No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

sessions, Yofi, his chow dog, whom he called his Protector, slept by H.D.’s couch and snored. When Yofi got into a fight with another of his dogs, Freud lay on the floor between them, coins falling out of his pockets. He gave Bryher two of Yofi’s puppies – to Bryher’s dismay.

H.D. told Freud about Havelock Ellis’s urolagnia habits, about which he ‘bust his cat-whiskers with joy’. She also told him Ellis’s wife was lesbian, which he did not already know. Freud seemed smitten with H.D. According to Bryher, he said of H.D. ‘that seldom if ever had he come into contact with a mind so fine, a spirit so pure’ as hers. He hoped she would have analysis ‘of months of weeks of even years if she so desired and she would have preference over all others’.

In one session Freud talked half the time, in another he beat his hand on the pillow of his famous analysands’ couch where H.D. lay and said: ‘I am an old man, you do not think it worth your while to love me.’ He asked her to stand beside him to see who was taller: she was, though she had hoped he would be, so that she could feel herself to be a child. H.D. felt special because of Freud’s interest in her. To Bryher she wrote that ‘anyone who gets within ten miles of Freud is a sort of minor god-in-the-machine’, and she told Havelock Ellis that Freud ‘cannot take on people who have nothing to offer in return any more’.

After the sessions, H.D. wrote Tribute to Freud. She called him ‘a discoverer of new life’. According to him, H.D. was ‘the perfect example of the bisexual’. He explained her bisexuality, she told Bryher, in terms of parental loss:

usually a child decides for or against one or another parent, or identifies himself with one. But to me, it was simply the loss of both parents, and a sort of perfect bisexual attitude arises, loss and independence. I have tried to be man, or woman, but I have to be both. But it will work out, papa says and I said, now in writing.

At the root of H.D.’s lesbian loves, Freud surmised, was her search for union with her mother, or a mother. To Bryher, H.D. boasted of the size of her ‘mother-fix’:

F says mine is absolutely FIRST layer, I got stuck at the earliest pre-OE stage and ‘back to the womb’ seems to be my only solution. Hence islands, sea, Greek primitives and so on. It’s all too wonder-making.

Freud told her he did not like being the mother in transference: ‘I feel so very, very very MASCULINE.’ Nor did he have time for her horoscopy and what he called her ‘star fish stuff’. She characterized his dismissal of what he viewed as superstition and pseudoscience as a racial trait:

These Jews, I think, hold that any dealings with ‘lore’ and that sort of craft is wrong. I think so too, when it IS WRONG!!!! But it isn’t always. And I want to write my vol. to prove it.

To Bryher, H.D. voiced gratitude for making psychotherapy with Freud possible – and for much else too:

You evidently in some way are food, help, support, mother, though of course it mixes over into father too.

And it was true. Whenever Bryher could make life better for the people in her orbit, she did so – and for the wider world. She expected little in return and did not count the cost.

J’accuse!

Freud’s work was publicly burned by the National Socialists in Berlin in May 1933. Bryher offered to pay for the Freud family to move from Vienna. She sent him emergency funds, in case he needed to escape, and a copy of J’accuse!, published by the World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism. It exposed Nazi atrocities and included the letter written by Émile Zola in 1898 to the President of France about the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus.

In Close Up in 1933, Bryher published a long article, ‘What Shall You Do In the War?’ She wanted to galvanize outrage and action against the pogroms of German Jews, the tide of refugees and exiles, censorship, book burnings, the aggressive militarism of the Nazi regime. ‘I cannot understand how any person anywhere who professed to the slightest belief in ethics could stand aside at such a moment.’

She viewed the situation as too grave for ‘a pacifism of theories and pamphlets’ when an attempt was underway:

to exterminate a whole section of the population no matter whether their characters were good or bad… It is useless for us to talk about disarmament when children are being trained in military drill and where every leader of intellectual thought in Germany is exiled or silenced.

Freud got H.D. writing again. Bryher went often to Vienna to visit her, sometimes with Macpherson and Norman Douglas. After a break in London, H.D. resumed the sessions in autumn 1934. One evening she strayed into closed-off streets and was interrogated by the military police. Jews were regularly attacked by Nazi gangs. On a day of violence when swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were chalked on pavements, she turned up for her session with Freud, though all his other patients had cancelled. Bryher sent her instructions on how to get out of Vienna. H.D. replied that as her heart was ‘here with this old saint’, she would stay and risk death.

Freud was accepting of the relationship between the two women. He respected them both. Bryher said of him:

Freud in himself was not what his admirers wanted him to be, a silent sage or hermit sitting on a rock and staring at the horizon. He reminded me rather of a doctor of the nineties, full of advice and kindness, who would have gone out in all weathers to help his patients and turned no one away from his door… nobody this last century has helped humanity so much.

Pursuit of psychoanalysis was in defiance of the meaningless evil of the times. Freud was pessimistic