The H.D. Book

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

  •

  “To make clear the complexity of his perception in the medium given to him by inheritance, chance, accident or what-ever it may be,” Williams writes in The Wedge: “to work with according to his talents and the will that drives them.” The change in Williams as a poet is toward a conscious art, to be aware of the will that drives. In the “Projective Verse” chapter, Williams sees the poem as “a cell, a seed of intelligent and feeling security. It is ourselves we organize in this way not against the past or for the future or even for survival but for integrity of understanding to insure persistence, to give the mind its stay.”

  •

  It was to give the mind its stay that H.D. came to Freud as a patient, for she was sick of soul, but also she came as a student, for she followed the sense she had that he had opened a way toward the integrity of understanding in language; he had found a means of translation. “Safety, love, and virtue,” those old themes of the poem that had come so into question in the modern attitude, disillusioned by the misuse of “safety” in the interests of selling the war, by the misuse of “love” in the interests of sexual affairs, by the misuse of “virtue” in the interests of moralistic Christianity, and now it was argued that one must read Dante in the suspension of belief, and even, finally, poetry in the suspension of belief. In Ion, in her notes to the close of the play, H.D. recalls her theme of the fall of the city in time of war, the fall of Athens in whose art “the conscious mind of man had achieved kinship with unconscious forces of most subtle definition.” And she tells here the story of an Athenian youth discovering where he thought the tree of the mind, the olive planted by Athené, “the charred stump of the old”: “Close to the root of the blackened, ancient stump, a frail silver shoot”—not only that Athens, like those cities, the Wagadu of the Sahel or the Ecbatan of the Medes, recalled in The Pisan Cantos, is immortal, but that the mind itself and the language, charred, burnt-out, revives.

  •

  “Intelligent and feeling security,” Williams says; a poem, “a seed of intelligent and feeling security”—a cell, a seed, then, of Dante’s safety restored in meaning. Is there a common ground in The Walls Do Not Fall where Sirius may be the hidden source of true security?

  Sirius:

  what mystery is this?

  you are seed,

  corn near the sand . . .

  •

  Where the events of the poem are not viewed as peculiar but as events in a field, having their identity in areas that extend beyond the knowledge of the individual consciousness, Dante and Williams may inform a continuous—but we see it too as an eternal—great field of poetry. H.D. never mentions Williams in her writing after The Egoist days, and Williams recalls her only in rancor; but as poets, in the midst of the personal aversion, they come along separate ways to a common ground of language charged with old meanings revived, of form and content as immanent in the universe, where the responsibility of the poet is to recognize what is happening. In Paterson as well as in The War Trilogy—it is in this that they differ from The Cantos—there is the conviction that meaning everywhere is complex. “You’re listening to the sense,” Williams writes in Paterson Five, “the common sense of what it says. But it says more. That is the difficulty.” For H.D., as for Williams, there was the recognition of subconscious directives that Freud had introduced. “I feel / the meaning that words hide;” she writes in The Walls Do Not Fall, “they are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies . . . ”

  II

  Ion, begun in the Spring of 1920, continued in the Spring of 1922, was taken up again and completed in the Spring of 1932. With its peroration in praise of the intellect’s work with the unconscious, Ion is not only a translation of Euripides but a translation of Freudian thought. It stands as a statement opening toward her analysis with Freud, a preparation, an expectation. “True, the late war-intellectuals gabbled of Oedipus across tea-cups or Soho cafe tables,” she tells us in Bid Me to Live. That Freud had brought forward out of classical Greek poetry a central figure in the Greek mystery drama as a key to the new psychology and, more, that psychoanalytic thought drew upon and drew near mythopoeic thought must have attracted H.D., for whom a Greek name in itself had often excited poetic voice. Psyche, Eros, Thanatos—the cast of the Freudian metapsychology were members of a new mystery cult, a revival of the Greek spirit in psychoanalysis as it had revived before in the humanism of the fifteenth century and in the Hellenism of Alexandria. The Oedipus complex itself does not preoccupy H.D. She never pursues the sexual aetiology of neurosis or the sexual reference of symbolic charge. In the “Electra-Orestes” sequence which appeared in 1932, a year before her sessions with Freud, Electra speaks as if she were a mystagogue: “To love, one must slay, / how could I stay; / to love, one must be slain . . . ”—recalling not the Viennese mysteries of the Elektra complex nor the theater of Euripides but the epiphanic intent of Orphic or Eleusinian mystery-play. “No one knows what I myself did not,” Electra tells us: “how the soul grows / how it wakes / and breaks / walls,”—there may be a hint here of psychoanalytic waking and breaking of repressions, and in her refrain “that the soul grows in the dark” a hint of the Freudian unconscious; but neither in this sequence published in Pagany nor in the “Orestes Theme” published five years later in Life & Letters Today are we confronted with the Freudian concept of the violent sexual love and hate for father and mother as the primary content of the drama. What was important for her in Freud was that “he had brought the past into the present”; “he had opened up, among others, that particular field of the unconscious mind that went to prove that the traits and tendencies of obscure aboriginal tribes, as well as the shape and substance of the rituals of vanished civilizations, were still inherent in the human mind” (as what she had found in the Electra-Orestes sequence was a ritual of a vanished civilization); and that “according to his theories the soul existed explicitly, or showed its form and shape in and through the medium of the mind, and the body, as affected by the mind’s ecstasies or disorders.” Thruout the Tribute to Freud, it is clear that H.D. saw him not as the psychosexual theorist but as a guide of the soul, psychopompos—“Thoth . . . the original measurer, the Egyptian prototype of the later Greek Hermes” or “Asklepios of the Greeks, who was called the blameless physician.” If she displaces Freud, the displacement is not downward but upward. In 1944, writing a decade after her last sessions, she sees him in the light of occultist preoccupations that were already evident two years earlier in The Walls Do Not Fall. The Doctor who stands at the door of the unconscious also stands at the door of the other world, and his once-patient or student now works to bring him from the past into her present terms. Yet ten years before, in going to Freud, she had been in search of hidden content, of “the occult”; predetermined to find in her analytic sessions a way in her writing that would lead eventually from the Greece of the Oedipus of the tragic theater and of her own early translations from Sappho and Euripides, and from the Greece of the Viennese Oedipus and of her own stream-of-consciousness novels and stories, of “Murex” and “Narthex,” to the Renaissance Hermeticism of the Œdipus Ægyptiacus, which she follows in 1957 in the poetic sequence “Sagesse.” Her sessions with Freud were initiations.

  •

  “The first series began in March, 1933, and lasted between three and four months,” she tells us. The second series began at the end of October 1934 and lasted for five weeks—until December 1, 1934. “I had a small calendar on my table. I counted the days and marked them off, calculating the weeks. My sessions were limited, time went so quickly.”

  •

  In 1944, Dr. W. B. Crow’s Mysteries of the Ancients calendar has replaced her calendar of analytic sessions, and the schedule of hours with Freud has been replaced by another schedule in which “Every hour . . . has its specific attendant Spirit,” the angelology of the 1944 Tribute to the Angels. The appointment of hours itself gives pattern. Back of the later occultism, as back of the
Freudianism of her middle period, her primary concern in life is for poetic life, and she converts subject matter and design into the working form of her poetry.

  •

  The secret of the poetic art lies in the keeping of time, to keep time designing or discovering lines of melodic coherence. Counting the measures, marking them off, calculating the sequences; the whole intensified in the poet’s sense of its limitation. “My sessions were limited, time went so quickly,” defines the span of the poetic sequence as well as the span of the analytic sequence.

  “Here,” “there,” what once was, what is now—this return in a new structure is the essence of rhyme; the return of a vowel tone, of a consonant formation, of a theme, of a contour, where rhyme is meaningful, corresponding to the poet’s intuition of the real. “The heart of Nature being everywhere music,” Carlyle writes in The Hero as Poet, “if you only reach it.” The poet would go to the heart of things because he believes he will find Poetry there; to the heart of his self, not only for his case history, but also for the key to poetic form that he is convinced is there.

  H.D. in her work with Freud followed, she tells us: “my own intense, dynamic interest in the unfolding of the unconscious or the subconscious pattern.” The unfolding pattern of the psyche is not primary for her, but the unfolding pattern of a poem the psyche enacts. The poet, like the scientist, works to feel or know the inner order of things, but for the poet the order is poetic, measures that renew his own feelings of measure in his art. The form in process of the poem, the form in process of the psyche, correspond in turn to the form in process of What Is. “The world ever was, and is, and shall be,” Heraklitus says: “a Fire, kindled in measure, quenched in measure.”

  •

  Where? When did it happen? these are terms of a felt form. A map or a calendar. “Isles of Greece, Spring, 1920” of Hippolytus Temporizes or the “War and post-war London (circa 1916–1926 A.D.)” that parallels or sets up a reincarnation of the “War Rome (circa 75 B.C.)” in Palimpsest are intensifications of pattern in history. The extension of historical timing becomes a compositional pattern in writing. Metric, ratio, is at the heart of the matter.

  •

  The artist seeks to render articulate a figure in process. In conventional forms, the poet refers to the literary set pattern before him. But the poet may derive his formal feeling from patterns that he has experienced in nature—from the tidal flow of the sea, from the procession of seasons, or from the growth of organisms. The map of a city, the flow of its traffic, or the daily change of its moods may give formal feeling. So, following the series of analytic hours with Freud that in 1933 and 1934 had been her initiation into the mysteries of the subconscious or underworld, H.D. carries over the “Freudian” presence of the past in the content of the present and derives form from the appointments themselves in a sequence of poems that are “sessions” of the narrative to which they belong.

  The “for Karnak 1923 / from London 1942” of The Walls Do Not Fall continues the “there, as here” dimension that she had worked with in Palimpsest but now, beyond the earlier hint of reincarnation-time of the palimpsest-time of life written over life in one ground, she may refer too to the Freudian-time in which the experience of the species is the ground of the individual experience. The important thing here is the presence of one time in another, of one work in another, giving rise to possible reverberations—depth the form demands—and information—complexity of structure the form demands; as in rhyme there is a structure of message within message in which sound and meaning in pattern cooperate to give qualities of portent and fulfillment.

  With Tribute to the Angels a new notation of time is incorporated in the work at its close: “London / May 17–31, 1944.” We not only know when it was written, but we are led, if we follow the notation to what it implies, to apprehend the order of experience from which the order of the poem arises in which the specific days “count.”

  •

  The calendar kept in those psychoanalytic sessions becomes now the calendar in poetic sessions. Freud had asked of everything, What does it mean? What is back of that? “When?” “Where?” Now, in the realization of the poem, as it had in the first series at Berggasse 19, Wien IX, or at Döbling, place and time begin to tell. It had been Freud’s great “discovery” to bring back into our consciousness how names and numbers as well as images build up references in our feeling of things. It was not new, it was the return of an old Jewish way of the mysteries. Names, numbers, images, events in The Zohar of Moses of Leon in the thirteenth century co-operate as puns and hidden meanings to reveal the inner Nature of What Is.

  •

  “The arrangement for receiving us (at Döbling),” H.D. writes, “was more informal, and one did not have quite the same sense of authenticity or reality as in the Professor’s own home.” Here, the formality of the Professor’s own home is also the specific genius of place and time—the potential form the artist feels in the occasion. Authenticity and reality tend to be identified with the appropriate and significant; the artist is searching for compositional openings in a complex experience.

  III

  The “Ion” of Euripides, Translated with Notes, was sent to Freud when it was published early in 1937. The translation begun in 1920 had been finished in 1932, but the notes extend the play as if it had been seen anew, after not before the Freudian illumination. In the passage I had taken the dating of the work from: “numerically 1920, 1922 and again (each time, spring) 1932, we touched the stem of a frail sapling, an olive-tree” the notes would seem to be recalling at a later date the work of the translation.

  “Deeply moved by the play (which I had not known before),” Freud wrote in thanking her for the gift: “and no less by your comments, especially those referring to the end, where you extol the victory of reason over passions. . . . ” In the play itself lines 1334–5, translated by Ronald Frederick Willetts in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, as follows:

  Ion: All men are pure who kill their enemies.

  Priestess: No more of that—hear what I have to say.

  have been given an import Freud would appreciate in H.D.’s translation:

  Ion: to strike at evil, is pure:

  Pythia: you must know why you strike:

  •

  In the “Translator’s Note” at the beginning of Ion we can see a gain, from the earlier intuitive form, toward a conscious speculation and projection of form. Not only has H.D. articulated the play into felt sections, but she is concerned with the interpretation of her aesthetic feeling. Once the psyche of the person has been analyzed, a new sense of the psyche of the poet arises along analytic lines as well as the pure stroke of the original inspiration. You must begin to know why the impulse is appropriate.

  •

  H.D. had found her poetic style in the beginning in the process of rendering choruses from Euripides. She did not exactly find it in the text alone but also in her own critical reaction to the text. Writing in The Egoist in 1915, she observed: “It seemed that the rhymeless hard rhythms used in the present version would be most likely to keep the sharp edges and irregular cadence of the original.” But there was also “the repetition of useless ornamental adjectives . . . where the Homeric Epithet degenerates into what the French poets call a remplissage—an expression to fill up a line. Such phrases have been paraphrased or omitted.” It was style, the cut-line and facet, the tensions that the modern movement in music and painting as well as poetry demanded, that H.D. was searching out of Euripides in 1915.

  Now she returns, after Freud, to search out that workable stuff of Euripides’ text, not the manner that made for a new style in poetry, but deeper, back of that, for the level at which manner and style are seen as form and meaning. She makes much then of Hermes’ entrance to give the Prologue: working now beyond the line-edge for depth. “He might bear a lighted torch,” she notes; there is no stage property specified, but “the torch is symbolical as well a
s practical. This is Delphi, still night, the sun has not yet risen.”

  She wants the opening read from a script, almost chanted. “This would give a rhythmic, hypnotic effect and heighten mystery, in the manner of cathedral litany, heard at the far end of a great vault; our vault, here, is the dome of heaven.” And Ion we read is a mystery play; its great god—Apollo, the Sun. And the nineteen divisions into which she has articulated the play are not only then practical, where “Each one represents an entrance, an exit, a change in inner mood and external grouping of the characters,” but in her description of the proportioning of scenes, we read suggestions of an initiatory sequence: “two gods who comment on the beginning and the end; a messenger; in this case, a servant who is also an outside observer, half-way as it were, between the gods and men; a trinity of father, mother and son; the father, in this instance, being a divinity, has a double in the earthly manifestation of the king of Athens; an old man, a stock figure, and the Pythian priestess who, in the hands of this fifth-century ‘modern’ genius, is freed from all taint of necromancy and seems almost to predict a type made famous by Sienna and Assisi,” then: “The choros in a Greek play is, in a sense, a manifestation of its inner mood, expression, as it were, of group-consciousness; subconscious or superconscious comment on the whole.” Here the formal elements of the play, even the numbers, the twos, the threes, and the many of the chorus, have been extended into meaning.