Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, and Thorn Thicket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt (ELS Monograph)

Magic Mirror is H.D.'s unpublished roman à clef of her eight-year "strange relationship" with Dr. Erich Heydt, a psychiatrist in Zürich with whom she formed a bond which often oscillated between professional consultation and a sort of analyst-analysand intimacy accompanied by much inner conflict and resistance. Relatively short, and written in three drafts between 1955 and 1956, Magic Mirror is autobiography in disguise: "Everything is true there… I had a hard time finding names for my people. They are real people; everything is real except the build-up of Eric's enigmatic German background." Magic Mirror sheds abundant light on her relationship with Heydt, who played a role much like Freud did in H.D.'s life twenty years earlier. The work also offers insights into her relationship with Ezra Pound; her unresolved bond with her half-brother, Eric Doolittle; Pieter Rodeck; as well as the sinking of the Lusitania and the still-birth of her first child on May 21, 1915. Further, the memoir is significant as a textual alembic which casts into sharp relief issues manifested in her other postwar works, for example, the occult, spiritualism, and how they both relate to psychoanalysis and her vocation as a writer. Magic Mirror contains material that is further expanded in her memoirs Compassionate Friendship (1955) and Thorn Thicket (1960).