The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

  The war experience had revealed a division in which one side could no longer communicate with the other. Freud writes in “Thoughts on War and Death”:

  It rends all bonds of fellowship between the contending peoples, and threatens to leave such a legacy of embitterment as will make any renewal of such bonds impossible for a long time to come. Moreover, it has brought to light the almost unbelievable phenomenon of a mutual comprehension between the civilized nations so slight that one can turn with hate and loathing upon the other.

  But this abyss of incomprehension appeared not only between opposing states, but, within each state, between the few antipathetic to the war itself and those obedient to or sympathetic with the war. In the poem “The Tribute,” H.D. sees the “we” and the “they” divided by a will on the part of the “they,” not to hear, not to see—a resistance against beauty and any hope of peace, but also a compulsion toward ugliness and war, a conspiracy that these shall be the terms of the real. The City of the Gods, “set fairer than this with column and porch,” no longer, as in the poem “Cities,” what once was or what will be, the city of an historical task, is now in “The Tribute” a dwelling place of youths and gods “apart.”

  Augustine, when Rome fell to the Vandals in the fifth century and the Christians were accused of betraying the Empire in their disaffiliation from the war, answered in The City of God with the ringing affirmation of an eternity more real than historical time, a life eternal or supreme good more real than the good life of the philosopher. “And thus it is written,” Augustine tells us: “The just live by faith, for we do not as yet see our good, and must therefore live by faith.” For Augustine—as for Freud, there was the incomprehension between nations, or for poets the incomprehension between writers and readers, or for Sapir the incomprehension between the individual happenings and the language as communication itself—for Augustine too, in the world beyond the household and the city, the world of human society at large “man is separated from man by the difference of languages.”

  For if two men, each ignorant of the other’s language, meet, and are not compelled to pass, but, on the contrary, to remain in company, dumb animals, though of different species, would more easily hold intercourse than they, human beings though they be.

  But the imperial city has endeavoured to impose on subject nations, not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless.

  He continues:

  This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description—and with these the whole race has been agitated either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak.

  For Augustine, convert of the Christian cult, Latin words themselves had a difference of meaning, and in that difference there was a disillusionment with all the values of the Roman world. Only in a total conversion could the “they,” the would-be good and just men of the Empire, understand the “we,” the little company of would-be saints. The rest—the whole “realistic” approach—meant utter misery.

  But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrong-doing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars, and this wrong-doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be a matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrong-doing. Let everyone, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.

  •

  To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness. But this “commune” is not, even in the broadest sense, the language of the human society at large. To write in English is not only to belong to a language-world different from French or Aranda but also to belong to a language-world different from, though within, the English-speaking world at large. Writing and reading is itself an initiation as special as the totem-dance of the Aranda, and just as the Aranda learns to read his own parts in the parts of the landscape about him, so that the body of the world becomes one with his own consciousness, so we learn to find our life in a literature, and, in turn, literature itself is valued as it seems true to life.

  But once we would derive our life not in terms of tribe or nation but in terms of a larger humanity, we find our company in Euripides, Plato, Moses of Leon, Faure, or Freud, searching out keys to our inner being in the rites of the Aranda and in the painting processes of Cézanne. We must move throughout the history of man to find many of our own kin, for here and now those who think and feel in the terms we seek are few indeed. But from each of these the cry goes up—to whom other than us, their spiritual kin—from an intense solitude. Not only Freud’s “There are very few who understand this,” but Stein’s “Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know. (Silence) My long life, my long life,” or Joyce’s “Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?” or Pound’s plea from Canto CXVI:

  I have brought the great ball of crystal,

  who can lift it?

  Can you enter the great acorn of light?

  but the beauty is not the madness

  Tho my errors and wrecks lie about me.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  I cannot make it cohere . . .

  Before war and death the whole world of the higher culture seems to be an illusion indeed. For Freud, the war evoked a powerful disillusionment. The cosmopolitan man, as Freud portrays himself in “Thoughts on War and Death,” in peace-time dwelt in an “other” world, leaving the Mother-land or Father-land of the national state and entering a new Mother-land of an international dream:

  Relying on this union among the civilized races, countless people have exchanged their native home for a foreign dwelling place, and made their existence dependent on the conditions of intercourse between friendly nations. But he who was not by stress of circumstances confined to one spot, could also confer upon himself, through all the advantages and attractions of these civilized countries, a new, a wider fatherland, wherein he moved unhindered and unsuspected.

  The generation of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and H.D., living in the dream of European culture, or of Lawrence living in the dream of Western Indian culture, is the last to live abroad so. The generation of the twenties—the “lost” generation, as Stein called it—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mary Butts, Henry Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Robert McAlmon, live in Europe or Mexico as if in limbo, forerunners of the Jet Set and the New Wave. The cosmopolitan son of an imaginary world-father pictured by Freud had his roots in a time “before the War,” in an illusion of peace, and thought of the achievement of the past as his spiritual heritage.

  “This new fatherland was for him a museum also, filled with all the treasures which the artists among civilized communities had in successive centuries created and left behind,” Freud continues:

  As he wandered from one gallery to another in this museum, he could appreciate impartially the varied types of perfection that miscegenation, the course of historical events, and the special characteristics of their mother-earth had produced among his more remote compatriots.

  This dream of European Culture must recall the Palace of Eros. But Freud’s heir of
the ages and of the earth finds his reality not in daydream but in an actual sea and actual mountains, in the treasure store of men’s actual works. “Property is not capital. The increment of association is not usury,” Ezra Pound insists in Social Credit: An Impact (1935) and prefaces his pamphlet with Jefferson’s saying—“The earth belongs to the living.” In the rites whereby man became cosmopolitan man, he came into an increment, an environment enhanced by his realization of the work and experience of others involved, into an increase that was not taken from things but taken in them.

  In the cult-life of Freud’s cosmopolitan man, as in the life of the Imagists, the gods and the heroes, the imagined beings and the men who in their creative work have increased the store of the imagination, are ancestral, Eternal Ones of the Dream. A new father-land is taken in the image of a world-father of man-kind. And a new kin is found in the ancestors—those who have contributed to the association of man “any and all of the qualities which have made mankind the lords of the earth.”

  “Nor must we forget,” Freud concludes his picture of this illusion of the civilized man:

  . . . that each of these citizens of culture had created for himself a personal ‘Parnassus’ and ‘School of Athens.’ From among the great thinkers and artists of all nations he had chosen those to whom he conceived in himself most deeply indebted for what he had achieved in enjoyment and comprehension of life, and in his veneration had associated them with the immortals of old as well as with the more familiar masters of his own tongue.

  •

  It is not the world of nature from which the poet feels himself alienated. One of the primaries of the poet is his magic identification with the natural world—“the pathetic fallacy” the rationalist-minded critics and versifiers call it. Freud’s cosmopolitan man is a poet and a primitive mind, for in his pathetic union with the world, he “enjoyed the blue sea, and the grey; the beauty of the snow-clad mountains and of the green pasture-lands; the magic of the northern forests and the splendor of the southern vegetation . . . the silence of nature in her inviolate places.” To find joy in the blue sea or beauty in mountains, magic in forests, splendor and silence in nature, is to live in an environment transformed by human sentiments; for these qualities are just that increment that would make man a lord. The joy and the splendor exist in a magic reciprocity—a property that is not capital; an increment that is not usury. Joy, magic, splendor, beauty, and the silence of “inviolate places” are pathetically present too in the language of the Aranda sexual organs and orifices, the “secret” organs of joy, magic, and splendor in the flow of blood and urine, the excitement and release of orgasm.

  So too, the nature poems of H.D.—the early poems of sea and orchard, shell and tree in full blossom or fruit—betray, in their troubled ardor, processes of psychological and even sexual identification, and those critics who have rebuked her for these poems may be disturbed by content in the poem they do not want to recognize. In “Orchard,” she writes: “and I fell prostrate / crying: / you have flayed us / with your blossoms.” This flowering tree—it is the flowering half-burnt-out tree of The Flowering of the Rod—may also be the emotional tree of a sexual encounter; for this poem addresses the “rough-hewn / god of the orchard,” “alone unbeautiful,” “son of the god,” and in its first publication in The Egoist was titled “Priapus (Keeper of Orchards),” and the “you” was then “thou,” the too-intimate almost forbidden second person pronoun in English. The first pear falling, the thundering air and the honey-questing bees of the poem appear then in a poetic magic in which the natural environment and the sexual experience are fused. The intensity belongs neither to the tree as object nor to the priapic penis as object but to the evocation of the image in which they are fused.

  Nor is it from the world of the ancestors that the poet feels alienated. The ultimate reality that the eternal ones of the dream have for the Aranda—the ultimate reality that our toys and imaginary playmates had for us in childhood—Moses, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Hannibal have for Freud; and Sappho, Euripides, Shakespeare, or Browning have for H.D. They are forefathers of the work, but they seem also at times previous reincarnations of the spirit at work.

  These poems where many persons from many times and many places begin to appear—as in The Cantos, The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, The War Trilogy, and Paterson—are poems of a world-mind in process. The seemingly triumphant reality of the War and State disorient the poet, who is partisan to a free and world-wide possibility, so that his creative task becomes the more imperative. The challenge increases the insistence of the imagination to renew the reality of its own. It is not insignificant that these “poems containing history” are all products of a movement in literature that was identified in the beginning as “free” verse. The Egoist, where Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Lawrence, and Aldington first appeared together had formerly been The New Freewoman; free verse went along in its publication with articles on free love and free thought. And the “new” we find also as a demand. In his quarrel with Eliot, Williams could oppose the “new” to the “past”—as if all of the past were what Eliot meant by his “tradition.” But the definition of the “new” was given by Ezra Pound from Confucius in “Make It New,” and in The Spirit of Romance and the essay “Cavalcanti” he turns to the late Medieval reawakening of poetic genius not with the antiquarian’s concerns but in search of enduring terms for the renewal of poetry in his own time. The study of literature, he wrote then, was “hero-worship”—“It is a refinement or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.”

  The image, for the Imagists, was something actually seen. “At least H.D. has lived with these things since childhood,” Pound writes to Harriet Monroe in 1912, “and knew them before she had any book-knowledge of them.” In ABC of Reading he argues for a statement of Dante’s as a starting point:

  because it starts the reader or hearer from what he actually sees or hears, instead of distracting his mind from that actuality to something which can only be approximately deduced or conjectured FROM the actuality, and for which the evidence can be nothing save the particular and limited extent of the actuality.

  In the major phase of his last years William Carlos Williams, the poet who was to have “no ideas but in things,” would relate poetry to dream and to phantasy, as H.D. in “Good Frend” would project the fictional life of Claribel who had no more actuality than her being mentioned in passing in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—itself a drama of the poet’s powers to enchant—and in Helen in Egypt H.D. would weave another fiction of persons who belong not to actuality but to an eternal dream. But the bias for what Williams called “the local conditions” as the primary impetus is strong and continues to haunt my own generation.

  The immediate persuasion of Imagist poets was against the fantastic and fictional as it was for the clear-seeing, even the clairvoyant, and the actual, for percept against concept. The image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in time” or “the local conditions” could open out along lines of the poet’s actual feeling. The poem could be erotic and contain evocations of actual sexual experience as in the poem “Orchards.” And then, the image was also something actually seen in the process of the poem, not something pretended or made up. It was the particular image evoked in the magic operation of the poet itself—whatever its source, and it usually had many sources. In reviewing Fletcher’s poetry in 1916, H.D. may be speaking too of her own art:

  He uses the direct image, it is true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound.

  There was in the image a presentation that gave, Pound writes in “A Stray Document,” “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” When he tells us that t
he total plan of Dante’s Commedia is itself an image, there is a possibility that the image is something seen of or in the “other” world, a clairvoyance. Works of art here are works of a magic comparable to the imaginative practices of Vital or Ficino in which the imagination is thought of as a higher vision. In Pound’s “Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden,” Poggio says: “We are fortunate to live in the wink, the eye of mankind is open; for an instant, hardly more than an instant.”

  The personae of the Imagists had derived from the dramatis-personae of Robert Browning. Pound and H.D. wrote not in the tradition of the personal lyric, but they drew upon the dramatic choral lyric and the trance-voice of religious evocation to charge the actual with meaning. In this making the actual the condition of the true and the real, there was a curious consequence. For those elements of the imagination that are usually distinguished from what is actual—the impersonations, the projections, the creations of worlds and the speculations in ideas—return now in their higher truth and reality to be identified with the actual. In such an operation, H.D. suggests in her notes to Ion, for the devotee of Euripides, the actor of Hermes is indeed Hermes:

  Roughly speaking, there were two types of theatre-goers in ancient Greece, as there are today. Those who are on time and those who are late. The prologue is the argument or libretto; it outlines the plot. The ardent lover of the drama will doubtless be strung up to a fine pitch of intensity and discrimination from the first. The presence of this actor, who impersonates the god Hermes, will actually be that god. Religion and art still go hand in hand.

  If poetry has to do with enchantment and the imagination has traffic with what is not actual but a made-up world, if indeed these would-be serious poets wove a romance of the actual itself, then religion and art may both be fictional and the intensity of their truth and reality is the intensity needed to make what is not actual real. The crux for the poet is to make real what is only real in a heightened sense. Call it his personal feeling, or the communal reality, it exists only in its dance, only to its dancers. Outside the created excitement, what we call the inspiration of art, the things done—the bleeding, the exhibition of private parts, the reiterated correspondences of the human world to the great world of nature and the eternal world of the dream—do not communicate. The reader of the poem must be just such an ardent lover as the communicant of the Mass, or the magic of the sacrament is all superstition and vanity. Christ is not actually there, even where He is most real.