V

Einstein in Poppy-land

Reflections on the Death Drive

 

I Poppy-Land

Poppy-land is the area of North Norfolk that runs from Cromer in the West to Happisburgh in the East – or at least more or less. It was given the name by Clement Scott, a reviewer of plays and occasional travel writer of the fin de siècle. It is the also the place that Albert Einstein stayed between May and October 1933, that is, between Hitler coming to power and his final exile in the United States. (How he came to be there, we will discover later). It was during this sojourn in North Norfolk that Einstein renounced pacifism and accepted the necessity of theoretical physicists working towards a nuclear weapon. And this thought came to him, while he stayed in Poppy-Land, a region whose psychic impact was described by William Sharp in 1904:

One great charm for those who love waste places and solitude is the sense of something tragical in nature. That element is conspicuous in the powerful appeal of the wilder or more desolate regions of maritime East Anglia. When, with nothing visible but a vast level of seemingly unstable land, a land sombre in aspect and intricately interwoven with dark, still, sinuous canals and blind water-alleys and spreading uncertain fens, with perhaps not a house or a human being in sight, and overhead the immense and almost oppressive dome of the sky . . . generally so grey or so cloud-strewn in the continual conflict of the winds, but sometimes of a prolonged and imposing serenity, and often, especially in autumn and winter, filled with the most marvellous emblazonry of radiant flame … the spirit may not be moved to blitheness, and may well be affected to melancholy; but it is also habitually uplifted to those unpassing things of which great solitary spaces and still loneliness and all the sombre phantasmagoria of land and sky are symbolic. But, apart from this, it is impossible for an imaginative mind to confront such aspects, in such a region, without a more or less painful recognition of the brevity and insignificance of the material world.

Einstein faced up to the necessity of the destructiveness he bore within him in landscape that had become synonymous with dreams of death, sleep and eternal forgetting. The remarkable passage above comes from Sharp’s work of 1904, Literary Geography. It was published by ‘the offices of the “Pall Mall” publications’ and comprised a collection of essays about certain literary landscapes (‘The Brontë Country’, ‘Dickens Land’ etc) originally issued as articles in The Pall Mall Magazine. They formed a sort of superior travel guide. There are a number of striking things about the passage quoted. One thing is the oddness of encouraging a visit to a place primarily because of the intense melancholy it induces. Can you imagine a current advertisement for a holiday destination that included the phrase ‘it is impossible for an imaginative mind to confront such aspects, in such a region, without a more or less painful recognition of the brevity and insignificance of the material world’? The other thing that is strange is the chapter it is from. We might expect a book outlining key English literary landscapes to include – as it does – chapters entitled ‘Scott Land’, ‘The Country of George Eliot’ or ‘The Literary Geography of the English Lakes’, but what should one expect of a chapter entitled ‘Aylwin Land’?
 

Aylwin is a novel by Theodore Watts-Dunton. Published in 1898, it was viewed by the audience of its time as a literary achievement to rank alongside the great works of the century; indeed, in 1904 it was published as an Oxford World’s Classic and by the time of its author’s death in 1914 it had reached its 26th edition and sold in excess of 100,000 copies. The edition I own – printed in 1906 – has three separate prefaces specially written for different celebratory imprints of the novel. As Sharp comments in Literary Geography: ‘I wonder if any other first romance has ever had so swift and so great a success’. It was still in print in 1950, but is now entirely forgotten. It shared the fate of much late Victorian literature in that its heady combination of Romanticism and mysticism, its references to mesmerism and amnesia, its overblown globe-trotting plot, was precisely the sort of culture designed to be wiped out by the modernist revolution of the early twentieth century. The complete artistic ascendency of modernism, achieved after the Second World War, coincided with Aylwin’s death.
 

The novel opens with a child sitting in the graveyard at the bottom of the tower of a ruined church overlooking a cliff where a landslip has recently taken place. The boy himself has been seriously injured in another such landslip and a further landslip, in a key episode of the novel,  buries a villain as the result of the theft of a cursed Gnostic bejewelled cross that the corpse is found still clutching. The church tower in Aylwin is based on the remnants of St Michael’s Church, Sidestrand. The church was moved inland as a result of coastal erosion in 1881; only the tower and graveyard were left. The tower had already acquired a certain degree of literary fame as a result of Clement Scott’s poem ‘The Garden of Sleep’. Indeed, Watts-Dunton had no connection to North Norfolk and would never have visited the place that briefly became synonymous with his novel had it not been for Scott’s work.
 

 

The facts of Watts-Dunton’s visit are recorded in detail in a letter Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote to his sister. Despite the fame of Aylwin, Watts-Dunton is now known almost exclusively as the saviour and companion of Swinburne. He is credited as having rescued the poet from a life of intemperance that was killing him, but also, because of plucking him from that life and marooning him in the ennui of suburban Putney, of robbing the poet of his creative powers. In The Rings of Saturn W G Sebald describes how the ‘two bachelors lived […] carefully avoiding the least excitement. Their days invariably followed a routine devised by Watts-Dunton. Swinburne, Watts-Dunton reportedly said with a certain pride in the tried and tested correctness of his system, always walks in the morning, writes in the afternoon and reads in the evening. And, what is more, at meal times he eats like a caterpillar and at night he sleeps like a dormouse.’ The image of a pathological, almost demonic relationship, in which Watts-Dunton kept Swinburne a slave to boredom in order to rescue him from his own nervous deterioration, is hardly maintained by the following letter:

To Alice Swinburne [letter 1244]

c/o Mr Jermy,

Mill House,

Sidestrand,

Norwich

September 18, 1883

Yesterday we left the metropolitan splendours of Cromer for the delicious little refuge from whence I write to thank you for your letter of the 13th from Sidmouth […] I waited till we were settled here to write, as it would have been useless dating from the Bath Hotel, which we only stayed in till good Mr.Jermy, the miller of this tiny old village, was able to receive us as lodgers. On entering I find an envelope directed to me, left by the outgoing tenant to be delivered immediately on my arrival, and containing a copy of verses of a most fervent and flowery description, adjuring me to confer fame on this lonely country – which verses I find to be the production of the author (name unknown) of the very article in the Daily Telegraph which sent us hither. It appeared on Aug. 30th under the highly ‘aesthetic’ title ‘Poppy-land’, and on my showing it to Watts and saying, ‘This must really be a delicious sort of place, in spite of this worthy man’s florid style of cockney enthusiasm,’ he set his heart on coming here in case the weather were suitable; and it has been very favourable hitherto. But is it not funny we should have got into the very house occupied till last evening by the man who had unconsciously induced us to come into the country?

The unknown fan and author of the article in The Telegraph was Clement Scott. There is a certain irony in Swinburne’s remark that Scott ‘unconsciously induced us to come’ because the transactions of influence – the pushings and pullings – between the two are far more complex than the letter would suggest. Swinburne accuses him of ‘cockney enthusiasm’, that is, of being an acolyte of Keats. It would be truer to say that Scott was an acolyte of Swinburne. There is a further irony that it was not Swinburne, but Watts-Dunton who gave Poppy-Land – or Aylwin Land – the fame Scott desired for the region, though since Aylwin’s oblivion, it is truest to say that Scott’s own work is most often associated with North Norfolk.

 

*

In 1885 Scott published a collection of the articles about the area he had put out in the Telegraph entitled: Poppy-Land: Papers, descriptive of scenery on the East Coast. It celebrates the virtues of the area of shoreline from Sheringham to Mundesley and its influence, not only on Watts-Dunton, was considerable. Scott argues that, for natural beauty, the region can compete with anywhere in Europe; however, it is undiscovered and thus surpasses other destinations in the peace it can offer. Early on in the book Scott leaves Cromer, which he finds too full of hustle and bustle, and wanders up past the lighthouse and across the cliffs: ‘It is difficult to convey an idea of the silence of the fields through which I passed, or the beauty of the prospect […].’ His journey of 1883 into this undiscovered country changed his life and stirred the landscape, giving it a brief unsettled consciousness.
 

Approaching a miller’s house, suspended in the stillness of summer, he asked for and was given lodging for the night. The appeal was addressed to one Louie Jermy, the nineteen year-old daughter of the miller. Scott was struck by the simplicity and beauty of the girl, the cottage and the landscape. He was to return many times to what he described as this ‘deserted shore’.
 

Before Scott had even had a chance to collect his articles in a single volume, his jottings had wrought a change; as he puts it midway through Poppy-Land: ‘The hod and trowel has advanced as far as Overstrand. For my own part I prefer the Cromer of the past to the Cromer of the present. Into the future I will not inquire.’ He was keenly aware that there was a paradox at the heart of his enterprise. This place, whose ‘only charm is its simplicity; its only recreation rest’ was becoming a sought after holiday destination. In the midst of celebrating the fact that one can watch the sun rise and fall over the sea in midsummer, Scott comments that hardly anyone sees it happen: ‘The air is so laden with sleep, the whole district so covered with poppies, that the four o’clock arousing is, I find, indefinitely postponed.’ Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, the first to catch on to the Poppy-Land vogue, came to stay a mere 18 days after the first of his articles. And soon Overstrand, the place where Scott found this ‘Garden of Sleep’, was dubbed the ‘millionaires’ village’ as Lord and Lady Battersea bought a house there, followed by Sir Edgar Speyer, Sir George Lewis and Sir John Hare who had new houses built. The London theatre set – Scott was most famous in his own time as a theatre critic – also came in troops. Rather than building houses, they wanted a taste of the rustic life offered by miller Jermy and his daughter. Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Beerbhom Tree stayed there.
 

Clement Scott gave the place its name and even before 1904, when he died, he felt a profound regret for the peace he had destroyed. But he shouldn’t have worried; by the 1930s almost all of the houses of the rich and titled, who had been drawn by his descriptions, had been pulled down, burned, or perhaps more approprately, fallen into the sea to rest with the tower of St Michael which toppled over the cliff in 1916. The silence here is profound and resilient. Even now the sad and decaying evidence of the influence of Scott’s celebration of the area, and the local entrepreneurs’ attempts to cash in, is everywhere visible. In Mundesley, a village of perhaps fewer than a thousand people, you can still enjoy the mouldering hulks of three grand hotels and a sanatorium in a mixture of the continental and vernacular styles that are a matter of feet from the swiftly dissolving cliff edge. Even in 1890, when, at the height of the Poppy-Land bubble, there was a sale of land in Mundesley that enabled the hotels to be built, it was not successful: only three plots were bought. With a huge investment, a railway line was built so that you could go from North Walsham to Knapton, Mundesley, Overstrand and on to Cromer: a journey through the heart of Poppy-Land. It was opened in 1906 and closed merely 47 years later in 1953, ten years before Beeching. Its remnants are still visible; where it is raised on embankments it resembles Iron Age earthworks and where dug into the ground it has become what looks like a river of tangled vegetation. The entrepreneurs’ homeland was in the papers and being talked about; what they failed to grasp was that its fame depended on emptiness, absence, tranquillity. Their attempt to turn the area into a tourist haven was doomed from the start. They envisaged thousands of well-heeled Victorians visiting their village, flocking the streets, idly toying with casino chips in some replica Côte D’Azur Ritz. Nothing of the station at Mundesley – beautifully designed in the arts and crafts style by Ratcliffe and Marriot – with its three six-hundred-foot platforms, remains now. The only traces are faded black and white photographs in the tiny maritime museum on the seafront. In Mundesley the familiar melancholy of the British seaside is intensified to an unearthly static hum of absence (a noise emitted by the military radar station a few miles along the coast in Trimingham, which is shaped like an outsized golf ball). In some ways Poppy-Land is a prophetic legacy of the Victorian and Edwardian ages that tells what the world will look like after the last human has gone. But, perhaps more interestingly, it offers a distillation of our contemporary predicament: economic hubris coupled to environmental catastrophe.
 

Much of Scott’s work celebrates the region in conventional terms; it has ‘the cleanliness of Cornwall, the seclusion of Etretat, the romantic surroundings of Lynton and Ilfracombe […] and above all an air coming across from the sea perfectly laden with vigour, health, and exhilaration.’ However, among the rather jolly account of seaside pleasures, are passages of haunting and silence. The most famous landmark of Poppy-Land was the church tower of St Michael’s. Scott returned to it literally, and as a theme, time and again. It first appears in prose not dissimilar to Sharp’s:

So serious has been the cliff fall eastward and westward from Cromer that the frightened villagers of our little hamlet have moved their tiny church a quarter of a mile landward, and have left their old tower and their buried dead enclosed in a churchyard doomed for destruction, but making in its loneliness and melancholy one of the most pathetic and picturesque corners of this land.
 

Scott would always spend the last hours of every year in the crumbling yard around the ruin. Poppy-Land ends with an evocation of one such New Year’s Eve:

Time’s destiny is written on the very face of the landscape. There is no need for church bells to ring, or clocks to strike, or for any sign to show us that the death-hour has come. Let us mount together to the cliff’s edge, close by the deserted churchyard and the ruined tower, high up where the poppies grew so luxuriantly in the ripening corn, let us stand side by side at the old corner, where there used to be spread for us such a garden of wild flowers. Is this the sea, so silent and so still, stretched out like a grey and waveless lake before us? Imagination cannot reconcile a winter sea with such a scene. There is not a footprint on the blackened sand; there is not a ripple upon the silence of the waters. A grey sky, a dark and flowerless land, a sea of inexpressible sadness. It is the close of the year, and it looks, as we stand lost in imagination, like the end of the world. … It is silence everywhere; silence across the lonely fields, silence on the lonelier sea; no light in any window, no sparkle or star in the darkened heavens; nothing of life and hope but the flash and gleam of the lighthouse on the sea down miles away. Listen again, and try if you can hear a bell or a clock strike. Nothing but silence. Far off, a dog barks in a distant farm. It is the time now. Listen again; do you hear nothing? Nothing; no moan, no whisper. There is no breath or pulse in the old year. […] Thus upon the old year’s tombstone we write “Finis!” and together we journey onwards still into the land of shadows.

The silence and peace of the region – its great boon – are always threatening to tip over into death. And secretly it is this that Scott was drawn to in the region. This deathly fascination is visible in ‘The Garden of Sleep’, the poem in which the name ‘Poppy-Land’ was introduced. The name and the pictures of a beautiful landscape laden with wildflowers it conjured were used by GNER when touting the train line. But if we turn to the poem itself, it seems far more troubling and ambiguous than its promotional use might seem to imply:

The Garden of Sleep

A summer Song

“Whenever men are noble they love bright colour : and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures !”

                                             Ruskin, “On Poppies.”                                 [Proserpina]

On the grass of the cliff, at the edge of the steep,
God planted a garden - a garden of sleep!
'Neath the blue of the sky, in the green of the corn,
It is there that the regal red poppies are born!
Brief days of desire, and long dreams of delight,
They are mine when Poppy-Land cometh in sight.
In music of distance, with eyes that are wet,
It is there I remember, and there I forget!
O! heart of my heart! where the poppies are born,
I am waiting for thee, in the hush of the corn.
Sleep! Sleep!
From the Cliff to the Deep!
Sleep, my Poppy-Land,
Sleep!

In my garden of sleep, where red poppies are spread,
I wait for the living, alone with the dead!
For a tower in ruins stands guard o'er the deep,
At whose feet are green graves of dear women asleep!
Did they love as I love, when they lived by the sea?
Did they wait as I wait, for the days that may be?
Was it hope or fulfilling that entered each breast,
Ere death gave release, and the poppies gave rest?
O! life of my life! on the cliffs by the sea,
By the graves in the grass, I am waiting for thee!
Sleep! Sleep!
In the Dews of the Deep!
Sleep, my Poppy-Land,
Sleep!

As was the case with Sharp’s description of the region in Literary Geography, I find it hard to imagine how this was used as publicity. It is a poem troubled by the certainty of forgetfulness and death, notions of which the poppy is the symbol. And Poppy-Land here becomes figured as a location in which death and life bleed into one another. The sleep induced by the poppies is the image of the persona absorbed into unconsciousness. The tower of which Scott sings fell into the sea in 1916 – the year that the symbolism of the poppy was changed forever in this country from its previous narcotic implication into something more straightforwardly deathly. Swinburne’s comment that it was Scott who ‘unconsciously induced’ he and Watts-Dunton to come to Poppy-Land is unsurprising; Swinburne was seduced by the article in The Telegraph of August 30th 1883, as it was, largely, a product of his own imagination. Scott’s poem is indebted to ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ by Swinburne, a poem – dreadfully shocking to the Victorian imagination – that evoked a world of dreamless unchristian death. Scott must have found it uncanny that he had conjured up the very poet by whom he was so intensely influenced: imagine his feelings as he opens the door to miller Jermy’s cottage and in steps his idol. That Scott was fully aware of Swinburne’s influence on his own most famous poem is shown in his use of a quotation from Ruskin’s book on wild flowers, which is entitled Proserpina, as an epigraph to the version of the poem printed in the collected Poppy-Land papers. The opening of Swinburne’s ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ is strikingly similar to Scott’s evocation of North Norfolk; the ‘world is quiet’, there is a ‘green field growing’ and upon the sea ‘wan waves and wet winds labour’. The speaker is tired of those who ‘reap and sow’ – those who thoughtlessly involve themselves in the diurnal activities of life – and who are lost in ‘Desires and dreams and powers’.  Scott writes:

'Neath the blue of the sky, in the green of the corn,

It is there that the regal red poppies are born!

Brief days of desire, and long dreams of delight,

They are mine when Poppy-Land cometh in sight.

Unlike Tennyson who used Persephone to underwrite his belief in immortality or Robert Bridges who fully endorsed Swinburne’s nihilism, Scott seems unsure exactly what to do with his knowledge of ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. There are moments when it seems he is trying to find a traditionally picturesque landscape in Swinburne’s world where ‘life has death for neighbour’. And Scott’s speaker appears to be waiting for a tryst with a lover with whom he hopes to spend his future. But even this expectant pleasure is undermined by the location. He ‘wait[s] for the living, alone with the dead’. Indeed, the corpses, which remained in the graveyard at St Michael’s when everything else was moved, become presences that are almost too real: ‘For a tower in ruins stands guard o’er the deep,/ At whose feet are green graves of dear women asleep.’ It is not insignificant that sleep and death are once more conflated. The poem ends on a note that is far more Swinburne than Tennyson:

Was it hope or fulfilling that entered each breast,

Ere death gave release, and the poppies gave rest?

O! life of my life! on the cliffs by the sea,

By the graves in the grass, I am waiting for thee!

Sleep! Sleep!

In the Dews of the Deep!

Sleep, my Poppy-Land,

Sleep!

Death is a ‘release’ made restful by ‘poppies’, which can only mean by virtue of the ‘deadly wine’ Proserpine ‘crushes’ from them in Swinburne’s poem. Indeed, in the first stanza of ‘Poppy-Land’ Scott’s speaker is haunted by some sort of trauma and finds that in the shadow of the tower ‘with eyes that are wet/ It is there I remember and there I forget’. The forgetfulness that Swinburne’s speaker revels in sits on the edge of an abyss – all there is at the end of ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ is ‘the sleep eternal/ Of an eternal night.’ Similarly, Scott closes with four exhortations to ‘Sleep!’ And as the poem is overtaken by sleep the figure for whom the speaker waits has ceased to be living; she is surely not some Victorian domestic goddess – she is now Proserpine-Persephone, indifferent bringer of eternal sleep.
 

Scott and Louie Jermy are said to have been in love. (Indeed, John Madden, who directed Shakespeare in Love, made a BBC2 drama about the affair in the 1980s.) When Scott came to call at the miller’s house the first time, she answered the gate in a bonnet strewn with recently picked poppies. He was in his fifties, married, a successful journalist; she was nineteen, candid and uneducated. As a result of the Poppy-Land columns in the London papers, Jermy became a little famous; she was visited – and occasionally entertained – by the rich and famous. She left Norfolk for some time to work in the home of the pre-Raphaelite Edward Burn-Jones. Sadly, when her father died (in 1916, the same year that the tower disappeared into the sea) many years after Scott had passed to eternal sleep and the Poppy-Land bubble had burst, she was evicted from the cottage; she spent the remainder of her life wandering the streets of Overstrand and Sidestrand pushing a pram full of albums which contained newspaper clippings from her brief sojourn in fame and a variety of knickknacks given her by the Prince of Wales, Ellen Terry and the like: her and Scott’s child. The second manifestation of St Michael’s church, which was moved inland, survives now and its yard houses the gravestone and remains of Louie Jermy.

 

II The Death Drive

The theory of the death drive was first outlined in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, a work, unsurprisingly perhaps, which is decidedly uncanny. It does not explain the drive directly but rather investigates the nature of repetitive childhood play and neurotic compulsions to repeat unpleasant experiences. Freud can do little more in Beyond the Pleasure Principle than point to the effects which might be caused by such a drive and speculate on why it might exist. His final explanation is that, as we are born of inanimate matter, we must desire a return to that state. We spend our lives avoiding dangers merely because we are programmed for our own intrinsic form of death. The apparent will to live and protect ourselves is merely a roundabout detour to our central desire which is for our own annihilation. There is no real way of assessing the truth of this account; in a sense, the death drive is the very epitome of the void in its inexpressible otherness. It is visible only in repetitions that themselves defy rational analysis. Like Hannah Arendt’s conception of evil, these compulsive reiterations are banal and profoundly terrifying all at once.
 

The second section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle begins with a consideration of the nature of trauma. Freud comments that ‘it is a distinctive feature of the dream-life of patients with traumatic neurosis that it repeatedly takes them back to the situation of their original misadventure, from which they awake with a renewed sense of fright’. He finishes this passage with the comment that these dreams reveal the ‘masochistic tendencies of the ego’. These words are an uncanny harbinger of what is to come.

He then makes a strange leap: ‘I should now like to suggest we leave the dark and dismal topic of traumatic neurosis and study the working of the psychic apparatus by reference to one of its earliest forms of normal activity. I mean the play of children.’ Both the change of subject and the way it is signalled are odd and become odder the more we look at them. He describes himself as having taken ‘advantage of an opportunity that happened to present itself to me in order to elucidate a game played by a one-and-a-half-year-old boy … .’ He proceeds to explain the game:

… this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often not an easy task. He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long, drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ which in the judgement of the mother (one that coincided with my own) was not simply an exclamation but meant ‘go away’ (fort). I saw at last that this was a game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’ (fortsein) with them. One day I made an observation that confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it, but he kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the side of his little draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then said his significant ‘o-o-o-oh’ and drew the reel by the string out of the cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there). This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.

Disappearance and return; death and rebirth followed by inevitable death again. This is the game that Freud must elucidate; the first absence that must be filled in.
 

Freud begins the next paragraph in confident mood:

The interpretation of the game presented itself immediately. It was connected with the child’s remarkable cultural achievement—the foregoing of the satisfaction of an instinct—as the result of which he could let his mother go away without making any fuss. He compensated for it, so to speak, by dramatising the same disappearance and return with the objects he had at hand.

This interpretation seems somewhat tendentious. It turns out that the boy was Freud’s grandson, Ernst Halberstadt, and that Freud’s observations must have occurred during the period when his son-in-law, Max Halberstadt, was fighting in the First World War. Indeed, on the next page, Freud comments that Ernst ‘a year later than my observations used to throw on the floor a toy which displeased him, and to say ‘Go to the war!’ He had been told that his absent father was at the war, and he did not miss him at all, giving the clearest indications that he did not wish to be disturbed in the sole possession of his mother’. A more economical explanation would surely be to attach the play to the absent father, the game being developed with an accompanying phrase when the boy was old enough to talk.  But why limit it? The game seems to encapsulate a re-enactment of loss even more primary than that of the mother or father, something fundamental and which we must all face.
 

But the explanation Freud offers even as it stands is riddled with more empty space. Most importantly, the question arises: why does the child seek to repeat this unpleasant experience? As Freud puts it: ‘The departure of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor merely a matter of indifference. How then does it accord with the pleasure-principle that he repeats this painful experience as a game?’  His first suggestion of an answer is defeated by the nature of the way in which the game was played:

The answer will perhaps be forthcoming that the departure must be played as the necessary prelude to the joyful return, and that in this latter lay the true purpose of the game. As against this, however, there is the observation that the first act, the going away, was played by itself as a game and far more frequently than the whole drama with its joyful conclusion.

Freud reiterates that the return is only infrequently played out and that the departure or loss can be, and often is, a self-sufficient game.
 

Freud thus offers two further explanations:

He was in the first place passive, was overtaken by the experience, but now brings himself in as playing an active part, by repeating the experience as a game in spite of its unpleasing nature. This effort might be ascribed to the impulse to obtain the mastery of a situation, which remains independent of any question of whether the recollection was a pleasant one or not. But another interpretation may be attempted. The flinging away of the object so that it is gone might be the gratification of an impulse of revenge suppressed in real life but directed against the mother for going away, and would then have the defiant meaning: ‘Yes, you can go, I don’t want you, I am sending you away myself.’

The child wants to assert an aspect of mastery over the scene of loss, to become active in the departure rather than merely the object of a process beyond his control. This accords with much subsequent psychoanalytic material (including my own clinical experience) that games and fantasies – especially sexual fantasies – are a way of making sense of and controlling something that undermines the ego. Furthermore, the boy wants to enact a fictional revenge on the force that departs from him. An interpretation that maintains a pleasurable outcome is thus preserved in the teeth of what seems a compulsive repetition of loss.
 

But it is at this point, when the explanation is seemingly most secure, the Da of the equation most happily confident, that a footnote in the text appears:

When the child was five and three-quarters his mother died. Now that she was really and truly ‘gone’ (o-o-o), the boy showed no signs of grief. However, a second child had been born in the meantime, provoking the most intense jealousy in him.

The dead mother was Sophie Halberstadt, née Freud. The Fort will always win, indeed, was always a sufficient game in itself. And now the true uncanniness of the text becomes clear. Freud had claimed to be moving away from a ‘dark and dismal’ topic, but it turns out, only to look again at the death of his beloved daughter. The narrative of early ‘normal’ life is in fact a story that is haunted. But is a ghost a Fort or a Da? And the grandson, the object of these scientific speculations, becomes a stand-in for the author – the loss is as much Freud’s as Ernst’s. Then there is the noise the boy makes, which Freud and Sophie agreed readily meant ‘Fort’. Freud includes it in the footnote: ‘Now that she was really and truly ‘gone’ (o-o-o)’. It looks and sounds nothing like Fort; it looks like three repetitions of nothing, of absence, and sounds like a miserable ululation of grief which the author cannot but include as he narrates the death of his child. And Freud knew this. In a letter of 1923 in which he is answering the suggestion that the theory he expounded was related to his personal grief he comments:

I certainly would have stressed the connection between the death of the daughter and the concepts of Beyond in any analytic study on someone else. Yet still it is wrong. Beyond the Pleasure Principle was written in 1919, when my daughter was young and blooming.

But clearly that is not true of the footnote. Is a footnote a Fort or a Da? Like Sophie, it certainly haunts the text.
 

And even if what Freud says is true, it simply reveals another uncanny aspect of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: its proleptic quality. Just as the death drive haunts Ernst’s game – despite all Freud’s attempts to explain it in terms of pleasure – the game somehow prophesies the death of Sophie. But this is only one instance. The next twenty years of European history cast their shadow backwards onto Freud’s text and it becomes a prophecy of what is to come.
 

In 1938 Freud escaped Austria and had his entire work room lovingly recreated in Hampstead. It was already a sort of museum, he a sort of ghost, and it formally became the Freud Museum in 1982 after the death of Anna Freud. The first of Freud’s relatives to arrive in England after the Anschluss was Ernst Halberstadt. This double of Freud’s in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ changed his name after the war to Ernest Freud and became a psychoanalyst. Not all of Freud’s relatives escaped. Four of his five sisters died in concentration camps in 1942: Regina Debora (known as Rosa) in Auschwitz, Marie (known as Mitzi) in Theresienstadt, Esther Adolfine (known as Dolfi) and Pauline Regine (known as Paula) in Treblinka.
 

By the end of section III of Beyond the Pleasure Principle the attempt to explain the repetition of unpleasant experience in terms of pleasure has been abandoned:

Sufficient evidence remains to justify a compulsion to repeat; and this compulsion appears to be more primal, more elemental, more deeply instinctual than the pleasure principle, which it simply thrusts aside.

Freud thus begins to elaborate his profoundly pessimistic philosophy (his love of Sophie) which is expressed in the idea of the death drive. He finishes with the diabolical formula:

We must also be struck with the fact that the life-instincts have much more to do with our inner perception, since they make their appearance as disturbers of the peace, and continually bring along with them states of tension the resolution of which is experienced as pleasure; while the death-instincts, on the other hand, seem to fulfil their function unostentatiously.

The unostentatious filling of a function. The banality of evil. The thing about the death drive is its silence; it does its work out of view and always through the agency of something other than itself. It is everywhere and nowhere, the Fort that finishes and is the foundation of every Da.
 

Why War? Freud, Einstein and the Death drive

Freud’s pessimistic philosophy is captured beautifully in the exchange of letters between himself and Albert Einstein published, in 1932, as ‘Why War?’
 

After the First World War, and more especially after 1928, Einstein had been a tireless pacifist. However, 1932 was a year of terrible trials in this struggle for peace. A conference, held in Geneva, seeking tangible advances in disarmament, dissolved in acrimony. In a press conference Einstein commented: 'If the implications weren't so tragic, the Conference's methods could only be called absurd. One doesn't make wars less likely to happen by formulating rules of warfare. [...] The solution to the peace problem can't be left in the hands of governments. [...] I think the conference is heading for a bad compromise. Whatever agreement is made about the "types of arms permissible in war" would be broken as soon as war began. War can't be humanised. It can only be abolished.' Later, a proposal for an international peace centre at The Hague was undermined when a number of the most important international bodies agitating for peace backed out at the last minute. Furthermore, an anti-war congress held in Amsterdam became, in reality, pro-Stalinist propaganda. It was at this time that Einstein was invited by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation under the auspices of the Permanent Committee for Literature and the Arts of the League of Nations, to write to an intellectual of his choice about any topic of pressing international concern. He chose Freud and he chose to ask why it is so difficult to agitate for peace. As it proceeds, one can detect the sense that he feels he is fighting against an unassailable enemy and, thus, the despair that lies at the letter’s heart:

How is it these devices [propaganda, nationalism, tribal animosities etc] succeed so well in rousing people to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because people have within them a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.

In the course of Freud’s answer there is a passage which, if anything, must have served to intensify Einstein’s feeling that the well is poisoned at its source.

[…] I would like to dwell a little longer on this destructive instinct which is seldom given the attention that its importance warrants. With the least of speculative efforts we are led to conclude that this instinct functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed it might well be called the “death-instinct”; whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on. The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain organs, it directs its action outwards, against external objects. The living being, that is to say, defends its own existence by destroying foreign bodies. But, in one of its activities, the death instinct is operative within the living being and we have sought to trace back a number of normal and pathological phenomena to this introversion of the destructive instinct. We have even committed the heresy of explaining the origin of human conscience by some such “turning inward” of the aggressive impulse. Obviously when this internal tendency operates on too large a scale, it is no trivial matter, rather a positively morbid state of things; whereas the diversion of the destructive impulse towards the external world must have beneficial effects. Here is then the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities which we now are combating. We can but own that they are really more akin to nature than this our stand against them, which, in fact, remains to be accounted for.

The implication of this passage is, first, that we are all trying to work our own ruin and in certain circumstances this impulse can be turned towards others. The latter, perhaps even more frightening suggestion, is that the very hatred of destruction represented by pacifists such as Einstein is in fact simply a purer form of the death drive, working to curtail the excesses of the very self it seems to protect. Indeed, conscience, altruism and nonviolence are positively perverse.

*

Einstein was in the habit of spending the summer in Berlin and then the winter months lecturing in the United States. In March of 1933, at the precise time that the exchange of letters with Freud was published by the Institute in Paris simultaneously in German, French and English, he caught the boat back to Europe; during the journey he received the dreaded but anticipated news that the Nazis had seized power. He had already been denounced, his theories dismissed by Nazi-sponsored physicists as ‘Jewish Science’ and now his property was expropriated. Furthermore, the Nazis had offered a bounty of 1000 guineas for his assassination. On the voyage he resigned his membership of the Berlin Academy and on arrival in Antwerp he renounced his German citizenship. He remained in Belgium until the intervention of Oliver Locker-Lampson, a British soldier and Unionist Member of Parliament who lived near Cromer in North Norfolk. He had met Einstein at a lecture in Oxford, and with some promptings by Winston Churchill and a group working to secure the safety of Jewish refugees, he arranged to have Einstein collected from Antwerp and ensconced in a holiday hut he owned on Roughton Heath. The scientist arrived in England on 23rd May and left on 7th October for permanent residence in the USA: he never returned to Europe.
 

The nearest coast to him – a mere mile or two – would have been Overstrand, where Clement Scott had discovered the region he dubbed Poppy-Land. It must have been a strange and horrifying dream-like experience for Einstein. He was robbed of his home, but more importantly he was faced with the impossibility of his most cherished dream: peace. Two days before he departed for the USA, he told an audience of 10,000 in the Royal Albert Hall that freedom itself was at stake. Indeed, it was while he was in Roughton Heath that he renounced his pacifism and admitted that the only response to the Nazis was force. He made the decision with intense reluctance, with revulsion in his heart and with passionate foreboding. He carried in his head a seed of knowledge: mass could be converted into energy. He travelled back again to the USA aware that the implication of his position was an undertaking to work to enable the manufacture of a nuclear weapon. Einstein: pacifist and greatest genius; Einstein: the bearer of the code of ultimate destruction.
 

Another seed that had lodged itself in Einstein’s mind was Freud’s comment that we all contain a drive ‘striving to work [our] ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter’. And this thought, to return to where we begun, was formed against the backdrop of Poppy-Land, described by William Sharp in 1904:

One great charm for those who love waste places and solitude is the sense of something tragical in nature. That element is conspicuous in the powerful appeal of the wilder or more desolate regions of maritime East Anglia. When, with nothing visible but a vast level of seemingly unstable land, a land sombre in aspect and intricately interwoven with dark, still, sinuous canals and blind water-alleys and spreading uncertain fens, with perhaps not a house or a human being in sight, and overhead the immense and almost oppressive dome of the sky . . . generally so grey or so cloud-strewn in the continual conflict of the winds, but sometimes of a prolonged and imposing serenity, and often, especially in autumn and winter, filled with the most marvellous emblazonry of radiant flame … the spirit may not be moved to blitheness, and may well be affected to melancholy ; but it is also habitually uplifted to those unpassing things of which great solitary spaces and still loneliness and all the sombre phantasmagoria of land and sky are symbolic. But, apart from this, it is impossible for an imaginative mind to confront such aspects, in such a region, without a more or less painful recognition of the brevity and insignificance of the material world.