The Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian by Her Analysand Nephew . . . . Oneiric Precognition of Parricide . . . . The Case of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth.

QUESTION: Is it possible for an infant of 5½ years to dream of his committing a violent crime . . . a murder to be committed thirteen years later?

ANSWER: Yes, if you’re the infant analysand and nephew of the psychoanalytic pioneer Hermine Hug von Hugenstein (defined as the first child psychoanalyst recognised by Freud and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) . . . and if the murder victim thirteen years later is destined to be your aunt.

A garden intruder from the
Fin de Siècle Viennese Crime Sheet:
Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt

Extraordinarily . . . and, indeed, sinisterly . . . the nephew in question – Rudolf  Hug (‘Rolf’, illegitimate son of Hermine’s illegitimate half-sister) – was the infant subject of one of the earliest analyses of Kindheitsträume (childhood dreams), an infant whose premonition of the circumstances of his own adult degeneracy were clinically documented in 1912 by his Aunt Hermine in her paper for the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie under the title of Analyse eines Traumes eines Fünfeinhalbjährigen (The Analysis of a Dream of a 5½-Year-Old-Boy) and written, in consequence, in dutiful adherence to prevailing Freudian psychoanalytic methodology.

A dispassionate record, maybe, but Rolf’s dream is surely one of the most startling testaments in psychoanalytic case histories from the Viennese wellspring, notwithstanding the analyst’s self-censorship – in her eagerness to be recognised by Freud as an accomplished unraveller of childhood’s pharaonic visions – leading to a calamitous failure to interpret the symbolic language of a dream that in so many coordinate details is a parable for the prefiguring of her own death.

Symbolic determinism.

The infant Rudolf is described by his eminent aunt as ‘. . . a strong [sexual] exhibitionist . . . a little tyrant . . .’ of ‘. . . precocious intelligence . . .’ yet ‘. . . an excrement smearer . . .’ who ‘. . . kept up an active interest in his and others’ defecation.’ At five years of age he could read and write. He looked like a ten-year-old, but was pale, according to a neighbour who knew the family. The boy never looked healthy.
  
His prophetic dream was described by Rolf thus: ‘I am so afraid. A big bear wants to eat me. There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top. The bear wants to hug me with his front paws. In the middle of the ceiling there was a gigantic black spot, no, a big blot.’

Let us be clear. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (the name by which she was latterly known following the abolition of nobiliary particles under the Habsburg Law of 1919) is remembered certainly for the professional detachment of her meticulous analytic method but – particularly in relation to her principal object of study, the child Rolf – that cold-eyed detachment is revealed to be a process of observation that saw the 5½-year-old as more an object of scientific enquiry than as a vessel receptive of familial affection.

Beyond the Pale? To be ever banished from a tender heart by barbed defences ?
‘. . . a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’

Visceral wish-fulfilment.

Let us examine Hermine’s analysis of Rolf’s dream more closely. 

1 – ‘I am so afraid.’ In his aunt’s view, Rolf was attention-seeking by ‘forcing affection for himself through the pretended fear.’

2 – ‘A big bear wants to eat me . . . and hug me with his front paws.’ The bear can be seen, according to Hermine, as the embodiment of his absentee black-bearded father by whom he wished to hugged  and kissed. At the age of ‘approximately three-and-half years of age he visited Schönbrunn Zoo for the first time. He saw bears standing up clinging to the lattice fence . . . His delight knew no end as he even saw the “standing up” bears’ erect penises.’ The appearance of the bear is, therefore, both a wish fulfilling dream of brute potency and an expression of the fierce ‘longing of the boy for his big, strong father.’ The bear, accordingly, is the ‘leitmotif of his nightly experience.’  

3 – ‘There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’ In the child’s bedroom were ‘. . . Venetian blinds . . . and the light of the street lamp creates . . . shadow stripes like an actual fence drawn on the ceiling . . . In the dream the picket fence primarily refers to the railing of his little bed . . . through which he exhibited his penis . . . In connection with his lust to exhibit himself in bed he also had a habit of urinating during walks at every fence . . . for example, on a certain board or exactly through two slats into a crack.’ This exploit recalls for him the transgressive act, age two years, of making the arms or hands of his female carers ‘the target of his stream.’

4 – ‘Lots of pointed arrows.’ These refer ‘at first to his own penis but also to the penises of several boys who lived in the neighbourhood during his second year of life. They were repeatedly seen urinating through the fence into the neighbouring garden.’

5 – ‘A black spot, no, a big blot, in the middle of the ceiling.’ The boy – guilty in his infancy of ‘gross coprophilic activity’ as an ‘excrement smearer’ – was observed ‘some days before the dream’ running ‘obsessively around and around the room, squatting here and there, and calling, “Aunt Hermine, I will sit down and make a blot [faeces].” The dream ‘granted him the fulfilment of his wish, and, further, it was on the ceiling in a very exposed spot where everyone who entered the room could see it. In his defecation games he repeatedly selected to “blot” in the “middle” . . . ’ so, in Hermine’s view, her little nephew’s dream accorded at the most visceral level to Freud’s irrefutable dictum ‘Der Traum ist eine Wunscherfüllung’ (the dream is a wish-fulfilment), and moreover permitted a classical interpretation by which infant urolagnia and coprophilia are seen as simulative of adult sexual gratification and indicative of nascent carnal refinements yet to be fully explored.

13 years later . . .  the murder of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth by Nephew Rolf. 

In the small hours of September 9 1924, eighteen-year-old Rolf Hug climbed over the green fence that ran along the Viennese street on which his aunt lived, and scrambled up to an open window giving him entry to her small, functional ground-floor apartment where the noise of his footfall awoke Hermine whom he at once attacked, attempting to smother her with a pillow when in a fierce struggle for her life she fell on the floor.

When he could not silence her screams he strangled her, then gagged her after he became aware her limbs were still moving. He carried her body to her sleeping-couch in the centre of the room. He placed with care her head on a clean pillow, which concealed the blood-covered pillow that had smothered her. 

One drop of blood remained in her nostril. Her larynx and three ribs were broken. Rolf searched her underwear for money and took 2,600,000 kronen and a gold watch. With the aid of a chair he climbed out of the window and put on his shoes, which he had placed for retrieval in the darkness below, to leave by the way he had come, through the ‘garden of ivy’ that separated Hermine’s apartment house from the neighbouring building. 

In the years preceding the crime, Rolf had approached his aunt and demanded money with menaces on numberless occasions. Since childhood he had been a persistent thief and even neighbours were warned to guard their purses. 

Rudolf Otto Hug – ‘Rolf’ – was apprehended the next day at Mürzzuschlag railway station, some 85 km from Vienna. 

In brief, these are the essential forensic facts and confession evidence as they emerged from the police enquiry and trial.

Dark Street. (1933)
by Nikolai Sinezouboff. 

A child’s foreshadowing of a death. 

The theory of typological relationships, which sees the Boy as Father of the Man, can be as exegetical for the psychopathography of a patient as those correspondences identified by scholars of biblical prophecy, who find in events in the early scriptures revelatory foreshadowing of the Redeemer . . . sightings of the prefigurative type that anticipates the antitype of the future, proclaimed as the fulfilment of messianic prophecy. 

So, to draw similar parallels, what instructive concordances can we identify when – favoured by 20/20 hindsight – we examine the tragic history of Rudolf Otto Hug and his aunt?

1 – ‘I am so afraid.’ The corollary to Hermine’s dream-analysis of Rolf’s Fear is a counterview that considers the supposed Saviour to whom the infant looks for protection – Hermine herself – from whose hands, she records, he was ‘forcing affection for himself through the pretended fear.’

Yet, according to by Hermine’s biographers, Hermine (as Rolf’s closest surviving relative upon the death of his mother) ‘. . .  [never] entered into a loving relationship with Rolf.  On the contrary, her attitude towards him appears to have been distant, hostile, even mean. She kept away from all others’. She also ‘was unable to relate to other people in an intimate manner . . . ’ and she did not have friends in whom she could confide.

Hermine was a person, then, who positively bristled with resistance to intimacy, and it’s significant that in The Analysis of a Dream of a 5½-Year-Old-Boy she recalls ‘Rolf once saw his aunt by accident in her corset . . . ’; significant because the more-than-figurative steel corset has been the oft-repeated symbol of lovelessness for troubled analysands whose unresolved neuroses surface in adulthood to betray minds tormented by the absence of parental affection in infancy . . . the softness of an embrace denied, literally, by steel ribbing. And Hermine, after all, stood in loco parentis  for her dead sister.

So a palisade stockaded against affection is a persona suggestive of many resonances, not least the emotional resonance to be found in the archetypicality of her given name . . .  Hermine is a feminine form of Herman, a variant of which is Arminius, great chieftain of the Germanic tribes whose warriors – shielded by staked palisades – defeated the Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.  Her name is destiny and totemic of indomitable Germania. Nomen est omen. 

Indeed, in addition, the martial defensive connotations of Hermine’s family name, Hellmuth, should not be ignored, composed as it is of the Germanic elements helm (‘helmet’) and muot (‘spirit’ or ‘mind’), a combination redolent of the introspective, cautious, guarded person Hermine evidently was . . . an armour against amour.

      Barbed defences . . . 
Helmeted Arminius
leads the Germanic tribes from
his staked palisade (see rocky heights, above)
to defeat the Roman army in the
Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD. 

Nor, in this regard, should we forget the cursed name of Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria, and heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who killed his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling and then turned the gun on himself. Can we be sure that Rolf was not condemned to misfortune by his ill-fated namesake, whose death set in motion a chain reaction that saw the heir presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated, an event that triggered World War I, and a defeat that brought about the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.  Nomen est omen.

So it is possible to see that far from a warm maternal-filial relationship, Hermine (Arminius) and Rudolf (Kronprinz) stood in stark opposition: a Victor-Vanquished nexus that could be resolved only in a high tragedy of mythological dimensions such as those Ancient Greek tragedies from which many of Freud’s psychoanalytical methodologies were derived. In short, did child-psychoanalyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, a Freudian doctrinaire and Rolf’s second mother, maintain conformity to Freudian doctrine (namely, belief in a variant-Oedipus Complex) even unto her death?

By examining more closely the remaining strands of 5½-year-old Rolf’s prophetic allegorical dream the embedded truth of Hermine’s analysis may begin to emerge.

2 – ‘A big bear wants to eat me . . . and hug me with his front paws.’ Contrary to the self-censoring interpretation proposed by Hermine (that Rolf’s dream projection is the fierce ‘longing of the boy for his big, strong’ absentee father), the bear’s forepaws can be also interpreted as Hermine’s own repressive hands of his recent infancy. At the age of three, Rolf’s exhibitionism (lifting his nightgown to display his penis) was discouraged by Hermine who admits, ‘In order to distract him [from ‘exhibitionist pleasure’ and the ‘strong auto-erotism’ of the ‘lust to exhibit’ his genitals] . . . I let my hand circle above the bed and swoop down like a swooping bird [pecking?] on his naked foot or hand . . .’ to ‘. . . fly away disgusted if it saw too much nakedness.’ So the [peckish?] hands sought by Rolf for longed-for warm embraces are both desired and feared in equal measure and, moreover, in his dream, become an anthropomorphised expression of a woman’s threat to his sexual potency, and a vision of hands to both clasp and consume him. This sense of repressive menace is more likely the ‘leitmotif of his nightly experience.’

3 – ‘There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’ The significance of the picket fence with arrow-headed palings reappearing at the crime scene thirteen years after its dream occurrence prompts speculations as to second sight, particularly as ‘the picket fence’ of the 5½-year-old boy exerts the same attraction of a taboo as the forbidden barrier to the ‘garden of ivy’ that the eighteen-year-old youth scrambles over: the forest ‘green fence’ – the Arminius-erected palisade – looming in the dark that separates him from the apartment of his aunt.

4 – ‘Lots of pointed arrows.’ If, as Hermine proposes, the dream-arrows refer to penises defiling a garden by their urinating through a fence, in defiance of the rigidities of propriety, then Rolf’s criminal penetration of the ‘garden of ivy’ to reach the murder scene can be viewed as a fulfilment of a rite of desecration long meditated in his quest to be avenged. Hermine in her dream analysis suggests the ‘crack between two [fence] slats . . . could also refer to a vagina’, so the assault on Hermine’s apartment can be similarly seen as a violation preparatory to a virtual necrophilic rape, insofar as Rolf manhandled the half-naked Hermine in her death throes and searched her underwear to steal her long-preserved savings.

5 – ‘A black spot, no, a big blot, in the middle of the ceiling.’ There is conclusive fulfilment, too, of infant Rolf’s prophetic dream in the subconscious stage-directions the eighteen-year-old follows to set the crime scene.

           [Middle] Rolf carried the dying Hermine to the centre of the room.

           [Spot] One blackened drop of dried blood remained in one nostril.  

           [Blot] Her forehead had a swelling with a dark bruise on her neck

Just as Hermine had described Rolf’s childhood games of defilement, so Rolf in adulthood had selected to ‘blot’ in the ‘middle’ of the room and retrace the action of his dream by making a ‘blot’ in ‘a very exposed spot where every one who entered the room could see it.’ 

Murder was the dark stain on the chamber of sleep he foresaw from his infant cot. For Rolf, it was the ultimate act of defiance against the persecutor of his infancy who he believed had treated him with rigidity and without mercy. And indeed, the violence of his resentment can be measured by the smashed larynx and the silenced woman’s three broken ribs, a final breaching of the barricade of aloofness that for so long had resisted him.

Yet, in the end, when the deed was done, was it a simply a matter of basest greed for a benefactor’s possessions compounded by a sense of entitlement compelled by a paranoiac grudge?  In this connexion, we should be reminded that murder for financial gain in those desperate times of hunger and spiralling hyperinflation was a primary cause of homicide, with the highest banknotes then circulating printed in denominations of 500,000 kronen; at the time of Hermine’s death Austria’s money supply had increased by 14,250 percent.

Or was it, for Hermine, a case of an ‘elective victim’* submissive to a preordained slayer? There is substance in this suspicion. In the month before her death, in one of her letters to her principal confidant, Hermine confesses her fear of being strangled by Rolf. ‘I will be killed anyway,’ she predicts.

Deterministically, despite her fear of her nephew, only weeks before her death Hermine had placed in the hands of the same confidant a copy of her will in which she named Rolf as her only heir.

Murnau Street with Green-Fenced Garden,
Bavaria, Germany. (1908)
by Vasily Kandinsky.

A victim of psychoanalysis.

In the words of George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen, the joint editors of her work and distinguished as her quasi-speculative biographers, ‘Rolf can be considered a victim of psychoanalytic study that lacked a true loving relationship.’ In point of fact, after being released from prison, Rolf attempted to get restitution from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, as a victim of psychoanalysis.

In sum, Hermine’s biographers conclude: ‘Hug-Hellmuth abetted her neglect by others by neglecting herself . . . Lacking friends, she did not create any nucleus of a following of colleagues or students . . She was a closed person who never talked more than was absolutely necessary, and even then reluctantly. One neighbour reported that Hug-Hellmuth talked to his cat more than she talked to him.’

For me, this last observation on Hermine’s detachment summons up the pathos and bathos of the ‘high-functioning sociopathic personality’ that Patrick Hamilton captures so perfectly in the final paragraph of his classic novel, Hangover Square, and the death of his socially-withdrawn protagonist (whose suicide note reads, ‘Please order they look after my white cat which I left behind’):

He died in the early morning, and because of the interest then prevailing in the war, was given very little publicity by the press. Indeed only one newspaper, a sensational picture daily, gave the matter any space or prominence – bringing out (his crude epitaph) the headlines:                                                                  SLAYS TWO                                                                                                            FOUND GASSED                                                                                                      THINKS OF CAT.

A family trait of attention-seeking.

Ironically, when Hermine and Rolf are considered together in a ‘characterological analysis’, the traits that the aunt identifies in her infant nephew’s proclivity for recurring fantasies – ‘attention-seeking statements in his repertoire’ – she, herself, is to be found guilty of, insofar as her calculations to court the attention of Sigmund Freud decidedly succeeded when the Founding Father of Psychoanalysis agreed to write the adulatory introduction to her notorious faux-journal, Tagebuch eines Halbwüchsigen Mädchens – Von 11 bis 14½ Jahren (‘Diary of an Adolescent Girl from 11 to 14½ Years’), an intimate record of the developing sexuality of a ‘young girl belonging to the upper middle class’, first published anonymously in English in 1921.

The fact that Freud wrote in his introduction ‘This diary is gem’ and then withdrew permission for the book to appear after a succès de scandale when doubts arose as to the authenticity of its authorship (purportedly the work comprised the jottings of girl who had later died; an attribution that even today remains an unresolved question) is a measure of the notoriety the Diary won. For reasons of privileged confidential information, the ‘editor’ of the Diary (Hermine herself) protests she must ‘conceal the identity of the author’.

A public thirst for pubertal confessions.

As the writer of an incisive essay in Strange Attractor Journal Two (2005) intimates, there existed in the early 20th Century – an excessively repressive age, particularly in England – an eager reading public furtively grasping after a sexual knowledge that was withheld from the lay reader . . .

It’s now easy to poke fun at those classifications, ‘members of the educational, medical and legal profession’, considered qualified to read such books, but this was the period of the repressive reign of Britain’s infamous puritanical Home Secretary, Sir William (‘Jix’) Joynson-Hicks (the ‘Policeman of the Lord’, 1924-1929) . . . 

As the essayist makes clear, referring to the publication of an imitative work, The Diary of a Public Schoolgirl, (written in 1929 and first published in 1930), the fabricator of the spurious journal  . . .

. . . had again presciently recognised the existence of a specialised readership whose thirst for pubertic confessions he was confident he could satisfy.

Hermine’s journal evidently unloosed a flood of imitators . . .

This fraudulent journal [i.e. Hermine’s Tagebuch, inspired the] spurious Public Schoolgirl’s Diary. And [the faux-diarist’s] motives for the deception are remarkably similar, having at their root a countercultural, feminist-liberationist ideology that was entirely genuine.

In the British Journal of Psychology, 1921, Vol. 1, A Young Girl’s Diary is perceptively reviewed by Cyril Burt, the famous English psychologist, describing it as a journal, telling ‘. . . in her own colloquial phrases, how an Austrian girl [Rita] acquired, during the years of puberty, a knowledge, more or less exact, of the chief biological facts of sex . . . the book is anonymous.’  The publishers note that sale of the book is restricted to ‘. . . members of the educational, medical and legal professions as are interested in psychology.’

Cyril Burt doubted the veracity of this work, and believed the publication was encouraged ‘. . . no doubt, by the popularity attained by such writing as those of Daisy Ashford [1919] and Opal Whitely [1920] . . . purporting to be the unaided work of young children.’

Sigmund Freud exclaims rapturously in his preface: ‘This diary is a gem. Never, I believe, has anything been written enabling us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl, during the years of puberal development.’ But by 1928 Freud’s laudatory reception of the work had been replaced by doubts. The work is now believed to be bogus, and confected by an adult woman, an ambitious child-psychologist lecturing in Berlin (see Hermine Hug-Hellmuth: Her Life and Work by George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen, Routledge, 1991). 

Its authenticity has been questioned because the document, more fraudulent than Freudian, is understood to have been written to exhibit Hug-Hellmuth’s psychoanalytical knowledge to enhance her stature in the eyes of Freud (she was a rival of Anna Freud).

These remarks from my stable-mate at Strange Attractor (an essay of mine appeared in Journal Three) appear to be a fair summary of the ambiguity of Hermine’s professional reputation, which there can be no doubt was undermined by the suspicions as to her veracity that became associated with her name, due to the obfuscations of her persistent denials of the Diary’s authorship [as Rita].    

So in conclusion, I will add that commentators of this affair, including Cyril Burt, have failed to identity what I would regard as a diaristic precursor of this confessional genre in German, and a work that also attracted similar notoriety. I refer to the best-selling Tagebuch einer Verlorenen** (‘The Diary of a Lost Girl’, 1905) by Margarete Böhme, a literary phenomenon, supposedly the true-life journal of a young woman forced into prostitution. This popular work, which scandalised society by prompting comparisons with the works of Zola, opens with the words:

Aunt Lehnsmann brought me a diary yesterday, as a belated Confirmation present. ‘Such a nice thing for a young girl,’ she said. ‘And such a cheap one,’ thought I.

Hermine, in her own Tagebuch eines Halbwüchsigen Mädchens, begins in a similar racy style (for girls, that is, of a similar period): 

July 12 . . . Hella and I are writing a diary. We both agreed that when we went to high school we would write a diary every day. Dora [older sister] keeps a diary too, but she gets furious if I look at it. 

Artfully/artlessly Hermine,  in the guise of editor, writes in her Preface: 

No attempt has been made to correct trifling faults in grammar and other inelegancies of style. For the most part these must be regarded as the expression of a child’s incapacity for the control of language. Rather they must be looked upon as manifestations of affective trends, as errors in functioning brought about by the influence of the Unconscious.

I have had occasion, in an earlier post, to identify certain suggestive passages from Hermine’s Diary, pointing them up as instructive, see Sex Lessons from Literature Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sex-lessons-from-literature-unhindered.html

Under one of my note-headings, Sexual Heat, I quote the following from the young diarist, Rita, in her her twelfth year. She is observing her teacher on whom she has a crush:

When he strokes his beard I become quite hot and cold with ecstasy. And the way he lifts up his coattails as he sits down. It’s lovely, I do want to kiss him. Hella and I take turns to put our penholder on his desk so that he can hallow it with his hand as he writes. Afterwards in the arithmetic lesson when I write with it, I keep looking at Hella and she looks back at me and we both know what the other is thinking of.  

The symbolism of dip-pen and pen-holder and the excitement stimulated by these objects need not be dwelt on here, other than to observe that the secret sexual life of adolescent girls in the late 19th century, as expressed by contemporaneous women, must be sought in such almost imperceptible textual glimmers.

Similarly, for mydriatic response to stimulus (pupil dilation) as an index to sexual arousal, see Rita’s diary entry for the same year, observing a schoolboy admirer:

When he says that his eyes grow dark, quite black, although his eyes are really grey and they get very large. Especially in the evening when we say goodbye, it frightens me. I'm always dreaming of him. 

So, when Hermine writes in her Preface that we must regard such writings ‘. . . as the expression of a child’s incapacity for the control of language [under] the influence of the Unconscious . . .’, we correspondingly must observe that such clunking symbols as Pens and Pen-holders are very much within the control of a Conscious Mind anxious to please her mentor by conformity to oneiroid symbols central to the practice of doctrinal Freudians.

*For a fine novella tracing the journey of an ‘elective victim’ to her violent end, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark is recommended, a work I first read in its entirety in a special issue of The New Yorker published in May 1970.

**Significantly, Böhme’s Tagebuch einer Verlorenen was first translated into English by Ethelind Colburn Mayne, one of the earliest translators of Freud. 
Note also: Ethelind’s own writings are distinguished by her own very elegant Englishing of the Conscious and the Unconscious mind, which she calls the 'Stage-side' and 'Cage-side' of human personality. How exquisitely neat!

Our Lobbying of the Viennese Government for Recognition of Hermine.

It was only after the appearance of this posting (June 2016) and selective, persistent lobbying of the compilers of the Cultural Archive of Vienna that Hermine Hug von Hugenstein was accorded, a month later, recognition on that city’s website. Thanks to these efforts, this permanent record of her status in Austrian cultural development now cites her as a ‘pioneer’ of child psychoanalysis, ‘Hermine Hug gilt als Pionierin der Kinderpsychoanalyse. . .’ 
See :
https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Hermine_Hug-Hellmuth

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

A Prisoner of My Father’s Name: Alexis Lykiard’s Skeleton Keys

Is there such a thing as an act of vicarious expiation? Apparently, yes, according to Alexis Lykiard in his unsettling suite of poems, Skeleton Keys, and you can be pretty sure that this unburdening of his verses will join other Oedipal confessional texts that Freudians are eager to pin down on the couch. (I’m thinking here of literary analysands such as Ackerley and his My Father and Myself, Gosse and his Father and Son, not forgetting – in terms also of divided familial loyalties – Svetlana Stalin, who in her memoirs laments her fate as a ‘prisoner of my father’s name.’)

Do my initial remarks appear irresponsibly flippant? Not so! Like Athens-born Alexis, I can freely take such an informed line because I, too, throughout my life, have suffered the emotional fallout from the chain reaction that follows when one’s national identity is compromised by ideological guilt, in my case a German-born father who chose British naturalization before the outbreak of WW2, a decision that was to condemn him to isolation from his own family in Vienna for the remainder of his life. A decision, too, that was to condemn me to a future of denied roots.

See my recent post:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html 

The Acropolis, 1941.

So the problem of the ‘deracinated writer’ can be seen to be a leitmotif that’s all too recognisable; what’s more, it induces a disturbing mood that cannot fail to colour one’s writings with morbid darker shades.

And the darker shades of moral ambivalence (or certain amoral half-shadows in WW2 Occupied Greece that recall Genet’s Funeral Rites in Occupied Paris) are surely to be found in such characteristic lines of verse as these, which indict Alexis’s ‘sullenly mendacious’ fascist father, a ‘wartime collaborator’ or, more pragmatically, a ‘survivalist, dealer, smalltime crook’ (who, worse, surely, chatted up and ogled the poet’s girlfriend before she’d been properly introduced!):

Were you whatever you claimed, Daddy, / Resistance hero or unwilling baddy?

The German soldier by my cot, / officers billeted in our house, / weren’t they a strangely friendly lot? . . .
A wireless lay hidden under me – / unlikely story, one more I was told – / so you could tune in to the BBC.
Held by the Gestapo and then released? / I discount these fairy tales I was fed . . .
Each morning trucks collected up the dead. / Dad, I don’t believe a word you said.

For certain things that slippery conman did . . . he tried to make me and my mother pay. 

I grew up unaware my father lied / or that [Mother had] twice been bride* and dupe of such a man.

Despite ample evidence here to tempt the reader to regard the poet, when a child, as standing in a classic Oedipal attitude to his mother and father, Alexis (perhaps unsurprisingly, given his birthplace) calls on another Sophoclean protagonist, Theseus, founder-king of Athens, to guide him as a surrogate father ‘through the labyrinth . . . slowly finding a way out of the darkness. And onward – past the elusive dreams and false memories, all those tortuous politics and outworn myths – until the confrontation with what, in the end, was always instinctively guessed from the beginning.’ A knowledge that ‘these reassessments of family ties serve to underline how truth and lies are relative at last . . .’ (My italics. A consolatory well-meaning resolution that echoes Paul’s counsel to the devout Greeks of Corinth, that though now they may only ‘know in part’ they shall know at the last Reckoning even as also they are known.) 

However, for Alexis, this magnanimity of the Ego is rather sabotaged in the Reckoning by the assertion of the Id in the very last lines of Skeleton Keys, page 52: If it were proved a god existed I might pray / that there should be a showdown and a way / of telling some home truths on Judgement Day.

Notwithstanding my rather glib attempt at a Freudian interpretation (irresistible, in the context of Attic archetypes), readers should not assume they will encounter poems arranged on the page as psychotherapeutic agony columns or, indeed, configured as versified columnar agonies. No. For readers familiar with Alexis’s fluent pen, be assured the characteristic wit and brio and aphoristic squibs are ever present here . . . in superior vintage quantities.

Related themes, therefore, of dispossession, diaspora, disinheritance and grief abound in this collection, for as a teenager Alexis could never ‘guess that legacies might move from bad to worse . . .  Nothing was left me, other than / a clutch of adult toys gone rotten . . .’  and no honour paid his ‘long-lost mother . . .’

Thieves may believe that money talks and sanctifies all power,
but I rate disinheritance as much my finest hour.

Alexis’s epigraph for At Chora Sphakion makes clear the weight of yearnings for lost kin, for as Conrad writes, ‘One’s literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades . . .’

The Bruise of Memory.

Yet in his Thesean labyrinthine search, in the harsh Greek sunlight so many of these poems inhabit, a hard-etched meaningfulness is often mercifully bleached from the poet’s impressions (in neurological psychology, this ‘threshold reverie’ is defined as a ‘liminal state’, a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective conscious state of existing between two different existential planes). As Alexis writes: ‘Partially blinded by . . . light / that catches a knife and traps a tarnished spoon, / . . . Motes, quotes, fragments, / swirl toward meaning and fade all too soon. / Our histories are also drowned in shadow.’

Alexis’s valediction to a venerated Greek poet-academic (Academic Questions) seems to me (in quoting a Hellenophile admirer of the departed) to be describing his own formula for writing in a second language: ‘A foreign poet / writing in English may gain / by handling the language with an old- / fashioned simple correctness and purity.’ 

True. As Alexis writes of a second language, so he writes of an exiled life: ‘If some truths get exiled, or lost, others are left still to pursue . . .’

There can be no doubt that these poems are an expression of the profoundest agonies of personal loss, evidenced by how, as a toddler caught up in a street battle of 1944, he receives ‘the first jolt, the bruise of memory.’  The poet is saved by his mother who flings him to the ground and covers his body with hers.

She’d kept her head, saved us both. So much I saw,
mourning with age, as though I’d never wept before.

Stepping into the dark, Alexis is an intrepid Thesean warrior to the end. He writes:  ‘. . . If you lose one fight / there’s always next time: you might win the war. / Whatever’s stolen from you you must not regret – / each true guerrilla travels swift and light before / the burdened tyrant meets that last sunset.**

Although, I dare to say, I have interpreted many of these verses with reference to classic Oedipal complexities, you will be encouraged by an interesting solacing conclusion that arises from these ruminations in that, in a certain sense, one kills one’s tyrannical father when one outshines him; ask Mozart Snr, a composer whose own music died when his young son’s musical talents became evident.

So let there be no doubt. Alexis Lykiard’s superb musicality as a poet is unmistakeably evident here.

It follows, then, that I propose we describe a new thing: a poem as a substitutionary votive offering to provide atonement for familial guilt. And, as it turns out, both writer and reader are beneficiaries of this obligatory ritual of sacrifice, which has no rules of conduct other than conformity to poetic best practice and an atavistic memory of a primal crime. I see no contradictions in this thought, for – lest we forget – before Original Sin, in the beginning, there was the Word.

*To the many approaches to reading Alexis’s own personal Greek mythos we might add the example of the Telemachy of Homer’s Odyssey, since Telemachus in his journeyings in search of his father, Odysseus, can be seen to resemble all conflicted writers (Ackerley, Gosse, et al.) who attempt to both mythologize and demystify their elusive fathers in quests that must navigate the pitfalls of false memory and the lures of hagiography. More than this, mention of Alexis’s mother who had twice been bride (to the same man) recalls the rewooing of Penelope by her disguised husband on his return to Ithica from his epic voyages. On reflection, then, despite the temptation to pursue recognizable psychoanalytic symbolization, I believe the rites of passage undergone by Telemachus, as filial protector of his mother in the absence of a legendary father, more closely mirror the restlessly questing mood of Skeleton Keys than any Freudian interpretation dependent on classical archetypes. 

**Only lately have I learned that, beyond the Thesean thread leading us into Alexis's labyrinth, there is an Oedipal thread that is not fully unravelled for the questing reader. I refer to ‘that last sunset’, which as the poet makes clear, in a personal note to me, refers to ‘the 1961 Robert Aldrich film The Last Sunset, a very odd indeed Oedipal western!’ An Oedipal western? Correct. The screenplay is by the celebrated Dalton Trumbo, and the movie stars Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson and Carol Lynley. And, yes, this Freudian drama, like Alexis’s own family history, is as convoluted as any Greek tragedy.

Sex Lessons from Literature Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight.

Sometime late in 2007 there was a call for learned papers on the aesthetics and putative authorship (thought to be Oscar Wilde) of Teleny, or, The Reverse of the Medal, the notorious, salacious, homoerotic novel, first published in London in 1893.

I made my response clear. ‘It might be instructive for me to write a short essay quoting contemporary women in an attempt to interpret their likely contemporary response to the subject matter of Teleny. I would be objective in my writing in every respect, and NOT exhibit 20/20 feminist hindsight.’ In the event, this proposal met with a deafening silence and I moved on to other concerns.

It was only today that I revisited my notes for filing and realized that I had fleetingly touched upon this theme in an essay of mine, a year earlier, in Strange Attractor literary journal (2006), Contra-Genesis: Unusual Cases of Extra-uterine Gestation and Post Mortem Extra-genital Conception. 
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/journal-three/ 

These torturously imagined permutations for achieving extracorporeal or adventitious conception recall that notorious novel of homosexuality, Teleny, written in 1893 and attributed to Oscar Wilde, in which the hero, Teleny, impregnates a young countess while visualising the face of his male lover, and nine months afterwards the ‘fine boy’ which issues from the act resembles the lover ... a treacherous male fantasy of the grossest sort, in the opinion of most women readers I should imagine. 

I remember well the thrust of my intended remarks for the 2007 Teleny Symposium because my notes tell me my sources were cited from feminists (male and female) who were of age in 1893. My intuition was simply to attempt a composite contemporaneous view of female sexual desire from glimpses and glints and glimmers sometimes disclosed by psychoanalytical fiction writers of the time. I use the word ‘fiction’ advisedly in the case of the Austrian child psychoanalyst Hermine Hug von Hugenstein, who was 22 years old when Teleny was published.

See also, Hermine Hug von Hugenstein, the Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-murder-of-doctrinaire-freudian-by.html

Hermine Hug von Hugenstein

Hermine’s Diary of a Halfgrown Girl (believed by many to be a work of fiction rather than an authentic document edited by her) charts the puberty of the diarist from ages eleven to fourteen-and-a-half in a record unmatched, according to Freud in his Introduction, by any chronicle formerly written since it enables ‘... us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl ... during the years of puberal development.’

Sexual Heat.

Under one of my note-headings, Sexual Heat, I quote the following from the young diarist, Rita, in her her twelfth year. She is observing her teacher on whom she has a crush:

When he strokes his beard I become quite hot and cold with ecstasy. And the way he lifts up his coattails as he sits down. It’s lovely, I do want to kiss him. Hella and I take turns to put our penholder on his desk so that he can hallow it with his hand as he writes. Afterwards in the arithmetic lesson when I write with it, I keep looking at Hella and she looks back at me and we both know what the other is thinking of.  

The symbolism of dip-pen and pen-holder and the excitement stimulated by these objects need not be dwelt on here, other than to observe that the secret sexual life of adolescent girls in the late 19th century, as expressed by contemporaneous women, must be sought in such almost imperceptible textual glimmers.

Similarly, for mydriatic response to stimulus (pupil dilation) as an index to sexual arousal, see Rita’s diary entry for the same year, observing a schoolboy admirer:

When he says that his eyes grow dark, quite black, although his eyes are really grey and they get very large. Especially in the evening when we say goodbye, it frightens me. I'm always dreaming of him. 

And as to dreams, the celebrated diary of Mariya Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva, Russian feminist writer, painter and sculptor (she died from tuberculosis in her twenty-fourth year in 1884, in Paris), reveals the turmoil of her early adolescence (1873):

I had a horrible dream last night ... I saw the sun growing bigger and covering nearly half the heavens, but it emitted neither light nor heat ... then half of it was covered by a cloud. We all cried out, ‘The sun is standing still!’ ... Then the sun began to turn round like two wheels one within the other ... the bright sun was covered at intervals by a cloud as round as itself ... What is the meaning of this dream?

The Burden of Secret Knowledge.

The vividness of her recall, as a young late 19th Century woman recording her disturbed psychical state, suggests to me a mind and emotions responsive to profound impressions yet whose stimuli remain almost wholly uncomprehended. As Freud writes, in the Introduction to Rita’s diary, ‘Above all, we are shown how the mystery of the sexual life first presses itself vaguely on the attention, and then takes entire possession of the growing intelligence, so that the child suffers under the load of secret knowledge ...’

The child, then, of this period, shoulders a burden of secret knowledge that is all the more burdensome for being beyond her complete understanding. 

Proto-feminist novelist George Gissing rams home this point in his novel Denzil Quarrier, published in 1892, the year before Teleny. Here is another glinting facet from the past, as headstrong twenty-three-year-old Serena, a young woman of independent means, seated on a piano-stool, defies her mother, who with purple face insists her daughter should refrain from reading a French novel. As to French novel-writing, in her family’s view, ‘One and all are drenched in impurity!’ The bosom of Serena’s mother heaves ‘like a troubled sea.’ Serena protests:

‘You had rather have me play than read that book? That shows how little you understand of either. This is an immoral piece of music! If you knew what it meant you would scream in horror. It is immoral, and I am going to practise it day after day.’

We might guess the musical piece, like the novel Serena is reading, was composed by a Frenchman. As a character of Gissing’s remarks in Denzil Quarrier, ‘[I read] No English [novels], unless I am in need of an emetic.’ That Teleny has fin de siècle Paris as its setting, and reeks of the Aesthetic Movement in highest Decadent style and swooning mood, recalls a cultivar from the same hothouse, Salomé, written in French by Wilde two years earlier. As for the piano composition, was it by César Franck or one of his franckistes one wonders, since they wrote immersed in the Romantic Catholicism that claimed their contemporary, Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel, À Rebours, was the ‘poisonous French novel’ that corrupted Wilde’s Dorian Gray, published in 1890, three years before Teleny.

A Short-Lived Joy.

That brilliant satire on the Decadence, Autobiography of a Boy by G. S. Street, published appropriately in the year following Teleny, 1894, is very clear as to the responses by young women to the posturings of male aesthetes. Each chapter pillories most aspects of Pateresque aestheticism ...  Medievalism, Utopiaism, Grecophilia, Romantic Catholicism, etc.

This passage from Street I suspect reflects contemporary women’s general view of the Decadent Manner and is in its effect, because of this, more Wodehousian than Wildean ...

One or two ambitions he [the aspiring Aesthete] did, however, confide to his intimates.  He desired to be regarded as a man to whom no chaste woman should be allowed to speak, an aim he would mention wistfully, in a manner inexpressibly touching, for he never achieved it.  I did indeed persuade a friend of his and mine to cut him in the park one crowded afternoon; but his joy, which was as unrestrained as his proud nature permitted, was short-lived, for she was cruelly forgetful, and asked him to dinner the next day.

It was these tiny details, gleaned from reading so many of the books listed by William Gaunt in the bibliography for his Aesthetic Adventure (read when I was sixteen), that I intended to assemble into a simulacrum of a young Englishwoman’s psyche as it might have responded to subconsciously perceived sexual stimuli at the end of the 19th Century.
 
At the time of the 2007 Teleny Symposium, my researches for my appreciation of a feminocentric view of Teleny had delved further back into the theme of an Englishwoman’s quest for, and response to, sexual knowledge in the latter part of the 19th Century ... particularly the period 1870s to the 1890s.  The sexual repression that I researched is very evident in this quotation, for example, which describes how an ‘undergraduette’ is thwarted when she enquires at her University bookshop for a copy of Tennyson’s Idylls of a King:

The bookseller had pursed his lips in refusal when I requested the Idylls:  ‘We never have had any poetical effusions on our shelves, and we don’t think we shall begin now.’  My innocent enquiry had been treated as though it were a cause of offence to the severest censors of the University’s morals and manners.

Before I conclude this very modest conspectus on An Englishwoman’s Perceptions of Homoerotica in the Late Nineteenth Century, I would like to note that this literary genre’s suppression was, according to my sources, apparently due directly to an Englishwoman’s interdict. It should be remembered that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the well-known prostitute and great propagator of pornography ‘Mary Wilson’ — whom a contemporary called ‘the reviver of erotic literature in the present century’ — strictly forbade the description of homosexual love in any of the erotic fiction and poetry she published.

Were I a Man.

In The Voluptuarian Cabinet Mary Wilson wrote:

It is much to be regretted, that some of the very best French works should be deformed by passages descriptive of Socratic love but it is still more to be lamented that such ideas should ever be transferred into our language. I speak not merely the feelings of a woman upon the subject, for were I a man, I should consider it highly criminal to propagate doctrines, the adoption of which is attended with such horrible consequences. Let us have all kinds of orthodox [copulation] but not heterodox fashions.

Personally, I see a stark contrast between the homoerotic wish-fulfilment evidenced in Teleny and the dreams and fantasies that I believe absorbed the minds of cultivated late 19th century Englishwomen. The glimpses and glints and glimmers I’ve identified by way of illustrating the female psyche of those times all seem to configure a composite mind for this sorority appreciative of realism in their amours in contrast to the perfumed phantasmagoria firing the blood of the aesthetic brotherhood. 

The Separate Room, the Inviolable Retreat.

Two final glimpses of this feminine realism can be observed in the writings of novelist Ethelind Colburn Mayne (aged 28 years in 1893, and the first translator of Freud into English) and the pioneer of Birth Control, Marie Stopes, herself entering puberty in 1893, when Teleny was first published.

In Married Love Marie Stopes writes: 

Now it may enchant a man once — perhaps even twice — or at long intervals – to watch his goddess screw her hair into a tight and unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain indefinite enchantment ... A married woman’s body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can only be so if she has an inviolable retreat.

In a key feminist text, Colburn Mayne, in her short story The Separate Room, makes clear the reasons for the underlying discontent of her tragic heroine, Marion (an autobiographical fiction that connects us directly to the world of the Yellow Book and its aesthetes, since she was a member of its editorial team). Marion, who’s forced by circumstance to share a bedroom with her mother, confronts her on the same vexed question of Stopes’s ‘inviolable retreat’.

‘Shall I tell you what I was crying about? It was about never being alone. I’m going to ask the doctor to order me a separate bedroom. The extra-quarter’s salary will pay for it. It will do me more good than any other change.’

I think, on reflection, that had I truly written a paper for the Teleny Symposium I would have reminded the aesthetes that the educated Englishwoman in the late nineteenth century was essentially a domestic creature, societised to cultural norms, for whom there was little space allotted, either for intellectual or political freedom or, moreover, for nourishing sleep, and that febrile sexual reveries of the kind productive of Teleny would have been denied her ... unless — improbable outcome — they were written under duress by a bluestocking at the mercy of a Bluebeard as though she were some sort of latterday Scheherazade.

  

See also, the Hypatian Erotica Awards – High Victorian Nominees Announced!
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hypatian-erotica-awards-high-victorian.html