[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]
I sent off the draft by this same boat but in a different envelope, so if you do not receive it by this mail, you have to let me know at once. NowHale, Emilybirthdays, presents and love-tokens;w2furs sought for EH;d3 I wonder whether it is really enough to buy a really good fur piece, so if it is not, let me know that. Not that you have to buy a fur, if you prefer something else! It is never quite satisfactory asking people to get their own birthday presents, but with anything pertaining to dress, it is the only thing one can do.
I do not suppose that I shall have a letter from you until the end of next week, especially as you were plunged into the midst of work immediately on arrival, and before getting settled. I am naturally anxious to hear all about the new conditions and the work and the girls.
By the way, the bank said they could [not] draw on Northampton, so it is on Boston, but if you have an account in Northampton I expect your bank there can collect it for you.
I'Development of Shakespeare's Verse, The'composition and revision;a3 have had a reasonably quiet week, working every morning at Shakespeare – I still have ten pages to go – and one morning at the dentist – very little to do this time, and three sittings put me in order for another six months – and I hope you will like my new blue suit and blue winter overcoat. TheMorleys, thevisit Hamburg;j1 Morleys went off to Hamburg on Tuesday – I saw them off at Liverpool Street – and tried hard to persuade me to accompany them (they return tomorrow); but what with Shakespeare and these weekends, I did not feel at all like going. TheTandys, theTSE's Hampton weekends with;a1 Tandys tomorrow will be easy enough, butde la Mares, theTSE's dread of visiting;a3 IAiken, ConradTSE dreads seeing;a1 rather dread the De la Mares and still more Conrad Aiken’s in November.1 HadMairet, Philip;a9 dinner with Philip Mairet on Monday; MartinBrowne, Elliott Martin;c2 Browne is coming in to see me this afternoon.
I should like to know when you expect to get to Boston. IMartin, Dr Karl Bernhardand TSE's experience of analysis;a1 do not want to say much more at present about psychology, especially as I am speaking rather in general and for [sc. from] the outside. MyMorrell, Lady Ottolineand Dr Karl Martin;g6 only direct experience is half a dozen sittings, many years ago, with a German who used to come to London for a few weeks every year, and whom Ottoline wanted me to see.2 He was not a pure analyst, but combined it with physical treatment of his patients. HeCecil, Lord Davidbeliever in Dr Karl Martin;a6 was very highly thought of, and was said to have helped Lord Salisbury a great deal with insomnia – David Cecil confirmed this to me. My own experience during that very short time was (1) that as soon as he began enquiring about dreams I began having the most complicated and cryptic dreams, such as I had never had before; and these stopped as soon as I left off; 3 and (2) he did not tell me anything about myself of which I was not already conscious, although to be sure I did not see how he elicited the facts from the dreams. I believe there are cases in which a specific trouble (like insomnia) can be helped; what I distrust most is the general treatment which goes on indefinitely – and with some people, becomes a lifetime habit, though they may change their analyst from time to time. What a doctor needs is not merely scientific attainments but wisdom, which does not always accompany them, by any means, and spiritual purity. They may not always distinguish between the particular twists which are a definite handicap in ordinary living, and the general difficulties which may be simply the product of circumstances, and just have to be borne. Furthermoreanti-Semitism;c1, they are most apt (especially if Jewish) to take a materialistic attitude, or, everything can be put right, on the ordinary plane of existence. But I am not only rather in the dark in your case, but am perhaps too deeply involved with you emotionally to be able to take a detached view. I should not, however, be convinced of the opinion of any doctor whom you did not know, and who did not know you.
There, that’s all now. The lapse of time between now and our voyage to the Docks is constantly changing like an accordion – sometimes it seems last Saturday, and sometimes months ago. I have to be glad of this, that our summer was I think the happiest of those that you have spent at Campden; all I missed was a few weeks of you in Rosary Gardens. And you do not know how grateful I am to you for your goodness and sweetness, and what a help you have been and continue to be.
[Enclosed'Epistle: To the Learned and Ingenious Dr Morley, An'sent to EH;a1: ‘An Epistle: To the Learned and Ingenious Dr. Morley.’4]
1.ConradAiken, Conrad Aiken (1889–1973), American poet and critic: see Biographical Register.
2.BothMartin, Dr Karl Bernhard TSE and Vivien had consultations during 1924 with Dr Karl Bernhard Martin, who lived at Dorfstrasse, Günthersthal, Germany, and ran a clinic called Sanatorium Lengenhardstrasse. The treatments he meted out combined starvation dieting with psychoanalysis. One of his most socially prominent British patients was Lady Ottoline Morrell, who chose to submit herself to his ministrations for several years. Lytton Strachey, who met Martin at Garsington, thought him ‘a miserable German doctor – a “psycho-analyst” of Freiburg’ (letter to Dora Carrington, 3 June 1923).
AccordingMorrell, Lady Ottolineand Dr Karl Martin;g6 to Miranda Seymour, ‘It was as a doctor, not as an analyst, that Marten [sic] was an unfortunate choice. “He thinks he has found out my trouble – some old germ left from typhoid years ago,” Ottoline reported to Bertie [Russell] in November 1923, “and now he is injecting me with all sorts of injections of milk and other things in advance in England.” The milk injections did her no good; Marten’s belief in starvation diets, dutifully followed by Ottoline over the next ten years whenever she felt ill, did her considerable harm. No woman of her age and complicated medical history should have expected an improvement in health from fortnightly regimes of fruit and water which left her so weak that she could scarcely sit up, but that was Dr Marten’s panacea for all ailments’ (Ottoline Morrell; Life on the Grand Scale [1992, 1998], 448–9).
InFry, Rogerand Dr Karl Martin;a4n due time, Virginia Woolf too encouraged Roger Fry to consult Dr Martin. Another such sorry patient was Edward Sackville-West, heir to Knole House, who spent some weeks in Freiburg under Martin’s off-beam orders in the hope of getting a ‘cure’ for his homosexuality. StracheyStrachey, Lyttonand Dr Karl Martin;a7n subsequently mocked Sackville-West’s efforts, in a letter to Carrington: ‘After 4 months and an expenditure of £200 he found he could just bear the thought of going to bed with a woman’ (quoted in Michael De-la-Noy, Eddie: The Life of Edward Sackville-West [1988, 1999], 87).
3.See Reilly, in The Cocktail Party, addressing Edward:
———… as for your dreams,
You would produce amazing dreams, to oblige me.
I could make you dream any kind of dream I suggested,
And it would only go to flatter your vanity
With the temporary stimulus of feeling interesting.
MaryMartin, Dr Karl Bernhardand TSE's experience of analysis;a1 TrevelyanMorrell, Lady Ottolinepushiness in medical matters;e7n reports TSE as saying in 1956, of OM: ‘She was a very domineering woman who, when she found a good doctor or dentist, was determined that all her friends should go to her “find”. She made me go to a German psychologist – a nice man – but he asked me my dreams and gave me the most extraordinary reasons for the things I dreamt. I soon began to dream things I thought would interest him – so I stopped going to him’ (‘The Pope of Russell Square’, 256).
4.Poems II, 217–18, ‘The Whale and the Elephant: A Fable’.
1.ConradAiken, Conrad Aiken (1889–1973), American poet and critic: see Biographical Register.
4.E. MartinBrowne, Elliott Martin Browne (1900–80), English director and producer, was to direct the first production of Murder in the Cathedral: see Biographical Register.
5.LordCecil, Lord David David Cecil (1902–86), historian, critic, biographer; Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, 1924–30; Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1939–69; Professor of English, Oxford, 1948–70; author of The Stricken Deer (1929), Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (1934), Jane Austen (1936) and studies of other writers including Hardy, Shakespeare, Scott.
4.RogerFry, Roger Fry (1866–1934), artist and enormously influential critic of art; celebrant of Post-Impressionism; author of works including Vision and Design (1920) and Matisse (1930).
8.PhilipMairet, Philip Mairet (1886–1975): designer; journalist; editor of the New English Weekly: see Biographical Register.
2.BothMartin, Dr Karl Bernhard TSE and Vivien had consultations during 1924 with Dr Karl Bernhard Martin, who lived at Dorfstrasse, Günthersthal, Germany, and ran a clinic called Sanatorium Lengenhardstrasse. The treatments he meted out combined starvation dieting with psychoanalysis. One of his most socially prominent British patients was Lady Ottoline Morrell, who chose to submit herself to his ministrations for several years. Lytton Strachey, who met Martin at Garsington, thought him ‘a miserable German doctor – a “psycho-analyst” of Freiburg’ (letter to Dora Carrington, 3 June 1923).
4.LadyMorrell, Lady Ottoline Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), hostess and patron: see Biographical Register.
3.LyttonStrachey, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), writer and critic; a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. Works include Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921). See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (1971); The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (1972).