I loved the bit about Freud being so interested in gossip about, um, Havelock Ellis, I think it was.
"Ah, you tell this all so beautifully." And then Ellis starts turning up in her dreams.
I like H.D.'s recording of her dreams, because while she interprets them according to Freud's principles and her own mysticism, she tells them with all the loose ends and sudden jump cuts and incongruous equations of actual dreams, not narratives shaped to feel dreamlike. People are sometimes themselves and sometimes not and she doesn't tell Freud about all her dreams, which is interestingly candid. I suspect she doesn't tell the reader about all of them, either.
And poor old Freud saying he didn't think anything would happen to him because the Viennese were so kind, when they were holding parades with swastika-shaped confetti.
The few occasions where she directly describes the atmosphere of Vienna are strange and chilling to me, partly because what she sees is the lowering tension, not the atrocities that prey on her mind when she reads about them.
Then there were rifles. They were stacked neatly. They stood in bivouac formations at the street corners. It must have been a week-end; I don't remember . . . They were not German guns—but perhaps they were; anyway, these were Austrian soldiers. The stacks of rifles gave the streets a neat, finished effect, as of an 1860 print. They seemed old-fashioned, the soldiers seemed old-fashioned; I was no doubt reminded of familiar pictures of the American Civil War. This was some sort of civil war. No one would explain it to me. The hall porter, usually so talkative, was embarrassed when I questioned him. Well, I must not involve him in any discussion or dangerous statement of opinion. I went out anyway. There were some people about and the soldiers were out of a picture or a film of a reconstructed Civil War period. They did not seem very formidable. I had meant to go to the opera—it was late afternoon or early evening—so I might as well go to the opera, if there was an opera, as mope in my room or loiter about the hotel, wondering and watching. When challenged on one of the main thoroughfares, I said simply, in my sketchy German, that I was a visitor in Vienna; they called me the English lady at the hotel, so I said I was from England, which in fact I was. What was I doing? Where was I going? I said I was going to the opera, if I was not disturbing them or getting in their way. There was a little whispering and shuffling and I was embarrassed to find that I had attracted the attention of the officers and had almost a guard of honor to the steps of the opera house, where there were more guns and soldiers, seated on the steps and standing at attention on the pavemen. It seemed that nothing, at any rate, could stop the opera. I stayed for part of the performance of—I don't remember what it was—and had no trouble finding my way back.
If she saw anything nastier, she doesn't write about it here; but the rifles tell their own story in ellipsis.
I used to own Captain January, by Laura E. Richards -- my edition was in a double with The Little Colonel by Annie Fellows Johnston, with Shirley Temple movie illos on the covers.
no subject
"Ah, you tell this all so beautifully." And then Ellis starts turning up in her dreams.
I like H.D.'s recording of her dreams, because while she interprets them according to Freud's principles and her own mysticism, she tells them with all the loose ends and sudden jump cuts and incongruous equations of actual dreams, not narratives shaped to feel dreamlike. People are sometimes themselves and sometimes not and she doesn't tell Freud about all her dreams, which is interestingly candid. I suspect she doesn't tell the reader about all of them, either.
And poor old Freud saying he didn't think anything would happen to him because the Viennese were so kind, when they were holding parades with swastika-shaped confetti.
The few occasions where she directly describes the atmosphere of Vienna are strange and chilling to me, partly because what she sees is the lowering tension, not the atrocities that prey on her mind when she reads about them.
Then there were rifles. They were stacked neatly. They stood in bivouac formations at the street corners. It must have been a week-end; I don't remember . . . They were not German guns—but perhaps they were; anyway, these were Austrian soldiers. The stacks of rifles gave the streets a neat, finished effect, as of an 1860 print. They seemed old-fashioned, the soldiers seemed old-fashioned; I was no doubt reminded of familiar pictures of the American Civil War. This was some sort of civil war. No one would explain it to me. The hall porter, usually so talkative, was embarrassed when I questioned him. Well, I must not involve him in any discussion or dangerous statement of opinion. I went out anyway. There were some people about and the soldiers were out of a picture or a film of a reconstructed Civil War period. They did not seem very formidable. I had meant to go to the opera—it was late afternoon or early evening—so I might as well go to the opera, if there was an opera, as mope in my room or loiter about the hotel, wondering and watching. When challenged on one of the main thoroughfares, I said simply, in my sketchy German, that I was a visitor in Vienna; they called me the English lady at the hotel, so I said I was from England, which in fact I was. What was I doing? Where was I going? I said I was going to the opera, if I was not disturbing them or getting in their way. There was a little whispering and shuffling and I was embarrassed to find that I had attracted the attention of the officers and had almost a guard of honor to the steps of the opera house, where there were more guns and soldiers, seated on the steps and standing at attention on the pavemen. It seemed that nothing, at any rate, could stop the opera. I stayed for part of the performance of—I don't remember what it was—and had no trouble finding my way back.
If she saw anything nastier, she doesn't write about it here; but the rifles tell their own story in ellipsis.
I used to own Captain January, by Laura E. Richards -- my edition was in a double with The Little Colonel by Annie Fellows Johnston, with Shirley Temple movie illos on the covers.
All right; one for references I didn't recognize!