Hilda Doolittle - Tribute to Freud

The old gentleman says that she must choose what she wants. Actually, there is no pansy border to “pick” from and no fruit on the trees. But she must choose what she wants.

She sees what she wants. Is it the only flower in this garden?

It is not a flower she would have chosen, for she would never have been allowed to choose it. It is an Easter-lily or Madonna-lily, growing by the path.

She points to it, overwhelmed by her audacity.

The gardener unclasps a knife, cuts off the flower for her.

But this is rather overwhelming; what does one do with one huge Easter-lily? She races down the now empty street to their front door on Church Street.

She rushes into their front sitting room or parlor. It seems emptier than usual, with light falling from the apparently uncurtained windows. There is mama sewing, there is mamalie sewing.

My Easter-lily!

“Ah,” says mama or says mamalie (our grandmother), “that will look beautiful on your grandfather’s new grave.”

She is alone at Nisky Hill, where her grandfather has recently been buried. There is just this one mound, like a flower-bed. She “plants” the lily.

Obviously, this is my inheritance. I derive my imaginative faculties through my musician-artist mother, through her part-Celtic mother, through the grandfather of English and middle-European extraction. My father was pure New England, a one-remove pioneer to Indiana, who returned “back east.” My father is here too, but dissolved or resolved into the “other grandfather,” whom we had never known. My mother’s father was the first “dead” person I had ever known. I do not at the time actually associate the godfather or god-the-father with a recognizable personality. He is a stranger. He is a General from the Old South. I later ask my mother where he has gone? But there is no such person, no General from the Old South, no such house with a narrow walled-in garden, she says, on Church Street. She knows everyone on Church Street.

I do not accept this, but I cannot not find the house, opposite what had been the College; they are tearing down the College and putting up new buildings but anyhow, the old godfather’s house was the other side of the street. It does not quite work out, but it is only afterwards, long afterwards, that I find this out.

The trees were very leafy. He gives me an Easter-lily. Easter-lilies come at Easter time, spring or early spring; the trees are summer trees in full leaf. But worse than that. It was after he gave her the lily, only a day or two later, that he sends his sleigh. It is a beautiful sleigh with sleigh-bells. The gardener is the coachman. There is a thick fur rug. We drive across the untrodden snow; there is no one in the streets.

He sent a message with the coachman. He said he had sent the sleigh because of the little girl. “When will he come again?” I ask my mother. Is it winter, summer? “Why — what?” “The sleigh, of course, he said he would send it whenever I wanted, it is for you and me and Gilbert and Harold, but he said it was because of me that we could all ride in his sleigh.”

We were all tucked up together under the fur rug.

But no one had sent us a sleigh, my mother told me.

Anyhow, the seasons are all wrong.

In Corfu, someone placed two white lilies and one red tulip on my table. Bryher probably. But there seemed mystery about it. I did not ask Bryher about it. I had learned long ago not to inquire too deeply into the mystery.

The ivory Vishnu sits upright in his snake-hood, like the piston of a calla-lily, or a jack-in-the-pulpit.

My grandfather was the jack-in-the-pulpit, a pastor or clergyman.

Church Street was our street, the Church was our Church. It was founded by Count Zinzendorf who named our town Bethlehem.

People tell one things, and other children laugh at one’s ignorance. “But Jesus was not born here.”

That may be true. We will not discuss the matter. Only after some forty years, we approach it. “I don’t know if I dreamed this or if I just imagined it, or if later I imagined that I dreamed it.” “It does not matter,” he said, “whether you dreamed it or imagined it or whether you just made it up, this moment. I do not think you would deliberately falsify your findings. The important thing is that it shows the trend of your fantasy or imagination.”

He goes on, “You were born in Bethlehem? It is inevitable that the Christian myth —” He paused. “This does not offend you?” “Offend me?” “My speaking of your religion in terms of myth,” he said. I said, “How could I be offended?” “Bethlehem is the town of Mary,” he said.

March 4

I was cold and I found difficulty in starting. I went on talking about the Doré pictures, the dead baby in the Judgment of Solomon. I told him of the graves of my two sisters. I had never known these sisters; one was a half-sister and really belonged to the two grown half-brothers, Eric and Alfred. Their mother was there too. We went on with the lily-fantasy. The old man was obviously, he said, God.

The lily was the Annunciation-lily. I said it was the ivory Vishnu that had prompted me to tell the anecdote. He asked me about my early religious background. I said it was not that they were strict, we were not often punished. I remembered, however, terrible compulsions or premonitions of punishment. Hell from the Bible stories seemed a real place. But I did not speak of this. I went on to tell him of our Christmas candles.

“An atmosphere. .” he said.

He said, “There is no more significant symbol than a lighted candle. You say you remember your grandfather’s Christmas-Eve service? The girls as well as the boys had candles?” It seemed odd that he should ask this.

Sigmund Freud got up from his chair at the back of the couch, and came and stood beside me. He said, “If every child had a lighted candle given, as you say they were given at your grandfather’s Christmas Eve service, by the grace of God, we would have no more problems. . That is the true heart of all religion.”

Later at home, in bed, I was stricken and frightened, thinking of all the things that I wanted or rather felt impelled to tell him. I think of Sigmund Freud as this little-papa, Papalie, the grandfather. Talking half-asleep to myself, or rather to the Professor, I realize I am using the rhythm or language I use only for cats and children. There is my daughter’s cat, Peter, that, she tells me, “I have left to you in my will.”

“It’s an old, old cat,” I say, talking to the Professor, and then it occurs to me that the jerk of his elbow as he orders or summons me from his waiting room to the consulting room is like the angular flap of a bird-wing. I have lately been watching these great crows or rooks here in the gardens off the Ringstrasse.

Yes, there is a singular finality about his least remark, his most insignificant gesture. There is the Pallas Athené on his desk, beyond the double door, leading from the consulting room to the inner sanctum. Just above my chamber door — that was a bust of Pallas, if I am not mistaken, from Poe’s Raven. There is a quoth-the-Raven mystery about his every utterance, though he seems to huddle rather than to perch, more like an old owl, hibou sacré in the corner back of the couch.

I remember a special gift from my father: this time the gift is not from little-papa, Papalie. The wretched and fascinating creature stared and stared at me, from the top of his bookshelf. The bookshelf ran the length of the wall opposite his table, or rather there were bookcases along all the walls that were not broken by windows. I must have been indeed the child of heroes and a hero from Geburt des Helden, for I asked him, “May I have that white owl?”