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.