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From: Martin Zehr
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2019 12:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Response to Hal's Message

I read Hal Bush’s note from Vienna last week and recalled my own visit to the Leopold, with its excellent collection of Egon Schiele and Kathe Kollwitz paintings, very dramatic works from artists definitely under-appreciated in the U.S.

Responding to one point brought up by Hal, a possible meeting between Freud and Twain during Twain’s 18-month stay in Vienna.  I’ve written about this years ago in a book review for the Forum.   As Carl Dolmetsch, in his excellent book on Twain’s stay points out, while it’s within the realm of possibility, and Freud attended at least one of Twain’s public lectures, it’s not certain, as Dolmetsch is careful to note.  While it is nigh on impossible to prove a negative in a case like this, I would doubt that such a meeting ever took place, for the following reasons.  First, while Twain was obviously an international celebrity at this time, Freud was still a neurologist in private practice, not even widely known in Vienna, and then as something of a quack- his close friend and colleague, Wilhelm Fliess, was still promulgating the theory that neuroses were generated by problems traceable to pathologies of the nose.  Freud’s first major publication (in retrospect) on his own, The Interpretation of Dreams, was not published until 1900, and then sold maybe a hundred copies or so.  Freud would be virtually unknown in the U.S. until 1909, when he attended a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and not generally known in this country until after the First World War, when he influenced writers like Van Wyck Brooks, who wrote the critical mess titled The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920).  Secondly, whatever one thinks of Freud’s ideas, it’s indisputable that  he was an indefatigable writer and self-promoter, the latter illustrated by the account of his hagiographer, Peter Gay, of Freud’s attempt in 1922 to solicit support for a Nobel Prize in medicine- it failed, but, according to Gay, Einstein was willing to support Freud’s petition for a Nobel Prize- in literature.  In the 650-plus pages of Gay’s Freud-A Life For Our Time, there is a mention of Freud’s reading in the 1920s that includes Twain (it doesn’t specify any particular writing), but that’s it.  There is simply no record, in Freud’s writing or letters, of a meeting with Twain, and you can betcha, by golly, if there had been, we would have a detailed account in his published  writings or private correspondence.  Not that it means anything, but I’ve had the privilege of meeting Freud’s niece, Sophie Freud, a retired professor of social work at Simmons College in Boston, twice, through a mutual friend.  She’s in her 90s now, but accompanied her uncle in 1938, when he fled Vienna for Paris, then to London.  The last time I met her, in 2008, she had nothing to add when I asked her about a possible connection, which, again, proves nothing.

While Freud didn’t actually say “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” perhaps, if he had gotten a whiff of one of Sam’s stogies, he might have been tempted.

Martin Zehr, PhD, JD  | Neuropsychologist
Saint Luke’s Marion Bloch Neuroscience Institute
4225 Baltimore Avenue, Kansas City, MO  64111
Office: 816.932.1610  |  Fax: 816.932.1719

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