{"id":160840,"date":"2022-07-25T15:54:08","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T19:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160840"},"modified":"2022-07-27T14:38:05","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T18:38:05","slug":"re-covered-lucys-nose-by-cecily-mackworth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/07\/25\/re-covered-lucys-nose-by-cecily-mackworth\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: Lucy\u2019s Nose<\/em> by Cecily Mackworth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCY SCHOLES.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the winter of 1892, in his consulting room at his home on Vienna\u2019s Berggasse, Sigmund Freud treated an otherwise healthy but \u201claconic\u201d English governess suffering from both a loss of her sense of smell and olfactory hallucinations. The most unsettling of these was a pervasive odor of burnt pudding that worsened whenever she was feeling agitated. Miss Lucy R., as Freud refers to her in his and Joseph Breuer\u2019s\u00a0Studies on Hysteria <\/em>(1895), was a thirty-year-old woman, originally from Glasgow, living in the home of a managing director of a factory on the outskirts of the city. She was looking after his two children whose mother, a distant relative, had recently died. Freud interpreted Lucy\u2019s symptoms in accordance with his\u2014then, still nascent\u2014theory of hysteria, a condition in which the troubles of the mind manifest themselves in torments of the body. After nine weeks of sessions, Freud came to the conclusion that Lucy was secretly in love with her employer. When this hypothesis was proposed to her, Lucy agreed immediately, her symptoms disappeared, and the analysis was brought to an end.<\/p>\n

Unlike some of Freud\u2019s more famous analysands, the case is not especially noteworthy, and Lucy herself remains something of an enigma. Nevertheless, a century later, the Welsh journalist, poet, and writer Cecily Mackworth, who was then in her eighties, went to Vienna to find out what she could about the real woman behind the pseudonym. She encountered a series of dead-ends; few of the city\u2019s official records survived the cataclysmic destruction of World War II. Yet, as the real Lucy\u2014whoever she was\u2014drifted ever further out of Mackworth\u2019s reach, a different Lucy begins to take shape in Mackworth\u2019s imagination instead.<\/p>\n

Lucy\u2019s Nose <\/em>(1992), the book Mackworth published about her quest, is an act of imaginative audacity that mimics Freud\u2019s imposition of narrative onto the fragmented stories his patients told him about their lives. Mackworth employs both her powers of deduction and imagination to piece together an entirely credible but utterly fictional story of Lucy\u2019s encounter with Freud that fills the gaps, silences, and elisions in the original case study. The life that emerges on the page is less a unified, uninterrupted narrative and more a series of novelistic episodes interwoven with Mackworth\u2019s reflections on her own experiences. \u201cAt what point does fact drift into fiction, possibilities become translated into probabilities, one kind of reality give place to another?\u201d she asks in the book\u2019s opening line. \u201cWhat and where is the borderline between biography and a novel?\u201d Part hybrid novel, part memoir, part travelogue, Lucy\u2019s Nose<\/em> unfolds in these borderlands.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Lucy R.\u2019s story begins back in Calvinist Glasgow, \u201cwhere thousands of fires stoked with cheap coal spread a veil of smutty fog over the streets,\u201d and even the icy flagstones on the pavement shine \u201cblack under the gas-lamps.\u201d This sooty, gray city, Mackworth tells us, contrasts starkly with the \u201cbright colours and exuberant architecture\u201d that await Lucy in Vienna. Mackworth gives Lucy\u2019s employer the name of Meyer. She calls the two children in her charge Mechtilde and Mitzi. Their grandfather\u2014who, in Freud\u2019s account, is mentioned only in passing\u2014becomes \u201ca spritely old gentleman,\u201d technically retired, but still meddling in the running of the factory, \u201ca source of annoyance to his son.\u201d The mistress of the house welcomes Lucy into their family when she first arrives, proudly showing off the city\u2019s sights\u2014the great Ring, the Parliament building\u2014and calls her \u201clittle cousin\u201d in tender moments. Shortly thereafter comes the scene of her death, which\u2014in Mackworth\u2019s telling\u2014replays itself in Lucy\u2019s mind after she has described it to Freud. \u201cWhen I am gone, my children will be motherless,\u201d the dying woman begs. \u201cPromise me you will always be there to take my place and care for them.\u201d Meanwhile, \u201cHerr Meyer stands at the foot of the bed, rigid, his face stiff, because he is Herr Direktor and must remain in control of himself and his subordinates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lucy\u2019s Nose<\/em> describes this world in sumptuous detail, moving vividly from the Herr Doktor\u2019s flamboyant, cluttered consulting room to the grandeur of Herr Meyer\u2019s house, with its roaring fires and staff of servants, between bustling coffeehouses and the fair at Luna Park. Mackworth writes scene after scene of captivating, highly believable description and dialogue that center on the two-month period during which Lucy\u2019s analysis took place. She recreates these sessions\u2014Lucy \u201cseated nervously on the edge of her chair,\u201d on her first visit; the doctor, meanwhile, with a look of excitement in his \u201clarge, dark and extremely shiny\u201d eyes as he questions her\u2014but also spins all manner of additional episodes around them, inspired by tidbits found in Freud\u2019s original text. We see Lucy at home with the Meyer family, and Freud with his own children, or discussing his work with his colleagues. Mackworth peppers this narrative with snatches of authorial commentary: \u201c(This man, who will be important in Lucy\u2019s story, must have a name and \u2018Meyer\u2019 seems neutral, suitable for whatever sort of person he will turn out to be. What did he make in his factory, I wonder? Furniture comes first to my mind and seems right, or at least as likely as anything else.)\u201d Rather than serving as distractions, or stumbling blocks in the plot, these asides are integral to Mackworth\u2019s unorthodox narrative form.<\/p>\n

Once Lucy leaves the house on the Berggasse, Mackworth\u2019s investigative trail goes cold. The impending wars cast ominous shadows on her possible future. Assuming she lived that long, did she eventually end up in Auschwitz? (Lucy must have been Jewish, Mackworth reasons, because \u201cit would have been difficult, back in the 1890s, for a non-Jewish girl to follow the path from Glasgow to the Berggasse, and because her employer belonged to the middle-class of industrialists who were mostly Jewish at that time.\u201d) Or did she somehow survive? Could she have been living in Vienna still when Mackworth herself first visited, as a journalist, in 1946?<\/p>\n

For this book is as much Mackworth\u2019s tale as it is Lucy\u2019s. Mackworth\u2019s research trip is its backbone, providing the chronology along which both Lucy\u2019s story and the author-narrator\u2019s reminiscences are strung. Lucy\u2019s Nose <\/em>is thus also a story of the changing Vienna of the twentieth century. When Mackworth arrives in search of Lucy, she finds that \u201cextreme orderliness\u201d is the prevalent atmosphere. There\u2019s an easy-to-read underground map, and myriad placards adorning every building deemed \u201cworthy of interest.\u201d All this legibility leaves Mackworth feeling uneasy. Human contact, she argues, \u201cshould provide a touch of fantasy.\u201d Although she hopes that her historical research might uncover such traces of fantasy, all her inquiries about the past are met with polite but firm indifference. She understands her interlocutors\u2019 reserve: \u201cthey have been involved in history and want no more of it,\u201d she suspects. But her own experience of Vienna is of a deluge of history, both personal and public, real and imaginary. As she traipses around its peaceful, bourgeois streets, she\u2019s bombarded by memories of the same city some forty years earlier. These details\u2014of occupied, postwar Vienna, \u201cbombed and fought over till it was battered practically out of recognition,\u201d its surviving inhabitants \u201csad and crumpled\u201d\u2014emerge piecemeal, in a handful of monochrome shards; a panorama that, like the city itself, has been shattered, each jagged sliver reflecting awkward angles like a distrustful house of mirrors, seemingly impossible to fit together into a lucid and logical whole. Vienna, she writes, exists \u201cin the geography of my mind like a patch of half-explored, badly-surveyed territory, like those very early maps of Africa where rivers and mountains are in the wrong places.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mackworth\u2019s narrator is prepared for the shock of re-encountering this \u201cstranger who had been myself, whom I had almost forgotten.\u201d Yet she\u2019s still dazed by the force with which her recollections of other people resurface, not to mention the strange way in which they then \u201cweave themselves into Lucy\u2019s story, and Freud\u2019s.\u201d She recalls a ghostly brigade of characters, especially the elderly Baron in whose requisitioned Baroque mansion Mackworth was billeted in 1946. He had once been a gentleman-in-waiting to Crown Prince Rudolf, and his stories of \u201copera and balls and stag-hunts in the Wienerwald\u201d are relics of the bygone world of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Lucy also belonged. As her time in Vienna draws on, and more and more memories crowd her mind, the author-narrator\u2019s desire to locate the Baron\u2019s mansion overwhelms her initial mission to find traces of Lucy\u2019s life. Now Mackworth is on the trail of her younger self.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Mackworth exists in Lucy\u2019s Nose<\/em> in many guises. As narrator, she\u2019s the author in her eighties, describing herself writing the book. But the narrative contains two avatars of the author\u2019s younger self: both the real woman, whose experiences are lost in the mists of time, and her fictionalized double, another amalgamation of fact and fantasy. As these women, along with the various incarnations of Lucy whom we also meet, crisscross in and out of each other\u2019s stories, real physical terrain collapses into psychical space. \u201cI am constantly being tugged into byways of memory,\u201d Mackworth writes, \u201cinto unlikely channels, long-past moments and incidents that involve me as a stranger I can hardly recognise.\u201d The past is envisaged as a complex network of paths taken and those unexplored. The book\u2019s title thus invokes both Lucy\u2019s symptoms and the theory of history sometimes referred to as Cleopatra\u2019s Nose\u2014that history is merely a series of accidents.<\/p>\n

Looking back, the narrator describes herself as a \u201cbewildered girl who had clambered over the ruins of a vanished civilization and longed for love\u201d\u2014but the historical record appears to contradict this. The thirty-five-year-old woman who arrived in Vienna in 1946 was no wide-eyed innocent. She had been widowed seven years previously and left with a two-year-old daughter. She\u2019d been forced to flee her home in Paris when the city fell to the Germans in 1940, making her way by foot across France and Spain to Lisbon and then by sea to England. She was then recruited by MI5 to spy on the Free French (the government in exile that was established under the leadership of de Gaulle), at whose London headquarters she then worked. \u201cI have come to a blank wall in my life and my own springs are sagging and I think I shall never get across it,\u201d Mackworth wrote in her journal on 30 December 1944, mired in an acute depression that lasted until she was able to return to her beloved Paris at the end of 1946. In this light, the material allegory Mackworth\u2019s narrator draws between the \u201cuntidy meaninglessness of the landscape\u201d and the bewildering state of her younger self\u2019s confused interior geography has a familiar, Freudian ring to it. As Freud has impressed upon us, amnesia is one of the most common coping mechanisms for dealing with trauma.<\/p>\n

Mackworth\u2019s narration departs from a series of questions: Who was Lucy R.? What brought her to Vienna in the first place? Why is nobody else interested in her real identity? Ironically, these questions are echoed in those that Lucy\u2019s Nose<\/em> implicitly poses regarding its narrator\u2019s motivations. Mackworth never explains quite why she became so \u201cintrigued\u201d by Lucy. Nor does she divulge when or how she first encountered Freud\u2019s case history. But perhaps\u2014the reader imagines\u2014she felt a special kinship with this woman, who inhabited a brighter, bolder version of a city that Mackworth describes as so personally significant. After all, both women were also outsiders, exiles from their home countries, and each adventurers of a sort. In this way, the reader\u2014like Freud in relation to Lucy R.\u2019s hysterical symptoms, and Mackworth in relation to Freud\u2019s text\u2014becomes a kind of psychoanalyst, tyring to uncover the psychological motivations for this textual evidence at their disposal.<\/p>\n

Freud famously posited that it was of little consequence whether his patients\u2019 disclosures were real memories or fantasies, since both material and psychical reality have equal power to shape one\u2019s inner life. Similarly, the narrator\u2019s search for the truth about Lucy is revealed to be beside the point: ultimately, the mission to fill in the blanks in Lucy\u2019s story merely affords Mackworth the opportunity to fill in some of her own. Or, as she puts it, \u201cto bring some sort of order out of this bright chaos of memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Towards the end of the book, Mackworth learns that, rather than residing in Leopoldstadt (where she\u2019d been picturing the Meyer household), it\u2019s more likely that the family would have lived in the then new suburb of Floridsdorf. Off Mackworth goes to visit the district, emerging from its \u201ccuriously old-fashioned,\u201d curlicue-decorated station to make her usual enquiries at the local town hall. As ever, she finds nothing, but something about her surroundings makes her feel tense. Long-buried memories begins to stir within her: a \u201cjeep-load of journalists \u2026 bumping over a mile or so of flat greyness, broken only by high, neatly-stacked pyramids of rubble \u2026 the Soviet zone \u2026 \u2018enemy territory\u2019 \u2026 the half-remembered glimpse of a tiny rococo station, incongruously upright. And the special flavour of time remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is senior editor at McNally Editions.<\/em><\/main><\/main><\/p>\n
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