Square Haunting
Page 4
We enter Mecklenburgh Square at a time of significant turmoil, in and outside its walls: a time of endings and beginnings, of fleeting hope and of serious despair. In his novel Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence wrote that ‘it was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter of 1915–1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed, the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors.’ We begin in 1916, with Zeppelin airships droning over Mecklenburgh Square, a flickering candle illuminating a half-finished manuscript, and an abiding dread that ‘the war will never be over’.
H. D.
(1886–1961)
44 Mecklenburgh Square February 1916 – March 1918
Changing partners, changing hands, dancing round, in a Bacchic orgy of war-time love and death
H. D., Bid Me to Live (1960)
When Hilda Doolittle left her Vienna hotel one afternoon in the autumn of 1934, she found the street littered with golden strips of paper, folded in half like the mottos from Christmas crackers. She stooped to unravel a handful, and saw they were printed with short messages: ‘Hitler gives bread’, ‘Hitler gives work’. Startled, she dropped them in the gutter and continued to Berggasse 19 for an appointment with her psychoanalyst, Professor Sigmund Freud. Barbed wire barricaded the streets and soldiers with guns lurked on corners, reminding her of grainy photographs of the American Civil War. On the pavement, leading right to the professor’s door, were chalked swastikas.
In Tribute to Freud (1956), her memoir of this period, H. D. wrote that her sessions were intended to confront ‘my own personal little Dragon of war-terror’ and fortify her to face the likelihood of a second world war. But she had also entered analysis in the hope that working with Freud would help her clear the ‘psychic weeds’ that were stifling her writing and had driven her to the cusp of breakdown. Freud encouraged H. D. to let her mind wander unfettered: to take herself out of his room – crammed with ancient objects among teetering piles of books and letters: shards of red Pompeiian stone, Egyptian cloth, painted wooden coffins, a statue of a sphinx – and travel back in time to the bomb-stricken London of 1916. As the professor probed her unconscious, seeking the origins of her mysterious block, H. D. found that she kept returning to a brief period of the First World War when she had lived with her then-husband, Richard Aldington, and various others at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. In letters from Vienna to her partner, Bryher, and later in her memoir, H. D. described how Freud persuaded her to contemplate an era with which she had ‘carefully avoided coming to terms’, the resurfacing of which ‘made a violent purple-patch in my analysis’. Sensing that this spell remained an obstacle for H. D., Freud advised her to resume work on the autobiographical novel, set in her Mecklenburgh Square flat, which she had begun in Cornwall in 1918. To Bryher, H. D. confessed that Freud ‘seems to believe … that it would be best for me to make this vol. of mine about 1913–1920 explicit’. ‘Evidently,’ she wrote in resignation, ‘I blocked the whole of the “period” and if I can skeleton-in a vol. about it, it will break the clutch … the “cure” will be, I fear me, writing that damn vol. straight, as history.’
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Over her long career, H. D. achieved a reputation as one of the greatest poets of her generation. In 1960, she became the first woman to be awarded the Merit Medal for Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in recognition of her innovative, complex body of work, which interrogated gender and myth, language and modernity, in restless pursuit of pattern and meaning. At her death in 1961, she was lauded as a genius and promptly forgotten about, until she was rediscovered amid the second-wave-feminist project to reclaim lost ‘mothers’. Her poems appeared in new editions, several works of scholarship and biography emerged, and her unpublished novels – which foregrounded her intimate relationships with women – were released, with moving biographical introductions by her daughter, Perdita Schaffner. Yet still H. D.’s life is often told as the story of her relationships with men: her youthful engagement to Ezra Pound, her turbulent marriage to Richard Aldington, her strange liaison – an affair? a creative disagreement? a wholly fictionalised encounter? – with D. H. Lawrence. She has been pitied as the victim of a series of painful sexual rejections, or admired askance as the ethereal fantasy whose beauty and eccentricity inspired great work by great men. But more than that, her life is the story of her attempts to step out of their shadow and establish an identity on her own terms – a struggle rooted in Mecklenburgh Square.
‘All your life,’ says the narrator in H. D.’s novel HERmione (written around 1926 but not published until 1981), ‘you will retain one or two bits of colour with which all your life will be violently or delicately tinted.’ The years she spent in Mecklenburgh Square during the First World War were so critical to H. D.’s sense of herself that she spent the next four decades trying to make sense of them. She worked compulsively on a cycle of autobiographical works that she considered one single novel, in which she transposed the dramatic events of that time to different settings, experimented with perspective, style and narrative form, altered characterisation, motive and timescale. On most of her finished manuscripts she wrote the word ‘DESTROY’. H. D. began working on ‘the novel’ in July 1918, shortly after she left Mecklenburgh Square, and continued to rework the material, in versions more or less distinct, until 1960, when a book was finally published under the title Bid Me to Live. When the earlier drafts – HERmione, Asphodel, Paint It Today (the latter two written around 1921, and both published in 1992) – finally appeared in print, they revealed H. D. as a writer of elegant modernist prose as well as verse, but further complicated the picture of her life. H. D. never wrote the story ‘straight’, as she had apparently intended, but had composed multiple contradictory versions which could not possibly all represent the truth of events. Each of these strange and fascinating novels – repetitive, fragmentary, laden with dream imagery and classical allusion – explores one character’s inner life across a series of ambivalent relationships. She encounters idealised but arrogant men who threaten to challenge her development as an artist, and women who seem to offer comfort and understanding, yet who hold within them an alarming power to engulf and obliterate her. All turn on the protagonist’s efforts to dispel past trauma and rediscover her ability to write. In writing about her past, H. D. was trying to take control of her public presentation, to challenge the myths that others had always created about her. But if writing was to be a way for H. D. to present her own story, she still had to establish exactly who she was.
In her novels, in her analysis, in letters and in interviews, H. D. would offer wildly inconsistent accounts of herself and those around her. Although she claimed that all her protagonists ‘are of course … the same woman’, each of her novels is attributed to a separate writer, their various names listed clearly on the manuscripts, as if to distance herself not only from the character within, but also from the authorial persona. She wanted Bid Me to Live to appear under the pseudonym Delia Alton, but her publisher insisted that it would be advantageous for publicity to use the famous name H. D., to which she very reluctantly agreed, though she drew the line at supplying a photograph of herself to accompany the text. The use of initials had been Pound’s idea: in 1912, she had shown him a sheaf of early works over buns in the British Museum tea room, an event which became famous as the founding myth of Imagist poetry. ‘But Dryad,’ exclaimed Pound, ‘this is poetry.’ Seizing a pen, he altered some words, slashed through some lines and – when satisfied – scrawled at the bottom the assignation which would both propel and constrain her career: ‘H. D. Imagiste’. She was flattered to be held up as the figurehead of Pound’s new movement, and glad to shake off the sluggish implications of her surname as well as the associations of her gender. But despite the acclaim she won under this name during her life, she never felt comfortable being known as the protégée of Pound. ‘H. D.’, to her, always remained a name linked to her early poetry, and to a lite
rary scene she came to find suffocating. She felt the signature – bestowed without her consent – restricted her to a fixed identity that she would spend her life attempting to escape.
With the publication of Bid Me to Live, she made a dramatic break with the past. The novel – a compelling work of late modernism, shot through with a dreamlike surrealism – is an evocative portrait of Mecklenburgh Square in wartime, and a dissection of the unlikely ménage that occupied the flat. H. D., then seventy-three, provocatively told an interviewer from Newsweek who visited her in the Swiss sanatorium where she was living that the book was ‘completely autobiographical’: ‘It’s just that, word for word,’ she told him. ‘It is a roman à clef, and the keys are easy enough to find. I even thought there might be some libellous material in it, but some lawyers said no. I am Julia. And all the others are real people.’ It was clear enough to knowledgeable readers that Rafe Ashton, the bumbling husband, was a portrait of Richard Aldington, whom H. D. had married in 1913; that Bella was his lover, Arabella Yorke; that debonair Frederico and his wife Elsa were D. H. and Frieda Lawrence; that the ‘huge drawing-room in Bloomsbury’ was the first-floor room at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. But the ‘truth’ presented in the book is cocooned in layers of fiction; in finally publishing an account of these years, H. D. was motivated by something deeper than a desire for documentary realism. In 1921 she had shown her friend John Cournos an early version, insisting that it was ‘not intended as a work of art – at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle.’
For a biographer, the palimpsest of fictions surrounding H. D.’s life is as frustrating as it is intriguing. Time spent sorting through the novels, cross-referencing their characters and descriptions, comparing plot details with contemporary letters and with the fiction and memoirs others wrote about the same events, reveals more mysteries than answers. The impetuous bonfire Richard Aldington made (and later regretted) of a shabby suitcase, stuffed with a bundle of H. D.’s wartime letters from him and Lawrence and abandoned in the basement of 44 Mecklenburgh Square after its inhabitants had dispersed, has ensured that an account of this period can only be partial. A biography offers one version of a life, and H. D. lived several. But whether or not the events, conversations and betrayals described in Bid Me to Live actually happened in the way she evokes, or even occurred at all, its composition was clearly essential for H. D. Not only did this work help her come to terms with complex relationships and emotions rooted in the war years, it also provided a space for her to address deeper questions about writing, gender, violence and power, and finally set to rest a crisis of confidence and identity which had haunted her since those complicated years in Mecklenburgh Square.
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From her childhood, Hilda Doolittle felt like an outsider. She was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the only girl among five brothers: two sisters had not survived past infancy, and like Virginia Woolf she later became keenly aware that her very existence was contingent on the premature demise of her father’s first wife. ‘Why was it always a girl who had died?’ she wonders ominously in The Gift, a memoir which begins with the young Hilda weeping for the women she had never met, and wondering whether she too was fated to a life of thwarted potential and limited horizons. Her mother, Helen, was descended from one of the original members of the mystical Protestant order known as the Moravian Brethren, a sect shunned by the traditional church for its arcane rituals. Helen had been informed by a fortune-teller that she would have one child who would be especially ‘gifted’, a prophecy which left her daughter feeling a failure. ‘How could I know’, H. D. later wrote, ‘that this apparent disappointment that her children were not “gifted” was in itself her own sense of inadequacy and frustration, carried a step further?’ Helen was a keen musician who gave up singing after her husband complained about the noise, and was convinced that only her brother had inherited the vision and talent that, in Moravian belief, passed down through the generations. Like Woolf’s mother Julia, Helen was the archetypal ‘angel in the house’, whose devotion to her husband’s work and deference to his opinions came to represent, to her daughter, the suffocating confines of traditional femininity. When she thought back through her mother, H. D. was confronted with a disheartening heritage of silence and ‘morbid’ self-effacement: nonetheless, she came to believe that she derived her own ‘imaginative faculties’ from her mother’s squandered inheritance.
H. D. in Mecklenburgh Square, 1917
When Hilda was nine, the family moved to Philadelphia, where her father, Charles Doolittle, had been appointed a professor of astronomy; to his daughter’s wonder, he would go out at night to observe the stars, and concentrate so hard that sometimes his beard would freeze to his telescope. Having studied at various Philadelphia schools and seminaries, Hilda entered Bryn Mawr College in 1905, but dropped out after three semesters and dedicated herself instead to her writing. She began, her schoolfriend William Carlos Williams recalled, by splashing ink all over her clothes ‘to give her a feeling of freedom’. Williams had always admired her ‘provocative indifference to rule and order’ – her masculine dress, her love of walking in storms, her spontaneous laughter. But her triumphant rejection of one sort of authority only ushered in another. ‘I don’t suppose it was the fault of Bryn Mawr that I didn’t like it,’ she wrote in 1950. ‘My second year was broken into or across by my affair with EP.’ She had met Pound at a Hallowe’en party in 1901, when she was fifteen; he was a year older, dressed as a Tunisian prince in a green robe. Over the next few years, he appointed himself responsible for Hilda’s cultural education, taking her to operas, compiling reading lists for her (Ibsen, Balzac, Rossetti, Bernard Shaw, and his own sonnets, which he composed daily while brushing his teeth) and introducing her to Brie (‘You have no palates,’ he sneered when she confessed she didn’t like it). He called her ‘Dryad’, and as a silent woodland muse she haunts his earliest poems, later published as Hilda’s Book.
Pound’s cosmopolitan company provided a thrilling alternative to her parents’ home, where she felt closeted and misunderstood. She knew she wanted a different life, for which her small world offered no example. But when their tentative engagement ended in 1908 with Pound’s abrupt departure for Europe, Hilda was secretly as relieved as were her family, who had been suspicious of Pound’s erratic tendencies and rumours of his multiple affairs. Pound was imperious and overbearing, and preoccupied with his own ambitions; at this time he was not interested in Hilda’s writing. H. D. later reflected that, had they married, ‘Ezra would have destroyed me and the centre they call “Air and Crystal” of my poetry’. In her novel HERmione, based closely on her Philadelphia years, H. D.’s protagonist becomes distracted by the legend of Undine, the mermaid who gives up her voice in exchange for the feet that allow her to live on land with her prince: Hermione realises that marriage would consign her irrevocably to the role of muse, not poet. The pattern established in this formative affair set the parameters for H. D.’s subsequent relationships: Pound was the first in a series of men whom she later called her ‘initiators’, to whom she made herself desperately vulnerable, yet against whose guidance she had eventually to rebel. Having avoided a future dictated by Pound’s arrogance, Hilda now set to enacting her escape from Philadelphia on her own terms.
In July 1911, Hilda also sailed to Europe, planning to spend a summer travelling and seeing the sights. With her was Frances Gregg, a poet, artist and mystic whom Hilda had met the previous year, and with whom she had fallen deeply in love. H. D. later described Frances as ‘a sort of alter ego’, whose intimacy had filled ‘like a blue flame’ the absence left by Pound. Frances was the sister and soulmate for whom Hilda yearned; they called themselves twins and witches, and the intensity of their bond – developed over long evenings writing, confiding and incanting spells together in Hilda’s tiny bedroom – cemented her longing to defy convention and live a life untrammelled by her parents’ narrow expectations. It was not to Ezra but to France
s that Hilda wrote her first love poems, inspired by a translation of Theocritus which Pound had given her.
Accompanied by Frances’s watchful mother, the pair stayed first in ‘a dreadful little place’ on the outskirts of Paris – where they were disappointed to find that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre – before travelling to London and finding lodgings on Bernard Street in Bloomsbury. ‘Arrive Sunday,’ wrote Hilda with feigned nonchalance in a postcard to Pound. ‘Hope to see you some time.’ Delighted by the prospect of new company, Pound immediately swept the women into the stylish milieu he had established in the city. ‘Our reception in London was surprisingly cordial,’ wrote a happy Hilda to Pound’s mother, Isabel, ‘due to the efforts of his friends spurred on by himself.’ Pound, well known in the London literary scene (and in the tabloid gossip columns) for his experimental verse and flamboyant dress, whisked them to crowded tea parties of fashionable suffragettes at the home of the literary editors Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), to hedonistic variety shows at avant-garde Soho nightclub The Cave of the Golden Calf, and to glamorous soirées in elegant apartments where Hilda admired the feel of the soft carpets, the scent of flowers, the witticisms of fellow guests, the whispered gossip of stolid footmen.