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.”