Narcissus Poem by gershon hepner

When Sigmund Freud is introduced to
Virginia Woolf he gives her a narcissus.
He means that, narcissistic, she is used to
receiving what this flowery giver misses,
affection that’s accompanied by phrases
to raise him from his ego-id abysses,
and, proofs of her appreciation, praises
more sweet than are her sycophantic kisses.
Since lines he writes will not like flowers fade,
she makes him sad each time that she dismisses
his dear poetic gifts he should have laid
not at her feet but at those of his missus.
What is isn’t said by fastly fading flowers,
may be by sonnets said, and last for hours.

Inspired by an article about memoirs by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker, January 25,2010 (“But Enough About Me: What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? ”) :

When, at the suggestion of her sister, Virginia Woolf started, somewhat reluctantly, to compose an autobiographical “sketch, ” she found herself, inexplicably at first, thinking of a certain hallway mirror—the scene, as further probing of her memory revealed, of an incestuous assault by her half-brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication. As it happens, Woolf, the tentative memoirist, met Freud, who wouldn’t dram of writing a memoir, when both were nearing the end of their lives. Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell reported that the psychoanalyst presented the novelist with a narcissus.Whatever Freud may have meant by the gesture, it nicely symbolizes the troubling association between creativity and narcissism, an association that is nowhere as intense as when the creation in question is a memoir, a literary form that expresses the author’s life without the protective masks afforded by fiction.

© 2010 Gershon Hepner 1/24/10