The H.D. Book

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

  “We see these skies here,” the Poetess said, “because we are very close to the destruction of the world.”

  III.

  In the middle ground of the panel, where men and gods mingle, under the stars and the fire, under fire (light and flame), what we see in the Heavens and what we see in terms of our evolutionary life (above and below) are dimensions now of something happening in a multiple image, like those revelations of one thing in another or mingling of images in Salvador Dalí’s dream paintings.

  Where in the foreground of our Nature the life of the worm is enacted, suggesting in his cocoon a shroud, and in his metamorphosis a resurrection; in the middle-ground of our human Person, we are reminded that men, gods, wear winged and horned head-dresses:

  as the butterfly

  antennae,

  or the erect king-cobra crest

  to show how the worm turns.

  These images are rhymes and recall previous occurrences of the poem to the mind as echoes of sound do. There is, as there is a highly developed melody of syllables, a melody of figures in H.D.’s work. Neither rime nor image occurs as a device, to punctuate line-end or to enliven some convention in its keeping; but they are cells of the tissue of meaning and feeling itself. Blake’s Worm on the Leaf is now not only “thy Mother’s grief” but Pharaoh, Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt—two kingdoms or two natures or two minds, and will be, in verse XXXV of The Walls Do Not Fall:

  in the light of what went before,

  “be ye wise . . . as serpents,” woven into one figure, a felt design in the poem that in turn transforms our sense of design in history where Blake, Pharaoh, and the cunning of the serpent that The Zohar tells us Jacob stole from Laban, enter in to a new continuum.

  “Transformation aims at the continuum of all perceptions,” Robert Kelly writes in his “Notes on the Poetry of Images” (1960). “Percepts are from dreams or from waking, rise from the unconscious or from the retina of the awakened eye. Poetry, like dream reality, is the juncture of the experienced with the never experienced. Poetry, like waking reality, is the fulfillment of the imagined and the unimagined.” Then: “Poetry is not the art of relating word to word, but the ACT of relating word to percept, percept to percept, image to image until the continuum is achieved.” And: “The progression of images constitutes the fundamental rhythm of the poem.”

  There is always reference to tapestry and painting—these images in H.D.’s work are interwoven; the movement of the poem in time is parallel to an imagined movement of the eye over the surface of the larger picture in time. But the fusion of voice heard and image seen along the track of a moving, changing picture is more immediately related to the sound-track and the film of the newest “visual” art, the movie. The sequence of the poem in which in the opening “shots” we see first “rails” then “rails gone” then “guns” then the old town square, in fog, for there is “mist and mist-grey, no colour,” and the frame changes to reveal “Luxor bee, chick and hare” carved in stone writing. The transitions, the flash-backs, the movement of the eye from object to object to tell its story, the projection—all these aspects of H.D.’s art relate not only to the stream of consciousness or the free associations of her analysis with Freud in 1933 and 1934 but to the techniques of the cinema.

  Answering The Little Review’s valedictory questionnaire in May 1929, H.D. wrote: “Just at the moment I am involved with pictures. We have almost finished a slight lyrical four reel little drama, done in and about the villages here, some of the village people and English friends. The work has been enchanting, never anything such fun and I myself have learned to use the small projector and spend literally hours alone here in my apartment, making the mountains and village streets and my own acquaintances reel past me in light and light and light. All the light within light fascinates me, ‘satisfies’ me, I feel like a cat playing with webs and webs of silver.” In this new art, contemporaneous with H.D.’s own lifetime, painting and tapestry could be recalled. H.D. sees the projection of the image as a web of silver, or is it the thread of film that she means? But “web” occurs again—it is not only what she most wants to do or know or be, it is also what she most fears: “I fear the being caught in any one set formula or set of circumstances, I fear poverty in that it might catch me up in some ugly web of the wrong sort of things and the wrong sort of attitudes. I fear people from the future who may ‘trap’ me.”

  Between 1928 and 1930, Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher’s second husband, edited and published Close Up, “The Only Magazine Devoted to Films as an Art,” with Bryher as assistant editor. Old associates appear from the literary nexus of the early twenties—Gertrude Stein is there to contribute her avant-garde note, and Dorothy Richardson writes an elegiac to the silent film. But the writers in Close Up seem not to be associated, as writers in Des Imagistes, The Little Review, transition, or Exile, were, with a common cause in a new art in writing; they suggest often the intimate amateur correspondence of a social “in-group.” “(Dear H.D. Pardon the theft)” Hay Chowl can write in quoting an article of H.D.’s. The “We have finished a slight lyrical four reel little drama” of H.D.’s reply to The Little Review, with “some of the village people and English friends” came as an account of how far she was from her old literary associations. The thought of Pound, Williams, or Lawrence is remote now; even the profession of poetry will not do when she is asked “What should you most like to do, to know, to be?” In this “Bryher” milieu new associations were forming however that will play their part in H.D.’s return in full to the profession of poetry in her last phase. When the London correspondent of Close Up, Robert Herring, later becomes editor of Life and Letters Today a new literary context appears. Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, and H.D. will be a familiar expectation; Bryher is an even more constant contributor; Edith Sitwell enters the picture (and there may be a common ground of magic and visionary prophetic mode between the later poetry of Edith Sitwell and H.D.’s War Trilogy); carried over from the impetus of Close Up, the art of film becomes a new department of Life and Letters Today, and more important, the genius of Eisenstein is brought into the new ground.

  The history of “in-groups”—Bloomsbury, Villefranche, or Basel—has yet to be studied out. Literary historians are shy, even unhappy, of accounting for the way purely social factors enter in to the picture of the development of the art. We are attracted, moth-mind to the flame, by the brilliance of the company. Within the charmed circle the four reel little drama glows, we are drawn in. To have been included! But just here I falter. From the outside, the circle is an armed exclusion. Raymonde, Gareth, Daniel in H.D.’s novels test each other as if they tested the defenses of a citadel. One could never be certain that circumstances, surroundings—for a moment these walls suggest the other walls of The War Trilogy—would not set one apart among “the wrong sort of things and the wrong sort of attitudes.” Here, as in the web that satisfies and the web that she fears of H.D.’s reply, the attractive social circle is forbidding; fearful within, and fearful without.

  The group of Bryher’s friends is involved now, as she is, in films. In film-talk and film study, and also in the making of a film. For Kenneth Macpherson in 1929 worked on a film with H.D. as star. Somewhere within the charmed circle copies may still exist. The “silver-self” “cast” as a “star” by Narcissus in the poem “Myrtle Bough” takes on a new meaning. And the medium of film is ultimately in the image projected in terms of light, cast upon the screen. Back and forth the puns of being cast in a star-role, being cast on the screen, being cast in a new light dance in bewildering webs of exchange. “The light within light fascinates me,” H.D. wrote. It’s a risky reading that for a moment again another impulse arises linking the flood of light streaming out from the movie projector with “the rain of beauty” of The Flowering of the Rod and just beyond with “where great stars pour down / their generating strength.” “The sky is skyey apparition,” Dorothy Richardson writes in Close Up: “white searchlight. The book remains the
intimate, domestic friend, the golden lamp at the elbow.”

  In the book tapestry, painting, film may be evoked as one vision where the mind is weaver, painter, projector. Here images are not seen in locus of the subconscious or locus of the eye’s retina, but they are visualized, created in the mind’s light that men have always puzzled over. In the midst of the City under Fire in The Walls Do Not Fall there is a light in which the artist works “circled with what they call the cartouche.” The cartouche in French is an escutcheon upon which or within which figures that are emblematic appear; it is also a cartridge. In Webster’s it says: “2. An oval or oblong figure, especially one on an Egyptian monument containing a sovereign’s name. 3. In some fireworks, the case containing the inflammable materials.” H.D. makes a passing joke about it, a play of words between her art and the rival war: “folio, manuscript, old parchment / will do for cartridge cases”; and then that “Hatshepsut’s name”

  is still circled

  with what they call the cartouche.

  Like the surrealists after Freud, she sets up new movements in the mind by the evocation of puns. Or like Eisenstein in his new language of cinematography where montage, rapid sequences and juxtapositions of images extend the vocabulary of the film. “The technical possibility,” he writes in Close Up, “foolishly called a ‘trick,’ is undoubtedly just as important a factor in the construction of the new cinematography as is the new conception of staging from which it is sprung.” Where it is not their pointedness or cleverness but their power to disturb our set idea, our sense of outline, that counts.

  Here the content of the cartouche, the Queen’s name, and then the thought of her, so that even in reference she appears to the mind’s eye, is something that threatens the cherished reality of the tangible; as the immediacy of God in evocation or invocation, beyond the sensory or outside the sensory, is something we resist the thought of. Stars, immortals, gods, contained in their cartouche or cartridge, the poem, if they invade our sense of the actual, disturb, are “inflammable materials.”

  And The War Trilogy itself in the mode of the apocalyptic revelation contains within the circle of its ecstatic longing and belonging the light of joy that is also the flame-heat of a stored-up wrath. The rain of fire is God’s wrath, and in a curious emanation the “sword” emerges from the “word.” Were it not for men’s thoughts and dreams, we realize, there would have been no war. The realization, once it is there, never ceases to trouble H.D. The terror and evil of the war give power and beauty to the poem.

  Never in Rome

  so many martyrs fell;

  not in Jerusalem,

  never in Thebes,

  so many stood and watched

  chariot-wheels turning,

  from the fearful scene a proud music takes over, and the poet’s voice takes on strength and resonance. The poem evoking, summoning forth from where it was hidden, this meaning of war, wrath, and the fulfillment of prophecy—is apocalyptic. Ammunition. A cartouche.

  Within the circle of initiates—the “we” that in H.D.’s life had been a group of poets and then an exclusive social group, and now, in wartime London, was a group of occultists—the encircling containment of an art, a knowledge in which figures become emblematic—we see the double image of a group and their patron or leader. One, among whom H.D. as writer belongs, children of Hermes,

  wistful, ironical, willful

  who have no part in

  new-world reconstruction

  take on from the cartouche an Egyptian character. But the cartouche that contains or surrounds the group is also “a spacious bare meetinghouse” where, within the congregation of the dream, a man appears, “upright, slender.” Once, long ago, she had been in love with Him in Daniel. There is no time for that. The whole scene exists in a split-second. The poet was dozing, perhaps . . . anyway: “then I woke with a start / of wonder and asked myself” she says. He is, or might have been, Ra, Osiris, Amen. In the projection, between his circle and the stars, he appears in another avatar as the zodiacal Aries painted in His Zeus glory—the Golden Fleece and the Lamb, as in the late middle ages He had indeed been worshipped at the Court of Burgundy. It is the Christ who impends, and His advent is created in the poem as it was created in history in the alembic of troubled boundaries, superimposed and adulterated civilizations, dissolved religions—a “trick” montage of Greek, Persian, Hindu, Egyptian, Syrian gods in one unorthodox Jewish god, a synthetic realization scandalous to the orthodox, in His incarnation an heretical affront, as H.D.’s realization in The War Trilogy was scandalous to the literary orthodoxy of the day. It was “silly,” “irresponsible,” “compounded of primitive elements yet rather appealing to a sensibility both modern and confused,” to present the world of the poet’s imagination in the old sense of the dream-vision; to be aware thruout that this dream-vision was still the very human mode of thought that Freud had studied; and in it all to insist upon the divine inspiration. Not only the thought of the Master in the dream but His Presence:

  In the meeting house, we see who the new Master over Love is, whom the star from the beginning announced:

  He might even be the authentic Jew

  stepped out from Velasquez;

  As long ago the sculptor appeared at work between the stone and the light in the poem “Pygmalion,” creating a medium at once for his art and for the god, and H.D. herself pictured her part as poet in terms of the chiseled line, the tempered and hammered image, now the painter appears at work between the dream and the realization or incarnation, and H.D. names the palette as one with script and letters that:

  are magic, indelibly stamped

  on the atmosphere somewhere.

  The magic charges the Christ of Velasquez with living Presence; a confusion between what the painter has made and what has inspired the painter in which the work of art has a life of its own. So that the poet recalling the eyes in the painting lowered know that open they “would daze, bewilder,” and in that bewilderment then testifies:

  I assure you that the eyes

  of Velasquez’ crucified

  now look straight at you,

  and they are amber and they are fire.

  IV.

  “An image, in our sense,” Pound writes in his 1916 memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, “is real because we know it directly. If it have an age-old traditional meaning this may serve as proof to the professional student of symbology that we have stood in the deathless light, or that we have walked in some particular arbour of his traditional paradiso, but that is not our affair. It is our affair to render the image as we have perceived or conceived it.” In “The Serious Artist” (1913), he saw that the responsibility of the arts was to “bear witness and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man.” “Even this pother about gods reminds one that something is worthwhile,” he went on. And in “Religio” from the same pre-war period, Pound presents the Renaissance neo-paganism of Gemistos Plethon, Ficino, or Pico della Mirandola, the higher humanism in which gods are “eternal states of mind” manifest “when the states of mind take form” that may appear to the sense of vision or to the sense of knowledge. Gnostic then as well as imagist, but not Christian. “What are the gods of this rite?” Pound asks, and answers: “Apollo, and in some sense Nelios, Diana in some of her phases, also the Cytherean goddess.” “To what other gods is it fitting, in harmony or in adjunction with these rites, to give incense?” “To Kore and to Demeter, also to lares and to oreiads and to certain elemental creatures.”

  Form and rite here are not associated by Pound with the image and practice of the poet, though, as in “Religio” it is by beauty that we know the divine forms, in another early essay “The Tradition” (1913) the tradition in poetry is “a beauty which we preserve,” and in passing, Pound tells us “We know that men worshipped Mithra with an arrangement of pure vowel-sounds.” This is as far as Pound goes toward a suggestion of the poet’s creative involvement with the divine world. Listing the reports that the artist must not fal
sify, Pound in “The Serious Artist” includes that he must not falsify his report “as to the nature of his ideal of this, that or the other, of god”—where Pound has all but put god aside among the random fancies of some men, with “this, that or the other,” as if he wanted to be sure he would not be taken for a Christian sentimentalist or enthusiast. “If god exist,” he adds. And not an “ideal” but a fact: there is no qualification here of “if the life force exist.” “We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy,” Pound argues: “something more or less like electricity or radio-activity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion.”

  In “Cavalcanti” Pound speaks directly of the god in the work of art: “The best Egyptian sculpture is magnificent plastic; but its force comes from a non-plastic idea, i.e., the god is inside the statue. . . . The force is arrested, but there is never any question about its latency, about the force being the essential, and the rest ‘accidental’ in the philosophic technical sense. The shape occurs.” We recognize here as we recognize in H.D.’s “Pygmalion” the informing genius of Gaudier-Brzeska. For this driven youth sculpted, wrote, or talked late at night to H.D. and Richard Aldington as he talked to Pound or Hulme—to create again and again in talk his vision of the artist-demiurgos at work in a spiritual vortex. In his essays and letters the language is charged with the character of his nature and art: “the driving power,” “life in the absolute,” “the intensity of existence.” In H.D.’s early idea of her art, in images of fire and cut stone, the ghost of Gaudier does enter in; as it enters in in Pound’s idea of her art in motives of force and form.