Unheimlich Thoughts from Abroad

[steepholm]

In the midst of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands; and, amongst other not very interesting matter, I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it...

Thus Freud, writing his essay on "The Uncanny" in 1919. I tracked down the story in question, which turns out to be called "Inexplicable" by L. G. Moberly and was published in The Strand in 1917. Freud describes it as "a thoroughly silly story" but adds that "the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable." It's an example of an obliquely ghostly genre that was very popular at the time, though no more than a journeyman piece. I wish I could have pressed a copy of M. R. James or even E. F. Benson into Freud's hands, with a cry of "You call that uncanny? This is uncanny." Would a reading of "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" have affected Freud's conclusions about the unheimlich, I wonder?

Mostly, though, I wonder how Freud got hold of that copy of The Strand magazine. By his own account it must have been between its publication in 1917 and the end of the war. Since he was living in an enemy capital, how did that happen? Also, it seems likely that he no longer possessed it in 1919 when he came to write his essay, for he misremembers the alligators on the table as crocodiles. It's uncanny - but not, perhaps, inexplicable. The obvious inference is that Freud was involved in some kind of espionage, and that secret messages were being conveyed between London and Vienna by means of underlined words in The Strand. No doubt, once he had decrypted them, he was required to burn the evidence - probably with one of his trademark cigars. What is certain is that the Armistice followed soon after. Can we doubt that it was brought about, in part, with the unwitting assistance of L. G. Moberly?

I don't know for sure, but it seems at least as likely as some of Freud's own inferences.

Comments

[oonaseckar.livejournal.com]

M.R. James leaves me comletely cold. All I can feel on finishing any of his tales, is that I've read a lazy story fragment, rather than a coherent and internally logical story, and that everyone involved (including me) has had an utterly rotten time for no apparent good reason.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I couldn't disagree more, but I'm not sure that I know how to convince you!

[oonaseckar.livejournal.com]

Each to her own eh? I do love a good ghost story, though. Joan Aiken, now, blooming creepy. Read too late at night, and I can't get up off the settee to go to bed, because something might grab me! Also Robert Westall, genuinely terrifying.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Fine writers both.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

On the fragmentariness, though - I think of his reticence as one of his great strengths. Take the final paragraph of 'Casting the Runes', which demonstrates it eloquently:

Only one detail shall be added. At Karswell's sale a set of Bewick, sold with all faults, was acquired by Harrington. The page with the woodcut of the traveller and the demon was, as he had expected, mutilated. Also, after a judicious interval, Harrington repeated to Dunning something of what he had heard his brother say in his sleep: but it was not long before Dunning stopped him.

That final clause always makes me shudder! But as, ever, de gustibus and all that...

[oonaseckar.livejournal.com]

Oh, he can imply a lot, which is fine when the reader feels he actually knows what he's implying. Often with implicit backstory, though, I have the feeling he has no more bleeding idea than I do about how a set of events came to pass. It feels like a house with no foundations, one good push and it'll go over.

It would be nice to think that Freud did something useful with his existence, though. Rather than just pathologising the entirety of human experience without a single testable hypothesis, in his entire body of faux-scientific fairy tales.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, he can imply a lot, which is fine when the reader feels he actually knows what he's implying. Often with implicit backstory, though, I have the feeling he has no more bleeding idea than I do about how a set of events came to pass. It feels like a house with no foundations, one good push and it'll go over.

Oddly enough, that's exactly how I felt on reading Hoffmann's "The Sandman", which is of course Freud's main text in that essay.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

HOW COME YOU ARE NOT WRITING THIS NOVEL RIGHT NOW? I want to read it NOW.

...of course, such a novel would only underline later Nazi claims that Jews were untrustworthy traitors, so maybe not. Unless Freud was receiving messages from a spy IN England, I guess.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Unless Freud was receiving messages from a spy IN England, I guess.

There's something quite suggestive about the phrase "fell into my hands", I think. I'm not sure how it comes across in German, but things and people often fall into that hands of the enemy, don't they? So possibly he intercepted a copy of the magazine that was intended for someone else. That still doesn't determine which side he was ultimately working for, of course. Espionage, like psychoanalysis, is a game of bluff and double-bluff. (Hmm, I'm warming to this novel idea...)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

That is way cool.

I want to relate it to the conversation about crocodiles in Antony and Cleopatra.

The German has Krokodile too, so it wasn't Strachey's slip.

But I wonder whether Alligator was too technical a word, in German, for Freud to think that accuracy trumped familiarity. I don't know, but I have a somewhat informed hunch that Krokodile is colloquial in German for both alligators and crocodiles, as (in the US) turtle is in English for both turtles and tortoises (and not doves), or dolphin for both dolphins and porpoises, or porcupine for both porcupines and hedgehogs....

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

My German isn't good enough to resolve that question, but I can add that anyone who had recently read the story should have no doubt that the animal concerned was an alligator, since the word is used at least eight times.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

It does actually say "crocodile" once, though. And the man who remembers a companion getting eaten by "alligators" in New Guinea is obviously thinking of crocodiles (see Nash reference already posted).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And while we're on that subject ... (http://www.westegg.com/nash/purist.html)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Hilarious. I didn't know that one.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Having now spoken to a German friend (and translator), I can confirm your hunch.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I can actually think of a couple of possibilities (e.g., the Strand may well have had an international edition, or Freud may have received it as packing material around a book he'd ordered), but your theory is more fun.

Lucy Gertrude Moberly must be one of the granddaughters of Bishop George Moberly.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't know - it seems kind of unlikely they were sending mail or magazines back and forth between Britain and Austria-Hungary while the two countries were at war?

You're quite likely right about Lucy Gertrude. That would also make her the niece of Charlotte Moberly, who encountered Marie-Antoinette in the grounds of Versaille in 1901. Spookiness upon spookiness!

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember that there was mail, at least of sorts (and people were chary of sending/receiving lest they be assumed to be not nice). If I could remember where I saw it, this would help. I read it in my twenties, though, and stared wondering about other communications between countries at war and it turns out that there are quite a few vectors.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

If you can remember, I'd be interested to know. I'm sure Governments had ways of communicating with each other, and the Red Cross would have carried letters and parcels to POWs, but I'm less certain about ordinary civilians.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I don't know where I got it from originally, but I do remember there being Mitford communications during the war. My Mitford letters are among the books in storage, alas, so I can't check the reliability of my memory.

Also, why would the censor be censoring and intelligence be checking private mail, if there was no incoming and outgoing?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Presumably World War II, if the Mitford sisters were the correspondents? Not that I imagine the restrictions for the first war were greater. (On the other hand, the Mitfords were in a social elite that I can imagine might have found a way of slipping personal correspondence into a diplomatic bag.)

The censoring that I've heard of has always been to do with letters to and from troops on the front line or POWs, not private citizens of enemy states. But it's far from an area of expertise for me, as you may have gathered!

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Yep, definitely WWII. Now I need to find out about private corro during both wars! And how far censorship extended. It may have been stronger in Australia than in the UK, for instance.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You know, the idea of sending material via a neutral third party (which you mention downthread) does sound like a very easy way for anyone who wished to get militarily valuable secrets out of (say) Britain to (say) Austria-Hungary to do so. That being the case, I'm sure the authorities were wise to it and had measures in place to prevent it. The obvious way would be through censorship, but in order not to stretch the intelligence services too far and generally to keep the channels of communication as manageable as possible, you'd expect that they would do what they could to limit the flow of mail to neutral countries altogether. I don't know that this is what happened, but if it didn't I'm jiggered as to why not. Mostly, this conversation has exposed to me the depths of my ignorance - or rather, its shallows.

It's pretty clear that Freud wasn't a subscriber to The Strand, at any rate: he seems to have found it a fairly trivial publication, and the idea that he'd go to the trouble of circumscribing enemy lines in order to get hold of the latest from E. Nesbit, Arthur Conan Doyle and co., is implausible. How it "fell into his hands" is still a mystery.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

The German postal system was functional during WWI and it had censorship. I just checked - I don't have time to find out what countries had direct communications with Germany during the period, however, nor how deeply the censorship ran, just that the postal service included censorship during WWI. I'm afraid the simplest probable answer then is that somehow a copy slipped past the censors, either because the censors were slack or because it came from a neutral country so they didn't bother opening it. Unless Freud said so, he does not have to have been a subscriber: it might have been sent to him or to someone else entirely or it might even have been deemed inoffensive (since the censorship may not have operated on the same principles as its cousin, a generation later). the "fell into his hands" could be for the exotic nature of it, during a time of censorship.

The thing that got to me when I found this out was how very much mail there was during WWI. I knew about postcards from the Front, but the magnitude was staggering. In other words, there was a vast *rise* in mail sent in WWI, not a dip. And my relevant histories are, of course, packed, so I can't tell you much more. I need to get a job and unpack my library again for I have 3 books that would have at least some of the info we want.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Freud did apparently read Sherlock Holmes (according to The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud), but that doesn't mean he read the stories as they came out in the Strand. It's not even clear whether he read them in English or in German (they were surely translated).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Freud and Holmes have such a lot in common - the consulting room, the convoluted inductive conclusions, the showmanship disguised as austere scientific method - that it's hard to believe Freud wasn't influenced by Conan Doyle. I suspect that the real reason Freud fell out with Jung was because he couldn't persuade him to bring his army service revolver on those "tricky" cases.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

In the spirit of steepholm's closing line, I must say that it seems entirely appropriate, in discussing Freud, to value the potentially interesting above the potentially plausible ;-)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You are finely attuned to my methods. :)

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

The Strand *did* have an international edition, because of the Commonwealth. I don't know the dates, though. I have a few copies from WWII.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

All I can say is, I would be amazed if they were distributing it to the Triple Alliance powers in 1917! (But then, the world is an amazing place.)

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

All they have to do is distribute to someone elsewhere who then has a German-origin citizen who posts it to Germany. I don't know how hard it was to post from the UK at that time, but there were bunches of countries who maintained postal services.