The H.D. Book

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

  Gareth and Daniel are late-war and post-war eyes. “Garry held true, fibre and valour but with strident inhibitions enough to drive any one, let alone poor nerve-shattered Rockway, to destruction. Garry had to be like that . . . ” to survive. “Garry links me up to the post-war people,” Raymonde thinks, “I link Garry up to the war people. We have held on sometimes hating each other . . . as now.”

  Two countries, two times: H.D. ambiguously American-English, before-the-war / modern, felt her life itself as a link of a larger design, an interweaving of two areas of pattern. Two continents: the Old World and the New World. But then there was also the duality of feeling. In “Narthex,” as years later in The War Trilogy, she builds interlocking patterns of her two’s and three’s, of fours and sevens, to compose the complex of her feelings and thought. “Classic Venice, romantic Venice (Raymonde was debauched with the whole spectacle), poster Venice, post-card Venice, Othello Venice, clap-trap stage Rialto Venice became real . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wagner and Duse and George Sand Venice (she was frankly reeling with it) came true, became so many sets of feeling to cope with.”

  It is this very multiphasic association that alienates Raymonde from Gareth. “Garry saw in one dimension . . . outgrown trick of pre-war Raymonde’s.” “Ages kept coming up into ages where they don’t belong, Raymonde was stricken with it, ghost ages like the dove in the light globe, Tintoretto swings, dove-sun into his barn annunciation in the Scuolo di San Rocco.” And Gareth, who does not see this way, is left out. “Propitiate Gareth,” Raymonde commands herself, “get her into it.” “She had spread wide wings and Garry (this was the honor of it) hadn’t. Garry was sulking visibly in sun-light.”

  “Garry was staring at her. Be decent, Raymonde. Garry sent you the wire, got you out of vibrant, weary, over-wrought loneliness and tension. Garry paid your fare here. You’re the guest of Gareth. Be decent. You have behaved horribly.” But the fact remained: “Garry couldn’t know, odd dissociated half relationship with Rockway, emotion and all its tangled connotations. Garry moved in one cycle, had just one dial to go by . . . Garry didn’t understand emotion and all its overlayers, the seasons so to speak, marked in zodiacal symbol like those seasons now part of a sort of coronal to the madonna . . . that blue garmented love-mother with time ticking away above it.”

  When we read Aldington’s Life for Life’s Sake, McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, or (this year, 1963) Bryher’s Heart to Artemis, these have in common a one-dimensional seeing, no mind for emotion’s overlayers. They seem to be rivals of the poet; both Aldington and Bryher putting down Pound, uninterested finally in the poetry to which H.D.’s work belongs.

  “Let Zeus Record,” the sequence in homage to her angel in Red Roses for Bronze, may also be in propitiation. For to get her into it, H.D. had made painful disclosures of her inner ambivalence of feeling. These are poems of praise too then, not only for Bryher’s loyalty, her “one dimension,” in the face of H.D.’s mixed emotions, but for her attendance in a time when Love seemed dead:

  yet when Love fell

  struck down with plague and war,

  you lay white myrrh-buds

  on the darkened lintel;

  you fastened blossom

  to the smitten sill;

  The dedication of The Walls Do Not Fall in 1942 is not a propitiation. In a lifetime the poetess and her patroness had come to the understanding of old companions, living in some recognition of their differences. But it is perhaps a payment of a kind, “for Karnak,” a gift in return for the gift of 1923. A return.

  And the poem itself begins as a letter from H.D. in London to Bryher, who was still in Switzerland in 1942. Just here: “from your (and my) old town-square”; but then, imperceptibly, it continues to be written for us, for all her readers.

  V.

  “for Karnak 1923”

  In 1920 Bryher had made real her promise that “she would herself see that the baby was protected and cherished and she would take me to a new world, a new life.” She had made Greece possible, “a new world”—but the New World was America, the first mother-land. In the latter part of 1920, in fact, Bryher and H.D. had gone to America, to see, as if for a last time, the old New World. So Bryher had been guardian angel, but also nurse or mid-wife, taking H.D. from her old life into a new, a second mother-land that was Greece. “My mother’s name was Helen,” H.D. tells us in Tribute to Freud. And the psychoanalyst had interpreted her desire for Greece as a desire for union with her mother. “I was physically in Greece, in Hellas (Helen). I had come home to the glory that was Greece,” H.D. writes.

  Geographically, this Greece was Athens or the isles, as in translating, for H.D. it was Euripides or Sappho. But in time, Hellenism meant for H.D. not Athens, the classic period, but the great Hellenic dispersion after Alexander—the city of Alexandria then, and Egypt. Her Hellenic time belongs to the stage that Gilbert Murray in his Five Stages of Greek Religion called “The Failure of Nerve,” in the orientalizing Greek world between the third century B.C. and the second century A.D.

  “The world of Hellenism was a changed and enlarged world,” Professor W. W. Tarn writes in his Hellenistic Civilisation: “Though the particularism of the Greek city-state was to remain vigorous enough in fact, it had broken down in theory; it was being replaced by universalism and its corollary, individualism. The idea emerges of an oecumene or ‘inhabited world’ as a whole, the common possession of civilised men.” “It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism,” it seems to Murray. “The personality of the individual has free scope,” Professor Tarn observes, but Murray sees: “a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient enquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God.”

  For the Hellenistic Greek, such as Plutarch, Egypt was the source of wisdom, at Sais, at Karnak. Helen, in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, is hidden away in an Amen-temple that may be at Karnak, in a “mother” back of Greece, back of America. And in Palimpsest, the book in which H.D. in the mid-twenties sought to delineate her Hellenistic consciousness related to the modern period, Ermy in “Murex” is a Jew, but she is also “The East. The lotos of Buddha.” She is “dead, unopened, unawakened”; she is “Egypt.” What Murray called the Failure of Nerve was also the mixing of Greek with Jewish, Indian, and Egyptian civilisations—the reawakening of the ancient world in the birth of a new. So, in Palimpsest the third “chapter” or story is “Secret Name,” “Excavator’s Egypt.”

  We too are excavators. In the vulgar eloquentia of our day we have a valuable coinage “to dig,” that may mean in the popular sense “to go in for”; that makes sense, deeper sense, in light of how archaeology has awakened our imagination of origins or sources in time past, as meaning to dig thru layers of what a thing is, to get back to the roots and to reconstruct from fragments. Back of that, the love one must have for the idea of Troy or the Mayan thing to go digging for it.

  Here, anyway, is a last find for the day. Some glimpse of another previous world, though it was contemporary also, seen in the genre of “Secret Name.” “Hipparchia” and “Murex” may be compared with the novels and short stories of Mary Butts, to the life of Speed the Plough, which appeared in 1923, or of Ashe of Rings, which was published by Contact Editions, closely associated thru McAlmon and Bryher with H.D.’s world. And in her later historical novels of the thirties, in The Macedonian and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra, Mary Butts portrays the dawn and the height of the Hellenistic spirit. For the connoisseur of The Little Review, The Dial, Pagany, or Life and Letters Today, Mary Butts and H.D. appeared in one context and must have had their resonances.

  In turn, “Secret Name” recalls another writer of the twenties—this time not a member of the avant-garde but a popular writer—Algernon Blackwood. I never asked H.D. if she had read Blackwood. He belonged to the same generation as Yeats, and in The Centaur in 1911 he had portrayed a Gre
ece behind Greece itself, an elemental Nature that man knows in dream. If she had never read Blackwood, H.D. was to enter the same thought. “I’ve begun at the wrong end,” O’Malley says in The Centaur; “I shall never reach men through their intellects . . . I must get at them from within. To reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise up from within. I see the truer way. I must do it from the other side. It must come to them—in Beauty . . . I can work it better from the other side—from that old, old Garden which is the Mother’s heart.”

  Ghost stories have to do with our feeling about the presence of the past in the present where we are. Blackwood, like M. L. R. James before him, had a feeling of the evil of the past, the ecstasy of the past as a power over man. James in 1904 had published the first of a series of volumes of such stories that had their fascination, the very real impact, in the real terror and disgust which James, the scholar of heretical documents, had found in those “ghosts” of old ways that lasted on, behind the scenes, in Christian history.

  But for Blackwood the beauty was greater than the evil. Like Yeats, he was at home in the occult and supernatural, most alive in the magic of the Eternal Return. To be possessed, in The Promise of Air (1918) or The Bright Messenger (1922), is to be inspired, flooded by a larger consciousness, an elemental but also an angelic Self. The horror of the orthodox Christian James gives way in the theosophical Hermeticist Blackwood to a floating sympathy with all spiritual imagination.

  The story “Secret Name” may have an intermediate kind in the psychological ghost-stories of May Sinclair, but in its central revelation of an other world, we are, for the first time in H.D.’s work, clearly in the genre of the theosophical romance.

  Memories of childhood and events in the past, and certain dreams, H.D. tells us in Tribute to Freud, are “retained with so vivid a detail that they become almost events out of time.” Memories, dreams, and then—it is the core of her memoir—hallucination: the “writing on the wall,” actually projected before her eyes on the wall of a hotel bedroom in Corfu 1920. It was for Freud, she tells us, “the most dangerous or the only actually dangerous ‘symptom’.” It was the essence of Imagism, the immediate presentation.

  Not until the Second World War did H.D. come, as Blackwood and Yeats had, into theosophical circles. She may be speaking, in the Freud memoir of 1944, from her later view, but not necessarily, for the concept of second-sight belongs to folk lore at large and the idea of vision to poet lore, before whatever doctrine there may be in theosophical initiation. “For myself,” H.D. continues: “I consider this sort of dream or projected picture or vision as a sort of half-way state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who, for lack of a more definite term, we must call psychics or clairvoyants.” Then later: “I may say that never before and never since have I had an experience of this kind.”

  Helen Fairwood’s hallucination or vision or presentational immediacy of the little birth-house or temple or tomb it seems to her, “set square with no imperfection or break in its excellent contour, like some exquisite square of yellow honeycomb” in the court at Karnak, is an effort to tell about this other actual presentation. Phantasy, tradition, surround it, and it almost seems a moment of what Cocteau so loves—the eternal return. But this is not, we realize, made up, as Helen Fairwood’s surrounding associations are a make-up, but—that is the danger, the madness—come from a source independent of our creative mind, our conscious daydream. The word rhymes with all the surrounding pattern we had been weaving but it comes as if of itself.

  Festugière in La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste comments that the evaluation of such presentations as a higher good or reality is a trait of the Hellenistic period, distinctly contrasting with our own sense of such presentations as mental disorders. Epilepsy, paranoia, or heat-stroke in the Egyptian desert—the Mi’Raj, the visionary trance, the writing on the wall, has been declared beyond our ken, out of bounds.

  Chapter 2

  MARCH 11, SATURDAY. 1961. (1963)

  I have been reading recently along a line in the German romantic tradition, perhaps with a vague sense of relation to this search that has a beginning and an end in the entity H.D., but at the same time it seemed to me a rest or a change from my daily preoccupation to read these romantic tales and phantasies in the evening before sleep. Then I found myself following clues of what I sought for in these tales of man’s psyche in the northern forest world. Long ago, as a child, I had known Tieck’s The Elves, and after years I had read it again, but now—in the light, that for some must seem the shadow, of the materia poetica as I have begun to see it in my study—Tieck’s fairy tale told its story anew. That folk that live in the fir-ground—“the dingy fir-trees with the smoky huts behind them, the ruined stalls, the brook flowing past with a sluggish melancholy,” “as if bewitched and excommunicated, so that even our wildest fellows will not venture into it” it appears to most eyes—that is really the ground at once of an enchantment and of a fructifying source, seem now the people of a despised way of life, gypsies they appear in the story, pagan remnant or Albigensian outcasts they may be; now the people of some outcast area of the psyche itself, of a repressed content that to the conscious mind seems the home of “a miserable crew that steal and cheat in other quarters, and have their hoard and hiding-place here” but that is in the unconscious a wonderland, the hidden garden of an other nature; now the people of the romantic impulse, mistrusted and disowned—the romantic fallacy, the right-minded call it. The magic of this source, whether it be an actual company, of poets or heretics, or a hidden area of the psyche, or a source of the poem, lies in its being secret to all who have not entered into its inner life. Once it is explained, shown up for what it is, once the Secret is told that man’s life has its abundance and blessing in this fearful, rejected ground, and that good fortune perishes. “Beware of telling any one of our existence; or we must fly this land, and thou and all around will lose the happiness and blessing of our neighborhood,” the Elfin Lady tells Mary in the story. And in the end, in anger at her husband’s injustice to those people that he sees as a nuisance to the country and their huts a blight, Mary cries out “Hush! for they are benefactors to thee and to every one of us,” “and as Andres at every word grew more incredulous, and shook his head in mockery,” she discloses the existence of the Elves.

  Now all enchantment falls, and it is not only the Elvin world that disappears, illusion that it is, so that all night a host passes out of the neighborhood, and in the morning all is still. But also the illusion of the actual world fades:

  The freshness of the wood was gone; the hills were shrunk, the brooks were flowing languidly with scanty streams, the sky seemed gray; and when you turned to the Firs, they were standing there no darker or more dreary than the other trees. The huts behind them were no longer frightful; and several inhabitants of the village came and told about the fearful night, and how they had been across the spot where the gipsies had lived, how these people must have left the place at last, for their huts were standing empty, and within had quite a common look, just like the dwellings of other poor people.

  The Square of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in “Narthex” exists in Raymonde’s seeing into it the way she does, not seeing thru it. “Crawl into Saint Mark’s Cathedral like a bee into a furled flower head”; but “It was true that you could slit the thing to tatters, it had none of that quality Gareth liked . . . reality.”

  The dark and the light, the fearful and the lovely, belong to the romantic illusion and disillusion. The “O wind, rend open the heat” with which we began belonged to the same world of romance-living as Tieck and Wagner. My sense is that we are coming from what were once national traditions, “German” or “English” or church orthodoxies of belief and doctrine or progressive views into something else, a community of meanings, where we are to inherit—all things seen now as works of the imagination of what man is—a thread of being in which there are many strands. A psyche will be formed having roots in all the old cultures; and—
this seems to me one of the truths I owe most to Charles Olson’s poetry—the old roots will stir again. But this sense of impending inheritance is in the thought itself; for long before us, in the nineteenth century, Carlyle, Emerson, or George MacDonald took their thought in Novalis, Tieck, or Hoffmann as we do now.

  So, last night, in this sequence of German Romantics—Tieck’s stories translated by Carlyle, Wagner’s Ring cycle, and then the “Helen Phantasmagoria” of Goethe’s Faust—I went on to Hoffmann’s Don Juan and with Don Juan this morning my thought takes its lead.

  E. T. A. Hoffmann. It had been “E. T. W.”; the biographical note by Christopher Lazare says that “the Amadeus, later substituted for Wilhelm, was a Mozartean afterthought.” Hoffmann, we read, “yearned for some signal from the unknown.”

  In “Don Juan or A Fabulous Adventure That Befell a Music Enthusiast on His Travels,” the narrator is an author (we take him for the author then) who wakes from deep sleep in a strange inn to the sound of an overture. He is told when he rings for the valet that a door opens from his bed-chamber into the theater itself, where Don Juan by the famous Maestro Mozart of Vienna is being presented. He attends then, sitting in this special visitor’s loge that opens off of his room.

  During the opera he hears in the loge beside him “the rustle of a silken garment,” senses “a gentle, perfumed breath of air close to me.” In the intermission he turns from his enchantment in the Mozart opera where he had been most drawn to the actress singing Donna Anna to find . . . to face the Lady of the play herself. “The possibility,” the author of the story writes: