cerberus, of Hell.
55
In the dream matter were Heaven and Hell, and he spared himself and his first avidly curious, mildly shocked readers neither. He did not spare himself or his later growing public, but others he spared. He would break off a most interesting dream-narrative, to explain that personal matter, concerning not himself, had intruded. Know thyself, said the ironic Delphic oracle, and the sage or priest who framed the utterance knew that to know yourself in the full sense of the words was to know everybody. Know thyself, said the Professor, and plunging time and again, he amassed that store of intimate revelation contained in his impressive volumes. But to know thyself to set forth the knowledge, brought down not only a storm of abuse from high-placed doctors, psychologists, scientists, and other accredited intellectuals the world over, but made his very name almost a by-word for illiterate quips, unseemly jokes, and general ridicule.
56
Maybe he laughed at the jokes, I don’t know. His beautiful mouth seemed always slightly smiling, though his eyes, set deep and slightly asymmetrical under the domed forehead (with those furrows cut by a master chisel), were unrevealing. His eyes did not speak to me. I cannot even say that they were sad eyes. If at a moment of distress — as when I went to him that day when all the doors in Vienna were closed and the streets empty — there came that pause that sometimes fell between us, he, sensing some almost unbearable anxiety and tension in me, would break this spell with some kindly old-world courtesy, some question: What had I been reading? Did I find the books I wanted in the library his wife’s sister had recommended? Of course — if I wanted any of his books at any time — Had I heard again from Bryher, from my daughter? Had I heard lately from America?
I would have taken the hour-glass in my hand and set it the other way round so that the sands of his life would have as many years to run forward as now ran backward. Or I would have slipped through a secret door — only I would have the right to do this — and entreat a kindly Being. (Only I could do this, for my gift must be something different.) I would change my years for his; it would not be as generous a number as I could have wished for him, yet it would make a difference. Perhaps there would be twenty years, even thirty years left in my hour-glass. “Look,” I would say to this kindly Being, “those two on your shelf there — just make the slightest alteration of the hour-glasses. Put H. D. in the place of Sigmund Freud (I will still have a few years left in which to tidy up my not very important affairs). It’s not too much to ask of you. And it can be done. Someone did it or offered to do it in a play once. It was a Greek play, wasn’t it? A woman — I don’t remember her name — offered her years in exchange — to someone else — for something. What was it? There was Hercules or Herakles and a struggle with Death. Was the play called Alcestis? I wonder. And of course, one of those three must have written — there they are on the top of the Professor’s case, to the right of the wide-opened double door that leads into his inner sanctum. Aeschylus? Sophocles? Euripides? Who wrote the Alcestis? But it doesn’t really matter who wrote it, for the play is going on now — at any rate we are acting it, the old Professor and I. The old Professor doubles the part. He is Hercules struggling with Death and he is the beloved, about to die. Moreover he himself, in his own character, has made the dead live, has summoned a host of dead and dying children from the living tomb.”
57
When I said to him one day that time went too quickly (did he or didn’t he feel that?) he struck a semi-comic attitude, he threw his arm forward as if ironically addressing an invisible presence or an imaginary audience. “Time,” he said. The word was uttered in his inimitable, two-edged manner; he seemed to defy the creature, the abstraction; into that one word, he seemed to pack a store of contradictory emotions; there was irony, entreaty, defiance, with a vague, tender pathos. It seemed as if the word was surcharged, an explosive that might, at any minute, go off. (Many of his words did, in a sense, explode, blasting down prisons, useless dykes and dams, bringing down landslides, it is true, but opening up mines of hidden treasure.) “Time,” he said again, more quietly, and then, “time gallops.”
“Time gallops withal.” I wonder if he knew that he was quoting Shakespeare? Though the exact application of Rosalind’s elaborate quip about Time hardly seems appropriate. “Who doth he gallop withal?” asks Orlando. And Rosalind answers, “With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there.” But a thief certainly; in a greater dramatic tradition, he had stolen fire, like Prometheus, from heaven.
58
Stop thief! But nothing could stop him, once he started unearthing buried treasures (he called it striking oil). And anyhow, wasn’t it his own? Hadn’t he found it? But stop thief, they shouted or worse. He was nonchalantly unlocking vaults and caves, taking down the barriers that generations had carefully set up against their hidden motives, their secret ambitions, their suppressed desires. Stop thief! Admit, however, that what he offered as treasure, this revelation that he seemed to value, was poor stuff, trash indeed, ideas that a ragpicker would pass over in disdain, old junk stored in the attic, put away, forgotten, not even worth the trouble of cutting up for firewood, cumbersome at that, difficult to move, and moreover if you started to move one unwieldly cumbersome idea, you might dislodge the whole cart-load of junk; it had been there such a long time, it was almost part of the wall and the attic ceiling of the house of life. Stop thief! But why, after all, stop him? His so-called discoveries were patently ridiculous. Time gallops withal. . with a thief to the gallows. And give a man enough rope — we have heard somewhere — and he will hang himself!