ABSTRACT
This essay pays mournful tribute to Laura Marcus through a reading of Hilda Doolittle's extrapolations of Freudian psychoanalysis, an area of scholarship pioneered by Marcus. Examining the dream-like shapes of H.D.’s writing on Freud in Tribute to Freud and her own oneiric experiences in works such as Helen in Egypt, it elaborates on what H.D. called ‘the hieroglyph of the unconscious’, cinematic realms of projection which bear testimony to ineffable events that seem to occur outside of time.
KEYWORDS:
I met Laura Marcus for the first time in the entrance hall of the British Library. It was in 2007, a year after I secured permanent employment in the Faculty of English at Oxford, and when my first book, Aesthetic Hysteria, had just been published. Laura, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, had won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize that year for The Tenth Muse, an outstanding scholarly intervention in cinema and modernism. This odd pairing of veteran and newbie had been the work of suits at Wiley, who wanted us to co-edit a volume of essays on literature and psychoanalysis. I remember the first meeting vividly: Laura coming in from the sun in her jaunty shades; our introduction in a threshold that seemed so absurdly full of promise; the embedding of a collaboration in that space of secular worship. In the years that immediately followed, Laura moved from Sussex to Edinburgh and then to Oxford and we were finally able to swap the email traffic and consultations in noisy cafes for face-to-face meetings in New College or Wadham. A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture came out in 2014.
A premonition of Laura’s imminent death happened across a threshold too. I was writing in the small hours of 30 August 2021, when I saw a black-veined moth at the study window. Laura was desperately ill, but I don’t know why this in particular felt like a ghost of the news to come on 22 September. These creatures are not bad omens in my belief systems, although the word ‘moth’ is a near-homophone of the Hindi ‘maut’, meaning death, and in Mexico the moth is called ‘mariposa de la muerte’, or butterfly of death, in Spanish. What shook me was not the apparition but the words that came unbidden with it, which I then looked up in my copy of H. D.’s Tribute to Freud: ‘No wonder I am frightened. I let death in at the window. If I do not let the ice-thin window-glass intellect protect my soul or my emotion, I let death in’.Footnote1 In the American poet Hilda Doolittle’s life, the moth is interchangeably the sign of Sigmund Freud, and Freud himself, unmediated by signs. This displacement is characteristic of the way in which she imagines her analyst. He is midwife to the soul; he is the soul. The moth is the thought of Freud; the moth is Freud. ‘Thought of him bashes across my forehead, like a death-head moth; he is not the sphinx but the sphinx-moth, the death-head moth’ (p. 117).
Since H.D. came beating moth wings that night, I have thought and written about her as never before, entering into a new dialogue with Laura Marcus’s scholarship, where I first encountered the dream-like shapes of H.D.’s writing. H.D.’s prose work, Tribute to Freud, was written in London during the Second World War. Drawing on the notebooks of 1933, which she kept during her analysis with Freud, the book was assembled in 1948 in Lausanne. Tribute to Freud is literature, cultural genealogy, aesthetic history, and autobiography rolled into one. H.D. had agreed to seeking treatment from Freud in 1933 to overcome a writer’s block and study psychoanalysis. Freud was 77, selective in taking on analysands, and H.D. was grateful to be one of the chosen few. She saw Freud five days a week for three or four months. However, her great admiration for Freud was not without ambivalence, resistance, and agon. She struggled with Freud’s authoritarianism and atheism; she questioned the ethics of psychoanalysis and its intellectual possession.
H.D. wondered if her intuition wasn’t sometimes the quicker. ‘But the Professor was not always right’, she insists (p. 18). If Freud’s pronouncements had the ability to ‘break something’ in a person, she would provide the resistance to ensure ‘something . . . would not, must not be broken’ (p. 16). Freud had struck oil in his explorations of the psyche, but, and I am quoting H.D. here, ‘the application of the “oil,” what could or should be made of it, could not be entirely regulated or supervised by its original “promoter”’ (pp. 92–3). H.D. apprehended the unconscious through what she called ‘the hieroglyph of the unconscious’, a realm of fantasy and imagination crimped in the shapes, lines, and graphs of dreams.
There are all these shapes, lines, graphs, the hieroglyph of the unconscious, and the Professor had first opened the field to the study of this vast, unexplored region. He himself – at least to me personally – deplored the tendency to fix ideas too firmly to set symbols, or to weld them inexorably. . . . [Y]es, a vast field of exploration and – alas – exploitation lay open. There were the immemorial Gods ranged in their semicircle on the Professor’s table, that stood, as I have said, like the high altar in the Holy of Holies. There were those Gods, each the carved symbol of an idea or a deathless dream, that some people read: Goods.Footnote2 (pp. 92–3)
H.D.’s ‘hieroglyph’ refers not just to the grimy alphabet of modernism but also ancient Egyptian ideograms. She had visited Egypt in 1923 with her partner Bryher, at the time of the Tutankhamen excavation, and she seen the ruins of the temple at Karnak. In Helen in Egypt, H.D.’s lengthy sequence of lyric poems (comprised of three-line choral stanzas), Helen takes refuge in the temple of Amen (the Greek equivalent is Zeus, Helen’s progenitor). Here she sees the hieroglyphs of the temple. She cannot crack the code, yet she imbibes the meaning of the pictorial writing. In a prefatory note, H.D. claims that
Helen herself denies intellectual knowledge of the temple-symbols. But she is nearer to them than the instructed scribe. For her, the secret of the stone-writing is repeated in natural or human symbols. She herself is the writing.Footnote4
If we move away momentarily from hieroglyphs, what does the word ‘unconscious’ mean to H.D.? She seems to use the concept interchangeably with vision, memory, dream-pictures, and works of art. Her analysis with Freud helps her differentiate between ephemeral and confused visions and ‘real’ ones. ‘Those memories, visions, dreams, reveries – or what you will – are different. Their texture is different, the effect they have on mind and body is different’, she writes in Tribute (p. 35). Her interpretation of these phenomena varied from Freud’s: ‘He said a dream sometimes showed a ‘corner’, but I argued that this dream was a finality, an absolute, or a synthesis’ (p. 119). I want to discuss one of these in some detail: ‘the dream of the Princess’, a dream about the Pharaoh’s daughter finding Moses in the bulrushes, which she had in Vienna in 1933 (p. 36).
She was a dark woman, wearing a yellow robe, wrapped around her like a sari, H.D. writes. ‘But she is not Indian, she is Egyptian’ (p. 36). She appears at the top of a marble staircase which descends into a river. ‘There is no detail’, historical or symbolic (p. 36). She has no visible indicators of rank, but we know this is a princess. ‘She is as abstract as a lady could be, yet she is a real entity, a real person’ (p. 36). The dreamer is at the foot of the stairs, unaware of who they are and how they got there. ‘There is no before and after, it is a perfect moment in time or out of time’ (p. 36). The dreamer’s attention is drawn to a reed ark floating in the river, with the baby nesting in it who will eventually be rescued by the Princess. H.D. identifies this image as one she has seen of the Pharaoh’s daughter in the illustrated Doré Bible, an image titled ‘Moses in the Bulrushes’, but this is a belated recognition, not a memory that surfaced in waking hours. Moreover, that was a black-and-white print, not comparable with the vividness of the present manifestation. Freud asks if it is she, the dreamer, who is the baby in the basket. Or is she the child Miriam, half-hidden in the rushes? ‘Do I wish myself . . . to be the founder of a new religion?’ H.D. ponders (p. 37). She was the sixth child in her large family, the only daughter to survive. Why was it always a girl who had died, she remembers asking her parents.
What does ‘dream’ signify in this reckoning, we may ask. Are they symbols of ideas, like the Gods – goods – in Freud’s office? The dreams are real, H.D. asserts, ‘as real . . . as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the cases around the walls, that are set in elegant precision in a wide arc on the Professor’s table’ (p. 35). This dream of the Princess, the river, the child, H.D. states, has been brought on by her contact with the Professor. The Egypt of her visit to the Temple of Karnak has collided with the dimly outlined Ra, Nut, and Ka figures on Freud’s desk. The Princess is a mother symbol. Is she a stand-in for Freud’s French translator, Marie Bonaparte, fondly called ‘our Princess’ by the Professor. Freud’s difficult German had not only been borne across a language barrier by Bonaparte, but she was also instrumental in securing the Freud family’s escape to and exile in London. Does the dream indicate that Freud would be born yet again, with the aid of another translator (H.D.) this time?
H.D. varies from and disagrees with Freud’s dream interpretations, but it is imperative for her to discuss the experience with the Professor. ‘There was no use telling the story, into the air, as it were, repeatedly, like the Ancient Mariner who plucked at the garments of the wedding guest with that skinny hand’ (pp. 39–40). I want to bring in another vision before we return to the meaning of the dream of the Princess. Freud was disturbed by this and called it a ‘dangerous tendency or symptom’ (p. 41). This vision belongs to category of dreams that H.D. calls ‘pictures’. A similar dynamic of revelation and withholding is at play here: the dream content, an ‘elaborate build-up of past memories’ and the ‘shadow, a writing-on-the-wall’ (pp. 29–30).
These pictures are so clear. They are like transparencies, set before candles in a dark room. I may or may not have mentioned these incidents to the Professor. But they were there. Upon the elaborate build-up of past memories, across the intricate network made by hair-lines that divided one irregular bit of the picture-puzzle from another, there fell inevitably a shadow, a writing-on-the-wall, a curve like a reversed, unfinished S and a dot beneath it, a question mark, the shadow of a question – is this it? (p. 30)
The series of shadow- or of light-pictures I saw projected on the wall of a hotel bedroom in the Ionian island of Corfu, at the end of April 1920 . . . . I consider this sort of dream or projected picture or vision as a sort of halfway state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who, for lack of a more definite term, we must call psychics or clairvoyants. (p. 41)
The picture-on-the-wall is a vision H.D. has never had before or since. ‘I saw a dim shape forming on the wall between the foot of the bed and the wash-stand’ she writes (p. 44). She thinks it is sunlight flickering from the branches of flowering orange trees outside the window before she realises that this side of the house is already in shadow. ‘The pictures on the wall were like colorless transfers or calcomanias, as we pretentiously called them as children’ (p. 44). The ‘shadows’ are actually not made of darkness but of light. The writing on the wall is ‘dim light on shadow, not shadow on light’ (p. 45). The first picture is that of a three-quarter face, head and shoulders, no marked features. A familiar face, but it could be anyone. The second picture is the outline of a goblet or cup. The third picture is not flat like the first two. It is a circle or two circles, the base the larger of the two. It is joined by three lines, not flat but in perspective. It reminds H.D. of the tripod of classic Delphi and also a small stand for a spirit lamp she carried in her travels. A venerated object of the cult of the sun god associated with the humble metal frame often used to support a small saucepan for boiling water. H.D. goes on to list a ladder, and a sun-disk with a winged goddess being drawn into it. She makes religious connections with the images: the goblet is the mystic chalice, the ladder Jacob’s ladder, the spirit lamp a tripod of the priestess or Pythoness of Delphi. For Freud, however, the visions remained a ‘dangerous symptom’ (p. 51) of megalomania and an infantile wish to be reunited with the mother.
H.D. tells Bryher that ‘There have been pictures here – I thought they were shadows at first, but they are light, not shadow’ (p. 47). While the pictures have emerged out of nowhere, the witnessing of them is a conscious act, capable of being suspended at will. H.D. describes it as a ‘sustained crystal-gazing stare’ (p. 47) ‘Shall I stop? Shall I go on?’ she asks Bryher, who says ‘Go on’ without hesitation (p. 47). The witnessing is therefore also a collective act, for without Bryher, H.D. admits, ‘I could not have gone on’ (p. 48). Bryher, whose name was Annie Winifred Ellerman, had taken H.D. to the islands to help her recover from her pregnancy and the illness – Spanish flu – she suffered during and after the birth of her daughter Perdita. ‘It was she really who had the detachment and integrity of the Pythoness of Delphi. But it was I, battered and dissociated from my American family and my English friends, who was seeing the pictures . . . Or perhaps in some sense, we were ‘seeing’ it together’ (p. 48).
The lead up to the ‘occult phenomena’ of the writing on the wall was grim (p. 40). H.D. had had a series of shocks before March 1920, which she described as a Spring of ‘unresolved terrors, perils, heartaches, dangers’ (p. 40). These included the death of her father in 1919, quite possibly related to the death in action of her brother in France, and her own near-death in the ‘influenza winter of 1919’, when she was waiting for her second child, having lost the first in 1915. War neurosis – she called it her personal ‘war phobia’ – is pervasive in her writing in this period, with H.D. believing that the stillbirth of her child in 1915 was brought on by the news of the Lusitania’s sinking by German forces (the British ocean liner was returning to Liverpool from New York). The writing on the wall appears at the start of a period of regeneration.
H.D. treats the unconscious visions as oracles, the wellspring of her inspiration to be a poet. The writing on the wall is a form of writing, not simply viewing. ‘The moving finger writes’ H.D. states, albeit without claiming agency or authorship (p. 52). The personages of myth in the vision are also creatures of imagination. H.D. evokes the idea of a fourth dimension – a fourth wall – which is space not time. The fourth wall in Freud’s office is a largely unwalled connecting room, a room beyond, which ‘may appear very dark or there may be broken light and shadow’ (p. 23). The writing on the wall is a projection on this as H.D. lies on the couch, translating the pictographic to the verbal for Freud, sitting behind her across the room. Here is Laura Marcus’s virtuoso interpretation of the collapsing of the hotel room in the consulting room:
If both spaces were the sites of projection, of picture-writing, of a Writing on the Wall, the psychoanalysis too was a cinematographic arena, with both analyst and analysand facing towards a surface – wall or screen – onto which memories and imaginings could be projected. Psychoanalysis was itself understood as cinematographic, the projection and play of sign, image, and scene upon a screen which, like H.D.’s representations of Freud’s “fourth wall,” was simultaneously wall and non-wall, absence and presence . . . at once past, present, and future.Footnote5
Laura and I had become friends as we worked on literary psychoanalysis, which often conceptualises writing as embodied visionary processes. In Tribute to Freud, which I think of as Laura’s parting gift to me, H.D. is lying on the psychoanalytical couch, and however excursive her fantasies, she knows that she has to abide by ‘a center, security, aim’ (p. 133). Perhaps consciousness is this condition of being salvaged and saved. ‘Ship-wrecked like the Mariner, I have sensed bell-notes from the hermit’s chapel’, H.D. writes (p. 133). And it is a regenerative shipwreck, the ‘psychic coral polyp’ becoming a coral island as it attaches itself to larger and larger bio-composite structures. H.D. contrasts her current individuated state to collective, replicative forms of being and seeing. ‘Do we build one upon another?’ she asks in that sub-aqueous state of mind (p. 133). Yes, we build one upon another, I answer with Laura and without Laura.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Hilda DooLittle, Tribute to Freud, Introduction by Adam Phillips (New York: A New Directions Book, 2012), p. 115.
2 The joke here is that H.D. had sent a cluster of gardenias to Freud in exile in Maresfield Gardens with an unsigned card that read ‘To greet the return of the Gods’. Freud read it as ‘Goods’. They were referring to the artefacts that had been transported from Vienna to London through the good offices of Marie Bonaparte, although Gods/goods could stand for Freud himself arriving intact after a perilous journey.
3 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), p. 366.
4 Hilda Doolittle, Helen in Egypt (New York: A New Directions Book, 1961), p. 22.
5 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 367.