Hilda Doolittle - Tribute to Freud

Now there is a Van Eck. In my Hotel Washington bedroom, I pick up the telephone book. It did not occur to me before this that he might be back in England. But there was the odd distinguished and unusual name. I asked for the number and in no time at all a voice answered. It was a Belsize Park telephone number. The strange voice said, rather curtly I felt, “Do you want Mr. or Mrs. Van Eck?”

This was a great shock to me. I was due to leave for Paris the next day. I managed somehow to get away. I met Bryher there. She said the shock was really a secondary one; that is, she felt I had superimposed it on the first shock of the parting from Aldington before we went to Greece.

But the Van Eck mystery still continues to obsess me. Again in London, from my Sloane Street flat, I consult a telephone book; there is Van Eck again, with another number.

It appears to be a City number, I judge an office. I will be ready now for any shock, but a pleasant young voice answers; he will give my number to Mr. Van Eck when he gets back to the office. Van Eck rings me. He comes to see me. I have other people in, Kenneth and Bryher, a strange girl who was sent to me from New York, a writer of sorts, pretty, in summer frock. This must be Van Eck, but I doubt if I would have known him had we met on the street.

March 25

Then I go on with the Van Eck saga. I receive a card, spring 1931, when I am staying near Miss Chadwick in a big room in Tavistock Square. We get the connection with the maternal uncle, the gifted younger musician brother of my mother’s Frederick. . Van Eck.

This card is a notification or invitation to attend the church service at which Mr. Van Eck is to be ordained — I believe that is the word. It seemed an odd volte-face.

However, there was the name, the card, the statement of his new choice of career, the words, Tray for me.”

When I go back to my flat again in Sloane Street, I write again. Mr. Van Eck comes to call, a friend is with me, the Dorothy of the earlier Joan and Dorothy dream.

Now Mr. Van Eck disappears but I am at least informed of his intention. He is going for a time into “retreat” in a High Church or Anglo-Catholic St. Francis of Assisi foundation in Dorset.

The Professor said these details only confirmed him in his first impression, or opinion, that the Van Eck episode or fixation was to be referred back to my mother. The maternal uncle, church, art.

The Professor asked me if I had ever wanted to go on the stage. He said he felt I narrated these incidents so dramatically, as if I had “acted them out” or “prepared” before coming to him. I told the Professor how I loved “dressing up,” but most children do. There were some old stage properties in our first home, left to my mother by a retired prima donna who had taught singing at the old school where my grandfather was. The Professor said he felt some sort of “resistance.”

I felt exhausted and restless. I made myself a hot lemon drink in my bedroom and took cibalgine. . a good night’s rest. It was blighting cold but I got out later in the morning in the sun.

Again, the Professor asked me if I “prepared” for my sessions with him. I said I had been writing letters up to the last. I had had a dream of the sea, fear. . and this connected with my youngest brother, who had been “the baby.”

Yes, we had had school entertainments if that was “acting.” There was a Kate Greenaway pageant or sequence and I had a poem to recite, “My Garden is Under the Window.” There was (the next year) Mother Goose but I was disappointed in my Miss Muffet spider rôle. The younger brother wore the Boy Blue costume that I afterwards appropriated. The older one was rather magnificent as King Cole.

I mentioned the circus “lady” who was “dressed up” in tights, taming the lions.

At school, when I was fifteen, one of the girls, half-French, whose name Moffat rather, now, recalls that other Miss Muffet disappointment. But with Renée I was featured as the hero in most of the plays or charades she arranged for us. Renée had seen Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon and would act out whole scenes. The Professor suggested that I visit Schönbrun, and see for myself the apartments of the Duc de Reichstadt.

The Professor repeated that he wanted the work to be spontaneous. He does not encourage me to take notes, in fact, would rather I did not.

I went on with Renée. Her name was Renée Athené, she had been born in Athens where her father was in one of the services. It was at her house that I had my first (and last) experience with table-tapping. I must say very little came of it. But this period, early adolescence, was a return to happy childhood. My mother had Halloween games, fortune telling “for fun,” and various games such as telling the future from a small candle-end stuck in a nutshell that was set afloat on a tub of water. These games were only played at Halloween. Renée pretended to see a ghost — perhaps she did see one — that Halloween when I first went to Miss Gordon’s school. Her name of course fascinated me; very soon after this, I saw my first real Greek play, done by students at the university. Still later, my friend Frances Josepha, with whom I first came to Europe, showed me beautiful photographs of herself in Greek costume; she had been a boy or youth in some play.

Now I remember Anny Ahlers and how I heard her sing, with Dorothy (of the dream) in London. She stepped from a window. I read this in my usual café picture-paper. It was du Barry she was playing. She might, too, have been in L’Aiglon.

The only actual experience I had with “ghosts” was in Cornwall, the last war-year. But these presences, these “knockers” were famous, everybody heard them.

I recall, for some reason, the Siena wolf. Remus was the legendary founder of Siena. Perhaps, I am thinking of the lost companion, the sister that I never had, a twin sister best of all.

We discussed Greek names, commonly used; Helen, my mother, Ida our nurse, now this Renée Athené.

Renée’s mother taught the smaller children French at Miss Gordon’s. Frances’ mother was supervisor of kindergartens in Philadelphia. My own mother taught music and drawing at the old Seminary in Bethlehem.

The Greek came most vividly to me when I was seven; it was a Miss Helen who read us Tanglewood Tales, Friday afternoon at school. Those stories are my foundation or background, Pandora, Midas, the Gorgon-head — that particular story of Perseus and the guardian, Athené.

The miracle of the fairy tale is incontrovertible; Sigmund Freud would apply, rationalize it.

Wednesday, June 12, 1933

I leave Vienna, Saturday of this week.

I discontinued the notes, at the Professor’s suggestion.

We repeated and worked through more of the detail of the first Greek trip and my dream of hallucination of the dolphins and the “double” Van Eck.

We went over the Egyptian trip too, the opening of the tomb, Luxor and Philae.

I dream of two books; I have written them. “I have this book coming out,” I say; then, “I have a second book to follow.”

The Professor says that Athené is the veiled Isis, or Neith the warrior-goddess. He found and placed the small statue of Athené in my hands. There is another Athené, or winged Niké, on the vase that we looked at, when I was describing my Writing on the Wall.

I remembered again the lion-headed Sekmet and spoke of a cat-carving we found on the Acropolis.

June 15

Continued rumors are perhaps responsible for last night’s dream, a nightmare. An enormous black buffalo, bison, or bull is pursuing a cart or carriage in which we are all crowded.