to freighted ships baffled in wind and blast.
Pregnant with her second child H.D. had been stricken with double pneumonia. “The material and spiritual burden of pulling us out of danger,” she writes in Tribute to Freud, “fell upon a young woman whom I had only recently met—anyone who knows me knows who this person is. Her pseudonym is Bryher, and we all call her Bryher. If I got well, she would herself see that the baby was protected and cherished and she would take me to a new world, a new life, to the land, spiritually of my predilection, geographically of my dreams. We would go to Greece, it could be arranged. It was arranged, though we two were the first unofficial visitors to Athens after that war.”
“Anyone who knows me knows who this person is”—“She turned out to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the heaviest taxpayer in England,” William Carlos Williams puts it in his Autobiography. Years later. But the thought of H.D. irritates him; he wants to put her down. “ ‘Wanna see the old gal?’ I asked Bob. ‘Sure. Why not?’ So one afternoon we decided to take in the show. Same old Hilda, all over the place looking as tall and as skinny as usual.” Wherever he remembers her this almost insulting, almost insulted affect colors his voice. He wants to brush Bryher off: “She had with her a small, dark English girl with piercing, intense eyes, whom I noticed and that was about all.” And the thought of Bryher’s proposing to Robert McAlmon and their marriage, McAlmon’s “disastrous story,” as he calls it, rankles. “She turned out to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the heaviest taxpayer in England. Bob fell for it. When he told me, I literally felt the tears come to my eyes, whether from the anticipated loss of the man’s companionship and the assistance of his talents, or joy for his good fortune, I couldn’t decide.”
The fortune itself rankled. Williams wasn’t going to fall for it. Fall under the claim money made. The reality of money, the charm of money. “I could not imagine what to give the wealthy young couple as an adequate present,” he tells us, “until Floss fell on the ideal gift: a box of the rarest orchids we could gather.” “Imagine,” Marsden Hartley laughed at the wedding supper, “what it would look like in the papers tomorrow, the headline: POETS PAWING ORCHIDS!”
Several days later, Williams continues, they received a post card “showing several actors, men and women with their hands in a pot of money, and signed, obscurely, D. H., in bold capitals.” He means to get back at something—“I accused H.D. later of being the sender”—of being in on the scene then? “but she violently denied it. I never believed her.”
The rancor is complex in William Carlos Williams; it flashes forth testily in his Autobiography. For us, for that constellation of new poets who began to appear in Origin in the fifties, where Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and I had our places, Williams was our immediate master. The poet of The Wedge in 1944 had broken a new way. The poet of The Clouds and then Paterson in the late forties had awakened us to our task in the language and had awakened us too to rediscover the poet of Spring and All. He seemed so wholly the poet in Paterson, the derisive, the defensive, the contending voice seemed so composed, to heighten the pathos of the ideal:
Go home. Write. Compose
Ha!
Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is
the only truth!
Ha!
—the language is worn out.
And She—
You have abandoned me!
—at the magic sound of the stream
she threw herself upon the bed—
a pitiful gesture! lost among the words:
we saw him so as the hero, that it was hard to admit how close to hurt pride he could be, how he contended in his own mind for recognition.
But this place is New York, this year is 1921. There is already a disappointment not an appointment between these two poets who had once read their poetry together. A divorce of feeling. A refusal of recognition.
Looking back, Spring and All in 1922 stands a major realization of form. Its twenty-eight poems belonging to an open sequence of feeling, cohering, not in any plan or prescribed theme, but in the essence of their belonging to the pure intuition of the whole. As free as the new music of Webern or the new painting of Kandinsky. The work itself having the insistence of the formal. So much depended upon seeing what was being done. Charged with spring. With the spring of a new poetics. The sequence of discrete, sharply drawn, contrasting poems that are in turn parts of something else, elements thruout of a melodic structure. That can include (as the new art of the collage begins to include):
Wrigley’s, appendicitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup–
or after “The Sea,” “Underneath the sea where it is dark / there is no edge / so two—,” comes XXI “The Red Wheelbarrow.” For upon the “so much depends” and upon the “red wheel / barrow” the imagination must have a heightened apprehension of what form means to take hold.
A year of achievement. Surely he must have known what he had done. But it was a year of rancor for Williams too, for what he had done in Spring and All, to give simple things a power in the imagination, to compose so in the pure exhilaration of a formal feeling, was not recognized by those closest to him in poetry. Pound, writing on “Dr. Williams’ Position” in 1928, does not mention Spring and All, and he seems to be defending an art in its lapse. “Very well, he does not ‘conclude’ ”; Pound writes: “his work has been ‘often formless,’ ‘incoherent,’ opaque, obscure, obfuscated, truncated, etc.”
Williams had struck out to make a new claim for form and it had not been recognized. More than that, the impact of Spring and All was obliterated by the timeliness, the mise en scène, the very usable attitudes and conclusions of The Waste Land.
The Waste Land, as it seemed to the literati of 1922 to voice most to their time, appears now as a period charade; with put-on voices and some epitome of modernism-1922 played against cultural tones, orchestrated with Edgar Allan Poe and the Vedas. The “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So intelligent” we all recognize as a knowing touch of the artist, a stylish manoeuvre.
The modernism-1922 is there in Spring and All, in the hey-ding-ding tough-voice of “Shoot It Jimmy!” and “Rapid Transit”
To hell with you and your poetry—
cuts in. But it is there an authentic part of the conflict the poet knows, in its own rights, as the red wheelbarrow is. For what it is. An insistence in the poem.
Yet . . .
Eliot must be part of our picture. He worried about social forms, about being in good form. He was never quite sure about the form, the beginning and the end of that first long poem. About what belonged. As he worried too about who and what belonged in the right thing, in literature, in the true establishment. About what to include. “Do you advise printing ‘Gerontion’ as a prelude in book or pamphlet form?” he writes Pound: “Perhaps better omit Phlebas also??? Certainly omit miscellaneous pieces.” “The poem,” Pound wrote Eliot, “ends with the ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih’.” A period charade? But it was the first poem in which the American mind lay so mediumistically open to the wastes of Europe’s agony. “The great catastrophe to our letters,” Williams recalls in his Autobiography:
I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit . . . I had to watch him carry my world off with him, the fool, to the enemy . . .
Yet . . . “This is not to say that Eliot has not, indirectly, contributed much to the emergence of the next step in metrical construction, but if he had not turned away from the direct attack here, in the western dialect, we might have gone ahead much faster.”
“He might have become our adviser, even our hero,” Williams puts it. But he left the American language, the speech of childhood, the common speech—not for English,
but for the language of English literature.
The footnotes may have done the damage, as Eliot believed later. They sent readers to look up the sources, not to find the fountain of feeling back of the poem, but to add to their know-all. For a new class in America that now fills our departments of English, bent upon self-improvement, anxious about what was the right book to refer to, Eliot, having his own like proprieties, became a mentor. “He returned us to the classroom.” The Waste Land with its contrasts of an upper cultured world in its anxious aristocracy, “staying at the arch-duke’s, my cousin’s,” to “go south in the winter,” or sitting as the Lady does in “A Game of Chess,” uneasily, in a movie set of traditional rich decor, with another world always threatening to show itself, to show the culture up—dead who will not stay buried, songs that are “ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears”—this contrast fit and fed the literary needs of new young men in the Universities who were no longer climbing in society but climbing in culture, haunted by a world they had come from where their people had not read Kyd or Webster.
Eliot represented a high sophistication, as Noel Coward represented a low sophistication for those who were not serious-minded. He gave a histrionic remove. The poem suffered in its very success. It had been cut and reorganized to succeed, and had lost in its conscious form whatever unconscious form had made for the confusion of sequence, the “miscellaneous pieces” that did not seem to fit. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Out of whatever real ruin that threatened, Pound and Eliot had agreed finally upon the monumental artifice of a ruin, a ruin with an outline. “Complimenti, you bitch,” Pound writes Eliot: “I am wracked by the seven jealousies, and cogitating an excuse for always exuding my deformative secretions in my own stuff, and never getting an outline. I go into nacre and objets d’art.”
The heart of the poem was the unbearable mixing of things. The ruins were the ruins rising from adultery and rage, “when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting,” of the cuckold cursing “Co co rico” and of finding the way thru, the meaning of what must be undergone. The agony of the adulterous marriage is seen as the agony of the earth in the corruption and desire of Spring. The curse burns the earth back and then in the waste land there is finally the prayer for rain. The Shantih shantih shantih at the close is the cry of the stricken heart.
In the fashionable reading the mise en scène took over. The fame of the poet itself had triumphed over the pain of the poem. Eliot was not, in the outcome, stricken but celebrated. The poem, once the Depression years were there, seemed to be an historical prophecy. And in the twenties, in circles like the little group that inhabits Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness, the game of the poem was taken up in a social magic, the charging of things with symbolic powers, the ritual mixture of Christianity and another cult of adulterous suffering, with the help of the new cult of psychoanalysis. “The glasses turn to chalices,” Pound had written off gleefully to Eliot in those initial letters:
The glasses turn to chalices
In his fumbling analysis
The Waste Land, anyway, is part of our story. In my first years at the University of California, in 1937 and 1938, when there was no knowledge at all—if there is any now—of H.D.’s post-Imagist work, Palimpsest, Red Roses for Bronze, or Ion, in the reading lists of modern lit., when William Carlos Williams was unknown, and Ezra Pound with his Cantos relegated to the dubious territory of the “experimental” along with Stein and Finnegans Wake; Eliot and The Waste Land were established, along with Archibald MacLeish and W. H. Auden. With the difference—and so it is part of our story—that back of the literary aspect of the poem was another aspect, back of the respectability there was something shady. A rite, a dramatization of life, that was something more.
William Carlos Williams could take Eliot as his challenge, and against the cult of Europe, in the year of The Hollow Men 1925, seek to define the issue with In the American Grain. Against the Old World. Red Eric. “Rather the ice than their way: to take what is mine by single strength,” he begins. “The worst is that weak, still, somehow, they are strong: they in effect have the power, by hook or by crook.”
Did he see his own lot in Edgar Allan Poe, an exile in his homeland? “But in poetry he was at the edge—there was nothing—”:
Here in poetry, where it is said ‘we approach the gods,’ Poe was caught, instead, in his time . . .
Had he lived in a world where love throve, his poems might have grown differently. But living where he did, surrounded as he was by that world of unreality, a formless ‘population’—drifting and feeding—a huge terror possessed him.
Disarmed, in his poetry the place itself comes through. This is the New World. It is this that it does, as if—
That year H.D. published a Collected Poems. She had been known in Poetry and in The Egoist since that moment in 1912 when Ezra Pound had written off to Harriet Monroe “it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes, even if the subject is classic,” as an Imagist. She had been featured in Pound’s Des Imagistes, and then with her husband, Richard Aldington, had taken part in the later Imagist Anthologies of 1915, 1916, 1917. The word was set in whatever public mind: H.D., Imagist. Miss May Sinclair had said in The Egoist that H.D. was the Imagist. That was 1914. It did not mean what it has come to mean. In the confusion of Amy Lowell’s sponsorship, the movement came to include impressionism, not a heightening but a broadening of sensitivity. The taut line of H.D.’s verse was coupled now in the uninformed mind with the loosely conceived line of popularizers. Certain poems—“Sea Rose” or “Heat” or “Orchard”—became set pieces with “Patterns” among anthologizers. For H.D. in the public mind seemed a more refined Amy Lowell, capturing images.
Writing on Sea Garden in 1917, John Gould Fletcher said: “To penetrate H.D.’s inner meaning, it is only necessary that we approach her poetry with an open and responsive mind.” Imagist, Imagist, Imagist—the cuckoo sang in the ears of the day from his anthology nest. “It is really about the soul,” Fletcher warned, “or the primal intelligence, or the Nous, or whatever we choose to call that link that binds us to the unseen and uncreated.” But the possibility that the image was no mere impression but had to do with the Platonic image or might come full round to the Imago Christi went unheeded.
Then there was, for those who saw beyond the “Imagism,” the cult of something called Greece. Along with her earliest poems appeared translations from Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis and Hippolytus.
Artemis dominates: “She fronts the coast.” Say it is no more than a translation, a task set to learn the lineaments and spirit of Euripides. The “we” in H.D. will always then be in part the choral consciousness of the Greek drama; the way “we” are a true folk, and our individual fates appear to us as if they were enacted upon a stage for our common sense as audience. There is an “I” each of us, as a member of a chorus of citizens, artists, or folk witnesses, has:
I crossed sand-hills.
I stand among the sea-drift before Aulis
a knowledge of the people. “At least H.D. has lived with these things since childhood,” Pound says in that letter to Harriet Monroe. And the chorus tells “what happened”; the myth, the hearsay, comes from them. The heroes or the participants in the great fate do not see the myth—what the hearsay tells. They are projections of what the chorus fears will happen.
But Iphigeneia commanding the chorus:
Stand silent, you Greeks.
The fire kindles.
is also the inspired actor in the play. She is the genius, fired by the chorus, and thus hints go out of a likeness to the genius of the poem itself:
For I come to do sacrifice,
To break the might of the curse,
To honour the queen, if she permit,
The great one, with my death.
And out from Iphigeneia’s “death,” from her “fame”:
. . . spears will clash in the contest,
the waves dash upon the coasts of Chalkis. Remembering,
“She fronts the coast.”
In 1916 “The Shrine” appeared in Some Imagist Poets with the subscription “She Watches Over the Sea.” The “She” of the poem may be the lure, that has grandeur too, of a woman, a femme fatale:
It was evil—evil
when they found you,
when the quiet men looked at you—
Certainly the sequences of “shelter,” “full and sweet,” “tempting the quiet,” “evil” and then:
But you—you are unsheltered,
cut with the weight of wind—
you shudder when it strikes,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
when the tides swirl
your boulders cut and wreck
all of this can, and does, once we recognize the possibility, more than an age of an exposed headland, refer to a persona or mask of the emotional regularity in women, of sudden “treacherous” moods and passions that make Scylla—or here may it not be Artemis-Scylla—a prototype. “She” of the Shrine does appear in all her savage splendor back of Iphigeneia.
You brought me to the Greek light
And I will not hold you guilty
For my death
Iphigeneia says, addressing her father. But some ambiguous play may move here, for at first I mistook the address and had thought it was the Goddess she addressed:
Alas, day, you brought light,
You trailed splendour,
You showed us god:
“Artemis, rejoicer in blood-sacrifice,” the chorus calls the Goddess. As Iphigeneia volunteers to the sacrifice, she enters her “fate,” which is also her “fame”; she becomes both the blood-sacrifice and the rejoicer in blood sacrifice.
“Alas,” the chorus cries:
she steps forward
To destroy Ilium and the Phrygians.
The H.D. Book Page 25