But Mr. Hueffer says that he never read Browning. Therefore Mr. Hueffer has followed the Browning mould unconsciously—as unconsciously and inevitably as Miss Charlotte Mew in her poem “The Fête,” and in her other poem, the wracked, tortured “Madeleine in Church.” When one reads of ‘the white geraniums in the dusk’ one feels that Madeleine has wandered in that same garden where the moth and moth kiss brushed the heavy flower petals—and the ‘portrait of my mother at nineteen’ brings to one’s oversophisticated imagination the Duchess with her unappreciated, wan smile and her branch of cherries.
“It is part of our pleasure in art in these days to imagine such things,” H.D. concludes, “and the lines lose none of their poignancy, none of their personal flavor for this fine, subtle association.” But it is also something more than a cultivated association, for the idea lingers that “that same garden” comes into the poem by Charlotte Mew that came into Browning’s poem and that the portrait of the poetess’s mother at nineteen and the portrait of Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” are significantly related, that there is, back of poetry, some collective poetic unconscious.
In the voices of Pound or H.D., the poet’s personal identity is involved in the projection of the poem, and, in this, they are different from the dramatic monologs of Robert Browning. Pound derives his own personal legend from Odysseus, Peire Vidal, Homer, Kung; he identifies with them in impersonating them. So too H.D. is to be confused with Sappho or Helen, with the priestess of Artemis in whom Artemis speaks. D. H. Lawrence undergoes a self-conversion in his poetic projection of Dionysos. In this the poets are most contemporary with the psychologists who begin to see the work of art as well as the dream as a projection of the individual psyche in which an unconscious content seeks to reveal itself.
The masks of Robert Browning’s dramatis personae lead directly to the masks of the Imagists, but the poetic persona is no longer discrete. The concept of person itself has undergone a crucial change in the work of Symbolists, and, for all of their reform of Symbolist ways the Imagists are heirs of their work. Where the poem was once theatrical, it is now more and more viewed as a process of psychological information, related to dream-work.
In his magic-lantern art, Robert Browning calls up Verona, as in the poem Sordello, not out of his subconscious but by virtue of his theatrical power, and:
Lo, the past is hurled
In twain: up-thrust, out-staggering on the world,
Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears
Its outline, kindles at the core, appears
Verona . . .
The darkness that rears and kindles at the core, in which the scene is evoked, suggests to us the unconscious; but for Robert Browning it remains a machinery of a stage midway between the phantom-shows of Doctor Faustus, where we but see Helen of Troy as a display, and the shadow-screens of the motion picture to come. So Browning also dismisses his phantoms: “The ghost is gone, and the story ends.” This is an art in which the poet calls up image and persona, keeping at the same time his distance, and our own, the magician’s pentacle within which he stands.
“The consciousness of some seems to rest,” Pound says in “Psychology and Troubadours,” “or to have its center more properly, in what the Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are, that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosmos.” Here image was phanopoeia, “a casting of images upon the visual imagination.” The Imagists in the beginning worked towards a new phantastikon. We are not to underestimate the role that this magic of reflections has in even the later works of Pound or H.D. But there was another, higher poetic power, it seemed to Pound, in the “germinal” consciousness. The image or persona—what is seen in the world “outside” or in the mind’s world “inside”—no longer is a show of that world only, but is a seed, a generative point of the inner and outer. This is a world not of mere appearance, but of a vital process.
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The images and persons of Palimpsest work through each other, as if story were written over story. So too the sequence of times works in a set of superimpositions. The palimpsest is not only that of image over image or person over person, but of time over time. Within London 1926 is wartime London of 1916. But also, within the Hellenistic world of wartime Rome in the story “Hipparchia” is the underscript of wartime London. It is the palimpsest of a layered consciousness in which all times and worlds are to be found. Not only may the past be back of the present, but the present may be back of the account of the past. So too as Edward Sapir, reviewing H.D.’s poetry, pointed out, back of her Hellenism is the subscript of an American experience and character:
Personal and remote as are her images, there breathes through her work a spirit which it would not be easy to come upon in any other quarter of the globe. The impatience of the rhythms and the voluptuous harshness and bleakness of the sea and shore and woodland images manifest it. Such violent restraint, such a passionate pleasure in the beauty of the denuded scene and the cutting thrust, themselves but inverse symbols of caress, could only develop in a culture that hungers for what it despises.
Sapir is reading H.D. in terms of what he sees the American spirit to be—at once the expression of a Puritan heritage and of the physical environment of a forbidding continent. Hipparchia, exiled from Greece, dreaming of her lost homeland in wartime Rome, reminds us of H.D. in wartime London, haunted by dreams of lost or forgotten coasts of New Jersey. For the generation of the twenties abroad, the American spirit was thought of as being in exile; and the America of the childhood late nineteenth-century, “lost.” Raymonde Ransome in the story “Murex,” an autobiographical portrait, sees her room in postwar London as a palimpsest in which memories survive:
such a tiny room to hold so much, so many superimposed people. And she was happy alone here and didn’t want to go away. They were passing, would always be passing and she would remember them; as an American she would remember them.
Helen Fairwood in “Secret Name” presents another autobiographical portrait, moving through an Egyptian scene haunted by overscripts or underscripts of Greece and America:
This was Egypt. America had been wiped out, she had thought, even before the heavy down-weight of London’s five war years . . . But it wasn’t. It stared at her in an English country-house bedroom, in a New England seaside village bedroom with four-poster draped with white of mosquito gauze, with strip of rug, and pottery Devon-like jugs.
“I spent most of my childhood,” she tells Captain Rafton, “(although you won’t accept it that I’m American) along the gigantic stretches of New Jersey. Sand and scrub-bushes. So the incurve of the sand about these sphinxes is familiar.” The scene itself, as she walks by moonlight to visit the ruins of Karnak, is a palimpsest:
Her past merged, moon eclipse, black crystal; the marshes of New Jersey low-flowering wax and wortle-berry brushed the shimmer of the robe of dragon-fly blue texture of some incredibly slender Graeco-Egyptian. A Graeco-Egyptian was wandering across New Jersey marshes in search of those famous (even in Egypt) ivory pointed, saffron centered lily lotuses.
Raymonde Ransome’s mind in “Murex” searches out along currents of association to draw a magic, a poem actually, out of the depths. But they are depths not only of her own life, the memory of a labor and the loss of her child at birth, while behind the scenes there was her lover’s adultery and desertion during her pregnancy, but depths also of human history that must be healed. The interior monologue itself provides a medium into which all things can flow as into one sea, from whose depths the murex may be brought up, and Raymonde Ransome’s mind returns again and again to the thought of the writer James Joyce, hinting that back of this writing—another sense of the name palimpsest—is the writing of Joyce’s Ulysses: “Art was magic—but it had lost—had lost—its savour. Joyce was right. It had lost.” In Ulysses, back of Bloom’s day in Dublin, magically, had been earlier Greek presences, a writing we almost read through the print we actu
ally read. Signs appear in the stream of consciousness that back of Bloom’s personality is that of Odysseus. Back of the stream of consciousness mode is Robert Browning’s dramatic monolog. Faces and masks are interchanged in a masque of identities. “Faces, people, London,” Raymonde Ransome recalls:
People, faces, Greece. Greece, people, faces. Egypt. James Joyce was right. On, on, on, on, and out of it like some deep-sea jewel pulled up in a net squirming with an enormous catch of variegated squirming tentacled and tendrilled memories, just this, this—
She cannot name it, but the painful “purple” or murex is the birth of the child that dies in birth. In the conscious mind it is a poem coming into form: “Verses were the murex. They dyed all existence with their color. Small verses, things that in no way matter.” Back of the poem that is coming up in her mind there is something she is listening to, the sound of feet passing up Sloane Street on the way to Victoria Station outside the room where she sits at tea facing a visitor who racks up the memory of Raymonde Ransome’s old life. But it is the sound of young men in that old life, marching to the War. Brzeska, Hulme, Wilfred Owen. The Egoist listed the artists and writers newly fallen with each issue in the war years. And there was another, an equally painful death of love. The Death of a Hero, Aldington, H.D.’s young husband had entitled his portrait of those years. The war and the adultery are written one on the top of the other, or one obliterating the other, erased to make room for the other. She has lost her child or her lover to the war. “Layer and layer of pain, of odd obliteration had forbidden Raymonde Ransome to see into the past that to her was further than an Egyptian’s coffin. The past of somewhere about 1917.” The marching feet of the young men on their way to the troop trains, the feet of the lost young men, are, we begin to realize, the measuring feet of the poem itself.
Raymonde is very much Hilda or the writing of a portrait in the place of Hilda. In the autobiographical portrait, the person of the author has been erased to make room for the story of the self revealed in a secondary personality. Just as Hilda Doolittle erased her name and wrote in its place the enigmatic H.D., so Raymonde Ransome has the writing name Ray Bart.
Behind the Botticelli, there was another Botticelli, behind London there was another London, behind Raymonde Ransome there was (odd and slightly crude but somehow ‘taking’ nom-de-guerre) Ray Bart. There was Ray Bart always waiting as there was behind the autumn drift and dream-anodyne of mist, another London. A London of terror and unpremeditated beauty. A London of peril and of famine and of intolerable loveliness. Behind London there was the London of darkened street lamps (of ‘doused’, Freddie used to say, ‘glims’) behind a mist and drift of anodyne in an Italian background of small and precise little pincushion pink roses, there was another Italy, another Venus, another realm of beauty never to be apprehended with the senses.
Recalling in “Murex” the stream of consciousness mode of Joyce’s Ulysses or, as in “Secret Name,” Algernon Blackwood’s narratives of occult experience, the prose of Palimpsest is not, as contemporary reviewers tended to think it was, impressionistic. Language becomes throughout a ground of suggestion and association, a magic ground, a weaving of phrases echoing in other phrases, a maze of sentences to bind us in its spell, so that we begin to be infected with the sense of other meanings and realms within those presented. The style is obsessional. We must come back and back to the same place and find it subtly altered in each return, like a traveler bewildered by lords of the fairy, until he is filled with a presence he would not otherwise have admitted. Here it is not past time or present time but the blur, the erasure itself, that is the magic ground in which the necessary image may occur. What we are to see needs a fused light, twilight or moonlight. What the eye must strain to see in the diminishing light takes on the imprint of inner phantasy and becomes newly significant to the soul. In the story “Hipparchia,” Marius sees his mistress’s eyebrows in such a light as a sign, “Black, like the inner hieratic marking on the honey-colored hyacinth,” activating the magic of correspondences:
He saw, in that thickening of the last glow of late sunlight, her eyebrows apart, separated from her being. As Greeks of the old days disregarded the sheer substance of the flower as they perceived (mysterious script) the aie, aie, that tells of lost Adonis or the wail for the dead Spartan. He saw why Greeks inordinately must rule forever, not Rome, but prophetically, the whole world.
“Your eyebrows, Hipparchia,” he tells her then, “penciled for my dismissal are engraved somewhat on my spirit.” Searching out from its dimness the detail, as for the reader, searching out what seems only dimly present in his text, Marius finds it comes to him at last as a content of his own inner experience. He has cooperated in what he has come to see.
Not only the dimness in which suggestion can arise but the circling repetition in which resistance is eroded and transformed is necessary for the author who would cast a spell. The mesmerist must call upon his reader’s assent to a conversion in which words come to have an artistic identity of their own. Readers of Joyce’s Ulysses before the impact of that work had been exorcised by the commentaries and appreciations of the professors of literature, where they were resistant to Joyce’s art, often expressed themselves in angry, even hostile, terms regarding the boredom they had experienced. Corresponding to this boredom or pain of resistance experienced by the reader who refused to be taken in by Joyce is the creative fatigue which the reader who is to follow the author’s lead must undergo. The ideal reader of his hypnogogic prose, Joyce suggests, must enter the realm of sleep as an insomniac.
In the story “Secret Name,” Helen Fairwood finds herself prepared by fatigue for her experience of the numinous. The reiteration of the word “fatigue” and the play of the words “curious” and “peculiar” suggest that both the nervous state and the moonlight are elements of an aura surrounding the event:
all the uncanny perceptions of the early morning, the fatigue, and the uncanny perceptions of the Tomb, nullified, smoothed away, eradicated by this curious moonlight; eradicated, sponged out . . . The intellect was to such an extent off guard, benumbed by her peculiar fatigue.
The prose demands that we yield to its wanderings, its reiterations; and when we yield, it brings us into such a fatigue of intellectual resistance that only an inner emotional acquiescence, and then an alliance with the shifting ground of things that is being prepared keeps us going and takes over, so that for us, as for Helen Fairwood, the sphinxes appear not foreign but most familiar. “Maryland is exactly the sort of child, more or less, I was,” Mrs. Fairwood tells Captain Rafton, “when I first crossed.” “And what kind of child do you think you are now?” he asks. To cross from America to Europe, to cross from childhood into womanhood, to cross from innocence into wisdom or mistrust? We have been confused and we are not sure. To be a child may mean more than we first thought.
What Helen Fairwood comes to feel as she stands with Rafton in the ruins of Karnak, in the blur or erasure of moonlight, is first the incarnation of Greek entities in the scene. Rafton appears to be Zeus as he turns to her who seems now to be “another Leda or Calliope.” But then, deeper—“What kind of child do you think you are now?”—the two see together an appearance out of the moonlight of a “tiny temple or tomb or birth-house,” a Greek shrine within the Egyptian: “It rose as if cut from one block of stone, at that little distance she could not tell of quite what material, with the moon too working its common magic.” The miasma of phrases, drifts of meaning within meaning exhausting any literal reading until the prose swarms with seeds of meaning, may be to prepare for the image of a wish. As Mrs. Fairwood and Captain Rafton return from Karnak, it seems to her “as if they stood static and the thud-thud of hoofs was only the heart beat of some close, live body. As if they in some strange exact and precious period of pre-birth, twins, lovers, were held, sheltered beneath some throbbing heart.” Egypt, the moon, the night, here, may be a mother, and the two, the man and the woman, are for a moment the twin King and Queen,
the children in the womb of Egypt. This Egypt, this night, is the Mother, the Imagination, the Dream that—it is the presiding theme of H.D.’s later work—is not only revelatory of but creative of Reality.
Hipparchia, confused in her fever, hears an “odd insistent bird note of anguish” that may be out of the past or of the distance, “a voice from far and far and far webbed over with its pain of actuality.” The pulse of the pain is actual, a condition of her fever. But it is also—the whole is a palimpsest—the script of an earlier pain, the pulse of labor pains that Raymonde Ransome knew in 1917. Hipparchia and Raymonde exist as twins in a womb of time where there is no before and after. They coexist. And Hipparchia in 75 B.C. remembers, as if it were in the past and also in the future, Raymonde’s labor pains.
“But there is no such thing as a start and a finish of the whole circumference of a circle,” the Hellenistic philosopher Porphyrius argues, and he refers then to the Hellenic philosopher Heraclitus: “Beginning and end in a circle’s circumference are common.” Hipparchia, Raymonde, Helen Fairwood, and their author H.D., like Heraclitus’s mortals and immortals, “live in each other’s death, die in each other’s life.” For H.D., as for the Greek philosophers, the reality of the world belongs to a unity of creative thought in which it has its origins, the circumference of a divine idea.
But the pain is an actual bird note, “outside,” an insistence of a new figure working in the matrix where identity is in transition. Hipparchia’s actual sickness we see now as something else, the condition in which a new state of consciousness is at work. The birth of a child, the birth of a poem, the birth of a spirit, the birth of self out of self—a host of experiences and fantasies, suffering and wish, gather to charge the epiphany of the little birth house with its particular force. They are rhymes, sounding in each other; so that a bass note accumulates. They are resounding identities belonging to the emergence in their unity of one person. Not only Raymonde in Hipparchia, and Hipparchia in Helen Fairwood, but each of these in turn in a mystery of person are more than a self portrait of H.D., whose personality now is not that of author but that of a member of the cast in the play. The autobiographical has become part of the fiction of the whole; H.D.’s own personality begins to appear, like the persons of the stories, as an extension of an identity in the process of revealing itself or creating itself.
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