Rupert Preston Bell

Sources include
https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/locations/netherlands/leiden/meeting-with-freud/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23439545/
https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128192566/a-composer-on-the-couch-mahler-meets-freud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler

When Shaw met Kipling

Thursday, 19 January 2023

When Mahler met Freud

In 1910, at a desperate time in his life, though at the height of his fame, Gustav Mahler decided to seek the advice of the equally celebrated Sigmund Freud.

He had returned to Europe after an exhausting tour of America, just before which he had suffered the devastating loss of his daughter Maria, and he had been diagnosed with a form of heart disease.

And that Summer he discovered that his wife was involved with another man.

After a couple of cancellations – perhaps he was wary of what he would learn – Mahler eventually arranged to meet Freud in Leiden in Holland, on 26 August.

Freud and his family were on holiday and staying nearby, but were about to leave for Italy. So this was Mahler’s last chance. Freud took the tram into town, and they spent four hours together, meeting at The Gilded Turk café and walking through the botanical gardens until late in the evening.

It seems they found an immediate rapport. Indeed, despite Freud lacking much interest in music, they had much in common, with their Viennese backgrounds and being of a similar age (Mahler was 50 and Freud 54). Freud had also travelled to America. They were pre-eminently deep thinkers.

Freud apparently said he’d never met anyone who so quickly understood the nature of psychoanalysis.

Various accounts of this meeting speculate on how Freud would have analysed Mahler, and what advice he might have offered. We know that Mahler told his life story – plenty enough to occupy the four-hour walk. He would have related episodes from his emotionally traumatic childhood: his violent father, the untimely death of his brother Ernst, and, we can assume, the incident he related elsewhere when he rushed from the house to escape hearing his parents quarrel, and was stopped short by the music of a barrel organ playing, incongruously, an amusing folk melody - an experience that he drew on in juxtaposing extremes of emotion and context in his music.

Recent events would also have occupied them. Mahler had had to leave his post at the Vienna Opera, and, the main reason for the meeting, his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius. (After Mahler’s death, Alma and Gropius would marry, and he went on to found of the Bauhaus school of architecture after the war.)

Psychoanalysts agree that Freud would have identified a mother fixation. For Mahler, Alma Mahler had become a mother figure, whom he could not bear to lose. Throughout their life together, he and Alma had wild, obsessive swings from being utterly devoted to desperately needing to get away from each other. Notoriously, Mahler wrote her a letter before their marriage, explaining that her life would have to be committed and subordinated entirely to his in order for him to achieve his musical vocation: "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner”, he wrote, demanding that she abandon her own musical ambitions, including composing. We know that Freud told Mahler that this was damaging, and after the meeting Mahler did encourage Alma to compose. He also dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her – it received a triumphant first performance in Munich in September that year.

However, Alma kept up her relationship with Gropius, albeit discreetly. The meeting with Freud seems to have been helpful, but the two never met again. Mahler died just eight months later, in May 2011.

When Shaw met Kipling

Friday, 10 June 2022

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich

There are two female English religious figures of the middles ages who are famous above all others because their writings survive them: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. And it’s rather wonderful to know that, despite their very different stories, in around 1413 they actually met.

Their encounter is described by Margery, in her autobiographical work now known as The Book of Margery Kempe.

Julian of Norwich, famously author of Revelations of Divine Love with its best-known lines “All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well”, received many visitors while living the life of an urban hermit. She was an anchoress, living a secluded life of prayer in a small cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich. This peculiar form of monasticism was fairly widespread in the middle ages. Anchorites or anchoresses were expected to live alone but also to be part of their community. They would see people who came to seek advice, in the way that they have of oracles and holy people since ancient times.

And one of these visitors was Margery, who says in her book that she made the short journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich and spent “many days” in conversation with Julian. This suggests that they might have got on rather well – although we only have Margery’s word for it – despite having little in common.

In this essay Margery is described as “a medieval celebrity”, “brash, loud and unapologetic” and “a wife and woman about town, mother to at least fourteen children” who persuaded her husband to become celibate and made a number of pilgrimages, including to Jerusalem, after she started experiencing visions. She must have been a person of considerable determination and energy.

By contrast, Julian comes across in her delicate, mystical writing as rather more modest. She didn’t travel anywhere, living sealed up in her cell and meeting visitors through a small window.

It was Margery’s brushes with ecclesiastical authority that made her seek advice, as her habit of falling into fits of crying made people suspect she was possessed, and she had been accused of heresy. Were her visions godly or diabolic? She travelled from her home in King’s Lynn to Norwich and consulted first a priest who became her confessor, then a white friar, and then, she writes, she “was bidden by Our Lord to go to an Anchoress in the same city [Norwich], who was called Dame Julian” to be reassured that she was doing God’s will and not the Devil’s.

We only have her word for it, but Margery’s account is clear that each of her counsellors gave her the reassurance she was seeking, especially Julian. “The anchoress, hearing the marvellous goodness of our Lord, highly thanked God with all her heart for his visitation, advising this creature to be obedient to the will of our Lord and fulfil with all her might whatever he put into her soul, if it were not against the worship of God and the profit of her fellow Christians.” And Margery says Julian told her to “set all your trust in God and fear not the language of the world, for the more despite, shame and reproof that you have in the world, the greater is your merit in the sight of God”. Read Margery's full account here.

They might have made a peculiar duo, but Margery emphasises that their meeting lasted “many days… conversing in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ”. She says she came away feeling validated, strengthened to continue the idiosyncratic path she had chosen in celebrating her faith. Given her strong personality, it’s possible that Margery did most of the talking, and one wonders whether Julian was pleased or sorry to see her go.

The novelist Victoria Mackenzie has recently reimagined the lives of these two women in her book For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain.

References
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2017/08/25/milton-galileo-affinities-art-science/
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/milton-visiting-galileo-when-a-prisoner-of-the-inquisition-125949

Monday, 28 February 2022

Existential dread

There were just a few days between the lifting of the last legal Covid restrictions in England and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Happy days. Now, with Russian tanks bearing down on Kyiv and Putin talking about nuclear weapons, more than one commentator has remarked that as well as ‘living with the virus’ we are going to have to learn to live again with the 'existential dread' of East-West conflict and mutual incomprehension. I certainly recognise that from my childhood.

How did we live through all those years of Cold War, with the actual idea of a nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds, not knowing how things would end? I remember sitting in a history classroom at school - maybe in about 1980 - in an upper floor building where of course the windows were too high for you to gaze out of, with a map of Europe and a large facsimile of Picasso's Guernica at the front - thinking just that: how will things ever change? How could they ever, when opposing ideologies are so entrenched and propaganda so effective?

This is what the next generation may be entering, as another Iron Curtain threatens to fall across Europe, and it dawns on me not to patronise them with stories of how we soldiered on regardless. If they are scared, they have every right to be. They have lived through Covid. They saw democratic politics shaken by Trump. They expect they will live to find out whether we do manage to escape irreversible climate change by 2050. Now they have to live with global political upheaval, and the economic consequences of that at the least.

But perhaps they can look back on the Covid lockdowns to remember that solutions can be found and the unexpected does happen, in the same way that I can look back at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am also heartened by reports of protests in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine – mostly by young people it seems, who are quickly arrested. They will not change anything now, but they show that Putin is a rogue actor, another Stalin, who does not speak for his nation, least of all its youngest members.

During most of my adult life, after the fall of Communism, we thought the world was heading in one direction - slowly and painfully, but inevitably - towards a greater unity and fellow-feeling; towards the Arthur C Clarke vision of a single planetary union, where barriers are broken down, racial differences are forgotten and wealth is more efficiently created and better shared. We witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a reunited Europe, Nelson Mandela released and transforming South Africa, the first black American president, computing and the internet making communication instantaneous. And the brilliant, happy and unifying success of the 2012 London Olympics seems to represent that whole period of optimism.

But we ignored that fact that the wealth gap kept on growing and that people still believe in the myths of national superiorities in the same way as our ancestors believed in spirits in the woods. And the world was being pushed in unhappy directions by minority fanatics and opportunists who pretended to speak for ordinary people. For me and I think most people, that realisation came when we woke up that morning after the EU Referendum in 2016 and realised we were living in a different country.

I take heart from the values that the next generation hold to. They seem freer of the poison of prejudice. They didn’t want the UK to pull away from Europe. They are the ones motivated to act on climate change. They are on the streets in Russia right now.

It was well said by Billie-Jean King in a TV programme which I watched in 2019. Talking about the difference between her own and the next generation, she said: "This is a monumental moment in our history. I tell millennials - you're the greatest generation in history for inclusion. They don't care where you're from, what religion... they have an opportunity to take this world further than any other and make it a better place."

In the meantime, we have much to be happy about – more, perhaps, than we thought. If we were beginning to take for granted the liberties we are just regaining after Covid, then we had better look at those refugees starting to pour out of Ukraine and remember that we should never do so.

Saturday, 29 January 2022

When Milton met Galileo

The most recent account of this meeting is given in Joe Moshenska’s excellent book Making Darkness Light: the lives of John Milton.

In 1638, in a collision of such giants in their own worlds that their meeting is almost too good to be true, the young John Milton met Galileo at his villa in the hills outside Florence.

Galileo, now in his seventies, had been living under house arrest since his conviction for heresy in 1633. His astronomical studies had eventually gone too far for the church hierarchy despite his best attempts for many years to avoid controversy. He was found to be sufficiently suspect of heresy in promoting the Copernican view that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, which was well-known as a theory by that time but not one that the church could officially countenance. He lived out his remaining days at his villa, receiving visitors and writing his book The Two New Sciences which summarised some of his earlier work. By the time Milton visited, he had recently gone blind and was suffering from a hernia, and he died in 1642.

The only account we have of this meeting is Milton’s own. He wrote that he had “found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought”. It’s a passing reference in his book Areopagitica, which was a defence of free speech – of the “liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience” - published in 1644. His intention was to use Galileo as an example of someone speaking out against authority, in the context of his argument that “Truth was never put to the worse in a free and open encounter.”

Because this account was inserted to illustrate an argument, and because there is no direct evidence of it, some scholars have doubted it took place, and perhaps the church would have tried to prevent Galileo from meeting a foreigner and a Protestant.

I think we can assume that they did meet. But what was Milton doing there?

This was on Milton’s only foreign tour, a visit to Italy via France in 1638-39. Aged 29 and with considerable reading under his belt, as well as mastery of the Italian language, Milton was an earnest academic in search of a purpose, and it was during this trip that his idea of writing an English epic poem began to crystalise. No doubt he was deeply influenced by the introductions he gained to many learned people and by his exposure to the southern European (and Catholic) ebullience of art and architecture. As a convinced Protestant, Milton was of course suspicious of the richness of the Catholic church, which he would later increasingly denounce, but he seems to have enjoyed his time in Italy, including in Rome itself, relishing an injection of intellectual and artistic novelty.

Galileo actually makes an appearance in Milton’s cosmic imagining of heaven, earth and hell in Paradise Lost. We see through the eyes of the angel Raphael: “As when by night the glass / Of Galileo, less assured, observes / Imagined lands and regions in the Moon”. Satan’s shield “Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”. And there’s a reference elsewhere to an astronomer looking “through his glazed optic tube”. [PL 5.261, 1.287, 3.588]

Milton and Galileo would certainly have valued their conversation. While Milton was not yet famous, word was going round about him in Italy and he was well-known enough to pique Galileo’s interest. This was not just a passing encounter, but an arranged meeting that they would have anticipated keenly. Maybe Milton was shown and tried out Galileo’s telescope, and surely Milton would have asked about his observations, but cautiously as they touched on theological matters. And given that they had both grown up in musical households, they might have shared an enthusiasm for music. But Moshenska speculates that above all they might well have discussed poetry. Galileo was known as an excellent writer of prose and poetry himself. He had strong views on the relative merits of Ariosto and Tasso, the two preeminent Italian poets after Dante, and Milton was familiar with and took inspiration from all three.

Evidently Milton thought back to this encounter in later life, when he wrote Galileo into his great epic poem. And he may have imagined again the Tuscan sun on his back when he too was imprisoned for getting on the wrong side of the establishment, and when, by 1652, he had lost his own sight, “In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude” [PL 7.27-28].

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Saturday, 9 October 2021

When Lawrence of Arabia met Joseph Conrad

Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), 'Lawrence of Arabia', met Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) on one occasion, and they seem to have got on well. It was in the warm summer of 1920, on Sunday 18th July, at the home of the novelist Hugh Walpole.

And, thanks to Walpole’s diary, we have a glimpse of the meeting.

Aged 31, Lawrence was in the middle of re-writing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, having lost the manuscript the year before. It wouldn’t be published until after he died. The exploits for which he was famous were over, and he was serving as an advisor to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office – a desk job he quickly got bored with.

Lawrence had recently become a household name as a result of the romantic dramatization of his role in the Arab revolt, in a theatre show first produced the year before by the impresario Lowell Thomas, who popularised his role. The show had just been relaunched, in early 1920, with Lawrence in a more prominent role than in the original production. He was later to regret it, but he willingly took part in promoting the show, posing for many photographs. He was in a sense the swashbuckling hero of jingoistic magazines of the time – he describes himself as a matinée idol.

Now, Lawrence was concerned to finish his book, wondering if his political ambitions for the Arabs he represented at the 1919 peace conference were going to come to anything.

The 64-year-old Conrad, suffering from rheumatism or gout, and prone to depression, was also in retrospective mood. He was looking back over his work, publishing some letters and notes on his books at around that time, and only slowly beginning another book. With an eye on his legacy, he harboured hopes of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this never came about.

And it’s clear from Conrad’s letters of the time that he was not enjoying writing – he wrote very little in 1920 and was distracted by his wife Jessie being ill and his sons struggling to get on in life. He wrote that he felt “uncertain and directionless, like a ship whose crew has gone to land leaving all her sails in disarray”.

Each were at the peak of the fame they would experience in their lifetimes, and they perhaps shared a sense that this was passing: Lawrence in growing disillusion, and Conrad knowing that his best years were behind him.

Here is Walpole’s diary entry.

“Conrad very cheerful. Really has started the Napoleon novel. Showed me some of the second chapter and I was surprised to see how many foreign phrases that were in this first draft. I am thus the first person in the world, after his typist, to meet Cosmo and Henrietta. When I criticised Mrs Travers a little, he said: “Of course, mon cher, it is not very good. I did my best work long ago.” Cunningham Graham and Lawrence the Arab man came down. The latter mild, small, modest, with fine eyes. Said the legend about him all untrue. Talked of printing and the Crusades.”

And there are two more glimpses of the encounter. One is mentioned in a letter by the architect Sir Herbert Baker who knew Lawrence at around this time, who said that “when meeting Conrad he probed him on the methods of his craft; Conrad admitting but little conscious design. Lawrence would say that he himself had over-studied his own craftsmanship.”

The other is a description of Conrad by Lawrence years later, in 1935, in a letter to the artist Bruce Rogers: “What I shall always remember is his lame walk, with the stick to help him, and that sudden upturning of the lined face, with its eager eyes under their membrane of eyelid. They drooped over the eye-socket and the sun shone red through them, as we walked up and down the garden.”

How curious that each man’s eyes are remarked on.

Of course they talked about writing, but perhaps while walking up and down the garden and not in Walpole’s hearing. Lawrence may have mentioned his admiration for The Mirror of the Sea, which he told people was his favourite Conrad book, on a par with Moby Dick. He received a signed copy from Conrad two years later. And Conrad may have mentioned his current project, Suspense, which is the Napoleon novel Walpole referred to. It was never finished, though. Instead, Conrad was soon working on what would be his final novel, The Rover. This is a story about age and retirement, with obvious autobiographical ideas in the tale of a retired sailor who questions his own purpose before being dragged into one last adventure.

Whatever else they might have discussed, beyond “printing and the Crusades”, they seem to have found each other good company.

And they did have some things in common. They both had an interest in the intelligence services, for example. Laurence had served in this capacity in the War, while of course Conrad had explored the subject in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. And the sort of ambiguous life that Lawrence had lived, in two cultures, with his increasing sympathy with the ‘native’ culture, is exactly the topic of The Heart of Darkness.

In the months following the encounter, Lawrence abandoned his efforts on behalf of the Arabs in the post-wat settlement, and he seems to have experienced a kind of mental breakdown, perhaps out of frustration or guilt. His life turned a corner soon after, when he joined the RAF under an assumed name, trying to escape his own fame.

In his memoir of his father, written in 1970, Conrad’s son Borys describes a man of old-fashioned values who discouraged displays of emotion in his family. Perhaps he was often reticent with visitors, especially when feeling as unsettled as he did around the time that Lawrence visited. Yet, as we read in Walpole’s diary, it was a good day: he was “very cheerful”. He enjoyed the meeting.

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The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938)

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 7, 1920–1922 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/247648/pdf

Joseph Conrad and T E Lawrence, Ton Hoenselaars and Gene M. Moore, Conradiana Vol. 27, 1 (Spring 1995)

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-349-09387-8_54.pdf

See also:

When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

Tuesday, 28 September 2021

When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

In 1773, while on his tour of the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson met the legendary Flora McDonald. And while he stayed in her house he slept in the bed that Charles Edward Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' (or the Young Pretender) had used while on the run after the Battle of Culloden.

Johnson's itinerary with Boswell was dictated by where they could stay - they hopped between the houses of the local gentry, who were invariably hospitable, and presumably sometimes curious to meet the famous Dr Johnson. So, for example, they were unable to visit the island of Muck because, although “this island well deserved to be seen, the Lairds’s absence afforded us no opportunity “. However, at Sky, they were well looked after.

"We came to Kingsborough, a place distinguished by that name, because the King lodged here when he landed at Port Re. We were entertained with the usual hospitality by Mr. Macdonald and his lady, Flora Macdonald, a name that will be mentioned in history, courage and fidelity be virtues, with honour. She is a woman of middle stature, soft features, gentle manners, and elegant presence."

It's a succinct account of the woman who had become famous after helping Charles Edward Stuart to escape capture, and Johnson is right that her name would be "mentioned in history": then she was well-known, but a century later she was elevated to heroic status by the Victorians.

In a letter to Mrs Thrale a little time later, Johnson repeats his favourable impression of Flora. He says she was: "of a pleasing person and elegant behaviour. She told me that she thought herself honoured by my visit; and I am sure that whatever regard she bestowed on me was liberally repaid."

To have only this much about their meeting would be only tantalising. But thankfully we also have Boswell's account. As usual, he is more gossipy in his description of the encounter, at the house of the "gallant highlander" Alan Macdonald.

"There was a comfortable parlour with a good fire, and a dram went round. By and by supper was served, at which there appeared the lady of the house, the celebrated Miss Flora Macdonald. She is a little woman, of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well-bred. To see Dr Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories, salute Miss Flora Macdonald in the isle of Sky, was a striking sight; for although somewhat congenial in their notions, it was very improbable that they should meet here."

Johnson retired early (though presumably after Flora had done so) and slept in the same bed that the Young Pretender had slept in nearly 30 years before. He was in a mood that Boswell describes as "quiescent".

Were they "congenial in their notions"? It seems so. There was some banter between them, as Flora explained that Johnson had been described to her as a "young buck", which he enjoyed hearing. At any rate, Johnson was impressed by the significance of the meeting, because, as Boswell tells us, "upon our table in the room I found in the morning a slip of paper, on which Dr Johnson had written with his pencil these words: 'Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum' ('with virtue weighted, what worthless trash is gold!') - presumably a reference to Flora's choice of allegiance over the financial reward of giving up the fleeing Jacobite.

So Flora lived up to Johnson's expectations, his Tory political convictions leading him to a certain sympathy with Jacobites as "true Britons", unlike the hated Whigs. (Although Flora had not been a Jacobite rebel, she always said, rather someone who had simply helped Charles out of compassion.)

In the morning, there was the opportunity for more relaxed conversation before the travellers moved on, and in fact Flora gave Johnson an account of the famous escapade. Boswell says that "perceiving Dr Johnson's curiosity, though he had delicacy enough not to question her, [she] very obligingly entertained him with a recital of the particulars that she herself knew of that escape" and Johnson "listened to her with placid attention".

The travellers departed after breakfast, taking leave of their hostess and escorted onwards by Macdonald for a few miles. Whatever their thoughts about the encounter at the time, it inspired Boswell to digress at length in his memoir about the rights and wrongs of the Jacobite cause.

Alan and Flora were soon to leave for a new life in America, as part of what Johnson described earlier in his journal as "this epidemical fury of emigration". They had to return after the venture failed and Flora died in 1790, aged 68.

Johnson and Flora were brought together again after death. A monument to her was erected at her grave in Kilmuir on Sky, and much later the epitaph was added using Johnson's own words: 'Her name will be mentioned in history and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour'.

See also: