“Of making many books there is no end”—all was caught up into a wave of hysteria, inspired, impersonating, daemonic in part, with a sense of its own caricature, with a sense of its social outrage. She had histrionics then, delighting in tirade and dramatic gestures. Lighting it all, so that she is still a power in my memory and love, she had intense joys and despairs, a vitality that leaped—as later I was to discover the Hasidim had leaped and danced before the glory or joy of the Lord in the most grievous of times—before the fact of a painting like Picasso’s Woman in the Mirror or some scene in reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, celebrant, before whatever was expressive of a passionate, troubled human soul. And she had a wild affection for whatever in us showed response. To suffer, to undergo, to understand anything, danced in a frenzy. Her consciousness rose, as the consciousness of the world rose in the last years of the Depression toward the mania of the War. The lot of the Jews, the lot of women—these stood for her as symbols of the real lot of mankind. Imitating Madame Croiza’s inspired howling as Electra in the recording of the Claudel-Milhaud Oresteia that we used to listen to ritually in those days, she was projecting something she felt prophetic of herself; and as we came to the ebb tides of the night, she would acclaim Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, where she had seen in the furies that maddened the young doctor working in the slums of Paris those furies that pursued her own mind. Something had been revealed in the heart of Paris that was prophetic of our own lot to come. Long before her anticipation of human disaster was illustrated in full in the actual world at Belsen and Buchenwald, before at Nagasaki and Hiroshima we were to see that the evil was not German alone, Athalie had passed from the brilliant wave of her despair and joy, and the wave had gone out, back into the miseries and infantile recesses of dementia praecox. Something once acted had become most actual.
Or, we may say, something set into action. We were, it seems to me now, trying the scene and ourselves to find the plot and our roles therein. We imagined a life as passionate, as full of depths and heightened colors as we found in works of art. The lawn, the sun, the two full-bodied young women with their flowing hair and their sandaled feet, and my reading there, had the command the stage has over all other events when we attend. They were my audience as I read—yes—but they were also—the whole little scene was built up with their composition of it—a chorus. Let these things be fates over me, I had resolved. As I read on, leafing through the pages of Joyce’s Collected Poems, which I had just found in a bookshop that day, past the bronze crayon portrait by Augustus John, past poems that did not key in, I was looking for poems that would belong to our own scene. Lines or words in scanning would give the clue: “A merry air,”—no—“Welladay! Welladay!”—I all but despaired finding the voice I wanted. There was a self-mockery in the book, where the title Chamber Music had a double meaning in which its author mocked his own sentiment with a possibility of parody, the too-muchness of the song’s manner. One had known something like this in adolescence we were only too close to, striving to cover for shyness and passion and ignorance, enacting one’s painful self-consciousness as if it were a deliberate sophistication, anticipating social rejection by a self-rejection incorporated in the feeling itself, a safety of irony or not caring that disavowed the fatal original importance of that feeling. The voice I sought was a different voice. There were glimmers of it in certain poems where for a moment Joyce had the courage of his sentiment:
Because your voice was at my side
That sprang into life for me, immediately speaking for what I wanted to say.
There is no word nor any sign
can make amend—
came direct from the emotion of the artist as a young man without the later Joyce’s self-knowing and dissembling pose, and it spoke too as if from my own emotion to say something I had to tell my two companions. Poetry was a communal voice for us—it spoke as we could not speak for ourselves. And there was a voice in me that sought such a communal speech in order to come to feel at all.
“All day,” I continued, “I hear the noise of waters / Making moan, / Sad as the sea-bird is, when going / Forth alone,” acknowledging in reading—what I could not otherwise acknowledge in myself or in them—that we too, each, had gone, and now went forth, in such a loneliness.
The Italian girl, Lili, had a kind of laughter of eyes, of the curve of her lips, as if even one’s loneliness was reflected there in an amusement. Did she pretend to be a Muse? She walked as if there were a music within which she walked, with an air, a reverie, that set her everywhere apart. Hesiod tells us that the Muses, hinting at their art, said: “We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.” And then he tells us: “They moved with vigorous feet. . . . Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice.” Everything Hesiod tells of the Muses might tell of Lili. She, like them, a serious spirit who was at the same time playful. She was amused, as if there were some womanly strength and wisdom in her countenancing life that came out of shared weaknesses and sorrows in which she had her self-humor, where compassion was part of appreciation. She had humanity; and to have humanity was harder and, at the same time, richer, than what was needed to be a woman or what was needed to be Italian or Jewish in a social world where this was foreign. But it was not that life was hard or that it was rich. Life was, I think, in itself, some kind of inner joy to her, not only human life but the life of a geranium or of the grass could awake in her a response that touched that inner music. As I read from Joyce that day, she had a sympathy for the inner music of the poem that in our consciousness of that sympathy made music all, as a sustaining current.
They were, in their audience, these two women, my nurses, as, with a nurse’s delight in the free vitality, they caught up the spirit of Joyce with that love in which we find most dear some earnest candid need or weakness—no—the vulnerability in itself that shows bravely forth as a condition, not for our commiseration but for our sympathy, feeling with it, as in Joyce’s poem, a vital information.
Or they were playing nurse, for we were all children of ourselves, and writers like Joyce or Dostoyevsky or painters like Picasso and Matisse, artists we admired, seemed to us children of their arts. Or we hoped to be children, for what we meant by “child” had little to do with what we had been. It was, rather, some potential we felt within us. It was the secret alliance with life that we saw in artist or saint that we admired.
Lili had come from a land and a language of saints. “Dearest Brother,” she would address me, laying her hands upon me with an expression of intimate care and love that may have emulated Saint Francis, for he was one of our heroes. The man Joyce, because his poem had that vulnerability and candor, in the midst of his self-consciousness and pose, would be “Brother.” I had no knowledge then of Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of Brother Sun; but, just as Athalie evoked her person at times from furies and lamentations out of the Songs and Wisdom of Solomon, so Lili’s joy in pathos had its counterpart in the litanies of Francis. The poem was a lament, a confession or a hymn that showed forth sympathy with what was otherwise alone. In truth the poet-voice was isolate, alone with its own music. “All day, all night, I hear them flowing / To and fro,” I read aloud and paused before turning to the next poem.
From the Campanile bells sounded, announcing with their renderings of popular tunes that the change of hours was about to come. Turning from my book with dismay, I cried, “There is the bell, I have to go.”
In the jostling streams, lowerclassmen, some in uniform, some still to change into uniform, went from all parts of the campus toward the gymnasium. It was the hour for R.O.T.C. classes that impended.
“You don’t have to go,” Lili commanded, raising her hand in a dramatic gesture that had been delegated its powers by the conspiracy of our company. “Stay with Joyce.” What we had been enacting, the reader and the listeners—the Muses, perhaps, for some serious amusement o
r enchantment had been worked through our cooperation—celebrating this most high reading of the poem, was to become real. “Rejoice with Joyce,” Athalie commanded. A poem was to take over.
Away toward duty, the one command of the State over us, the dutiful students went. In time. Toward the eleven o’clock drill. To march in time.
There had been the arrogance of Joyce, or the intelligence of Joyce, or the inspiration of Joyce, that had exiled him from church and state, from Ireland, from place and time, so that Dublin was finally to be all his own creation, transformed. For the poet, too, had been going forth alone. The moment was an eternal, an isolate thing. A moment of a poem was an eternal thing, from which many phases of itself radiated into time, where we might enter our share in a man’s isolation.
The students obeyed the orders of the day. Military at eleven, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some, I knew, got excused by doctor’s recommendations, escaping from the boredom of it, disqualified by virtue of some physical defect, bad eyesight or flat feet, or by psychiatric warrant. Doctors were liberal in providing the out.
I, too, did not like the boredom, the surrender of mind and body to obey compulsory authority in order that there be such an authority over me. There was an eternal conflict between these orders, forcing us into conformations, surrendering self and awareness in order to endure the tedium, and the other obedience we had just begun, to an inner order of spirit, or the obedience to the beauty of a thing or the fitness of the time. Nerves that must be kept the edges of a vulnerable everlasting consciousness, kept raw and yet fine, our nerves that must serve us if we were to be artists, strained and recoiled at each session of drill, barely allowed for the numbness necessary to get through.
I hear an army charging upon the land,
I read out of Joyce. Going on to the following poem from where I had stopped, taking up the words that rang out now, not of onerous classes and marches, but of war.
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam
about their knees!
War! We were supposed to hate the thought of it but to embrace the fact of it, as if only there we would prove our manhood. Some students were opposed to whatever fact of war. I knew there were pacifists, students who challenged the order to take Military and had gone on strike, as if they had a right to education that they did not owe to the State and its army. They were expelled from school, if they did not dodge the issue. They had conscience. For the State, to be prepared did not mean to be prepared for life but to be prepared for War. It was a condition of our being educated at all at a state university, we were told, that we subscribe to that position, that we be prepared, that we march. Keep time. I, too, believed that back of the army was a cult of War or a business or profession of War, an evil—for it stood against all hope of peace. But I had no sufficient righteous conviction to take a stand. I despaired myself of peace. I was afraid of vested authority.
Away from me the disconsolate students went as I read. It was too late. I could never make it. I would be late. Without an excuse. This poem of Joyce’s was not an excuse; it was an affronting fact. The time was gone.
It’s that moment I wanted to remember, turning, not without panic, but with relief too, away from the Military hour that had been a bother, a burden, and then, because I felt there was something wrong about the submission, a shame, and somehow, because there had been in those other students a strength of conscience that there was not in me, a guilt—turning away from bother, burden, shame, guilt, to the orders of the poem. Attended by two radiantly beaming women who had won me so into their company, their conspiracy, against the army, against the university finally. For I never took getting a degree seriously then. I never went to Military classes again. I ceased going to other classes that I had found a sham. I had come into a poetic order more commanding than my fear of military and school authorities, but I had lost too the reality of graduating from a course of studies, of going on to take my place as a member of some professional caste. Toward an other reality where the poem, the little book of Joyce, the reading, and the listening women had a commanding power stronger than the demand of time.
On the fields below, the troops were marching in ranks. Between eleven and twelve o’clock. The students flooded out, breaking and eddying, released, upon the noon bells, hurrying toward their fraternities and dorms and public eating places. I had let them go from me.
With panic, with the benediction of my muses, with guilt and with joy, I had come from the orders of the day, a deserter from my prescribed career where I was to have been assured of a steady living, from literary strategies and fellowships to be, into the reading of a poem. A member of the cast in a play that now would be autonomous—my idea of a drama of a poetry would rule my life. Now the melody of events was stronger in me, “carried away,” so the common sense of it is, I was carried away by the mood of our scene, transported into the authority of the impulse of a poem from the authority of parents, faculty advisors, and the R.O.T.C.
The authority of the poem was a voice of the spirit. To be a poet meant an even fanatic allegiance to a vision or dream, in order that there be Poetry. Men commonly spoke of vision or dream with mistrust. To be a dreamer was ambivalently respected, for dreams rendered men uneasy in their conventional pursuits. A poet must follow his own ideas or feelings wherever they led. In a way, instead of having ideas or feelings, the poet lets ideas or feelings “have” him. Seized by an idea.
Turning from the authority that the requirements and grades of the university or the approval of my teachers had once had over me to a new authority in the immediacy of what I had come to love, I came into a new fate. The quickening of vowels and consonants, the breath or spirit that moved beneath the meaningful, the sequence and hidden design of voice and image that followed the sequence of emotion and intellection belonged now to an eternal order that challenged all other orders.
“They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore,” I read.
In time, Athalie was to be a mumbling, cackling thing, as Lili or her sister Mary told me later, gobbling down chocolates and then, slyly, as if her visitor did not see, storing them away in her shoes. I saw her once in an interval before all was lost. She had been released by the hospital, shocked into a kind of conformity. But they had cured the jagged edge of her vital being back from its disturbed contact with the knowledge of a terrifying reality.
Lili, working in canneries in the summer, was converted in those years to a Trotskyite politics. Her dream and her imagination must have been won by the vision of unreleased powers that lay in the work of fields and factories still untranslated into ideal and action. But now, not only the expressions of compassion and vision won her, but she became partisan too in the political strategies and revolutionary stands in which the orthodox Trotskyites strengthened their commitment to the ultimate claim of the party.
It is toward what I have called the eternal that time is disturbed to awaken the workers of the world to the virtue, the power, that lies in their labor. The poet, too, is a worker, for the language, even as the field and the factory, belongs to the productive orders and means in which the communal good lies. All that is unjust, all that has been taken over for private exploitation from the commune, leaves us restless with time, divorced from the eternal. If I had come under the orders of poetry, I saw too that those orders would come into their full volition only when poetry was no longer taken to be a profession and when the poet would be seen to share in the daily labor toward the common need.
But the great vision of such a communism in which old dreams of a brotherhood of man survived, the acknowledgment that all goods belonged to a creative order, the gospel that the socialists of the nineteenth century had raised in terms of a new idealization of the working class, has gone into its ebb; and from the salvation and justice that were all ideal imagined themes for a new life, men’s minds have turned to strategies and expediencies and then to their defeat there. Workers were to be awakened not to the good that was in labor, to th
e true community that lay in the creation of social goods, but to the political and economic power that might lie in organization. To become leaders! To bargain in the market where labor was not a work but a commodity! Not to increase our common share in labor but to monopolize toward power. Over dinner tables and in living rooms with Picasso’s Guernica presiding on the wall the flame of inspiration disappeared in the heat of contentions and political ambitions for the seizure of power.
Those young men struggling back to their boarding houses, breaking away from their ordered ranks, released into their crowd or their individual selves, were to go on into the ranks of armies and industries and professions made real upon that other field of lies and ambitions, fears and hopes—a war that only gave rise to a wider breach between nations and peoples, preparing in its waste for war upon war.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
It was before the outbreak of the First World War that Joyce had written that close of his poem, of the war that we have come to know was not a last conflict but the continuum, the meaning of our nations, our politics, our labor unions, our leaders and masses.
Come, let us have a lasting sentence! the heart resolved. What is there lasting but our human condition, but what is most vivid in our imagination of what our life has been? The threat is part of that then. And the green lawn in the sun. The radiant women—Etruscan beauty, as we had seen it in Picasso’s archaic mode, Semitic beauty as in Matisse’s odalisques. The poem transforming loneliness and despair into lovely measures of song. The feet, feet, feet of young men marching. The distant shouting of orders in the playing field that in turn becomes the issue of orders in battlefields and war offices, warehouses and shipyards and laboratories, new classrooms and political parties and factories of mind. The war, too, defines eternal measures.
The H.D. Book Page 7