Archival Selections
Marion Milner
In putting together a folio on Marion Milner, Marianne and I found that we wanted above all to share aspects of Milner’s archive that concern art and creative life. We include here an extract from one of Milner’s diaries, which describes her experience of color and her reflections on sublimation. Readers of Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint will be able to draw connections between this diary entry and the chapter on “The Plunge into Colour,” in which Milner relates her experience, and fear, of color in painting to the experience of losing the boundaries of the self and experiencing the pain of the other. We follow this with two essays—Marianne responds to the first collage made by Milner, which is reproduced here, and I write about the experience of looking at Milner’s tracings of drawings made by her patient of over twenty years, the woman she called Susan, and whom she wrote about in The Hands of the Living God. In doing so, we return to questions about creativity and love that preoccupied Milner in the full range of her work, the companions of her life as writer, artist, and psychoanalyst.
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NOTE: The following is an extract from a diary kept by Marion Milner, held in her archive. Milner based her experimental books of memoir on her diaries, reproducing what she wrote in her diaries in her books, sometimes with alterations. I find Milner’s handwriting difficult to read, often discovering that over an hour has passed in trying to decipher a sentence. Marianne pointed out to me that reading Milner’s handwriting requires movement and touch—together we held her diary at different angles to try and make sense of some recalcitrant words, asking the archivist Ewan O’ Neill to help us out, each of us squinting and straining. Photographing Milner’s collage, which Marianne discusses in her essay in this portfolio, was similarly complicated. Everywhere the thick glass which protected the collage reflected light, and we tried photographing it in different rooms in the British Psychoanalytical Society’s building, turning off lights and crouching over the collage with no real success, finding always ourselves reflected in the glass.
Such difficulty leads to mistakes—I misread the lines in Milner’s diary to say what I wanted or expected from Milner. Even in the bright and austere temperature-controlled room, desire finds a way to make trouble. I had a wish to reproduce here an extract that was fully legible, with all words decoded. I have not succeeded. In another diary entry Milner wrote that she didn’t want her writing to be fully legible (“I don’t want it legible, a sort of protection, also keeping something to myself, secretiveness, it’s mine, not giving anything away”).[1] Milner, like her colleague Donald Winnicott, valued paradoxes. As a mark of her self-exposure and privacy, and her desire and mine, I have used brackets { } to indicate words that I couldn’t understand. I have stayed as close as possible to Milner’s punctuation and included explanatory notes where appropriate.
DIARY [2]
April 8th 1939
Again the problem of what to think about the evening—yesterday evening.
Wanted to think about ‘visual experience’ systematically, but couldn’t, too full of war worries— seemed to be striving to get some satisfying idea about something after a lot of floundering found I could achieve direction of thought, control by going over the happenings of the day—the pictures that I had found interesting in the Kenneth Clark book, John’s story about how he’s found a little stone man near a ploughed field at Wittering, in armour—how he said he’d forgotten to bring it back—and when I said perhaps he’d imagined that, he agreed.[3]
Obviously, this is what I’d found so interesting in A.L.O.O and profitable—but then I had to do it by writing, because I could not hold the insight I suppose there were too many frightening things to shy me off.[4] But to be able to brood over the face of the days experience, with full awareness, surely this is the point— to give experience time to crystallize and is also the secret of remembering what has happened—this is the clue to the relation between ourselves and imagination and perhaps also to what has been puzzling me all these days in painting, whether to paint the imaginative images of free drawing or the things I see—perhaps this is the answer—to let my attention brood watchfully over the things, happenings, to the day so the imagination has its say in what it selects, throws up—and can’t all the mythological images be linked into the real happening—as overtones, enriching it’s meaning. Yes, in words one can do this—which is what poetry does and analysis, but what about painting? Cf the Kenneth Clark contrast between Botticelli Venus and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini—but how far can you permit phantasies, overtones of meaning, vs objective painting? Stokes says you can in the relationships of colour—Vincent did in his wavy lines express phantasies of force.[5]
But this I’m sure, whatever one paints, imagination or object, it must be in terms of space—every line and shape and colour felt as related to the whole. And objective painting has this advantage—that it gives an impersonal reality to which I submit myself (as also {even the} Steiner concentration in a colour) it is “object love:—less shut in in itself—more an expertise in reality than the pure playing with imagination.
SUBLIMATION
Obviously, when I let my mind cling to phantasy desire satisfying pictures (e.g. of P.B.) there’s no possibility of sublimation, the impulse can’t attach itself to something else when it’s already got the image to cling to—but if I let all images go, the blackness of the alchemists perhaps, then it can surely more easily reattach itself, form some new bonds. So my feeling from analysis that I must have what I want, that I need not accept so much frustration at first seemed to get timidly close to what the critics say about throwing over all altruistic obligation—but I don’t think this is what P means—she means I’m allowing D’s demand, my feeling of obligation to determine what I do—rather than what I really want—I’m sitting down to the masochistic satisfaction in having been terribly good to him—whereas the real unsocialized desires are just being stifled but still there—and I must face them—if I don’t want to waste my creative energy in sitting in there and having headaches etc.[6] I’ve been using my obligation to him as a protection, an easier way, than making real social contacts—partly because I think often other contacts viz my unconscious mean { } all-or-none.
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May 10th
I grumbled, in analysis, over the fact that I see what a fool I’ve been, yet I don’t seem able to be different. P says of course it must be slow, gradual [repetition?] of insight within the situation and so not feeling guilty about it, glory to goodness, is this the point? Instead of thinking I’m going to be perfect all of a sudden, now I know my mistakes, I’m just going to recognize myself doing this—know that this is what human beings are like—and not feel guilty about it—is that it really—forgiveness of sins—Montaigne’s “generosity”—a generous soul toward himself.
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May 20th
PAINTING
‘What colours do to each other’ I said I’d been concerned with that lately—in some of my Payne drawings, the pure colour splodge ones— also the shading of the colour into another on my palette, then that yellow and white of the Provost Road house, two joined into one, and yellow hibiscus and white crab apple became father and mother. ‘What colours do to each other’—suddenly sitting in Lyons this morning I shifted focus and saw the colours ‘doing things to each other’ saw them as a whole, and the Lyons became, in that grubby corner—an eternal moment —just because of colour.[7]
[1] Diary entry by Marion Milner, 1938, Marion Milner Collection, Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, GB BPASA P01-E-B-40.
[2] Diary entry by Marion Milner, 1939, Marion Milner Collection, Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, GB BPASA P01-E-B-41. Reproduced with kind permission of the British Psychoanalytical Society Archives, with thanks to Ewan O’Neill and Dr Christine English.
[3] John Milner, Marion Milner’s son.
[4] Her reference is to her recently published first book, A Life of One’s Own.
[5] Adrian Stokes, (1902–1972), British art critic.
[6] The letter P likely indicates Sylvia Payne, Marion Milner’s psychoanalyst, and the letter D her husband Dennis Milner.
[7] Lyons was a popular coffee house.