The H.D. Book

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

  The possibility of explaining how she could, at one and the same time, be both on stage and in my loge never occurred to me. Just as a happy dream brings together the strangest events and our instinctive belief freely accepts it, in all its incongruity, as a phenomenon of life, so did I somnambulistically accept the presence of this marvelous creature. More than that, I realized, all at once, that there were secret bonds which tied me so closely to her, that she could not keep away from me even when she appeared on the stage.

  Then:

  She said that music was her only reality, and that she often believed she could understand in song much that was mystically hidden or evaded expression in life.

  There follows a moment of hallucinatory revelation in which Hoff mann, the author of the story (“the Amadeus, substituted for Wilhelm . . . a Mozartean afterthought”) in a sleight of name is also the author of the opera, is Mozart. It depends upon the old afterthought, the possibility of the actual name Amadeus held in common:

  ‘I know the frenzy and yearning of love’ [Donna Anna confides] ‘that were in your heart, when you wrote the part . . . in your last opera. I understood you. Your soul was laid bare to me in song! Yes,’ (here she called me by my first name) ‘Naturally, I have sung you. I am your melodies.’

  Here again, as in Tieck’s The Elves, the secret life is betrayed and the world of illusion dies. “As from a great distance, accompanied by the harmonica of an aerial orchestra” the author seems to hear Anna’s voice: “Non mi dir bell’ idol mio!”; then, in the Epilogue, Clever Man and Mulatto-Face, the Mid-Day critics discuss the death of the singer: “But that is what comes of overacting.” “Yes, yes. I warned her time and time again! The role of Donna Anna always affected her oddly. Yesterday, she carried on like one possessed.”

  For the author the opera had been “as though the most esoteric thoughts of a bewitched soul had become fixed in sound and had taken form and shape, standing out in relief against a remarkable concept”; his very life seems to have its source in the stage. Writing to his friend, Theodore, he says “This conflict between the divine and demoniac powers begets the notion of life on earth, just as the ensuing victory begets the notion of life above earth.” But this “notion of life” we see is the story of a ghost, an afterthought, that appears between our being and the other life that we know on the stage, in the story, in legend, in the poem, in the vision of painting and sculpture.

  I.

  Our figures of the patrons in late medieval painting belong to two worlds. We know not in The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin whether the Patron is in Her presence or She is in his house. In Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, Joos Vydt kneels in the life in contrast to the facing figure of St. John the Baptist who stands in the painting of stone, having the presence of a work of art within the Altarpiece itself. The patron, the donner, in the painting takes on flesh of flie, an illusion, in paint that seems life-like in contrast to the illusion of stone in the painting of the saint.

  In back of that Adoration of the Lamb, the great central figure of the Ghent Altarpiece, is another play of images, a cult or afterthought of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, a fifteenth-century charade—the Order of the Golden Fleece, where his court played Knights of the Round Table and Argonauts in one mystery. The blood of Flanders shed at Ghent, out of which Burgundy had great wealth, flows from the Lamb into the Grail. Christian figures—the Lamb, John the Baptist, the Bleeding Heart, the Cup—become one with the wool that was the source of the wealth; with the theatrical ideal of chivalry; became one, in turn, with Greek legend.

  It took wealth. It was in turn the creation of wealth. In this relationship between the artist and the patron, the artist—the true alchemist—transformed money into richness. For Colchis to be present in the court of Burgundy; for Karnak to be present in London or the glory that was Greece to be brought to Bryher. So, the Van Eycks painted for Philippe le Bon, tableaux of the chivalric mysteries, woven in turn into tapestries to transform the streets of Sluys where his bride Ysabel of Portugal landed in 1428, enhancing the actual world with another reality of the imagined world. And that imagined world of the Van Eycks takes on a solidity from properties of the patron’s world: the jeweled crown, the sumptuous robe, the golden throne, the burnished chandelier, the laver and basin have a greater immediacy. For the artist himself, Jan Van Eyck, had been brought into such a world by his patron, as ambassador of Philippe to the court of Portugal must have worn such robes.

  The reality that Gareth poses against Raymonde’s other world of lure and involvement or enrichment is the seeing thru lure to the things of common sense and hard cash. It is the Protestant ethic described by Weber in The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism that gives Gareth her one dimensional resistance. Putting together this picture of the patron Bryher, from “Narthex,” from “Let Zeus Record”—but also now three years after my first draft, from Bryher’s Heart to Artemis—I see how typically she resists luxury, phantasy; to keep money virtuous. It was the image of Artemis, the ardent spare beauty in which some ascetic necessity was satisfied that drew Bryher to H.D.’s poetry. For the artist it meant the beauty possible for one with limited means. For the patron it meant the beauty permissible for one who would maintain the responsibilities of capital, avoiding luxury and waste.

  Remembering McAlmon’s “Money Breeds Complications,” we remember too that the artist breeds complications in order to enrich: the intertwining and doubled images of marginal illuminations, the underpainting and mixing of tones in the luxuriance of Titian, the elaborations of the poet worked in interchanges of vowels and consonants, undermeanings and overmeanings. So Joyce, presented with the largest gift of the century by his patroness Harriet Weaver, developed and complicated his Finnegans Wake—a jeweled, overworked texture that only the extravagantly endowed artist could venture. Miss Weaver was dismayed for she had wanted some reiteration of the solid achievement Joyce had secured in Ulysses, her money’s worth; not this fairy gold or counterfeit of values.

  “Compare the ‘Phaedra’ and the ‘Hippolytus’ series which were actually written in Greece,” Bryher says in reviewing Hymen in 1922: “with ‘Cuckoo Song,’ ‘Thetis,’ ‘Evadne.’ Apart from an added intensity of color—the ‘lizard blue’ water, the ‘red sands’ of Crete” . . . but in “Phaedra” there was not only the added intensity of color, there was also the appearance of a counter force, protestant to Phaedra’s passion:

  For art undreamt in Crete,

  strange art and dire,

  in counter-charm prevents my charm

  limits my power:

  that may be the same limit that Raymonde sitting in the Square of St. Mark’s faces, the resistance the protestant ethic has against the alchemy, the transmutation of values, of the artist’s impulse. The modern patron, the capitalist patron, may be loyal, generous, conscientious, but he must also be righteous, and the art he sponsors must be valid, credible, creditable. For all of “wish” and “touch,” of “sea-magic” and Circe’s longing for the glance of Odysseus, Bryher in reviewing the poem “Circe” sees her as “any woman of intellect who, with the very sincerity of her vision, turns lesser minds ‘each to his own self’,” an image of the higher capitalist mind. It is not by her inability but by the very strength of her character that Gareth is not taken in by the honeyhorn of St. Mark’s cathedral with its saints and incrustations of wealthy suggestion. Bryher’s H.D. is the high-minded priestess of Artemis—the poetess set apart. But in the twenties, H.D., in the milieu provided by Bryher, changes. Athens was integrity, but now there is not only Athens. Another H.D. emerges in kinship with Venice and finds herself alienated from the earlier “pure” H.D. She has a secret alliance with things and people that Gareth hates. “Mordant brought me those blue hyacinths . . . How Gareth hated Mordant.” Phaedra in her passionate heat for Hippolytus offends Artemis: that is the play of the mid-20s, Hippolytus Temporizes. But also, between the artist and the patron, between the one who would transform reality and the one who would
use reality, there is a difference of view and even truth that quickens another division within the self of two images where Phaedra and Artemis contend.

  In “Narthex” we see for the first time the synthesis that will flower in her later work. In the composite image of St. Mark’s H.D. reaches forward towards a fusion of oriental opulence and Greek spirit in images now of the Renaissance Christian world. “I had enough of Greek things, I said I wanted something . . . so-called Christian mysticism that finds complete co-relation with so-called classicism,” Raymonde says to Daniel: “I have found it this time and with you, in Venice. I never really understood, accepted the renaissance till this time.”

  Entering more and more into the world of Bryher, H.D.’s major expression in this period is in the prose novelette that can provide elaborations and developments. Between 1925 and 1927 there are six published pieces: the three stories of Palimpsest, the children’s book The Hedgehog, the novel Hedylus, and the story “Narthex.” In 1928 and 1930 there are four more: two “Raymonde” stories “The Usual Star” and “Two Americans,” then “Kora and Ka” and “Mira-Mare.” There is a new—“precious” it could be felt—scene now: the cultivated love-life, the emotional transmutations of two’s and three’s, the divisions and multiplications of the authoring personality, the practised sensibilities belong to life in the higher circles of our society, the leisure class. Poems in Red Roses for Bronze appear not as works but as gifts or tribute. There is not only Raymonde’s “Say ‘Garry liked my writing,’ what did it mean? It meant, Garry paid my fare here and I have behaved outrageously” but there is also H.D.’s pathos in “Chance Meeting”:

  Take from me something,

  be it all too fine

  and untranslatable and worthless

  for your purpose,

  take it,

  it’s mine;

  In the drift of her writing in the twenties, she provides a picture of this world set apart by money from the common lot of working for a living, of the poet living from hand to mouth, and set apart by the post-war modernism from the traditions of the upper class. As the artist sees it: haunted by the unrealized wealth of associations, unreal then in the terms it has made for its reality. A fiction of sensibilities, these stories are related on the one hand to the art of Proust in the period before the war or of James in the golden age of American capitalism. Raymonde and Daniel in their triangle with Gareth, we find, are like Kate Croy and Merton Densher in their triangle with Milly Theale: “They are far from a common couple, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as befits the remarkable fashion in which fortune was to waylay and opportunity was to distinguish them,” James writes in the introduction to The Wings of the Dove: “—the whole strange truth of their response to which opening involves also, in its order, no vulgar art of exhibition; but what they have most to tell us is that, all unconsciously and with the best faith in the world, all by mere force of the terms of their superior passion combined with their superior diplomacy, they are laying a trap for the great innocence to come.”

  A fiction of an emotional drifting, these stories related on the other hand to the literature of the “lost” generation, to the romans-àclef of Mary Butts, especially Armed with Madness, The Death of Felicity Taverner, or Imaginary Letters, but also the popular novels of the day, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. The cult of the poem—Imagism—and the “we” H.D. had known in association with poets before the war was replaced now by the cult of the personality in other circles, verging upon the old orders of high society and upon the new orders of café society, little intense groups of ephemera having their day in the brief “modern” wave after the War that would run out in the “crack-up,” as it was for Fitzgerald, of the Depression. “Something not very far off the deification of man is on us now,” Mary Butts wrote in Traps for Unbelievers (1932):

  not, or not yet, of the kings and millionaires, but, and again, and this is primitive, of the conspicuous young men and women, our sexually desirable ones, whose nature it is to wax and wane and be replaced. Our Year-in-Year-out spirits, eniautoi daimones, whose beauty is no stronger than a flower.

  So Daniel Kinouel, Gareth’s husband, is an agonizing lure for Raymonde in “Narthex”:

  the turn, she could almost feel it, of fine collar bone under the grey or under the dark blue or under the fawn-brown of his shoulders. She had been so vivid, so certain of what had been there that there had seemed no reason for reaching across, drawing simply as one draws a curtain from before some holy statue, the cloth from those lean shoulders . . .

  In the poem “Red Roses for Bronze” the avidity is not so tempered:

  but sensing underneath the garment seam

  ripple and flash and gleam

  of indrawn muscle

  and of those more taut,

  I feel that I must turn and tear and rip

  the fine cloth

  from the moulded thigh and hip,

  force you to grasp my soul’s sincerity,

  and single out

  me,

  me,

  something to challenge,

  handle differently.

  They turn, twist, test each other to produce flashes of higher emotion. The noli me tangere, that is so important a part of D. H. Lawrence’s sexual design, is important here; there is also their living off of their nerves or their erotic excitement, living beyond their means, dependent as they are upon Gareth. Like Lawrence, they use the potentiality of homosexual attractions to heighten the heterosexual bond. In London, Raymonde had held Daniel up to her lover Mordant, as if she fired the one man like a crystal before the furnace heat of the other, it seems to her; and, sitting in Venice, she recalls “this sacrificial thing between them, great bulk of remembered (in London) male body, heavy thighs” of Mordant to key up the idea of Daniel as Hermes. The double triangle image of Katherine-Mordant-Raymonde / Ray Bart–Gareth-Daniel is the instrument of an erotic art. We remember from Williams’s 1905 the naive magic of “She said I was Rosalind in As You Like It and she was Celia”; but now more terrible powers are called up to inhabit the drama of life.

  Daniel follows to the Cathedral, where Gareth will not go, to fetch Raymonde: “Gareth is waiting.” They have just this place and time before they must return, before Raymonde says to Daniel “We must go back to Gareth”:

  ‘Look at the drinking fountain’ meant ‘and how is Garry?’ Daniel knew that the ‘whole renaissance is in this drinking fountain’ meant ‘I am worried about Garry.’ The mind, a lily, rising on tall stem, rose out of confusion, out of hysteria . . . ‘I loved her . . . terribly.’

  ‘I mean,’ a voice continued, her voice? ‘I have loved . . . terribly. It’s terrible to love and know oneself inadequate and helpless.’ ‘So she says.’ ‘So—?’ ‘Gareth. She says she is sorry for me if . . . I love . . . Ray Bart.’ ‘Being sorry does no good to any one, I am sorry for myself, harassed and lacerated loving . . . Daniel.’ Sparks were drawn into one tall light. One candle burned where inappositely darkness had made cornice and square mosaic shine like gold fish.

  The two hermetic lovers practice cruelty as if to strike a light, flint against flint. “I know why people hate you,” Raymonde will flash out: “People hate you for the same reason that they hate me, Daniel.” And Daniel will flash back:

  ‘You have the tortured silly smile of some archaic statue.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Rather tight. Looking mincing almost.’ ‘I know.’ ‘You don’t know, I’m rather glad you don’t know.’ ‘Why—why glad Daniel?’ ‘It’s—horrible.’

  In “The Usual Star” (1928), the beauty of Daniel is thematic: “incandescence of swan features and the famous Swedish film star,” it seems to Raymonde; it can also include her, for there is the “incandescence of the two of them, burning with their cerebral intensity”—an identification in beauty. “Raymonde wanted Marc de Brissaic to protect her from intolerable incandescence.” In the twenties the great cult of beauty arises in those lights of the screen, g
athering all possible erotic attractions: Garbo or Valentino, existing as they do in an androgynous lure. “Human nature was not meant for that strain,” Mary Butts writes of the cult of person: “The star-dust at Hollywood is full of dead stars.”

  In “Two Americans” (1930), the presence of the great negro star Saul Howard awakens in Raymonde some other identification with him as an artist or an American that exorcises the hold Daniel had had. “ ‘No, it’s altogether this way. You see,’ she was surprised to hear what she said, ‘he’s removed a silver thorn out of my side, called Daniel.’ ”

  Outside the charged circle of this “incandescence”—as outside the circle of the Imagist poets—there is a “they,” those who do not understand, who misjudge: the general’s wife, the pro-consul’s widow of the poem “Halcyon.” H.D. must have been aware of how little sympathy the middle-class, more importantly, how little sympathy the professional class had for this disestablished, self-centered life of the rich. Her discomfort can show itself in the sense of vulgarity about her. But there is also the sense of being hated by the vulgar that she had known in another way as a member of the pre-War circle of poets. The “they” now are the economically responsible, the solid and moral middle-class, and Gareth, having her solid upper middle-class attitudes—having after all the “reality” of the hard cash—can seem to belong at times to “them.” In “Halcyon” we find:

  ‘tinsel’ they said the other lives were,

  all those I loved,

  I was forgot;

  and later:

  I never had an illusion,