Hilda Doolittle - Tribute to Freud

There are the wise and the foolish virgins and their several lamps. Thou anointest my head with oil — the oil of understanding — and, indeed, my cup runneth over. But this purposes to be a personal reconstruction of intention and impression. I had begun my preliminary research in order to fortify and equip myself to face war when it came, and to help in some subsidiary way, if my training were sufficient and my aptitudes suitable, with war-shocked and war-shattered people. But my actual personal war-shock (1914–1919) did not have a chance. My sessions with the Professor were barely under way, before there were preliminary signs and symbols of the approaching ordeal. And the thing I primarily wanted to fight in the open, war, its cause and effect, with its inevitable aftermath of neurotic breakdown and related nerve disorders, was driven deeper. With the death-head swastika chalked on the pavement, leading to the Professor’s very door, I must, in all decency, calm as best I could my own personal Phobia, my own personal little Dragon of war-terror, and with whatever power I could summon or command order him off, for the time being at any rate, back to his subterranean cavern.

There he growled and bit on his chains and was only loosed finally, when the full apocryphal terror of fire and brimstone, of whirlwind and flood and tempest, of the Biblical Day of Judgment and the Last Trump, became no longer abstractions, terrors too dreadful to be thought of, but things that were happening every day, every night, and at one time, at every hour of the day and night, to myself and my friends, and all the wonderful and all the drab and ordinary London people.

And the kindly Being whom I would have entreated had wafted the old Professor out of it. He had gone before the blast and bombing and fires had devastated this city; he was a handful of ashes, cherished in an urn or scattered among the grass and flowers in one of the Gardens of Remembrance, outside London. I suppose there must be a marble slab there on the garden wall or a little box in a niche beside a garden path. I have not even gone to look, to regard a familiar name with a date perhaps, and wander along a path, hedged with clipped yew or, more likely, fragrant dust-green lavender, and think of the Professor. For our Garden of Remembrance is somewhere else.

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,

Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,

Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,

Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,

Kennst du es wohl?

Dahin! Dahin

Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.

Kennst du das Haus? Auf Säulen ruht sein Dach,

Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,

Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:

Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?

Kennst du es wohl?

Dahin! Dahin

Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Beschützer, ziehn.

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?

Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg,

In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut,

Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut;

Kennst du ihn wohl?

Dahin! Dahin

Geht unser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn!

I have said that these impressions must take me, rather than I take them. The first impression of all takes me back to the beginning, to my first session with the Professor. Paula has opened the door (though I did not then know that the pretty little Viennese maid was called Paula). She has divested me of my coat and made some welcoming remark which has slightly embarrassed me, as I am thinking English thoughts and only English words come to prompt me. She has shown me into the waiting room with the lace curtains at the window, with framed photographs of celebrities, some known personally to me; Dr. Havelock Ellis and Dr. Hanns Sachs gaze at me, familiar but a little distorted in their frames under the reflecting glass. There is the modest, treasured, framed diploma from the small New England university, which I examined later, and the macabre, detailed, Düreresque symbolic drawing, a “Buried Alive” or of some such school of thought. I wait in this room. I know that Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud will open the door which faces me. Although I know this and have been preparing for some months for this ordeal, I am, nonetheless, taken aback, surprised, shocked even, when the door opens. It seems to me, after my time of waiting, that he appears too suddenly.

Automatically, I walk through the door. It closes. Sigmund Freud does not speak. He is waiting for me to say something. I cannot speak. I look around the room. A lover of Greek art, I am automatically taking stock of the room’s contents. Pricelessly lovely objects are displayed here on the shelves to right, to left of me. I have been told about the Professor, his family, his way of life. I have heard certain personal anecdotes not available to the general readers of his books. I have heard him lovingly criticized by his adorers and soundly berated by his enemies. I know that he had a very grave recurrence of a former serious illness, some five years or so ago, and was again operated on for that particularly pernicious form of cancer of the mouth or tongue, and that by a miracle (to the amazement of the Viennese specialists) he recovered. It seems to me, in some curious way, that we were both “miraculously saved” for some purpose. But all this is a feeling, an atmosphere — something that I realize or perceive, but do not actually put into words or thoughts. I could not have said this even if I had, at that moment, realized it. I do know that it is a great privilege to be here, this I do actually realize. I am here because Dr. Sachs suggested my coming here and wrote the Professor about me. Dr. Sachs had talked lovingly about the Professor and, sometimes in gentle irony, had spoken of the “poor Frau Professor.” But no one had told me that this room was lined with treasures. I was to greet the Old Man of the Sea, but no one had told me of the treasures he had salvaged from the sea-depth.

He is at home here. He is part and parcel of these treasures. I have come a long way, I have brought nothing with me. He has his family, the tradition of an unbroken family, reaching back through this old heart of the Roman Empire, further into the Holy Land.

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy Land!

He is the infinitely old symbol, weighing the soul, Psyche, in the Balance. Does the Soul, passing the portals of life, entering the House of Eternity, greet the Keeper of the Door? It seems so. I should have thought the Door-Keeper, at home beyond the threshold, might have greeted the shivering soul. Not so, the Professor. But waiting and finding that I would not or could not speak, he uttered. What he said — and I thought a little sadly — was, “You are the only person who has ever come into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me.”

But worse was to come. A little lion-like creature came padding toward me — a lioness, as it happened. She had emerged from the inner sanctum or manifested from under or behind the couch; anyhow, she continued her course across the carpet. Embarrassed, shy, overwhelmed, I bend down to greet this creature. But the Professor says, “Do not touch her — she snaps — she is very difficult with strangers.” Strangers? Is the Soul crossing the threshold a stranger to the Door-Keeper? It appears so. But, though no accredited

dog-lover, I like dogs and they oddly and sometimes unexpectedly “take” to me. If this is an exception, I am ready to take the risk. Unintimidated but distressed by the Professor’s somewhat forbidding manner, I not only continue my gesture toward the little chow, but crouch on the floor so that she can snap better if she wants to. Yofi — her name is Yofi — snuggles her nose into my hand and nuzzles her head, in delicate sympathy, against my shoulder.