"The Hidden Teacher" Analyzed
Essays like this one gave Eiseley his reputation as a mystic. But the mystical
tone stems less from his reaching for something cosmic and transcendent
than from the close connection between what he wrote and his unconscious,
his dream maker. The essay is the mystery of a night's dream work, but it
can be unraveled. One can not be certain how the essay was conceived, yet
it has the quality of a single night's dreaming or an hour's
recollections. Scenes are recalled serially; they are felt to be
connected, but the connecting thread is disguised. The task of the
analysis is to find the thread and trace it back toward its origin.
Eiseley's topic in the essay
was the hidden teacher who instructs, or more that that, changes a life.
The hidden teacher may not reveal itself to the pupil for years or at all.
A warning is sounded to those who would take their teachers or their own
learning too simply. But in a sense not intended by Eiseley, there may be even more about the unseen
forces that shape a life in the pages of "The Hidden Teacher," for the
essay speaks of dissembling while it dissembles. There is something hidden
within the essay which speaks as surely as the words of the essay itself
of those forces which teach and mold a life. The essay is also a
recapitulation of Eiseley's own development as a
mature adult through a series of identifications with the adults he loved
and tried to hold close. The sequence of images in the essay recapitulates
the identifications Eiseley passed through on
his way to maturity. First his mother, then his father; in the end, the
flame fed by both is guttering low and Eiseley,
old and childless perhaps, watches as his line is dying out.
The first two scenes in "The Hidden Teacher" grow out
of Eiseley's intense and deeply ambivalent
feelings toward his mother. She was his father's second wife. His father
married her in his late thirties after his first wife died. Eiseley wrote much about her; she is likely to enter
any narrative or poem: ". . . my mother was stone deaf . . . . I was
growing up alone in a house whose dead silence was broken only by the
harsh discordant jangling of a voice that could not hear itself." (The
Night Country, p. 197) Her deafness became a leitmotiv in his creative
work; it was symbolic of his unfulfilled wish for a comforting and
reassuring maternal love. Again and again in life's noisy and trying moments, he escaped to the
silence of graveyards: in the anxious days while enrolling in graduate
school at the University of Pennsylvania, when as a young man he
learned that his lungs were tuburcular, and as a
paleontologist digging in the graveyards of primitive man.
Of course he loved her, though he denied it. He admired
her courage, but he also knew " . . . that she
was paranoid, neurotic and unstable." There will be those to say, in this
mother-worshipping culture, that I am harsh, embittered. They will be
quite wrong. Why should I be embittered? It is far too late. A month ago,
after a passage of many years, I stood above her grave in a place called
Wyuka. We, she and I, were close to being one
now, lying like the skeletons of last year's leaves in a fence corner. And
it was all nothing. Nothing, do you understand? All the pain, all the
anguish. Nothing. We were, both of us, merely the debris life always
leaves in its passing. . . . I murmured to myself and tried to tell her
this belatedly: Nothing, mama, nothing. Rest. You could never rest. This
was your burden. But now, sleep. Soon I will join you, although, forgive
me, not here. Neither of us then would rest. I will go far to lie down;
the time draws on; it is unlikely that I will return. Now you will
understand, I said, touching the October warmth of the gravestone. It was
for nothing. It has taken me all my life to grasp this one fact.
The lines shatter a thousand pretenses and remind
us, as he says, that we are a mother-worshipping culture. Eiseley's anger shapes the first two scenes of "The
Hidden Teacher" and ties them together: first the rejection and
loneliness, then the hateful retaliation. The spider--as it is in the
Freudian notion of die Symbolik (Note
5)--is the malevolent mother. She lies at the center of a web stretched
between stalks of buffalo grass in an arroyo in the arid West. Thus she
resembles the Spider Women of Navaho mythology, one of the thirty-five
monsters and dangers spawned by the Navaho women's self-abuse. In the
Navaho religion, the Spider Women plays a dual role, sometimes helpful but
more often horrible. (Note 6) The spider's malevolence is expressed toward
Eiseley in a peculiar way. He enters her world
with the point of his pencil, but self-absorbed and unequipped to sense
the intrusion, the spider takes no notice: ". . . I realized that in the
world of spider I did not exist."
The child, rejected and alone,
travels back and forth between pathetic longing for the ungiving mother's love and angry retaliation. Eiseley's next recollection symbolizes his rejection
of her. At the opening of the second scene, he mistakes a seed for a
spider; in fact they are one: the spider in the gully has become the seed
which carries the duplicator of the species inside her. He reflects on
whether the seed that is blown across his path may be the statistical
improbability, the mutation of the line, the lower order that begets the
higher order. The meaning of the recollection and its hostility are
enhanced by the succeeding image. Deva Ki opens the mouth of Krishna, and if her senses had not been shrouded,
she would have seen that she begat a god. The defective mother bore and
nursed a genius; spider, seed and Hindu. Surely Eiseley knew even as a young man that he was gifted
well beyond normal limits. Shortly after his father died when Eiseley was twenty, his father's letters to a sister
were burned.
A week or so
after the funeral I came upon her incinerating in the yard the remaining
letters. Perhaps it was just as well. As I stood beside her a charred
sheet turned over. Written across it in the fine bold penmanship of my
father was a sentence rapidly being obliterated in the flames. I saw it curl and crumble as I read.
"Remember, the boy is a genius, but moody."
Whatever reservations the letter contained would never be read by me.
There was only the little licking flame and the words curling up and going
black. I could never reread them. Of course I was no genius, of course I was moody, as anyone young would
have been under the restraints of that household. Nevertheless, the words
were proudly comforting. My father had recognized me after all.
His demurrer is
no simple false modesty. Of course he wished himself a genius. No one
writes such themes as he wrote unless he feels himself set far apart. His
account of the mathematical prodigy in the third scene is tinged with
envy. As an intellectual and an academic, he would never have claimed
himself a genius. But the lowly seed whose kind was to be surpassed by the
improbable mutation within it, the unwitting Deva Ki who bore a god, and
the prodigy performing before the paleanthropes
speak of an immodest wish we all may be forgiven in our dreams.
The side of the mind that wishes one were not the child of one's hated parents is the same
side of the mind that dreams dreams in which
this wish comes true. The "family romance" dream is a fantasy in which the
child's relationship to its true parents is altered; often the child in
the dream becomes a foundling. (Note 7) Eiseley
had such dreams, we can assume, though, as with the dream at the end of
"The Hidden Teacher," he usually disguised dreams and their dreamers.
I remembered a ruined farmhouse that I had stumbled
upon in my solitary ramblings after school. The road was one I had never
taken before. Rain was falling. Leaves lay thick on the abandoned road.
Hesitantly I approached and stood in the doorway. Plaster had collapsed
from the ceiling; wind mourned through the empty windows. I crunched
tentatively over shattered glass upon the floor. Papers lay scattered
about in wild disorder. Some looked like school examination papers. I
picked one up in curiosity, but this my own mature judgment tells me, no
one will believe. The name Eiseley was scrawled
across the cover. I was too shocked even to read the paper. No such family
had ever been mentioned by my parents. We had come from elsewhere. But
here, in poverty like our own, at the edge of town, had subsisted in this
ruined house a boy with my own name. Gingerly I picked up another paper.
There was the scrawled name again, not too unlike my own rough signature.
The date was what might have been expected in that tottering clapboard
house. It read from the last decade of the century before. They were gone,
whoever they were, and another Eiseley was tiptoing through the ruined house.
All that remained in a room that might in those days
have been called the parlor were two dice lying forlornly amidst the
plaster, forgotten at the owners' last exit. I picked up the pretty cubes
uncertainly in the growing sunset through the window, and on impulse cast
them. I did not know how adults played, I merely
cast and cast again, making up my own game as I played. Sometimes I
thought I won and murmured to myself as children will. Sometimes I thought
I lost, but I liked the clicking sound before I rolled the dice. For what
stakes did I play, with my childish mind gravely considering? I think I
was too naïve for such wishes as money and fortune. I played, and here
memory almost fails me. I think I played against the universe . . . . I
played against time . . . , I played for
adventure and escape. Then, clutching the dice, but not the paper with my
name, I fled frantically down the leafsodden
unused road never to return. One of the dice survives still in my desk
drawer. The time is sixty years away. (ATSH, pp. 30-1)
He played with
dice and asked why he had been cast down into his father's second
marriage, the unhappy one. As a man and paleontologist, he played with
bones and produced scientific speculations on the origin of life. He wrote
wonderful stories of the evolution of life; there too, he was aware that
the mutation of genes was a toss of dice that could not be predicted.
Eiseley
and Freud were matched in those circumstances (each the first son of a
second marriage) and in that ability which permitted each to know the
wishes of a child's heart. Eiseley's father's
first wife had borne a son fourteen years before Loren was born to the
second wife. The other Eiseley family in the
dream is the father's first family. As he watched his father die, he
realized that he had been born an orphan.
It was the last
day. I stood in a corner of the room and watched him die. For hours there
had been no sign of consciousness. A nurse intervened. She shouted in his
ear.
"Your son Leo is here. Leo has
come. Leo, Leo is here." Leo was my half-brother, fourteen years older
than I, the son of an earlier marriage. Leo's mother was dead. I was the
child of a second marriage, long after.
Slowly, to my boundless surprise, the dying man's eyes, indifferent
to me for many hours, opened. There was an instant of recognition between
the two of them, from which I was excluded. My father had come back an
infinite distance for that meeting. It was wordless.
I walked out into the hall unnoticed. It was only
just, I thought fleetingly without rancor. Leo was the son of my father's
youth, of a first love who had perished in her springtime and of whom my
father could never bring himself to speak. . . . My brother who had been
summoned was the one true son, not I. For him my father had come the long
way back, if only for a moment. (ATSH, p. 15)
At age ten,
Loren rejected his mother symbolically, but in a way that even his young
mind knew was final.
She pursued us
to a nearby pasture and in the rasping voice of deafness ordered me home.
My comrades of the fields stood
watching . . . . I sensed my status in this gang was at stake. I refused
to come. I had refused a parental order that was arbitrary and uncalled
for and, in addition, I was humiliated. My mother was behaving in the
manner of a witch. She could not hear, she was
violently gesticulating without dignity . . . .
Slowly I turned and looked at my companions. Their faces
could not be read. They simply waited, doubtless waited for me to break
the apron strings that rested lightly and tolerably upon themselves. And
so in the end I broke my father's injunction; I ran, and with me ran my
childish companions, . . . with the witch, her
hair flying, her clothing disarrayed, stumbling after. Escape, escape, the
first stirrings of the running man. Miles of escape. (ATSH, pp. 32-4)
Eiseley became the running man, who is the subject of
a poem ("Prison Break, 1912" in All the Night Wings) and the
subject of the last chapters of his autobiography. In their first meeting,
he and Auden exchanged earliest memories of public events. For Auden, it
was the Titanic disaster. Eiseley spoke
enigmatically of a prison break. He was five, and a convict blasted his
way out of the Nebraska penitentiary and escaped into a
blizzard. The prison stood near his home, barely beyond the edge of the
city, a gray threat in the fantasies of the town's children. When the
posse brought the convict back, they pushed his dead face out of the train
window for the crowd at the station to see. A dead man who fled and died
became the symbol for a child's wish to escape.
At about age 18, Eiseley did
escape. He rode the rails west. It was a fleeing toward death, and a death
eventually ended it. The paradox of his escape was that while deserting
his mother, he assumed her identity--not finding her love in reality, he
gained the wished-for image by becoming her.
...my mother, who had been offered a safe refuge in the
home of her sister, quarreled and fought with everyone. Finally, in her
inelegant way of putting things, she had "skipped town" to work as a
seamstress, domestic, or housekeeper upon farms . . . . What ensued on
these various short-lived adventures I neither know to this day, nor wish
to know.
For a while in
the late 1920's, he lived a solitary and silent life in the boxcars and
hobo camps of the West. He was summoned home as his father lay dying of
cancer. The summons was fateful; it took him out of a life headed for an
early, anonymous death and placed him in another that made him famous.
When a loved one dies, the survivor
may assume some characteristic of the dead person as a way of holding onto
a lost image. A mannerism, a habit, or an attitude of the loved person may
be adopted; or so much may be taken on that the identification encompasses
nearly all that is visible. In small part or in toto, the deserted comes to identify with the
deserter. Eiseley cried when it was obvious that
the cancer had control; he only cried once more in his life, because of a women. He took from his father things that would
hold his image inside for a lifetime. His father was a traveling hardware
salesman before he died. As a young man he had been an itinerant actor
playing Shakespeare in little midwestern "opera
houses."
He had a
beautiful resonant speaking voice. Although we owned no books, and
although when I knew him in middle age a harsh life had dimmed every
hunger except that for rest, he could still declaim long rolling
Elizabethan passages that caused shivers to run up my back.
"Give me my Robe, put on my Crowne; I have Immortall
longings in me." (The Night Country, p.198)
Eiseley was twenty when he came home to stand by his
father's death bed. The poet died and the son turned to poetry. His first
poem, published in a local literary journal (The Prairie Schooner)
when he was twenty-one, introduces a familiar symbol and is poignant seen
in the context of his life:
SPIDERS
"Spiders
are poisonous, hairy, secretive.
Spiders are old--
they watch from dark
corners while wills are made.
. . .
people
die
and spiders inherit everything." (All the Nite Wings, p. 3)
His mother
survived his father. She did not inherit everything; his father left Loren
a well-thumbed copy of Shakespeare's poems, which he kept all his life.
Otherwise there was little but memories.
I will merely say he had had a great genius for love
and that his luck was very bad. He was not fitted for life under the
yellow cloud. He knew it, yet played out his role there to the end. So
poor were we it took me twenty years to put a monument upon his grave.
(The Night Country, p.199)
The image of the
father having supplanted that of the mother because he was now the greater
loss, Eiseley ended his lonely wanderings. He
returned to college. Perhaps he puzzled his teachers; later when he wrote
of teachers and pupils, he wrote about how little each knows of the other
and how little they sense what marks they leave. While a student he wrote
many poems. They appeared in academic literary journals and were variously
honored. Many of them were republished in 1979, in All the Night Wings. He
never lost the urge to transform feelings into poems. As he grew older
they appeared in more visible places. He left a few hundred; some were
published by the executors of his estate in 1977 (Another Kind of
Autumn).
He was drawn to
paleontology. He had reason enough to find fascination in its questions:
by what path did man come here? Why did he leave? In Nebraska in the
1930s, the academic excitement would have focused on the bone diggers.
Mauvaises terres, the
tertiary badlands of western Nebraska were less that two day's ride
by car. It was the great fossil bed of North
America. Eiseley hunted bones with
the South Party of the Morrill Expeditions of 1931-33. Soon he went east
to study anthropology in Philadelphia. There he met Frank G.
Speck, the precocious linguist of the fourth scent in "The Hidden
Teacher."
Speck was Chairman and
taught in the Anthropology Department of the University of
Pennsylvania when
Eiseley enrolled in 1934. Their first encounter
is recalled in Chapter Nine of All the Strange Hours. Eiseley describes a scene in Speck's class. The
professor threw a pile of square-cut flints on the seminar table and asked
gruffly for an identification. Loren was not
fooled. They were not arrowheads; he recognized them as gun flints not
more than two hundred years old. Speck challenged him and warned him not
to bluff. Eiseley stood his ground and was
proved right. The scene parallels nearly exactly the student Speck's
confrontation with his professor in "The Hidden Teacher." Eiseley and Speck are one; two orphans raised by an
old woman softly babbling a strange tongue.
Speck's image joined with that of Loren's father and Eiseley's mature personality was formed: his
profession, his passions, his character. Poet and scientist. His career
was distinguished and honored to an extraordinary degree. All that need be
said of it here is that at first he repeated, then far outstripped Speck's
achievements. Eiseley returned to the
University of Pennsylvania department as a Professor in 1947
after ten years in the Midwest. It was
the year in which Frank Speck died. Later he assumed the chairmanship that
Speck once held, Speck's values became Eiseley's conscience.
One of Eiseley's first books, Francis
Bacon and the Modern Dilemma, was published in 1962 and later revised
(The Man Who Saw Through Time,1972). Eiseley, the anthropologist and poet, spent much of
his life as an academic studying the thoughts of the sixteenth century
genius. In the preface to the 1972 edition, he wrote, "I rapidly
discovered that I was unwittingly assuming the role of attorney for the
defense against sometimes extremely selfrighteous prosecutors who had been unduly
influenced by Thomas Babington Macaulay's intemperate and acerbic
treatment of Bacon in the nineteenth century . . . ."
Whatever its source, Eiseley's fascination with Bacon and defense of him to
the modern world took much of his energy for a few years. Knowing well
that I risk exciting even the sympathetic reader's incredulity, I must
remark nonetheless on the most curious coincidence in the triangle of
Loren Eiseley, Francis Bacon and Frank Speck:
the last two names are exact transliterations of each other between
English and German, a fact that Eiseley, with
his German surname, could scarcely have ignored though he never commented
in writing on the peculiar coincidence.
Eiseley recognized the importance of
Speck in his life. In "The Last Magician," he wrote movingly of an
encounter with a stranger in Penn Station, New York. At the time, Speck had been
dead for ten years. An apparition shocked Eiseley into the realization that to be true to
himself, he must be true to Speck's example.
Every man in his
youth--and who is to say when youth is ended?--meets for the last time a
magician, the man who made him what he finally is to be . . . . I was
fifty years old when my youth ended . . . . I had come in through a side
doorway and was slowly descending a great staircase in a slanting a shaft
of afternoon sunlight. Distantly I became aware of man loitering at the
bottom of the steps, as though awaiting me there. As I descended he swung
about and began climbing toward me.
At the instant I saw his upturned face my feet faltered and I almost fell.
I was walking to meet a man ten years dead and buried, a man who had been
my teacher and confidant. . . . He had been a man of unusual mental powers
and formidable personality. In all my experience no dead man but he could
have so wrenched time as to walk through its cleft of darkness unharmed
into the light of day.
The massive
brows and forehead looked up at me as if to demand an accounting of that
elapsed decade during which I had held his post and discharged his duties.
Unwilling step by step I descended rigidly before the baleful eyes. We
met, and as my dry mouth strove to utter his name, I was aware that he was
passing me as a stranger, that his gaze was directed beyond me, and that
he was hastening elsewhere. The blind eye turned sidewise was not, in
truth, fixed upon me; I beheld the image but not the reality of a long
dead man. Phantom or genetic twin, he passed on, and the crowds of
New York
closed inscrutably about him.
. . .
what terror save the terror of the living toward
the dead could so powerfully have enveloped me?
On the slow train running homeward the answer came. I had
been away for ten years from the forest. I had had no messages from its
depths, such as the dead servant had hoarded even in his disordered office
where box turtles wandered over the littered floor. I had been immersed in
the postwar administrative life of a growing university. But all the time
some accusing spirit, the familiar of the last wood-struck magician, had
lingered in by brain. Finally exteriorized, he had stridden up the stair
to confront me in the autumn light . . . . I had starved and betrayed
myself. It was this that had brought the terror. For the first time in
years I left my office in mid-afternoon and sought the sleeping silence of
a nearby cemetery. . . .It was time for a change. I wrote a letter and
studied timetables. I was returning to the land that bore me. (The
Invisible Pyramid, pp. 137-9)
In the
novelist's dream of the mirror, with which "The Hidden Teacher" ends,
Eiseley expresses a sense of the mixture of
identifications that shaped his life. Vague faces reflected in a dark
glass change from mother's to father's to his own. "I learned it was just
I, but more, much more, I had learned that I was they.
"
In the space of five
thousand words, Eiseley's imagination traced
with a sequence of visual memories the history of the formation of his own
personality. A thousand different images might have been selected to
illustrate the thesis of the essay, namely, that at the time the mark is
made, we understand little about the persons or events that change our
lives, that the true teachers are hidden from the pupil's view. But just
these five scenes were recalled. Whether the recollection requires
explanation or whether it ought to be ignored is a choice that will
separate those who regard the mind as explicable in even its most
insignificant details and those who do not. I believe that there is no
happenstance when the human mind is about its business. And although it
has learned the art of disguise, the mind grows more artistic as it grows
less disguised.
An Image of Eiseley
A patient will
frequently announce a theme to his analyst with the first words out of his
mouth. The theme will eventually reveal the source of his pain and
suffering. It may take years before this salutatory riddle can be
understood. The opening riddle is often observed in literature; the first
sentence read again when the book has been finished may be seen to contain
a theme which, as with an overture, was repeated and swelled and
eventually came to typify the entire book. "Gustave Aschenbach--or von
Aschenbach, as he had been known officially
since his fiftieth birthday--had set out alone from his house in
Price Regent
Street, Munich,
for an extended walk." Aschenbach, the stream of
ashes, embarks on a journey to Venice and to death. In Eiseley's autobiography, he speaks first of death and
a mirror:
When my aunt died I found among her effects a beautiful
silver backed Victorian hand mirror. It had been one of a twin pair my
maternal grandfather had given to his girls. The last time I had seen my
mother's mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle
had been snapped off. It had marked the difference between the two
girls--their care of things, perhaps their lives. I had looked into the
mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver. Mostly things
like that did not exist in our house. Finally it disappeared. The face of
a child vanished with it, my own face. Without the mirror I was unaware
when it departed. ("ATSH," p.5)
The mirror is a
fitting symbol. Its unusually frequent appearance in literature is matched
by the power of its appearance in dreams. (Note 8) The mirror reflects the
viewer's double, whose existence is the ego's insurance against
destruction. The Doppelgänger in literature is
the educated person's equivalent of the aborigine's belief that the mirror
harbors the viewer's soul, as Otto Rank showed. In Eiseley's first sentence there is a death and a
mirror. And before the first paragraph ends, both the mirror and the soul
it contains have vanished, and a young child is left to face life with no
defense against the threat of destruction.
Eiseley's theme is death; separation,
loneliness and death. Death is the night country that he would rather
visit than sleep. He suffered from insomnia which began the day his father
died. Death sleeps in graveyards, to which he was drawn. Death haunts his
poetry as it haunted his life. He dug with his hands among the remnants of
a dead past. His last poem, found in his desk after he died, asks
hopelessly that he be buried with dignity among artifacts and keepsakes,
upright in his chair with his office as his tomb; it would be an ancient
burial that "recognizes man's true nature." He warns whomever next occupies his office, "Henceforth I shall
linger about here." ("Beward, My Successor,"
All the Nights Wings, pp. 97-8). In his more academic writings
(The Immense Journey, Darwin's Century, The
Unexpected Universe, The Invisible Pyramid), Eiseley's thoughts were constantly drawn through
sidereal time to empty space. Personality, the human species itself, is
annihilated in a future beyond comprehension. The man's thoughts seldom
stray far from the memory of a tenuous hold on love, which if broken means
annihilation. The child's misfortune became the man's obsession. He had
the novelist in "The Hidden Teacher" speak his fears and sadness: "My line
is dying, but I understood. I hope they understand, too." (p. 128)
Perhaps Eiseley suffered in the care of an inadequate mother.
Perhaps he lost the mother he loved to his father and could never fully
forgive him. He seemed more a lonely man than an angry one, but one can
not know. This much is clear: he thought of death more than most people
do, and he returned to it repeatedly in his writings. Like Wright Morris,
with whom he shared an era and a boyhood homeland in Nebraska, Eiseley could not abide that duplicity in the artistic
treatment of love and death that Fiedler (Note 9) saw as characteristic of
American writing.
There is no
diagnosis of a personality here, whatever the appearance to the contrary.
The same facts can not be used both to adduce a psychological diagnosis
and then be explained themselves by it. We have no direct observations of
how Eiseley was raised by his mother or how his
father spoke to him. I never met the man, although we were born and raised
two miles and thirty years apart. He left his recollections and those only
in the form of creative work.
What
one dares to think are only fragments of what is kept in one's mind. What one dares to write are fragments of
fragments, rationalized and made pretty at that.
A critic may fashion a coherent picture of Eiseley's life and his works; but coherence is not
cause, and the man must remain largely unknown. Though causes compel their
effects, surely pictures do not. There can be many pictures. True
pictures, like first causes, were seen only by Eiseley or by no one at all. His art was like a dream:
Dreams or art may emerge without warning from the
soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up
suddenly in the farther reaches of void space. The critics, like
astronomers, can afterward triangulate such worlds but not account for
them. ("The Hidden Teacher," pp. 126-7)
Notes
- Auden,
W. H. "Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times," Nones. New York: Random House, 1950.
- Edward
Mendelson. Early Auden. Viking, 1981.
- Richard
M. Jones. The Dream Poet. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1979.
- The
reference is to "The Hidden Teacher," and the pagination is from The
Star Thrower (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), the most
accessible source. Frequent references to Eiseley's autobiography will be marked by ATSH and
page numbers will refer to the 1975 Scribners
publication of All the Strange Hours.
- J.
Laplanche and J.G. Pontalis, The Language
of Psychoanalysis. W.W. Norton, 1973.
- Gladys
A. Reichard. Navaho Religion: A Study of
Symbolism. Princeton University Press, 1963.
- J.
Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis. Ibid.
- Charles
Feigelson. The mirror dream. The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 1975, Vol. 30, pp. 341-55.
- Fiedler,
Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein
and Day, 1960.
This article was first
written in 1982, submitted to a journal in 1985, accepted but withdrawn;
it was lightly edited in 1998.
GvG (glass@asu.edu)
October 20, 1998
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