by Bryher;
I ought to have known better but in desperation I persuaded Kenneth and Herring to join me on a cruise to Spitsbergen. I had supposed it would be a large type of cargo boat and was quite unprepared for such scraps of conversation as “I think we are down to play deck tennis together. Isn’t it time we did something about it?”
The wildest rumors went round because we refused to join in the community games and perhaps I was a little too sniffy as I walked briskly up and down the deck with a history of Iceland under my arm and listened to the old ladies saying to each other, “My dear, how gray the sea is this morning.”
“Well, it’s never blue in the North. You have to go to the Mediterranean for that.”
“No, you don’t. You have to go to the Indian Ocean.”
On the whole, the passengers were elderly but they were determined to have fun. It makes such a difference to know the landscape of a poem and I had a perfect day at Thingvellir, wandering over the saga country among dwarf, intensely blue gentians and short grass. Both were an adaptation to the fierce winds. It was a moment that made up for the rest of the trip. We steamed round to Akureyri and from there to North City in Spitsbergen. Of course we were tourists, admiring the huskies in an enclosure outside the post office, but I saw a typical Arctic summer for the first time, with stretches of heather, bog cotton and in one place the short, creamy petals of the reindeer flower, Dryas octopetala. I have often found that if I have longed for something very much, the actual experience is more vivid than my picture of it. There was pack ice at Green Bay on our return and I stared into the light of a brilliant evening, wondering if I should ever see Greenland.
In May, 1933, my father was seriously ill for only the second time in his life. The doctors told him he must cut down on work. “How can I, Miggy,” he said to me, “we are still in the aftermath of the war and if I retired now, hundreds might lose their jobs.” I was not unduly anxious because apart from a few attacks of influenza, I had seldom known him to spend a day in bed. He was worried, however, about my brother who wanted to marry almost the first girl that he had met. My father asked him to wait for a year, travel and then if he was still of the same mind, promised his consent. None of us knew that there were people who were already doing all they could to break my brother completely away from his home.
On July 16th, I woke up at dawn, saw that it was too early to get up and drifted off to sleep again. I dreamed that my father was dying. I was not particularly startled when I woke up, I thought that it was an anxiety dream because he had been ill. It turned out afterwards, however, that he had had a stroke at that same moment. They telephoned me from Dieppe, where he had been on holiday with my mother, to come at once.
There was no train before the late evening so I rang up Geneva Airport and they offered me a small charter plane. It was a two-seater but the engine had a reasonable amount of power and the pilot had been trained by the Swiss Air Force. It was still the early days of flying and weather reports were meager. We got caught in a hurricane of wind above the Juras that twisted us round and side-ways as if our machine were a stray bit of paper until it looked for a moment as if we might crash before we could turn. Somehow the pilot circled, asked me if I were willing to try again, I nodded, he found another route and once over France the turbulence ceased. I believe that we were in extreme danger but due to the circumstances and my ignorance of flying I did not care. We refueled at Paris and flew on towards the sea. It was almost evening and I think that I have never seen a more magnificent sunset in my life. The gold and scarlet seemed to recede from us and I knew at the precise moment when it happened, that my father had died. We had always been so near to one another, and analysis, while freeing me from dependence, in other ways had deepened our relationship.
We landed. I went to the hotel but I did not need to be told. My father was cold beyond any ice that I had ever felt but he looked peaceful and it was fitting that he died in the Normandy that he had always loved.
I could not do much for my mother. She never recovered from the shock but had six long and, I fear, unhappy years before she could join him. “Oh, don’t look at me,” she begged, “you have his eyes.” It was a great love story that endured to the end.
They were kind in France, one of his own ships came to take the body back to England, covered, again fittingly, by an English flag. We were utterly unprepared for the veritable charge of press photographers that met us on land. Death comes to us all and this was a moment that concerned only the family and intimate friends. Reporters lined up in front of the hearse with cameras, they broke through the relatives trying to hold them back and literally charged my mother. I had the great satisfaction myself of kicking one cameraman hard in the stomach. It was the most disgraceful exhibition that I have ever seen because by no stretch of the imagination could it be called news and even strangers wrote to the Times in disgust to complain about such an intrusion.
The people who had loved him, those whom my father had helped, came and were welcomed. He was buried at Putney after another tussle with the photographers who tried to interrupt the burial service and turn their cameras on the grave.
I believe now that my father could have become a religious leader as easily as a financier, he had such an extraordinary inner detachment. I could appreciate this the more because I never had it myself. Had he been born half a century later, he would have been interested in pure science. It should not be forgotten that England is enjoying a higher standard of living today because of the efforts of the nineteenth-century industrialists to open up vast tracts for settlement in Canada and Australia and create risk capital. All of us, the entire welfare state, are living upon the riches that they made possible. We are moving now into another type of development but it is one that has emerged from the last hundred years, it is not a new growth. People like my father had a much deeper sense of responsibility about those whom they employed than is found in the huge, amorphous corporations of the present time. Bureaucracy has replaced private enterprise in many fields but it is arbitrary and less sensitive to human needs. The present tendency to scrap men and women after a lifetime of service simply because of some age limit, seems to me far more evil than Victorian initiative.
Sachs came straight to me from his holiday, it was an act of great kindness. My brother disappeared just when my mother needed him most. The will was read, we tried to resume ordinary life, we answered letters that came from people whom my father had befriended during his youth, we cleared up papers.
And then the jackals came.
My mother had always left her jewelry when she went abroad in a safe in my father’s office. It was her own property and she was asked to remove it before probate. The safe itself was in a basement and thickly covered with dust. We noticed marks as if it had been recently opened but did not trouble further then about the matter. My mother took out her case and we went away.
My father had told us all on several occasions that he had left a Letter of Directions as well as a Will. Nobody could find it. The lawyers put forward the theory that my father had omitted to write it because of his illness but I happened to remember distinctly that he had mentioned it to me when he was still doing a full day’s work at the office. I cannot of course prove that it existed: on the other hand my father never made such statements lightly, so the strong inference is that somebody, at some time, perhaps during the funeral had managed to get at the safe and remove it. Not that it would have affected my mother or myself who were provided for under the terms of the Will. The document in question was rather in the nature of a directive (or so we understood) about the carrying on of the business.
Be that as it may, almost all of my father’s trusted associates were demoted or retired within the next few weeks, and as for my brother, be returned for a few hours and said unpardonable things to my mother although she was ill at the time. I remonstrated, he threw a chair at my head and I have never seen him since. He married before my father had been dead a month.
The f
amily split. Aunt Emily and her family clung to us loyally and I shall always be grateful to my cousin, John Todd, he visited my mother or invited her to go out with him regularly until she died. I broke off communications with my other aunt and her connections. I knew what my father would have asked of me, to defend my mother in every possible way, and I did the utmost to carry out his wishes. “You had such patience,” my mother wrote to me just before she died.
I had to spend some months in England that year with only occasional visits to Burier and as it was necessary to leave somebody in charge of the house, Elsie Volkart came to me as secretary. At least that is how it started but she now rules us all, as I say, with a rod of iron. We are a complement to each other because her ancestry is out of the mountains and the earth and I am from the sea. She had been the most faithful of companions for thirty years and loyal to such an extreme that when I returned to Switzerland in 1946, I found that she had preserved some pencil stumps and a paint rag that I had forgotten to throw away and had given her own rations to keep my dog, Claudi, alive.
It was 1960 before I visited Germany again but I saw Sachs twice in Boston and I went to the congresses of the Psychoanalytical Society at Luzern in 1934, Marienbad in 1936 and Paris in 1938. There I met friends and made new ones, particularly Walter and Melitta Schmideberg and Christine Olden, all three of whom were analysts.
The Marienbad congress is the one that stands out in my memory, Lotte Reiniger joined us for what I called “our ride to Bohemia.” It was the first time that I had realized how landlocked much of Europe was and therefore static and traditional because bound to the fields whereas we at the western edge were seafarers and fluid. It has always made me wary of the idea of a united Europe. There are some chemicals that will not mix.
Marienbad itself was a faded Edwardian portrait under a glass dome, all the stranger because at our meetings we were so ardently alive. There were psychological discoveries to be discussed and, privately, the problems of analysts already wondering whether they ought to leave Vienna or Prague. I met an explorer who had traveled in Swanetia, “a swan land among mountains where the passes are only open three months a year,” and afterwards in Pamir. We planned an expedition to the North together but the war prevented us from carrying it out.
One day we drove through woods and waddling geese to Eger. The peasants had made patterns of blue, green and cream bowls among the eggs and bunches of flowers. “Lovely designs,” Lotte said, “but how could I carry them home?” I looked at the sloping roofs, the window boxes thick with white petunias below the pigeon loft windows and wondered how much the old market women had changed in their ideas since Wallenstein had been murdered at the end of the square?
We knew although we did not speak of it that we were seeing a doomed countryside for the last time. Yet man’s stupidity could be fought, I said, if only the analysts would be less prudent. “You cannot treat the psychoanalytic movement like a boxing match,” Sachs admonished me gently, “things have to go slowly.”
I believed in speed. “If only they would get a move on,” I grumbled, “we could change the world.”
Lotte had connections in the town and told me something of the other side of the story. Frustration can explain a lot of history. “They want to make their own stupid experiences,” she said but there were no opportunities for the young professional men and the Germans cleverly exploited their discontent. “I am appalled to death,” Lotte continued, “at what may happen.”
We returned to Switzerland by way of Vienna where I saw Freud for the last time. He was already too ill to do more than talk with us for a few minutes. Yet in spite of Vienna being the birthplace of analysis and of many of my friends, it was too southern for me in atmosphere. I could not help thinking sometimes of my lost city. A moment, a memory, would come back and I could not help murmuring, it was childish but I meant it, “Why, Berlin, must I love you so?” It had gone, I thought, for ever.
NINETEEN
It was during the thirties that I began to know America better. I went over several times between 1934 and 1938. My first impression was always of the beauty of the landscape, the width of the sky, clouds sometimes floating like birds across the skyscrapers, a new range of colors. Outside the city it was “Artemis country” and I have always wanted to walk some trail in summer and get closer to America, as I was near to Switzerland because of my Alpine walks.
I usually went straight to Boston on arrival to see Sachs. The worsening situation in Europe had subdued his natural gaiety and, as the years passed, he became more and more anxious about friends who had neglected his advice to emigrate while it was still possible to leave. He had begun to read American history with his usual thoroughness and we walked up and down the Charles River for hours, discussing assimilation. It seemed remote to me at first but rapidly became a problem that has absorbed more and more of my time up to the present day. Forced migrations have almost become the symbol of the twentieth century and it was the ability of America to absorb so many cultures and turn them into a unity that fascinated him. England has not been able to do it in the Commonwealth. The process is unknown in Europe. Unlike Dr. Sachs who favored a sudden plunge, I myself found that a slow, unconscious assimilation was the surer road to success. The native-born is less likely to resent a pleasant stranger with slightly different ways to his own than a man who tries to copy him hastily and badly.
It was not only politics, however, that Sachs and I discussed on our walks. There was language, “I value English for its freedom from grammatical formulas”; my own ideas (always a pleasant subject!), “You cannot change character, in yourself you have been a seaman, in yourself you have died”; and the future of psychoanalysis in America. He favored a slow and careful process of development, I wished to charge all adversaries at sight. He answered other queries in a way that turned the answers into further questions so that the mind soared upwards into space. I wish I could have recorded what he said to me because memory, although less fleeting than some believe, is also less exact than we like to think.
Sometimes we met friends. There was a winter evening when I discussed Freudian theory with Conrad Aiken as a group of us walked back to the hotel, and another night when Merrill Moore enthralled us with a theory that the American habit of following the seasons north and south was possibly a legacy from the Red Indians. It was rich in experiences, whether I was discussing children’s literature at the Bookshop for Boys and Girls, exploring the Eastern collections in the Boston Museum or merely watching the stiff, elderly ladies munching a single white peppermint after dinner as they sat chatting in the lounge.
H. D. kept to a strict seclusion while at work but, once this was done, she had a genius for friendship. She clung particularly, as I think we all do, to the friends of her girlhood. I thus met Mary Herr, at first in London but afterwards in America, and I owe so much to her explanations and help. Mary was living temporarily in Chicago in 1934 and took me to the office of Poetry to see Harriet Monroe. I had such a feeling of unreality after the long years of my lonely apprenticeship, when I entered the place that had been associated with so many early Imagist poems, that I almost wanted to touch the desks to see if they were solid; but thanks to my analytical training, I was able to combine fact and fantasy after a few moments without any feeling of disappointment. I met Harriet several times subsequently in Europe. She was a true servitor of art but such people are ill rewarded. They do the difficult and tiresome jobs, and afterwards how few remember them?
Modern architecture seemed to fulfill a need in me from the moment that I first saw it. It was open and free and belonged to the present age. I shall never forget the skyscrapers standing in their detached, impersonal beauty beside the dark lake on a winter night. Each century has a style that speaks for its aspirations and I felt the towers were a symbol of the wider life that we wanted to create.
On subsequent visits, Mary invited me to her home at Lancaster and drove me about the Pennsylvania countryside. She took me to Be
thlehem where H. D. had been born. Hilda was Greek, it is true, but her training and background came through every word she wrote. Her long residence in Europe merely intensified her love for her native country, and to me she has always been the most American of poets,
Mary was a wonderful guide, she showed me the great Amish barns that reminded me of Switzerland, she drove me to Ephrata and told me stories of the early Moravian settlers. I accepted it all unthinkingly but afterwards when I began to study American history, I had so many memories to clothe the bare bones of a textbook. We wrote to each other regularly for thirty years and now that she is dead I miss the warm, gay comments on events and people that I had come to take for granted. It must have been a rich culture that produced so many gifted people in the last years of the nineteenth century, H. D. and Mary Herr, among them, and the artist, George Plank.
“A lion! There will be a lion...” No wonder that the astonished commuters looked up at us when the rumor passed, as if we were a circus. We were on our way to Hartford to see the first performance of Four Saints in Three Acts and, as Kenneth whispered, anyone who counted in the artistic world of New York was on the train. I could not have been prouder if the world’s chief newspaper had sent me to report it. My orders were to write at once to Gertrude Stein and Miss Toklas. I smiled at everyone smugly and hoped that I looked surréaliste without being conspicuous.
Theater is the matter of an instant. Its immediate impact may be greater than that of a poem or a picture but there is no way of recording the experience on the tape of another art. It was the perfect moment for Four Saints to be performed. The depression was gradually ending and many Americans had returned from Paris full of avant-garde ideas, and avant-garde in those days implied a serious dedication. The evening remains for me one of the most triumphant nights that I ever spent watching a stage. The Negro singers stood stiffly as in an eighteenth-century painting of a courtly festival, there was a plaster lion though he had less to do than I had hoped, but Gertrude’s text soared out magnificently and with it her, and our, rebellion against outworn art. We had all been afraid that the words might not have survived the transition from the library to the stage but we had forgotten Gertrude’s rhetoric. I do not know much about music but Virgil Thomson seemed to bring out the implications of her ideas. It is sad that her work has been so completely absorbed that today some people question her originality. They have no picture, being devoid of imagination, of the shackles that she broke for us and of how well she led our revolt.