Hilda Doolittle: Tribute to Freud

Others never quite took the places of these three. Stephen Haden-Guest was a more casual friend. Arthur Waley was at best an acquaintance. Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher’s husband, was much closer. H. D. liked his novels as well as his company. With him as film director she acted with Paul Robeson in Borderline. To Close-Up, of which Macpherson was an editor, she contributed articles on the cinema. But none of these, nor others later, had the gloire. Freud was the exception.

J. J. van der Leeuw was a symbol rather than a person. H. D. in fact knew nothing but what she wrote about him in the two parts of Tribute to Freud, until in 1957 I could by chance tell her more and send her some of his books. He was the author of the often reprinted Gods in Exile, of The Fire of Creation, The Conquest of Illusion, and of The Dramatic History of the Christian Faith. Born in 1893, he joined the Theosophical Society in 1914, and was General Secretary of the Netherlands Section in 1930–1931. He founded the Practical Idealist Association for youth, and was field organizer for the New Education Fellowship. He lived for a short while in Australia. Of how he reached the Berggasse there is no published record. Looking back, H. D. always remembered him there. “I wrote of J. J. van der Leeuw and the illness or breakdown I had after I heard of his death in 1933. I connected him with my older brother and the fact that I could not ‘take’ the fact of his death in action in France, because I was expecting this child — so later, with my father’s death. Death is all around us.”

“Death and Birth — the great experiences,” as H. D. described them. Emily Dickinson talks much about death. H. D. talks much about both — and about rebirth. Emily Dickinson was wonderfully feminine; H. D. was womanly. One senses the fullness of her experiences, in Tribute to Freud, precisely as one feels the skilled warmth of Freud’s response. She would remember a person or a phrase and exhibit it to Freud, as he in turn picked up the correlative artifact and symbol from his desk. “There,” she wrote in 1955 in Küsnacht, still remembering, “in the print tacked to my wall above the couch, piled high with its heaps of books, manuscripts and letters, sits the Professor at his desk. There are books behind him and books and papers on his desk. There on his desk, too, are a number of the images he so loved and treasured, perhaps (although I do not identify it) the very Egyptian Osiris that he once put into my hands. ‘This is called the answerer,’ he said, ‘because Osiris answers questions.’ ”

Writing on the wall posed questions. Osiris, with the help of Freud, showed the way to answers. It is as H. D. put it in her Tribute — “The picture-writing, the hieroglyph of the dream, was the common property of the whole race; in the dream, man, as at the beginning of time, spoke a universal language, and man, meeting in the universal understanding of the unconscious or the subconscious, would forgo barriers of time and space; and man, understanding man, would save mankind.” Man would, could at least, write.

NORMAN HOLMES PEARSON

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

JULY 1973

* The quotation from the letter from Pound to H. D. © 1974 by the Estate of Ezra Pound.