I am on the fringes or in the penumbra of the light of my father’s science and my mother’s art — the psychology or philosophy of Sigmund Freud.
I must find new words as the Professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet unrecorded states of mind or being.
He is Faust, surely.
We retreat from the so-called sciences and go backward or go forward into alchemy. He said, I was impatient with him. He was turning a heavy seal-ring on his finger.
I said that I could not lose him, I had had his books before I met him and would have them again when I left Vienna. There is a formula for Time that has not yet been computed.
7
March 9
I dream of a Cathedral. I walk through Stephens dom almost daily and, as well, I had been interested in some pictures of Chartres that I had seen in one of the café’s illustrated papers. Two boys are with me in this dream, the older one was showing me around, I felt the little one was de trop. I had for some reason tipped the big one, now I must give something to the little one. This annoyed me. (I had been concerned the day before as to the exact tip to give the two page-boys in the hotel.)
I seem to have lost the big boy, so I regretfully annex the smaller.
My two brothers? Or my father and his attractive older brother? My older brother and my father’s older brother were both lost in the wars.
The boys in the dream are not recognizably the hotel page-boys. They are ghosts. They are, that is, “ghosting” for another or others; when the ghosts take form as brothers or as uncle-father, it will no doubt be seen that they again are ghosting. Or rather if we pursue the dream content, the intermediate ghosts, should they manifest, would be seen to be a step between brothers or uncle-father. We are all haunted houses.
It is really the Cathedral that is all-important. Inside the Cathedral we find regeneration or reintegration. This room is the Cathedral.
The Professor said, “But you are very clever.” It is not I who am clever. I am only applying certain of his own findings to my personal equation. The house is home, the house is the Cathedral. He said he wanted me to feel at home here.
The house in some indescribable way depends on father-mother. At the point of integration or regeneration, there is no conflict over rival loyalties. The Professor’s surroundings and interests seem to derive from my mother rather than from my father, and yet to say the “transference” is to Freud as mother does not altogether satisfy me. He had said, “And — I must tell you (you were frank with me and I will be frank with you), I do not like to be the mother in transference — it always surprises and shocks me a little. I feel so very masculine.” I asked him if others had what he called this mother-transference on him. He said ironically and I thought a little wistfully, “O, very many.”
But now he said he would show me a little new toy. He is delighted with a Coptic clay figure, sent him by a former student. The little image is startlingly like Yofi. Yofi sits as usual on the floor, emblematic, heraldic. The little clay dog looks like Yofi and I cannot help wondering if the donor of the figure on the shelf opposite the couch had noted the striking resemblance of this Etruscan image, with the pointed beard and the thin etched smile, to our Professor.
Today there are red tulips on the famous table with the row or semicircle, Osiris, Isis, Athené, and the others, with the ivory Vishnu in the center.
The Professor has gone into the other room to find another dog to show me. He brings back a broken wooden dog. It is a toy from a tomb in Egypt.
I tell him the only Egyptian dog I remember is one in the Louvre; was the jackal on the standard a dog? The only Egyptian dog that I remember was exactly like his daughter Anna’s Wulf.
Yes (I repeated), the Cathedral of my dream was Sigmund Freud. “No,” he said, “not me — but analysis.”
It is, as he had said of my grandfather, “an atmosphere. . ” The gnomes or gargoyles, the Gothic dragons, bird, beast, and fish of the inner and outer motives, the images of saints and heroes all find their replicas or their “ghosts” in this room or in these two rooms.
March 10
I had spoken of my disappointment in Havelock Ellis. He had not been interested in my experience in the Scilly Isles when Bryher took me there, July 1919. It had really been a great shock to me as I had visualized Dr. Ellis, during the time of writing my Notes on Thought and Vision, as a saint as well as a savant. The Professor said he had always wondered why a man so situated and not dependent on outside criticism should spend his enormous energy on a superficial documentation of sex. Now the Professor said he felt from my reactions that his own opinion was not unjustified. He said he had been puzzled. “He records so many funny things that people do but never seems to want to know why they do them. You see I lose him a little, but I always thought there was something immature about his Psychology of Sex.”
I had a dream about my little bottle of smelling-salts, the tell-tale transference symbol. In my dream, I am salting my typewriter. So I presume I would salt my savorless writing with the salt of the earth, Sigmund Freud’s least utterance.
I have tried to write the story or the novel of my war experience, my first, still-born child and the second, born so fortunately with Leo rising in the vernal equinox, Aries or the Ram. I have rewritten this story and others that “ghosted” for it, as in the case of Pilate’s Wife and Hedylus, both historical or classic reconstructions. Hedylus had the usual succès d’estime that had followed the publication of Heliodora, a short volume of poetry, and Palimpsest, a rather loosely written long-short-story volume. I feel, too, that the latest volume, Red Roses for Bronze, is not altogether satisfactory. I have never been completely satisfied with any of my books, published or unpublished.
Little things, seemingly unimportant, take precedence. I remember how the Professor said that you never know until the analysis is over what is important and what is unimportant. With my memories of Chartres, I recall an illustration in the same paper of a child at a birthday party. It was not an attractive picture, the child was devouring a cream-cake with the cream oozing out onto its frock or pinafore. But children don’t wear pinafores nowadays, do they? Birthday memories come back.
My books are not so much still-born as born from the detached intellect. Someone spoke of Hedylus as being “hallucinated writing.”
Yet if I become more “human” I seem to lose my sense of direction, or my prose style. The poetry is another matter. Yes, the poems are satisfactory but unlike most poets of my acquaintance (and I have known many) I am no longer interested in a poem once it is written, projected, or materialized. There is a feeling that it is only a part of myself there.
Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that I lost the early companions of my first writing-period in London, you might say of my “success,” small and rather specialized as it was. I was rather annoyed with the Professor in one of his volumes. He said (as I remember) that women did not creatively amount to anything or amount to much, unless they had a male counterpart or a male companion from whom they drew their inspiration. Perhaps he is right and my dream of “salting” my typewriter with the tell-tale transference symbol is further proof of his infallibility.