Memory, p.17
Memory, page 17
He immediately went to the bed, lifted up the chintz which then covered the frame, and found his old friend the hole.
A nut had been supplied and he could no longer get his fingers into it.
He rang the bell and, when the servant came, asked for a bedkey. All this time he was rapidly acquiring the reputation of being a lunatic throughout the whole house, but the key was brought, and by the help of it Hoare got the nut off. When he had done so, there sure enough, by dint of picking with his pocket-knife, he found the missing five-pound note.
See how the return of a given present brings back the presents that have been associated with it.
From SIGMUND FREUD, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), translated by James Strachey
I would like to cite one more example illustrating the significance that an apparently random childhood memory can acquire through analytical study. In my forty-third year, when I became interested in the remnants of my own childhood memories, I recollected a scene which had come into my mind now and then over a long period – for ever, as it seemed to me – and there were reliable indications that it must date from before the end of my third year of life. I saw myself standing in tears in front of a wardrobe [in Austrian usage: Kasten] and demanding something, while my half-brother, twenty years older than me, was holding its door open, and then my mother suddenly came in, beautiful and slender, as if just coming home from a walk through the streets. I had used these words to describe the three-dimensional scene, but I could take it no further. I had no idea whether my brother was going to open or close the wardrobe – in the first translation of the image into words I called it a Schrank [‘wardrobe’ in standard German] – or why I was crying, or what my mother’s arrival had to do with it; I was tempted to explain it to myself as a memory of my older brother’s teasing me and being interrupted by our mother. Such misinterpretations of a remembered childhood scene are not at all unusual; we remember a situation, but it is unfocused, and we do not know exactly where the psychic emphasis lies. My analytical investigations led me to an entirely unexpected interpretation of this image. I had been missing my mother, and began to suspect that she might be shut up in the wardrobe – the Schrank or Kasten – so I asked my brother to open it. When he did, and I could see that my mother was not inside, I began screaming; that was the part I remembered, along with my mother’s appearance immediately afterwards, which calmed my fears and longings. But what made me, as a child, think of looking for my absent mother in the wardrobe? Some of my dreams from the same period relate vaguely to a nursemaid of whom I had certain other memories, for instance that she consistently used to make me hand over to her the small change people gave me as presents, a detail which itself could claim to figure as a screen memory for later events. This time, I decided to facilitate the task of interpretation, and I asked my now elderly mother, about the nursemaid. I learned a good deal, including the fact that this clever but dishonest character had stolen from the household on a large scale while my mother was lying in, and my half-brother had insisted on bringing legal charges against her. This information, casting a sudden bright light on my childhood memory, helped me to understand it. The nursemaid’s sudden disappearance had affected me quite deeply, and in fact I had turned to that same brother to ask where she was, probably because I had noticed that he had something to do with her removal from the household. Evasively playing on words, as he commonly did, he had told me that she was ‘in the clink [German: eingekastelt, a colloquial expression for ‘in jail’]’. I understood this answer in a purely childish way [as meaning ‘in the wardrobe’ – Kasten] and asked no more questions, since there seemed no more to learn. When my mother went out a little later I was anxious, fearing that my bad brother had shut her up too, just like the nursemaid, and I made him open the wardrobe for me. And now I also understand why my mother’s slender figure, which seemed to have been just restored, featured so prominently in my visual version of this childhood scene; I am two and a half years older than my sister, who was born at this time, and when I was three years old my half-brother left our household.fn1
From EDMUND GOSSE, Father and Son (1907)
Out of the darkness of my infancy there comes only one flash of memory. I am seated alone, in my baby-chair, at a dinner-table set for several people. Somebody brings in a leg of mutton, puts it down close to me, and goes out. I am again alone, gazing at two low windows, wide open upon a garden. Suddenly, noiselessly, a large, long animal (obviously a greyhound) appears at one window-sill, slips into the room, seizes the leg of mutton and slips out again. When this happened I could not yet talk. The accomplishment of speech came to me very late, doubtless because I never heard young voices. Many years later, when I mentioned this recollection, there was a shout of laughter and surprise:
‘That, then, was what became of the mutton! It was not you, who, as your Uncle A. pretended, ate it all up, in the twinkling of an eye, bone and all!’
I suppose that it was the startling intensity of this incident which stamped it upon a memory from which all other impressions of this early date have vanished.
D.H. LAWRENCE, ‘Piano’ (1913)
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
W.H. HUDSON, Far Away and Long Ago (1918)
… when a person endeavours to recall his early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there, some feature in the landscape – hill or wood or tower or spire – touched and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence or regular progression – nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape.
It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus distinctly remembered and visualised are precisely those which were most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man’s life – at all events of some lives – in some rare state of the mind it is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever blotted out.
It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I had a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was tempted – forced I may say – to write this account of my early years. I will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in anything else contained in the book.
I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the bright colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an east wind in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up for six weeks with a very serious illness. Yet when it was over I looked back on those six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so little of physical pain. Never had I felt confinement less – I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds’ voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!
On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the beginning, it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible. Over it all my eyes could range at will, choosing this or that point to dwell upon, to examine it in all its details; or in the case of some person known to me as a child, to follow his life till it ended or passed from sight; then to return to the same point again to repeat the process with other lives and resume my rambles in the old familiar haunts.
What a happiness it would be, I thought, in spite of discomfort and pain and danger, if this vision would continue! It was not to be expected: nevertheless it did not vanish, and on the second day I set myself to try and save it from the oblivion which would presently cover it again. Propped up with pillows I began with pencil and writing-pad to put it down in some sort of order, and went on with it at intervals during the whole six weeks of my confinement, and in this way produced the first rough draft of the book.
And all this time I never ceased wondering at my own mental state; I thought of it when, quickly tired, my trembling fingers dropped the pencil; or when I woke from uneasy sleep to find the vision still before me, inviting, insistently calling to me, to resume my childish rambles and adventures of long ago in that strange world where I first saw the light.
It was to me a marvellous experience; to be here, propped up with pillows in a dimly-lighted room, the night-nurse idly dozing by the fire; the sound of the everlasting wind in my ears, howling outside and dashing the rain like hailstones against the window-panes; to be awake to all this, feverish and ill and sore, conscious of my danger too, and at the same time to be thousands of miles away, out in the sun and wind, rejoicing in other sights and sounds, happy again with that ancient long-lost and now recovered happiness!
During the three years that have passed since I had that strange experience, I have from time to time, when in the mood, gone back to the book and have had to cut it down a good deal and to reshape it, as in the first draft it would have made too long and formless a history.
From SIEGFRIED SASSOON, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man (1928)
Among a multitude of memories my ‘dream friend’ has cropped up with an odd effect of importance which makes me feel that he must be worth a passing mention. The fact is, that, as soon as I began to picture in my mind the house and garden where I spent so much of my early life, I caught sight of my small, long-vanished self with this other non-existent boy standing beside him. And, though it sounds silly enough, I felt queerly touched by the recollection of that forgotten companionship. For some reason, which I cannot explain, the presence of that ‘other boy’ made my childhood unexpectedly clear, and brought me close to a number of things which, I should have thought, would have faded for ever. For instance, I have only just remembered the tarnished mirror which used to hang in the sunless passage which led to my schoolroom, and how, when I secretly stared at my small, white face in the mirror, I could hear the sparrows chirping in the ivy which grew thickly outside the windows. Somehow the sight of my own reflection increased my loneliness …
And now, as I look up from my writing, these memories also seem like reflections in a glass, reflections which are becoming more and more easy to distinguish. Sitting here, alone with my slowly moving thoughts, I rediscover many little details, known only to myself, details otherwise dead and forgotten with all who shared that time; and I am inclined to loiter among them as long as possible.
From G. K. CHESTERTON, Autobiography (1936)
Of this positive quality, the most general attribute was clearness. Here it is that I differ, for instance, from Stevenson, whom I so warmly admire; and who speaks of the child as moving with his head in a cloud. He talks of the child as normally in a dazed daydream, in which he cannot distinguish fancy from fact. Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasising their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the world was anything but a real world …
At this time, of course, I did not even know that this morning light could be lost; still less about any controversies as to whether it could be recovered. So far the disputes of that period passed over my head like storms high up in air; and as I did not foresee the problem I naturally did not foresee any of my searches for a solution. I simply looked at the procession in the street as I looked at the processions in the toy theatre; and now and then I happened to see curious things, twopence coloured rather than a penny plain, which were worthy of the wildest pageants of the toy theatre. I remember once walking with my father along Kensington High Street, and seeing a crowd of people gathered by a rather dark and narrow entry on the southern side of that thoroughfare. I had seen crowds before; and was quite prepared for their shouting or shoving. But I was not prepared for what happened next. In a flash a sort of ripple ran along the line and all these eccentrics went down on their knees on the public pavement. I had never seen people play any such antics except in church; and I stopped and stared. Then I realised that a sort of little dark cab or carriage had drawn up opposite the entry; and out of it came a ghost clad in flames. Nothing in the shilling paint box had ever spread such a conflagration of scarlet, such lakes of lake; or seemed so splendidly likely to incarnadine the multitudinous sea. He came on with all his glowing draperies like a great crimson cloud of sunset, lifting long frail fingers over the crowd in blessing. And then I looked at his face and was startled with a contrast; for his face was dead pale like ivory and very wrinkled and old, fitted together out of naked nerve and bone and sinew; with hollow eyes in shadow; but not ugly; having in every line the ruin of great beauty. The face was so extraordinary that for a moment I even forgot such perfectly scrumptious scarlet clothes.
We passed on; and then my father said, ‘Do you know who that was? That was Cardinal Manning.’
Then one of his artistic hobbies returned to his abstracted and humorous mind; and he said: ‘He’d have made his fortune as a model.’
From HENRY GREEN, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
If I say I remember, as it seems to me I do, one of the maids, that poor thing whose breath smelled, come in one morning to tell us that the Titanic had gone down, it may be that much later they had told me I should have remembered, at the age I was then, and that their saying this had suggested I did remember. But I do know, and they would not, that her breath was bad, that when she knelt down to do one up in front it was all one could do to stand there.
From GWEN RAVERAT, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952)
Long after I have forgotten all my human loves I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path. In the long run it is this feeling that makes life worth living, this which is the driving force behind the artist’s need to create.
From CYRIL HARE, He Should Have Died Hereafter (1958)
How fantastic to suppose that he had forgotten all about it! With the scent of the heather in his nostrils, the sound of the horn fresh in his ears, gazing across the valley at two distant hummocks which suddenly revealed themselves as the very oldest of old acquaintances, Pettigrew found his memory opening up like some monstrous flower, fold within fold. He saw himself, a small boy, jogging uncomfortably to the meet along a road innocent of motor traffic but thick with dust on a hard-mouthed, self-willed pony that could not accommodate its pace to that of the big hunter alongside … The boy was wearing what struck him now as fantastically uncomfortable clothes – a hard hat that seared his forehead, breeches that pinched his flesh below the knees, gaiters that never quite spanned the gap between the breeches and the heavy black boots. In his leather gloves he clutched a thonged hunting crop that was at once his greatest pride and an appalling encumbrance. One pocket was weighed down with a vast pocket knife equipped among other things with a hook designed to take stones out of horses’ hooves; another bulged tightly over the packet of sandwiches which, when eaten later in the day, would prove, whatever their composition, to taste of leather gloves and smell of sweating pony …
By now the picture of the small boy was becoming overlaid in Pettigrew’s mind with a host of other images – his father’s old-fashioned, full-skirted hunting coat, the Henry Alken prints in the Sallowcombe dining-room, the echo of the peculiar wail of the Vicar’s voice at Mattins. With an effort he came back to the present and looked for inspiration across the valley towards Tucker’s Barrows. (How could he have forgotten that household name for an instant? he asked himself.) But the view gave him no help in self-expression …
