I spoke again of our toy animals and he reminded me of my tiger fantasy. Wasn’t there a story, “the woman and the tiger,” he asked. I remembered “The Lady or the Tiger.”
Today, I entered my third week.
11
March 16, 7 P.M.
I saw a volume of Arthur Waley’s on the shelf, and asked the Professor if he knew him. He said no. I started to tell the Professor how I had met Waley in London in the very early days, at the British Museum where I was reading and how he asked me to tea in the Museum Tea Room. We discussed an umbrella I was carrying, en-tout-cas they had called it, at the shop, to my amusement. Later, during the war, I met Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s flat in Chelsea. I said I thought Waley was a Jew, Freud said he thought so, but “he has tampered with his name.”
I went on to tell Freud why I had kept away from psychoanalysis in London, had read practically nothing until recent years, how Waley in our Buckingham Mansions, Kensington, flat, about 1920, had suggested that a friend of his might help Bryher, how Dr. Ellis discouraged it, but how finally Bryher went for a few sessions to_____.
(At this moment, writing on a marble-topped café table, a tiny bunch of violets is placed on my note-book. I want to cry. In my embarrassment, I only gave thirty groschen; but the beggar with the shoe-box seemed pleased and vanished. In the same way, violets were laid on the pages of a paperbound copy of Euripides’ Ion, open on the table of my Corfu Hotel Belle Venise bedroom. It seemed a “mystery” but Bryher must have left them.)
I went on to tell how I parted from Van Eck, in the drawing room of the Hotel Grand Bretagne in Athens. I said I was frozen.
Dr. Ellis, who was with us on the boat but in another hotel in Athens, went back to London after a few weeks. How cold it was — wind from Siberia — there was a stove in the corner of our elegant drawing room, everything was ormolu and gilded mirror frames — no sticks, no coal. Spanish influenza was raging there again.
Freud asked if Bryher had had it. Not dangerously, I explained. One of her father’s business associates there suggested that we leave Athens. We went up the Gulf of Corinth on the advice of this Mr. Crowe. In the night we stopped at Itea, below the landing or port for Delphi.
I tell the Professor how happy I was at Corfu — flowers, spring, orange trees, lead-pencil cypresses, Mouse Island or Böcklein’s Toteninsel. I told him of Bryher’s care of me, our walks and drives, and said the friendship seemed to have adjusted me to normal conditions of life. Freud qualified, “Not normal, so much as ideal.”
He wanted to know of the pictures, that I called Writing on the Wall, but the time was almost up so I simply stated that Van Eck all this time was in my mind. Bryher knew of this. The Professor said the problem was more subtle, more intricate than he had first imagined.
He said he did not wish me to prepare for my sessions with him. I said I did not. I spoke of my delight in the idea of resolving old problems.
When I told him of the Scilly Isles experience, the transcendental feeling of the two globes or the two transparent half-globes enclosing me, I said I supposed it was some form of prenatal fantasy. Freud said, “Yes, obviously; you have found the answer, good — good.”
March 17, 2:25 P.M.
Had strange dream of huge blackbirds. (Mr. Crowe of yesterday?) They peck or bite at my ankles with their great beaks. I am terrified. In some way, I am rescued by a youth or young man, and the polished black beaks of the birds turn to ebony anklets above my bare feet.
A friend of my school-days comes. She is looking for rooms. Rooms again. There is a confused sequence of a house or mansion with many rooms — my father’s house? I like Matilda and am glad to see her — but there is the old predicament! Will she interfere with my room or rooms? Is this a birth-anxiety? Bryher writes of joining me here later, with my daughter.
6:40 P.M.
The Professor asked me to interpret the dream of the blackbirds.
Freud said the man in the dream had given me womanhood, so he charmed the birds.
12
6:40 P.M.
Today I told the Professor of the picture-writing, or the Writing on the Wall as I called it. He wanted to know particulars of the exact size of the projected pictures that I saw in the bed-room of the Hotel Belle Venise in Corfu, the actual time it took for the series to materialize, what time of day was it? I looked round the room and found what I was looking for; on one of his Greek vases there was an image of Victory, or the Niké as I called her, of the picture sequence. I said, “Ah, there she is.”
The Professor and I went over to the glass case. Some of the pictures as I saw and described them might have been Greek vase silhouettes.
7:40 P.M.
I had taken a photograph of Bryher to show the Professor. He said it might have been a page in an Italian fresco.
The Professor said, “She is only a boy.” Then he said, “It is very clear.” Of another photograph, he said, “She looks like an Arctic explorer.” He liked another snapshot of my daughter with Bryher on the terrace of the house at La Tour. I told the Professor that they both might be coming later to Vienna. He said, “I would so like to see them.” This made me very happy.
He said Bryher’s letters were “very kind, very pliable,” though she herself looked in the pictures “so decisive, so unyielding.” I told him how staunch Bryher had been and loyal, and how she arranged everything on our numerous journeys. When I told him of the Writing on the Wall he asked me if I was frightened. I said I was not, but I was afraid that Bryher was frightened for me. He asked again about the lighting of the room, of possible reflections or shadows. I described the room again, the communicating door, the door out to the hall and the one window. He asked if it was a French window. I said, “No — one like that,” indicating the one window in his room.
8:10 P.M.
I sit in the Café Victoria, on a cushioned corner-bench, under an immense chandelier. I think of Venice when I look at the reflecting glass crystals.
March 18, 10:40 A.M.
I dream of my young mother. We are on the porch of our first house at Bethlehem. My brother is only a year younger, but I feel immensely superior as I watch him crawl over the floor. He creeps, crawls, or walks very swiftly on all four legs. I think he is very clever, this “little dog.” I try to indicate this to my mother. She says, “But he will get his arms dirty and spoil his dress.” The baby dodges into the open hall door. I say to my mother, very wise and tolerant, “But what does it matter? It is good for him to crawl about, it will make a difference to his whole life, it will strengthen his back, his arms, and legs.” He crawls out of the house again and I stand him on his feet and fling my arms about him in a delirium of devotion.
I connect this dream with the Professor’s remark about Bryher, “She is only a boy,” and with the fact that Bryher writes of coming with my child to visit me here in Vienna.
I had a later dream. Bryher’s pet name for Dr. Hanns Sachs is “the turtle.” A friend, an American resident in England, turns up here for some odd reason. The turtle-pond is high up in the hills, Switzerland, no doubt. I myself confront George Plank by this turtle-pond, bearing proudly a hen’s egg. There is a woman writing. She says, “You girls — you show off in your Elizabethan doublets.” I have a feeling of vast superiority to George, who is actually an artist and a sympathetic friend. I have a feeling, however, that he would not respond to psychoanalysis, though not inimical as I felt Frances and Ezra to be in the early dream sequence.