The H.D. Book

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

  Does Bergson’s élan vital enter in here? For Ezra Pound in his first London years the élan vital was very much in the air—in the theosophical environs of Yeats, Mead, and The Quest lectures, and then again in an entirely other circle, in the philosophical environs of the Bergsonian T. E. Hulme. In his “Prolegomena” and “Credo” of 1912, Pound sees his own turning to the Melic poets and to the Medieval romance-tradition in poetry as vital, not literary: “a man feeling the divorce of life and his art may naturally try to resurrect a forgotten mode if he find in that mode some leaven, or if he think he sees in it some element lacking in contemporary art which might unite that art again to its sustenance, life.”

  When Wyndham Lewis’s scorn for the romantic takes over—ranting against what he sees as the cult of Time, the Primitive, and the Child—Bergson will be out of bounds. When Eliot’s pervading concern for respectability introduces its criterion with the rhetoric of a new literary orthodoxy—though Pound’s élan will win thru in The Cantos, flooding passages with image and presence of light and divine energy—in Pound’s theory kulchur will replace life as the sustenance of art.

  But in his first development—pre-war, pre-Eliot and Lewis, Pound’s premises are not ideological but psychological. He insists upon the intellectual and emotional complex where “ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and concomitant emotions, must be in harmony must form an organism.” In poetry “the mind is upborne upon the emotional surge.” This relation of the poem to a wave of life expression is as far as Pound is to go to relate the art to an organic creativity; and in his later criticism even these ideas of emotion and surge become diffident. The Aphrodite of The Cantos does not rise as Hesiod would have her from a bloody wave; she is not the goddess of sexual love and life renewal Pound addressed in The Spirit of Romance but the Aphrodite of the higher intellect in which Beauty has become a pure essence. The spirit of romance is supplanted by the spirit of the schools. Philosophers, not poets, form the great tradition; and among philosophers, those who seek the victory of the mind over the passions are now Pound’s masters. So, in The Pisan Cantos, Anchises lays hold of the goddess’s “flanks of air / drawing her to him / Cythera potens”; yet even this phantasm of the air is not the very Aphrodite, who is “no cloud, but the crystal body.” In Canto XCI, Section: Rock-Drill, she appears again as “the GREAT CRYSTAL”—in its capitalization the insistence is clear. “Right reason” takes the place of the earlier “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”; and “from fire to crystal / via the body of light” the Princess Ra-Set “enters protection,”

  the great cloud is about her,

  She has entered the protection of crystal.

  Here the “river of crystal” appears, carrying the soul-boat up out of the carnal and psychic mire into “the body of light come forth from the body of fire,” a sublimation that contrasts sharply with H.D.’s impassioned evocation in Tribute to the Angels, “re-light the flame,” where venery and the venereous (the body of heat) are called forth from the body of fire and re-related to venerate, venerator in the name of Venus-Aphrodite.

  •

  H.D. sees the gods not only as eternal states of mind, higher beings, or great images cast in a phanopoeia, but as expressive entities of the worshipper’s own creative life:

  Shall I let myself be caught

  in my own light?

  Later, her Freudian persuasion will reinforce this view, but as early as “Pygmalion,” the worked image (each particular intellectual and emotional instance that becomes experience then) is thought of not only as being realized in itself, an expression, but as an entity in a psychological process, a projection. She has passed from the idea of the artist’s work as having its end in the object, the image, as if captured in stone, the closed system of beauty, to the dramatic perspective in which the art is a magic ground in which thought and feeling come into being and meaning returns from the object to inform the artist as he works—a way of participation thru the created object in a self-creating life; from:

  I made image upon image for my use,

  I made image upon image, for the grace

  of Pallas was my flint

  to the more involved recognition of poetry as a creative process, as in 1917 she had concentrated in a stanza:

  Now am I the power

  that has made this fire

  start from the rocks?

  am I the god?

  or does this fire carve me

  for its use?

  the questions that in the 1930s will lead Malraux to his massive Psychology of Art. In turn, the creative process is recognized as a life quest or romance—Psyche’s quest for Eros, the soul’s quest for salvation, a new Master. She had passed from the persona or mask worn in the play to the psyche, the soul of the play that comes into being thru its masks. When, in The Walls Do Not Fall, Christ appears in the Image “stepped out from Velasquez,” her sight of the painting, as with the statue of Pygmalion, has broken the boundaries of the aesthetic into meaning. The work is not self-contained but serves another purpose, that eyes “look straight at you”—a magic efficacy, the very presence of Christ.

  In such a transformation, paint or stone take on body, as in the Christian mystery the word is incarnate; there is a charged carnality in amber eyes that would shine so in the poem, as if they could shine so in the painting. Here H.D.’s insistence that she is, we are, involved in the poem as if it were a field of associations brings us up against such a bias in aesthetic as Dewey has in Art as Experience: “If the perception is then eked out by reminiscence or by sentimental associations derived from literature—as is usually the case in paintings popularly regarded as poetic—a simulated aesthetic experience occurs.” The criticism would seem to apply to my own appreciations as I go, where the poem and the painting are not objects but operations in a field of reminiscences, the perception eked out everywhere by associations that are sentimental, these senses of life and the mentality so identical for me. There can be no accident that along with my changing sense of poetry in my reading of H.D.’s work, and in my own writing the flooding out into literary derivations, has come a breakthru or breakdown of aesthetic evaluation of painting to include literary qualities in early Cézanne, Moreau, Böcklin, or the Pre-Raphaelites Burne-Jones and Rossetti, painters long exiled from the dominant taste of my day because of their false poetics. H.D. has been dismissed by adverse critics with slurring references to William Morris; as Pound has been put down with hints of Swinburnism; Joyce with aspersions of Pater. “There are works of art that merely excite,” Dewey warns: “in which activity is aroused without the composure of satisfaction, without fulfillment within the terms of the medium. Energy is left without organization. Dramas are then melodramatic; paintings of nudes are pornographic; the fiction that is read leaves us discontented with the world in which we are, alas, compelled to live without the opportunity for the romantic adventure and high heroism suggested by the story-book.”

  For Ezra Pound, the operation of the work outside the spirit of its art, the excess in which what might have been aesthetic, beautiful, or later, in Vorticism, energetic, becomes psychological—sensually, sexually, or religiously sentimentalized—the psychic chiaroscuro of and in any thing—is distasteful, even abhorrent. After The Spirit of Romance in 1910, Pound goes no further in the matter of Dante, though he pays homage to Dante’s mastery as a poet, for Pound would put aside the heart of the matter, the imagination of a Christian synthesis; as in The Cantos he can include the Greek gods in his history but must dismiss those unchaste aspects that the Cambridge classicists and the Vienna psychoanalysts had begun to suggest; he must exclude too the mire and the star in which Christ is born. There is a threatened chastity of mind in Pound that would put away, not face, the thought of hellish things, here in considering the Divine World, as later in considering fascism, where also he cannot allow that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure, with the obscene—what goes on backstage. Spirit in The
Cantos will move as a crystal, clean and clear of the muddle, even the filth, of the world and its tasks thru which Psyche works in suffering towards Eros.

  “The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades,” he writes of Cavalcanti. He is naturally repelled when in Rubens he sees the flesh portrayed as meat. He rages like a Puritan bigot faced with the Whore of Babylon at the adulterous—latinizing—syntax of Milton, who “shows a complete ignorance of the things of the spirit.” Usury brings “whores for Eleusis,” corrupts the sacred orgy; the art too, under usury, becomes whorish and profane.

  Healthy mindedness is an important virtue for Pound’s art—the clean line. Clean mindedness, then. “The old cults were sane in their careful inquisition or novitiate,” he insists in The Spirit of Romance. Here and in the Cavalcanti essay Pound insists upon the “well-balanced,” the “mens sana in corpore sano” base. “All these are clean, all without hell-obsession,” he writes of Ventadour, Guido, Botticelli, Ambrogio Praedis; and then, it does not occur to him that we must turn to others if we seek information concerning the nature of darker matters. To think at all, to imagine or to be concerned with, that state of human psyche whose light is Luciferian and whose adversity is Satanic—much less to admit that in our common humanity we are ourselves somehow involved in that state is, for Pound, to go wrong, to darken reason, a morbidity of mind. “We seem to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge,” Pound writes of the change from Cavalcanti to Petrarch, and he relates the change in poetry to a change in world view, the loss of “a world of moving energies ‘mezzo oscuro rade,’ ‘risplende in se perpetuale effecto,’ magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s paradiso, the glass under water”; “untouched,” he concludes, “by the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease.” In reviewing Love Poems and Others by D. H. Lawrence in 1913, Pound, who praises Lawrence’s narrative verse, finds “the middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection . . . a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so.” In writing on the work of Henry James, he tells us: “The obscenity of The Turn of the Screw has given it undue prominence. People now ‘drawn’ by the obscene as were people of Milton’s period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on author’s part; the other, a surgical treatment of a disease.” Where we begin to see that Pound’s aesthetic disgust is not unmixed with psychological factors that he would like to disown.

  Virgil was O.K. for Dante, it seems to Pound, for Dante knew no better. It is not the poet-portrayer of the Underworld and prophet of the coming Christos, but the high-minded master of the Superworld, Plotinus, who leads Pound up out of the mire of mud, bog-suck, and whirl-pool that is Pound’s Hell. Holding the Medusa-head downward, Plotinus petrifies the evil; and perhaps Pound sees Plotinus in history as having petrified into the clear crystal of neo-Platonism the murk of the Alexandrian period, the chiaroscuro in which Christ was synthesized. “You advertise ‘new Hellenism’,” Pound writes to Margaret Anderson of The Little Review: “It’s all right if you mean humanism, Pico’s De Dignitate, the Odyssey, the Moscophoros. Not so good if you mean Alexandria. . . . ”

  It is to the art of music that Pound looks, to the time “when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it.” There is an echo of Carlyle’s concept of poetry as musical thought here, but it is important too that in music the material of the artist seems most to have transcended the “slush” of flesh and earth, to be furthest from “the metamorphosis into carnal tissue” that represented the decay of values in Rubens. The avoidance of Christ in The Cantos. A poem that is after all primarily an epic of the gods and of the divine reality, is complex; but even with those gods who do appear in The Cantos, Pound avoids all knowledge of their aspects of embodying our carnal experience of suffering and mortality as a value in life. Aphrodite appears in Her light body, having no association with whorish simulacra men have made of her. There can be no compassion whereby the high suffers in the low. In the highest vision there are not then the eyes of the crucified, with their secret that life’s victory lies in the passion of the love-death, but there is the love-light of “the stone eyes again looking seaward” and the Sphinx’s riddle in Canto CXV “of man seeking good, / doing evil.”

  “Unless a term is left meaning one particular thing, and unless all attempt to unify different things, however small the difference, is clearly abandoned, all metaphysical thought degenerates into a soup,”—so the art for Pound must strive for the dissociation of ideas; in The Cantos he strives for the clear entity of things and beings in themselves. For H.D. terms are either duplicit or complicit, the warp and woof of a loom. As in Paterson, William Carlos Williams pictures poetry, like a city, “a second body for the human mind,” he quotes from Santayana’s The Last Puritan, having all the complication of one thing in another a city has. Neither H.D. nor Williams is concerned with metaphysical thought. Pound’s soup into which metaphysical thought must fall when associations are allowed may be the dream. “Paterson is a man (since I am a man) who dives from cliffs and the edges of waterfalls . . . But for all that he is a woman (since I am not a woman) who is the cliff and the waterfall.” In such a poem or such a dream no entity is unmixed, there is no form that can be satisfied in itself or fulfilled in its own terms.

  Since 1938, when at nineteen I began to read The Cantos and then in the library the files of The Little Review, I have had a strong sense of this quality of a thing in itself, the intensely realized form of Brancusi’s columns and heads, the deliberate design of syntax in Joyce’s Ulysses, the absolute sense of language in context in The Cantos, the changes in energy—movement and tone—so exactly made. Here it is the composition, not the exposition, of content that counts, and this count is a mathematic of numbers and the ratios that have been learned in the working hand and in the ear, having to do not only with soundings but with equilibriums, beyond the calculation of the brain alone. I have still this excitement about the masterpiece, the mastery of weights that lie at the edges of intuition, the informed impulse of each nerve in training, the skill that extends our apprehension of what is going on. In my mind H.D.’s War Trilogy and Helen in Egypt have been placed, “weighed,” with such works of art, realized forms having, as Pound writes of Brancusi, “a mathematical exactitude of proportion.” Our awareness of life itself springs from such an aptitude for intricate formulae, keeping the numbers dancing in proportions, the living mechanism of the body and the brain in its analyses and syntheses performing, to be alive to things at all demanding, a high cybernetics. The lasting thrill of the artist’s work is that it fits, as our actions fit, when we feel them to be most alive, more than we imagined or longed for, so that we gain a heightened expectation of proportion.

  I am sure that these apprehensions do not come from the unknown but are the very beginning terms of consciousness, the first factors of our human communication. The rumor remains of the unconscious, the incommunicable below, and of the super essential, the incommunicable above. But where numbers or images or persona occur we are in the realm of consciousness, for to figure and to sense is the mode of awareness. Even the rumors of psychoanalysts and metaphysicians are, like all rumors, elements arising in consciousness. The unconscious is, to apply the formula of theology, the uncreating; the super-essential, the uncreated. Myths and archetypes, like the structures Plotinus or Jung pursue in thought, are the stories and pictures we know as creation, the ground the collective conscious makes for experience. It is our consciousness not our unconscious that strives to imagine the real and the unreal, that would make a body even in the unrealized, so that the toil of creation is never done. Even these haunting rumors of the beyond consciousness, of the unknowable, appear as creatures of conscious language. Words propose “a Word beyond utterance, eluding Discourse, Intuition, Name, and every kind of being.”

  After the excitement in the au
thenticity of masterpieces, having resistant individuality and a demanding skill, I have come to see such works not as the achievement of inventors or masters or diluters or starters of crazes, as Pound would have us classify writers in his ABC of Reading, not as objects of a culture, embodying original sensibilities, but as events in another dimension, a field of meanings in which consciousness was in process; where I saw psyche and spirit, as I had come thru Darwin to see the animal organism, arising in an evolution of possible forms, surviving, perishing, derived always from an inheritance in which the formal persisted, arriving always as a trial or essay in which the formal had to live the last of a species, the first of a species, and yet having only its own terms, its own life, in which to make it. Every manifestation of spirit is the matter from which spirit must derive itself.

  What is intent here? “Does ‘intenzion’ mean intention (a matter of will)?” Pound asks, seeking the sense of certain terms of Cavalcanti, “as understood at that particular epoch,” he stresses: “does it mean intuition, intuitive perception . . . ?” The psyche strives to realize; the spirit . . . to render clear? to rarify?—but I would take spirit in a rock, who am yet obsessed with light. Intent is ours for we are at work; and may change its aspect where form is not a container or an object but “an extension of content.”

  It is the ground art makes for the experience and the dream to become communal that I most value. Our own dreams, like our own lives, are fleeting and insubstantial, unless they are delivered over from the personal into the commons of man’s dream. The man I am would stake my person from him, if it would not give itself to his intent. In works of art what was a passing fancy labors to become a lasting fantasy, the “Dream, Vision” of H.D.’s later poetic, personality to become manhood; for our manhood to be a ground of reality, for the gods to flourish, “stepped out from Velasquez.”