by Bryher;
I could not have burst through the barriers that were holding me up without help. We tried to dig down to the bones of the past and to excavate memories in the process. Sometimes an episode came to light, then there would be dreary weeks when the grains of sand we sifted had no meaning. Even those Sachs found rewarding though they infuriated me. “Try not to butt through the wall with your head,” he would admonish, “an indirect approach is more likely to be successful.”
“But not so much fun.”
I could feel his dark, almost Indian eyes glittering behind me as we plunged on, more often than not, I thought, by the most roundabout and illogical way possible, “I hope you feel you are getting enough out of your hours,” he said once a little anxiously; the word “session” had not then come into use.
“Of course, I can grumble as much as ever I like and I needn’t feel guilty because I’ve paid you to listen to me.”
There was a roar of laughter that time. I was certainly not an orthodox patient but I was immensely happy. Sachs told me honestly and with infinite precaution that he was obliged to charge his foreign analysands his full fee, it was twenty marks in 1928 or at the then rate of exchange, five dollars an hour. He took his German patients for ten marks or less, according to their circumstances, and yet he was one of the original “Seven” around the Professor. Freud told me later in Vienna that ideally no charge should be made at all but as psychoanalysts had to live the same as anybody else and as their professional training was so long, fees must be asked but should be adapted to each analysand’s means. The prices today are linked to an inflated world economy that has raised medical costs everywhere, not to the founder’s ideas.
It must have been Fate that led me to Sachs. The matching of analyst and patient is an important factor in a successful analysis and nobody else would have suited me so well. We shared so many interests in common, travel, the classics and the East. The Buddhists, we recalled, had used a technique of remembering for over two thousand years. He himself was preparing a paper upon the conquest of fear in the Roman schools for gladiators. He suspected that they had used something akin to analysis before the men were sent into the arena. He usually took about ten patients a day and they left him little time for his research. I know that he had made notes on the subject, I tried to trace them after his death but they seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps the most arresting of his articles was “The Delay of the Machine Age.” It is still applicable to conditions today.
The English commonly discover nicknames for their friends. It is a sign of acceptance. It was not long before Sachs became the Turtle, partly because he often retired behind an impersonal and impenetrable shell and partly because, if a word dropped that seemed to offer a clue to the situation, he responded to it with a sudden, darting movement of the head. There could have been no successful outcome to our work, however, if we had agreed too often. His pacifism was matched against my pugnaciousness, his desire for a scholarly life was in opposition to my wish to go to sea. We fought, we argued, but I think on both sides we enjoyed ourselves though I was a little hurt to hear outside that he regarded me as an easy patient. It would have been so flattering to be difficult! After my analysis was over in a release of great freedom, we corresponded regularly until his death in 1947.
I am a convinced Freudian both because it offers the greatest challenge to the mind and because I know through my own experience that it has given the most lasting help, not to myself only but to friends. Many individual psychologists, Havelock Ellis was one, can smooth out difficulties for a time but without research in depth they usually recur. I have not myself known anyone helped by Jung. His treatment is horizontal and shallow whereas Freud is vertical and deep. Jung’s books naturally are easier for the populace to read. I could never feel myself that a myth was the slightest use to me in everyday life whereas the analysis of some small apparently incongruous incident could suddenly, like a miner’s headlamp, light up the dark pit of the brain.
Analysis must have no morals, only mirrors, and yet if I have a criticism of it, it is that most analysands become drearily good, adaptable citizens. Afterwards it helped my history because I was able to watch the story of many ancient political and religious movements taking place within a circle that I knew. The gay excitement of the early days died with the founders, the second generation was engaged in obtaining official recognition, they aspired to become part of “the Establishment.” They succeeded and yet because in the deepest way they thus betrayed some of their leader’s ideas, they tended in compensation to make laws of what Freud had suggested were points worth investigation.
And outside was Berlin. It was the time of the Bauhaus and experiments in modern architecture. The schools were locked in a struggle between light and darkness. I loved the new functional furniture, the horizontal windows and the abolition of what I thought of as messy decoration. I saw the documentary film of a rocket; people laughed, I was interested. I understood very little of what was happening politically in Germany. Berlin was an international city but in any period of great artistic expression, and we had one in the twenties, there are always centers that draw people to them to form a kingdom of their own. “It’s got to be new,” we chanted because old forms were saturated with the war memories that both former soldiers and civilians wanted to forget. We were too savage, too contemptuous, but would you have had us be prudent? We did not realize at the time that it was not the concepts themselves that were at fault but the way that they had been used. Perhaps because my own unconscious was in the process of release, the unconscious passions of the city struck me with the more force. The war losses had been the same in all countries but there had not been the total upset of all values elsewhere as in Germany and Austria. I saw hunger, brutality and greed but there was also the sudden compassionate gesture, a will to help or the pre-battle awareness of the single rose, the transient beauty of some girl’s face.
There were films to see and review because I was the only one of the Close Up group to speak much German. Beware, my masters, a knowledge of languages is not always an asset. It adds riches to our reading but I have been put in charge of a group of refugees, had a baby dumped in my lap and had to lead various helpless people round customs all because for very shame I dared not deny some knowledge of French and German. Yes, it has certainly added to the color of life but has not always been helpful to an impatient traveler.
I did not actually see the Dreigroschenoper though I met Lotte Lenya later in New York but we all knew the words of it and Mahagonny by heart. Nothing else expressed so well the mood of that Berlin with its love-hate dream of America and what can be written about it now? “They say I am too realistic,” Pabst grumbled when he was compelled to cut out a scene, “but what am I to do? Real life is so romantic and so ghostly.”
It was also the moment when the first Russian films exploded on the screen. The early ones had been made in comparative freedom and expressed the shock of war and its resulting comradeship rather than propaganda. The mass scenes were impressive because although (as at the Armistice) we had formed part of a crowd, standing in ranks we had seen merely the backs of the heads in front of us, and never an individual face. Eisenstein’s work, Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia and a strange film made by Kuleshov from a story by Jack London are the ones that remain in memory. The Kuleshov picture was a study of loneliness in an Arctic winter that ended in death and judgment. It was said that he had so little negative that he could only shoot each scene once and yet although it is thirty years since I saw it, the sequences still have a terrible clarity whereas the movies made last year with all the resources of a huge studio are forgotten. We reviewed these films in Close Up and once at the press showing of a new Russian picture we were sent in ahead of the Times. Oh, how our tails swished!
Eisenstein was in Berlin once when we were there but instead of discussing the cinema, I see him leaning back on a rickety chair, helpless with laughter and with tears streaming down his broad cheeks as he watched
us ransom two beds and two chairs for our landlady. She had furnished the pension on the hire-purchase system and we had returned to find a moving van outside and everything being carried out of our rooms. We had some trouble in saving our own suitcases. It was commonplace in Berlin and again a legacy from the inflation.
The post-war feeling that we should all be one nation went too fast and too far. It has been replaced by a fiercer nationalism than the Victorian squire with his gospel of empire ever knew. “Engagement” came with the thirties and the depression when political movements replaced even the artists’ fellowship. Here my training as a historian prevented me from following many of my friends. I had made a study of the French Revolution and, in particular, Robespierre. A class went up, a class went down, but in fifty years everything was the same. Now for the first time—and it was so exciting that sometimes I felt that I could hardly breathe—psychology was beginning to uncover the true motives of mankind. Once we understood them we should not go round in a circle but truly move forward into a new age. Professor E. R. Dodds has written better than I can of this matter in his The Greeks and the Irrational.
The “talkies” were another symbol of the changing times. The silents had been shown from Scandinavia to Spain, they had cost less and the material was richer, they had to suggest rather than state. Now each country made films in its own language. Until this happened my Close Up work took me continually into the studios. I was often sent to talk to the English and American stars and found this an ordeal until I discovered a simple solution. All that was needed was a recent copy of the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal. They were interested in investments and contracts and the movies were a road to money. They were thus very different from the theater people whom I had known who usually possessed some feeling for their art.
My own interest, however, was in education rather than film. I went to congresses, I visited schools. I wrote some articles in 1930 suggesting that the essential lessons should be planned by highly paid specialists and given through films and radio, leaving the local teachers free to supervise and ensuring that the smallest country school should have the same opportunities as those in cities. There was laughter, of course, even anger but now, thirty years later, they are beginning to use machines. I taught several children to typewrite at the age of six and noticed that none of them had any spelling difficulties afterwards. I suggested that this was because it was hard for a small child to trace a letter with his hand and see the whole word in his mind at the same time. People merely said that I wanted to degrade learning. Why? A Viennese friend, Gertrude Weiss, and I produced an easy textbook called The Lighthearted Student for visitors to Germany in 1931. It was the most successful book that I have worked on, every copy sold. Again we were attacked for saying that it was better to learn grammar through phrases than repeat unconnected rules by heart. It has now become general practice in language classes.
One day I went over a famous so-called progressive German school with a friend. I disliked the director at once, I felt that he was a bully under his seemingly soft words. I happened to look up at the program of studies. Several hours a day were devoted to gliding and aerodynamics. “Did you see what I saw?” I asked my friend when we left. She shook her head. “We are about to have another war.” I wrote an article for Close Up warning the English that they would lose their leisure and their little cars unless they stopped German rearmament before it was too late. They called me a warmonger and a hot-headed fool.
In 1923 I went to Berlin for the last time. Sachs surprised me on my arrival by suggesting that we meet privately that evening for a walk. The air was full of the scent of lime flowers and roses, the new houses looked gay, people were strolling peacefully along the quiet streets. He told me that he was leaving for Boston. It was more for him than a judicious move, it meant a severance from the language and literature that formed the core of his life. There was nothing that I could say. I knew that nobody in Europe would lift a finger to arrest the situation.
The magic of Berlin was still about me, I had this last month. Or had I? The schoolgirl daughter of an acquaintance lay for twenty minutes on the pavement near where I was staying while two political groups shot it out over her head. Perdita was with me and Lotte Reiniger took her out to her house at Neu Westend to keep her away from the turmoil. I used to go out on the train to see them among savage faces and clenched fists. The non-German-speaking British tourists in the center of the city saw only the heavily policed main streets.
One night Pabst invited some of us to the private showing of a film in a house near the Wannsee. It was about ten o’clock when we started home and just before we got to the bus stop, we were surrounded by a gang of brown-shirted youths. Who were we? Where were we going? Had we papers? I produced my British passport, it was unsafe to go out without it. Even so, I think there might have been trouble but the bus arrived at that moment and they stood round watching us until we left. It was one of the infamous nights of horror and murders.
A short time later, I had just gone to bed when I smelt smoke and heard the crash of an ax. I crawled along the floor, stiffly because I was terrified, and peeped cautiously round the curtain. The courtyard was full of men in uniform. “It’s the revolution,” I thought and I wondered how I could get to Perdita, she was several miles away. Somebody pointed, I saw a fireman’s head at a window. A fire had broken out in an apartment whose owner was on holiday and they had had to break down the door. Amusing, yes, but not in that tense atmosphere. I found the uncertainty, the never knowing what would happen, as trying as actual war. People were beginning to whisper about each other, Pabst, they warned me, was “uncertain”; on which side did he stand, they asked? Some people would not work for him.
I can understand something of Pabst’s conflict. He had been directing a German theater in New York in 1914 when he received a telegram that his mother was dangerously ill in Vienna. He took the first steamer, it had no wireless and he landed in France the day after war had begun. They immediately put him into a civilian prison under the conditions that E. E. Cummings described so well in The Enormous Room and he had remained there for almost five years. There was inadequate food and he had also felt cut off from the experiences of his generation. He went to Hollywood during the thirties but returned to Austria in the summer of 1939. It is wrong to judge when we do not know the full circumstances but I did not feel able after the war to see someone who being “outside” had returned to a country that the Nazis controlled.
The station filled with the more fortunate refugees. They were not necessarily the rich but rather those lucky enough to have relatives in the States, South America or England. Not all were Jews; there were many war veterans who wanted to end their days in peace. We all formed the habit of never going out unless we were obliged, while people in England continued to praise German discipline and order.
Since I discovered that my ancestors had come from Hitzacker, my friends teased me; “Why you’re from the Lüneburger Heide, it’s the cradle of Prussia,” they said. There was no time to go there and for the first time I was glad to leave Berlin. It was to be twenty-eight years before I saw the city again.
It became the fashion for the avant-garde cinema groups to make films as it had been the custom in Paris to bring out two issues of a magazine. There were societies all over Europe, they corresponded with Close Up and subscribed to it. Kenneth hired an attic and began to experiment. He bought a Debrie with six lenses, a professional number at that time. His first documentary, Monkey’s Moon, starring his pet dourocoulis (tiny owl-faced monkeys from South America), was shown a number of times and greeted with enthusiasm. He became more ambitious, rented a broken-down theater and made a full feature, Borderline, for what seemed to me the huge sum of two thousand dollars.
Kenneth wrote the scenario, directed, photographed and cut the picture. H. D. was superb as the heroine with an almost too realistic death scene at the end. Paul Robeson, who was curious about films at that moment, came fo
r a couple of days to play a stranger whose chance arrival started a tragedy in a village but the show was stolen by a retiring gentlewoman from the British colony whom we called Mouse. She was quiet, certain in her movements and unforgettable. I spent my days keeping a register of the shots, helping to change extremely hot and dirty carbons in the lamps and now and then being the keeper of a disreputable lodginghouse with a cigar in my mouth and my eye clamped to a keyhole. “Just be natural, Bryher, and imagine you have heard a dirty bit of gossip about your best friend.” Uncle Norman’s training with the Toscana came in useful and even Pabst giggled when he saw the sequence. The only paid member of the group was an electrician. Extras had to be dispersed rather than sought, everybody wanted to be in it and every twenty minutes all the lights went out because the tram went by. Yet it was shown in half a dozen countries, Pabst sent all his cameramen to the performance in Berlin and would have given Kenneth a position on his own set if he had been willing to take it. Spain showed it a number of times, the English asked “Whatever is it all about?” and there have been requests for the loan of a copy as late as a couple of years ago, when there have been exhibitions of early avant-garde cinema.
It was part of “the art that died” because these small pictures were training the directors and cameramen of the future as the “little reviews” had trained the writers but sound came in, nobody could continue on account of the expense and by 1934 Close Up and about sixty of these groups had ceased to exist.
Analysis liberated the past and I remembered my childhood wish to go to Greenland. A permit was needed and I got as far as the Danish Embassy with an introduction from Havelock Ellis. The official I saw was not helpful. “Greenland!” he said in surprise, “But you can go to Paris.” I tried to explain that I had dreamed about the North for years but he refused even to look up the regulations.