Hilda Doolittle: Tribute to Freud

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.

4 P.M.

The Professor told me a few days ago that if he lived another fifty years, he would still be fascinated and curious about the vagaries and variations of the human mind or soul.

7 P.M.

I was five minutes late as Alice Modern had popped in about 4:30. The Professor met me at once, said my story of the picture-writing or the Writing on the Wall, “has made me think very hard.”

I asked him about the dogs; both go away over the weekend. He does not like cats; he finds monkeys are too near. “We have not the satisfaction of their being like us, nor the satisfaction of their being enemies.”

I told him about the little statues or images in the house that Lawrence had first spoken of in Cornwall. He asked me what the images were? I said that there was a painted Osiris on the shelf; seated at the end was a bronze Isis — there was I thought an egg-shaped mummy-owl.

The Professor said, “Come and see if we can find them.”

We went into the other room; he brought out various treasures from behind the glass doors. We spoke of a Sekmet that he showed me. I told the Professor of the cat-headed image in the little temple off the great temple of Karnak. He was amused to hear of the iron grille they had had to place at the temple entrance, because of the hysterical moonlight visitors. I said that the Arabs held the image in special awe, they were terrified to this day of the cat- or lion-headed goddess.

We looked over the images in one of the other cases; there was a winged Greek figure — tanagra? The Professor brought out a wooden Osiris (or Osiris-like image) blackened by time or else deliberately painted, as if with a sort of tar or pitch. There was another green-blue stone Osiris. The Professor said, “They are called the answerers, as their doubles or ka-s come when called.”

We went back to the couch.

I told him of the scenes or pictures that I myself had conjured up or acted out for Bryher, one of our last evenings in the Belle Venise. Bryher had seemed unhappy or remote; her mood frightened and saddened me. To amuse her, really, I began to act out what I called Indian dance-pictures. There was a girl in the mountains, there was a medicine man seeking for plants in the woods, there was another laughing, singing — our old friend Minnehaha; there were others as well: a Spanish woman, South-Sea Islanders, a Japanese girl, and a young priest from Tibet. The Professor said, “It was a poem-series the acting was drama, half-motivated by desire to comfort Bryher and neither “delirium” nor “magic” I had suggested that this might be some form of possession.

The Professor repeated, “You see, after all, you are a poet.” He dismissed my suggestion of some connection with the old mysteries, magic or second-sight. But he came back to the Writing on the Wall. The drama, as he called it, he said held no secret from him; but the projected pictures, seen in daylight, puzzled him.

He went on with it, could I now with my eyes closed still see the pictures? I said, “Yes, and with my eyes open.” He said this was possibly a “symptom of importance.” I said that I wished I had asked an artist friend to sketch the series for me, so that I could have shown it to him direct. He said that would have been no use. “There would be value in the pictures only if you yourself drew them.”

9:10

We talked a little of ghosts. I wanted to tell him of the many curious legends of Cornwall and of how I myself had heard the famous “knockers” when I was there in 1918. They were believed by the inhabitants to come out of the disused mine-shafts. They are the exact counterpart, though I did not have time to speak of this, of the gnomes or dwarfs of the old German legends. The “knockers,” however, were not ghostly presences, they knocked forcibly, almost violently, and often.

I did tell the Professor of a great-grandmother who heard her son calling to her. She ran out in the garden to meet him (in Pennsylvania). Her son was in the West Indies. It was some time after that news reached them that her son had died at the exact moment she had rushed into the garden to welcome him home.