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  • H.D.’s Post-Freudian Cultural Analysis: Nike versus Oedipus
  • Katherine Arens

H.D.’s 1944 Writing on the Wall is the first of two works later combined in the text Tribute to Freud, an autobiographical memoir of her analysis with Freud in 1933–34. 1 Most interpretations of this work rest on a narrow set of assumptions: that H.D. was principally a modernist (imagist) poet, that her world was unwilling to accept a female modernist, and that the stress of such suppressed creativity drove her to creative silence. Such assumptions evaluate H.D.’s work with Freud as part of her creative potential, as the start of a “Freudian poetics,” as many critics will have it. For this reason, this text is considered H.D.’s reassertion of her poetic gifts, her reemergence into active writing after she found her “own LEGEND” in her sessions with Freud (Pearson, v), her mental health, and her artistic creativity. Moreover, Writing is seen as a turning point in H.D.’s career: as a creative work that allowed her to abreact the personal problems that had kept her silent for the better part of a decade (as Freudians would have predicted), 2 a biographical turning point synthesizing her art and her history, 3 an example of Freud’s work translated into a model for a poetics of the unconscious, 4 or a key to a particular modernist poetics stressing writing about writing. 5

While the aesthetic implications of Writing on the Wall have been considered in detail with respect to H.D.’s later poetry, the structure of the text and its purpose as a memoir have been virtually ignored. Yet H.D.’s contact with Freud clearly had a much more personal dimension, one suggested by a March, 1933 letter that Kenneth Macpherson wrote to Bryher: “Oh that awful Kat. She has got in, hasn’t she. She’ll be unbearable. A pupil of Freud. She’ll live on that till she dies” (Guest 1984, 207). “Living on” her contact with Freud points to an H.D. who was interested in more than tending her poetic muse. Like Macpherson, H.D. had to have realized that contact with Freud [End Page 359] in 1933 meant much more than just treatment for an individual’s mental health: it meant admission into an inner circle, a cultural legend of its own, with its attendant publicity.

The “Kat” who met Freud was, for instance, attaining new status in her personal life through this gesture. Her companion, Bryher, had been a long-time financial supporter of the Freudian movement and was even paying for H.D.’s sessions (Guest 1984, 211–12). 6 H.D.’s sessions allowed her to claim a unique relationship with the great Professor, a personal authority as student that a mere supporter could never have. H.D. could tell Bryher (in a letter of 22 November 1934), for example, about “some of the tricks of the trade,” and report to her how psychoanalysis was less a science than an improvisation between analyst and analysand (Friedman 1987, 101). Such observations suggest that H.D. was not just tending her mental health, and that Bryher may have been more successful in creating a new stimulus in H.D.’s life than she had intended. In Freud, H.D. found a fellow gossip, an appreciator of art, and perhaps even a space away from Bryher. “Freud wants me to write,” H.D. reported on 20 August 1933, an imperative from an almost inevitable cultural force (Friedman 1987, 93). 7 When, however, Bryher wanted to intrude onto this new world, when she wanted to be in on it (Guest 1984, 214): “Bryher’s excited entrance into the psychoanalytic world of Vienna, a preserve dutifully trodden by H.D., caused H.D. to become ill” (215). Whether such biographical conjectures are true or not (and they echo the analysis of Anne Sexton a generation later), the situation suggests that H.D.’s sessions with Freud authorized her personally, as well as aesthetically.

But Writing on the Wall was not written in 1933/4. To write about Freud in 1944, as H.D. ultimately did...

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