“Death and Birth — the great experiences,” as H. D. described them. Emily Dickinson talks much about death. H. D. talks much about both — and about rebirth. Emily Dickinson was wonderfully feminine; H. D. was womanly. One senses the fullness of her experiences, in Tribute to Freud, precisely as one feels the skilled warmth of Freud’s response. She would remember a person or a phrase and exhibit it to Freud, as he in turn picked up the correlative artifact and symbol from his desk. “There,” she wrote in 1955 in Küsnacht, still remembering, “in the print tacked to my wall above the couch, piled high with its heaps of books, manuscripts and letters, sits the Professor at his desk. There are books behind him and books and papers on his desk. There on his desk, too, are a number of the images he so loved and treasured, perhaps (although I do not identify it) the very Egyptian Osiris that he once put into my hands. ‘This is called the answerer,’ he said, ‘because Osiris answers questions.’ ”
Writing on the wall posed questions. Osiris, with the help of Freud, showed the way to answers. It is as H. D. put it in her Tribute — “The picture-writing, the hieroglyph of the dream, was the common property of the whole race; in the dream, man, as at the beginning of time, spoke a universal language, and man, meeting in the universal understanding of the unconscious or the subconscious, would forgo barriers of time and space; and man, understanding man, would save mankind.” Man would, could at least, write.
NORMAN HOLMES PEARSON
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
JULY 1973
* The quotation from the letter from Pound to H. D. © 1974 by the Estate of Ezra Pound.