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‘A problem to be faced about history’: Marion Milner on holiday

2021; Wiley; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12642

1467-8705

Akshi Singh,

Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity

But these seasons, weather in the soul, not easy to forecast, to know when to lie fallow, when to sow, this only to be found by experiment. Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. I can’t see the least point in being in authority at the price of one’s liberty. The diaries with which Marion Milner began her autobiographical project are for the most part slim, and compact. Small enough to fit into a pocket or handbag, discreet, some designed specifically for women, many of these diaries contain pages of printed information before the blank or lined pages. In addition to conversion tables and calendars there is information about cooking (sample French menus) and the British Empire – the diary from 1921 comes with sections about ‘Areas and Populations of Empires and Countries’, ‘Colonial and Foreign Time Differences’, and ‘Populations and Areas of Empire and Countries of Chief Colonial and Foreign Cities’.1 Milner’s autobiographical project, at its beginning, is framed by the paratext of empire and conventions of femininity. A number of themes run through Milner’s autobiographical writing – the effects of varying forms of attention, the sagacity of the body, the mysteries of everyday living. The approach, open-ended and experimental, combining text and image, is also shared across her books. The first of these, A Life of One’s Own, was published in 1934, and Milner was working on the final one, Bothered by Alligators, till her death in 1998. Discussing diary keeping on holidays, Eternity’s Sunrise (1987), the fourth book in her autobiographical quintet, develops both the themes and the approach of Milner’s previous writing. I haven’t had a chance to look at the diaries that form the basis of Eternity’s Sunrise. The pandemic, and then West London floods, meant that the archives of the Institute of Psychoanalysis stayed shut. Curious as I am, I know that I don’t have to visit the archives to learn that the ‘populations and the areas of empire’ were altered by the time Milner took her first holiday in Greece (1959), as well as subsequent visits to Kashmir (1971) and Israel (1975). I’m interested in the ways in which that change in populations and areas – the history through which Milner lived – inscribes itself in Milner’s autobiographical writing. This inscription can be fruitfully tracked through Milner’s elaboration of her ideas about solitude. Eternity’s Sunrise presents her most extensive personal statements on solitude, and the significance with which Milner imbues the experience of being alone, I suggest, is also her way of crafting a response to the history she lived through, in particular the two world wars and their psychic costs. Writing this article though, for the most part in August, wanting to be away but unable to travel (visas, plagues), I couldn’t help but read Milner’s book as a manifesto for being on holiday. What follows then is also an account of the ways in which I am persuaded. On a Hellenic Cruise in 1959, Marion Milner found herself sad. It was her first visit to Greece, and she was 59. Neither the Parthenon nor the Daphni Mosaic had ‘spoken’ to her.2 In 1904, Freud had also found himself unsettled in Greece. Standing on the Acropolis and looking at the landscape he found himself thinking: ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’3 In the essay he wrote about the experience, years later in 1936, he attributes the strangeness of the statement to a feeling of ‘derealisation’ (Entfremdungsgefühl) brought about by guilt at ‘the satisfaction in having gone such a long way’.4 It was easier, he suggests, to think that he had never quite believed in the Acropolis at all, than to believe his own good fortune, which so exceeded that of his father. Milner’s reservations were, at least on the face of it, more prosaic. She attributed the situation to the ‘totally unfamiliar experience (since the days of my boarding school) of doing everything in a crowd’.5 By the time the cruise reached the island of Chios, Milner had ‘come to suspect that moments of solitude were essential’.6 Eschewing the group trip to the monastery of Nea Moni – Milner describes herself as ‘surfeited with sights’ – she instead found silence: ‘And there, beyond a wide stretch of sea, misty forms of land. “Turkey”, said our driver. But, in front and to the left, mountains, the mountain hinterlands of Chios. A lovely view, yes. But the momentous thing about it – silence’.7 The silence is liquid, Milner is ‘flooded’, ‘enveloped’, ‘permeated’, ‘soaking’.8 She drinks it in, ‘taking great gulps of it’.9 We’re left with the impression of an urgent physical need being satisfied. At this point in the book, Milner’s relief in the silence, in being away from a crowd, seems incommensurate with the scant discussion of why solitude is important to her. All we know is that, in the absence of solitude, something doesn’t speak. At the beginning of the book, Milner describes Eternity’s Sunrise as a continuation of her previous books, where she aimed to find out ‘what it might be that I really wanted’.10 She began this project when she was 27, attempting to develop in her first book, A Life of One’s Own, ‘a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes, for finding and setting up a standard of values that is truly one’s own and not a borrowed mass-produced ideal’.11 Her next book, An Experiment in Leisure, begins with the question of ‘what to do with one’s spare time’, especially for those people (‘very often they are women’) for whom it may be ‘so fatally easy to live parasitically upon other people’s happiness’.12 In both of these books solitude is a key scene for an encounter with the self, but it is in Eternity’s Sunrise, where Milner turns to evocative and associative memories that she calls ‘beads’, that we find a more explicit account of the various meanings that solitude holds for her.13 On a second visit to Greece the following year, once again on a Hellenic Cruise with the added commitment of attending a congress on ‘Aesthetics’, Milner noted her excitement at leaving the cruise ship early to travel alone to the conference. A band plays and Milner writes that she ‘felt it played for me, it celebrated my first steps alone onto Greek soil, responsible for myself, my passport no longer kept in a box with two hundred others but in my own handbag’.14 As she moves further away from the ship, travelling by coach through the dark night, her fears dissolve and she feels a ‘deep, quite unreasoning joy, something coming from far down inside’.15 On the same trip, her hat flies off when she is travelling with a busload of philosophers from the aesthetics congress, on a day trip to Delphi. She persuades the bus to stop and chases after the errant hat. Separated from yet another ‘herd’, this is a moment of ‘exultation’.16 Milner, for the first time, was ‘alone face to face with the Greek land’.17 Here, solitude is the occasion to experience herself as capable, though the writing also conveys a thrill at escaping. Milner visited the Parthenon again on this second trip to Greece. When she was accompanied by her colleagues from the congress, it did not ‘speak’ – a repetition of her experience when she visited the first time with a tour group. Then Milner went back, twice, each time unaccompanied. Alone, she found the experience that had so far eluded her: ‘I did feel as well as see’.18 What she experiences is ‘a different form of knowing’ where she can experience ‘the joy in the plain Doric capitals’ and feel ‘the steady rhythm of the pillars’.19 In solitude, the gap between object and observer is closed, Milner is not just at the Parthenon, she is in it. A particular form of attention becomes possible in her solitude. One day I’ll make a list of points of conflict with the herd. One is – ‘They’ assume that what happens is what matters, where you go, what you do, things that happen, the good time that you have. But often I believe it’s none of these things, it’s the times between, the long days when nothing happens, the off moments, perhaps when you open a letter, or sit alone in a restaurant, or exchange the time of day with a stranger.20 And yet leaving the Hellenic Cruise or sitting alone in a restaurant – a physical remove from the crowd or herd – are no guarantee of solitude. There remain the ‘mass produced ideals’ against which Milner writes her first book, the possibility of ‘drifting without rudder or compass, swept in all directions by influence from custom, tradition, fashion, swayed by standards uncritically accepted from my friends, my family, my countrymen, my ancestors’.21 In other words, there can be a crowd in the mind, a theatre of looking and being looked at. Milner is clear about the costs of such overcrowding: ‘unless one can recurrently let go preoccupations with one’s social image, what people think of one and sink down into the private sea of being, there will be no new beginnings, no freeing from the old prisoning rigidities, no spring time renewal’.22 It is a striking aspect of Milner’s thinking on solitude that, when she does indeed sink into this private sea of being, she finds that she is not alone. Such a retreat is often a form of surrender to something else. Inside herself is a presence ‘nearer than breathing’ – there is ‘an active “something” that is both “I” and “not I” and which gives me the feeling that I am not alone’.23 Milner tries out various names for this presence, calling it the answering activity, or inner other. At the time that Milner took her holidays in Greece, she was working with a patient, ‘Susan’, about whom she would go on to write a book, titled The Hands of the Living God. Susan came to Milner after receiving electro-convulsive therapy in hospital. For her, being ‘alone in her own body’ was associated with the terror of dying.24 Working with Susan, Milner developed her psychoanalytic vocabulary for thinking about solitude. Written eighteen years after her book about Susan, Eternity’s Sunrise departs from psychoanalytical terminology. Milner finds that ‘the good internalised other’, a psychoanalytic term, is a ‘clumsy’ way to describe the internal presence she can make contact with in moments of solitude, even though it acknowledges the memories of being cared for in infancy that can form an internal presence.25 Sometimes this internal presence – Milner also refers to it as an ‘other mind’ – is not easy to accept.26 There can be a resistance to experiencing a contact with this inner other, ‘a fight against allowing that there is any “other” within at all, a wanting one’s conscious thought and endeavour to be all there is’.27 Being alone can mean being in the presence of something that remains radically unknown. Milner allows herself to wonder whether there is even such a presence: ‘trouble is that so often what one has to have faith in seems like nothingness, emptiness, a void, when one tries to turn inward’.28 But she finds that there is something: ‘there’s always the sea of one’s breathing. And the feeling of one’s weight’.29 The body, for Milner, is a ‘so mysterious other’ that is also the companion of solitude.30 The form of attentiveness which characterises being with this inner presence often begins with the body, it is by feeling herself inside her body that Milner can access her ‘answering activity’. In contrast to its reputation for solipsism, psychoanalysis can be read as an account of the ways in which we are inhabited by others. Towards the beginning of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud makes one of his now famous statements: ‘in the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent’.31 Milner goes further. It is not only other human presences that populate a self. Alone with the Parthenon, she is both inside it, and it is inside her. Objects move into her, they speak. At the same time, the body which is the companion of solitude is also the site of a metamorphosis. Her ‘porpoise attention’ surfaces, she lifts her head from ‘the dark mole run of reverie’.32 Observing a pigeon in Hampstead, ‘his pink legs strutting, his gleaming head held high’, while carrying her shopping home, Milner straightens her back, thinking of the pigeon and ‘how proudly he loves the life that lives him, in whom he lives and moves’.33 A number of creatures nose their way through Milner’s book in a variety of attitudes, and she is increasingly identified with them: ‘people who write with such scorn about “being like an animal”, have they never really looked at an animal, felt its dignity in being what it is?’34 Solitude, in Milner’s sense of being in the presence of an internal other, seems to open the way to an expansive sense of connectedness. Having left the crowd, Milner is now interwoven into another network of presences. Here are echoes of William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’. Compare his ‘to see the world in a grain of sand’ with Milner’s question ‘(i)s it true that it’s only out of the mud that the new images come?’35 Blake’s influence is palpable in the way in which Milner associates herself with objects and animals – the entire non-human world. He is both interlocutor and inspiration for Milner’s work, his words a recurring motif in her writing. ‘Eternity’s Sunrise’ is the title of one of his poems, and Milner borrows it for the title of her book, as well as quoting it in an epigraph. Both Adam Phillips and Emilia Hatton Hernandez in their contributions to this journal have discussed Milner’s debt to English Romanticism – one that she herself acknowledged, turning to Blake in her clinical papers as well her autobiographical writing.36 Milner’s permeability to objects also links her to modernist contemporaries, particularly Elizabeth Bowen, where a hallucinatory quality of perception blurs boundaries between objects and people. As Jacqueline Rose puts it in her essay on Bowen and Mary Butts, this is writing that can ‘push our sense of perceptual reality towards a type of vertigo or precipice’.37 This is one of the reasons why Milner, who writes extremely elegant sentences, can sometimes be so difficult to read – her sentences can leave the reader displaced, unsure of where subject and object are located, and who is acting on what. It is in her moments of expansive, timeless connectedness – her moments of eternity, even – that Milner is so stylistically tied to her contemporary moment. This, I think, is no accident. Milner’s experience of and her desire for solitude are more precisely historical than they may at first seem. Milner’s thinking about solitude is connected to moments of retreat and leisure (‘the long days when nothing happens’).38 There is also a quality of attention, sometimes chanced upon, at other times summoned, that is connected to these moments of retreat. This is a ‘wide focus’, which Milner described as a way ‘knowing with the whole of my body’, that alters her perception of everything she sees.39 This wide focus, which often begins with an awareness of an insignificant seeming object, or part of her body, allows her to see the world in unexpected ways. Having written about it in her previous books, Milner continues to develop this idea of wide focus in Eternity’s Sunrise, seeking it out on her travels. In her essay for this collection, Eve Dickson elaborates on how this form of attention, for Milner, is ‘a state in which consciousness is suffused in the lived body’, a form of inhabiting the body that Milner found herself drawing upon in painting, clinical work, and everyday life.40 When Milner’s describes this quality of attention she is also making a case for the capacity of the mind when it is at rest. Here are mind and body opposed to the imperatives of productivity and self-improvement, engaged instead in a non-purposive thinking through a body that eschews effort. Milner’s retreats, her experiments in leisure, involve a distance not just from the demands of day-to-day living but also the norms of her place and time. Going on holiday, taking an afternoon off – we can see these as part of the same family of gestures as stepping away from the tour group on the Hellenic Cruise, or withdrawing from a crowd. They create a setting where it is possible to sink into the private sea of one’s being. Whenever I felt the clutch of anxiety, particularly in relation to my work, whenever I felt a flood of inferiority lest I should never be able to reach the goal I was aiming at, I tried a ritual sacrifice of all my plans and strivings. Instead of straining harder, as I always felt an impulse to do when things were getting difficult, I said: ‘I am nothing, I know nothing, I want nothing,’ and with a momentary gesture wiped away all sense of my own existence. The result surprised me so that I could not for the first few times believe it; for not only would all my anxiety fall away, leaving me serene and happy, but also, within a short period, sometimes after only a few minutes, my mind would begin, entirely of itself, throwing up useful ideas on the very problem which I had been struggling with.41 Milner’s language disturbs the attempt to read this as a purely optimistic exercise. Though the extract tracks a movement from stuckness to freedom via renunciation, Milner’s images of a ritual sacrifice and wiping out of existence exceed the narrative arc. We can draw a line between Milner’s dissatisfaction with the ‘mass produced ideals’ of her society, the ‘plans and strivings’ and her pressing need, on holiday, to be open, to be able to hear. In the natural world, in the architecture of Istanbul, she is looking for a way out of something that doesn’t work. Her texts witness the movement she wants to make from being in bondage to imperatives and forms of certainty and knowledge, into a wide focus where she can see the world anew. There is immense urgency to this project, the stakes are high, Milner is willing to wipe away all sense of her own existence for it. Though much of Milner’s autobiographical writing is about leisure, she was not herself a woman of leisure. Married to a man who could not work because of his asthma, and later a divorced single mother (these are not terms in which Milner described herself, though they bring home the point) Milner worked to support herself and her family. In her diaries, she describes her worry about the rent, housework, and the pressure to be ‘a good mother, a reliable worker, a considerate wife’.42 Milner’s diaries bear witness to her struggles with these gendered expectations: ‘So much of women’s work is doing things that enable other people to express themselves … chiefly of course, the care of a child … but feeding others is too … One comes to assume (at least I’d picked up the idea) that this is virtue for its own sake’.43 Noting that ‘many of the emblematic experiences Milner recounts are solitary ones’ Rachel Bowlby writes in her introduction to A Life of One’s Own: ‘the life that Milner sets out to gain – or at least, the life that she finds she gained – really is a life not just of, but on “one’s own”: a life imagined as free from the ties and constrains and “chatter” that take “one” away from a pristine sensual fulfilment in the natural world’.44 In 1931, on 19 December, Milner wrote in her diary only the following sentence, with a double bar of emphasis: ‘Woman’s life and keeping a private life’.45 Unlike other entries which have similar titles (‘Being a woman and sense of martyrdom’; ‘A woman’s ghoul’; ‘Attempt to reconstruct preoccupations on women’s jobs’) this one is not followed by any discussion.46 The moments of leisure of which Milner’s books are so richly evocative took place against a background of a demanding schedule of work, and obligations of care. However important the place of solitude in her writing and, by her own account of it, her life, Milner was not advocating – could not advocate – a total retreat from the world. Instead her books express the hope that the harvest of solitude need not only be reaped in retreat from everyday life – however necessary such retreat may be as a point of entry. Moments of solitude were essential, as Milner rediscovered in Greece, but the larger aim was to be able to live by experiment, rather than prescription: ‘weather in the soul, not easy to forecast, to know when to lie fallow, when to sow, this only to be found by experiment’.47 From the beginning, Milner’s approach is characterised by a suspicion of received knowledge, and postures of certainty. Some of the tentative, open quality of Milner’s writing may have been shaped in response to the way in which she thought knowledge, and opinion, was organised in cliques. Her diaries mention the worlds of Cambridge, the Bloomsbury Group, psychoanalysis, to which she was connected through her brother Patrick Milner, a physicist who went on to win the Nobel Prize.48 Milner was concerned about being dismissed: ‘my taste is uncertain, I often like things that other people jeer at as sentimental etc. (Taste is the god of the Bloomsbury School)’.49 The dismissals could also come at home – in a diary entry she writes about crying when her husband ‘teases me for being high brow, reading War and Peace’.50 In her diaries, she strategises: ‘To avoid the jeers of the analysts and such (my friends) … I must keep rigidly to the attitude “this is what I find … ‘this’ is what I found enjoyable … isn’t it odd” and never “this shows that such and such is true and valuable”’.51 The book that was to become A Life of One’s Own, she imagines as ‘an attempt to find a method by which the ordinary man can be himself, not dependant on experts … and they will hate this, the experts …’52 Milner’s position of keeping knowledge and certainty (such and such is true and valuable) at arm’s length may have, at first, been contingent on her worries about having her writing dismissed, but it also became part of her method, and integral to the kind of ‘wide focus’ attention that she would strive for. In Eternity’s Sunrise, in addition to being distracted by crowds, Milner also finds herself troubled by experts, who in following their maps and guidebooks get in the way of Milner’s enjoyment of her holiday. In The Hands of the Living God Milner had already written about a link between the ability to bear not knowing and the capacity to be alone. While working with her patient Susan, Milner developed her ideas about reverie, a state where vigilant separation between self and other is suspended. Milner suggests that a capacity to be in a state of reverie allows for an experience of being alone that is nourishing instead of persecutory. Solitude is presented as a practice of suspension. War is the near constant backdrop to Milner’s writing, and makes its presence felt in the opening sentence of Eternity’s Sunrise, when she tells the reader that An Experiment in Leisure was ‘blitzed out of print in the 1940 raids on London’.53 Milner had already lived through the First World War. Her diaries attest to the ways in which she was affected by the nationalism of wartime, and how it continued to trouble her over the years. At a dance in 1927, she described herself feeling a sense of discomfort amidst her happiness: ‘trouble at the thought of the men killed in the war no glow of pride but almost hot shame and hatred’.54 This war continued to haunt her – one of the recurring images in Eternity’s Sunrise is of the dead at Gallipoli, which Milner associates with the feeling of having a ‘spiky black sea urchin’ in her middle (it wasn’t until I looked at a picture of the diadema antillarum that I realised just how painful an image this was). To write An Experiment in Leisure, Milner spent time in Spain, ‘actually writing there when the elections were held which led to the Civil War’.55 Helen Tyson’s essay in this journal describes how distraught Milner was at news of European fascism (‘MASSACRE OF ABYSSINIANS’, she writes, in all capitals, in her diary).56 Milner’s biographer Emma Letley tells us that Milner’s psychoanalytic training took place during wartime – her qualification paper was delivered at the time of the ‘buzz bombs’ and she had to stop supervision with Melanie Klein because she used ‘to pedal over to Melanie with the V2s falling’ but this became ‘too difficult’.57 During these same air raids on London, Milner’s patient Susan was particularly terrified. The impact the war had on Susan provides an image for just how much can be at stake in the capacity to be alone. Having lost the distinction between herself and the world since receiving electro-convulsive therapy Susan felt ‘there was nowhere else for the bomb to fall except on her, since everything was her’.58 When Milner says that when the Second World War was declared she ‘straightaway began a fourth book’ we can read the ‘straightaway’ as an indication of just how much she relied on her writing to provide an antidote to the wartime environment.59 In fact it was almost as if one might not want to be concerned, in drawing, with those facts of detachment and separation that are introduced when an observing eye is perched upon a sketching stool, with all the attendant facts of a single view-point and fixed eye level and horizontal lines that vanish. It seemed one might want some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them than that. The very form of Milner’s writing, with its mixed-up relation to objects may be one of the places in her work where a response to war is forged and its impact navigated. It is a response to the consequences of war – displacement, holes, uncertainty – that seeks to preserve something of the ways in which certainties have been shaken, questions raised – in the interests of openness. In the solitude that Milner both seeks out and writes about, we may also read a threefold refusal of wartime ideology. In the first instance, Milner’s suspicion of crowds and her movement towards solitude is inflected by the wars past and to come. The crowd, herd, or mass is the entity against which she undertakes her project of self-exploration. In a typical instance, she writes of her desire to get ‘nearer to the truth of things – by straight seeing getting past conventions and hypocrisies – and the voice of the herd that fences in and bars from life’.60 This concern about the ‘voice of the herd’ is shared by Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays provide the epigraphs to many of the chapters in A Life of One’s Own. Montaigne’s essay, ‘On Solitude’, though not quoted by Milner, also sets up an opposition between crowds and the individual: ‘contagion is particularly dangerous in crowds. Either you must loathe the wicked or imitate them. It is dangerous both to grow like them because they are many, or to loathe many of them because they are different’.61 Milner keeps company with Montaigne in thinking that solitude is not a straightforward matter of removing the individual from a group. Even when removed from society, the mind can carry within itself affiliations and ambitions that, Montaigne writes, make solitude impossible: ‘by ridding ourselves of Court and market-place we do not rid ourselves of the principal torments of our life’.62 The contagion that Montaigne writes about has a particular inflection when Milner is writing – the crowd can be nationalist, even fascist. It is because she can see herself implicated in the darker enjoyments that crowds can sanction that Milner is so wary of them. She writes about at least two instances – a sports event (‘40000 men singing ‘God Save the King’) where, witnessing an injury, she shared with her neighbour ‘the horrid thrill at the thought of a broken neck’;63 and then a bull-fight in Spain, described in An Experiment in Leisure, the text where Milner is perhaps most anxious to investigate her own potential susceptibility to fascist ideology. It is against the backdrop of this crowd that Milner imbues solitude with the distinctive meaning it carries in her writing. ‘Creeds’ for Milner are an ideological equivalent to crowds, and Eternity’s Sunrise laments the detrimental effects of creeds, ‘how they become excuses, pretexts, for so much savagery’.64 The savagery for Milner lies in what happens to the mind: ‘Savagery to make people share one’s own beliefs, it must surely be because if anyone believes differently it threatens the absoluteness of one’s certainties’.65 There is something murderous about too much belief: ‘it’s the insistence that your statement is absolute – and then killing people who don’t agree, pretending it’s to save their souls, but really to bolster up your own beliefs’.66 Milner is discussing Christianity here, but she extends her critique to English slave-traders (‘who prayed to the Christian God while taking boat loads of manacled slaves, many of them dying, across the Atlantic from Africa’) and the British monarchy (‘that Queen of ours ordering the burning of three people in my own Kentish village for not believing as she did’).67 For Milner, the state of mind represented by what she calls a creed is deadly, resulting in ‘a Hitlerian certainty’.68 Milner wonders if laughing at oneself provides an antidote to the deadly effects of creeds and certainties, posing the question: ‘Can dictators laugh at themselves?’69 Towards the end of the book she writes about her favourite clowns – Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx amongst others – writing that it is a relief to ‘have one’s ineptitudes so mirrored back’.70 It is perhaps unsurprising then that in Milner’s account solitude is coeval to a state of not-knowing, where belief is tempered by doubt and one’s companion is a body – inept, perhaps ageing, at the very least mysterious. There is a refusal here of what war attempts to do to the mind through ideology and propaganda, and to the body, weaponised in fighting or war effort. In addition to rejecting crowds and creeds, Milner’s solitu