o mein Geliebter,
then O my guardian, my protector,
o mein Beschützer,
and in the end, she does not ask if she may go; or exclaim, if only we could go; but there is the simple affirmation, with the white roses — or the still whiter gardenias, as it happened — of uttermost veneration.
Dahin! Dahin
Geht unser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn!
LONDON
SEPTEMBER 19, 1944
NOVEMBER 2, 1944
ADVENT
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.