There were the two chief companions, as there were in the Cathedral dream. Richard Aldington and D. H. Lawrence had both seemed to like my writing. But I was unhappily separated from Aldington and it was impossible at that time to continue my friendship with Lawrence.
But Lawrence returns after his death, though I have not had the courage or the strength to realize this fully.
Lawrence came back with The Man Who Died. Whether or not he meant me as the priestess of Isis in that book does not alter the fact that his last book reconciled me to him. Isis is incomplete without Osiris, Judy is meaningless without Punch.
I am certain that I never mentioned Lawrence in my three months’ preliminary work with Mary Chadwick at Tavistock Square, in Bloomsbury. I felt that Miss Chadwick could not follow the workings of my creative mind. Talking this over with Dr. Hanns Sachs in Berlin, winter 1931, he agreed that it would be better to continue the work, if possible with a man and preferably one superior to myself. “The Professor?” he asked me. Of course, I would work with the Professor if he would take me.
Curiously in fantasy I think of a tiger. Myself as a tiger? This tiger may pounce out. Suppose it should attack the frail and delicate old Professor? Do I fear my own terrors of the present situation, the lurking “beast” may or might destroy him? I mention this tiger as a past nursery fantasy. Suppose it should actually materialize? The Professor says, “I have my protector.”
He indicates Yofi, the little lioness curled at his feet.
Protector?
I remember the mob scene outside Buckingham Palace, August 4, 1914.
March 11, 9:10 A.M.
I had a dream of an old mirror. The original was set in velvet; sprays of goldenrod were painted on it. I had particularly admired this early creation of my mother’s, but the mirror had been banished from downstairs when we moved from Bethlehem, and hung in a small room upstairs at the Flower Observatory house outside Philadelphia. In my dream the long-vanished mirror reappears in our flat at Riant Château, Territet, where my mother had stayed with us in the twenties. I am very happy with this mirror and touched that my mother should have brought it with her from America.
I re-examine the mirror; there are other flowers but I can only recall the narcissus, some association possibly with the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection in a pool.
Perhaps the books I last wrote of were too self-centered or “narcissistic” to satisfy my heart. I want a fusion or a transfusion of my mother’s art. Though she discarded the velvet with the realistic sprays of goldenrod and other treasures of the same period, there is nothing of da Vinci’s nor of Dürer’s that can now fire my very entrails with adoration as did those apple-blossoms, daisies, hare-bells, wild roses on her set of “wedding plates.” It is true, there was a bowl that she brought back from Dresden, from her honeymoon, painted with tulips and other flowers, that I admired almost as much.
Here is the catch. It is easy enough to discard out-moded fashions. The critical faculty can guide and direct us but it is not easy to be critical and at the same time recapture the flame that glowed with unreserved abandon.
The glow returns in the dream. I am happy reviewing my dream and making these notes of them. To continue this last dream, Frances Josepha appears; she with her mother sailed with me in the summer of 1911, on my (and their) first trip to Europe. She was a few years older and we were at that time taken for sisters. Frances found new friends and circumstances separated us. She came in my dream and said, “Do you remember. . so-and-so. . and so-and-so. .?”— as if to hurt or humiliate me. I say, “Nothing I remember matters now except in relation to my telling it or not telling it to Freud.” In my dreams, it seems to me that there is no argument or counterargument to spoil my delight in this word Freud. The Professor has himself pointed out the correspondence of his name Freud with the German Freude or joy.
I had known Ezra Pound in America at the same time; now Ezra comes as if to join forces with Frances. He says ironically, “Since when have you been so happy as this — since yesterday?”
They seemed banded against me; so many people had tried to break my faith. I said to Ezra, “I couldn’t believe Freud would take me — and I am going now every day.” Bryher seems to appear, as she did in actual life, to take the place of Frances. We discuss someone — who? Perhaps it was Ezra or it may possibly have been Lawrence, whose fiery diatribes sometimes reminded me of the early Ezra. In my dream, the Professor restores my faith. “If I had known Ezra, I could have made him all right,” he says.
In my dream I suddenly associate the Professor’s semicircle of little images with bottles. I remembered how, when he returned my smelling-salts, he said that he believed “this belongs to you — a little green bottle?”
When I told the Professor that I had been infatuated with Frances Josepha and might have been happy with her, he said, “No — biologically, no.” For some reason, though I had been so happy with the Professor (Freud — Freude), my head hurt and I felt unnerved. Perhaps it was because at the end I tried to tell him of one special air-raid when the windows of our room in Mecklenburgh Square were shattered.
8
6:30
The Professor had said, when I told him of Frances and Ezra and their apparent lack of sympathy or understanding of my delight in the analysis, that I was escaping from unwonted memories or putting them aside; he said I was leaving the situation or the solution to psychoanalysis.
For the time being, I leave my conflicts, trusting they will be solved or resolved in the dream.
In the dream we wander along the Nile in Egypt or the Lehigh or the Delaware Rivers in Pennsylvania, or we find some portion of the “lost” home or the “lost” love by the Danube, the Thames, or Tiber. The dream in that sense is itself Osiris, the world beyond, death or the world across the threshold of waking life, sleep. We do not always know when we are dreaming.
I tried to outline several experiences I had had on my first trip to Greece. I have tried to write of these experiences. I fact, it is the fear of losing them, forgetting them, or just giving them up as neurotic fantasies, residue of the war, confinement and the epidemic, that drives me on to begin again and again a fresh outline of the “novel.” It is obviously Penelope’s web that I am weaving.
I can decide that my experiences were the logical outcome of illness, separation from my husband, and loss of the friendship of Lawrence; but even so I have no technique with which to deal with the vision. It was as if a curtain had dropped, what Stephen Guest once referred to as an “asbestos curtain” between the ten years of my life away from America, and the then (spring 1920) present. I had sailed from New York, as I remember in summer 1911, but I believe I met Frances the year before, 1910, the comet-year.
The first decade of my adventure opened with the Argo, Floride, a small French-line steamer, sailing for Havre. The second decade of my adventure with the Argo, Borodino, a boat belonging to “one of the lines,” Bryher’s phrase for her father’s shipping. The third decade of my cruise or quest may be said to have begun in London with my decision to undertake a serious course of psychoanalysis, for my own immediate benefit and also to fortify me for the future.