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.