The H.D. Book

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

  •

  “The word ION has a double meaning,” we noted. We were thinking then of the opening of levels of meaning; but here, tracing the development from the first and second series of analytic sessions to the narrative poems written in series, we note too that to have a double meaning is to open up a new sense not only of possible depth in the work but of the work’s possible existence in depth. ION extends in two directions or opens up counterpoints in the composition of the whole. Order (“proportion” H.D. calls it) and significance appear as properties of the work itself, not only as acknowledged content, but, just in that, as the feeling for form. Where the Pythian priestess “predicts” St. Catherine or St. Francis, form also is not self-contained but predicts and inherits, is process.

  •

  The two gods are two points, but also two directives. There is “beginning and end”; there is “half-way as it were.” Geometrical figures begin to appear, for the sense of the when-where map of the diagram is operating—a trinity of counterparts, father above and below, mother and priestess, son who is also our source. Personae have roles in a drama that is a graph: fate = form. Hadn’t Aristotle come close to our sense here? The mythos he saw as the plot. To draw, draw out, figure out. To plot the movements and positions of the stars that are points in time.

  •

  In the beginning H.D. had been an initiate in Poetry, taking Euripides as her Master, as later she was to take Freud. She had found out the imagist manner that was to be her own in translating—“to keep the sharp edges and irregular cadence.” But—there was also in Euripides, disagreeable to the modernist taste, “the repetition of useless ornamental adjectives.” There was remplissage—fillings in to make up the measures of the line set by convention. The new temper of the 1920s strove to prune away and to attack ornament, remplissage, or sentiment, association, toward a clean, energetic and ascetic beauty. We see it in the austerities of Juan Gris or Brancusi. William Carlos Williams could call it in H.D. “the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style”; but he himself, at the inception of his late period, still speaks in The Wedge of a “machine made of words.” “When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem,” he writes in 1944: “I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.”

  •

  It was Freud’s role in H.D.’s second initiation to bring her from the formative prohibitions that had given rise to the modern style, from the stage which Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” represents, into a work which involved exactly those prohibited areas—repetition, remplissage, or sentiment. Associations must here not be cut away, dismissed, paraphrased or omitted, but dealt with, searched out until they yielded under new orders their meanings. Where the modern artist had sought a clean, vital, energetic, ascetic form—repression and compression—Freud sought the profound, delving in unclean thoughts, depressions, neuroses, voluptuous dreams. The Freudian permission or command saw form as a swarming ground.

  •

  Command, suggestion or permission—Freud helped H.D. to come in her art from a compressed style into an open exploratory form; from the cut-edges of Sea Garden to the woven tissue of The War Trilogy. The diagram comes in then, the map, for Freud led the consciousness into territories the mind had forbidden itself. One of the determinants of an art, of our existence as artists, is where the permission is given. It was not only sexual and erotic knowledge that had been prohibited. For sentiment, association, like repetition and ornament, were distasteful—fearful then, in Freudian terms—to the mind of the twenties. “The impact of a language,” H.D. writes “as well as the impact of an impression may become ‘correct,’ become ‘stylized,’ lose its living qualities.” It was, in this sense, away from style itself toward the act of writing itself that Freud helped H.D.

  IV

  The Permission is the Grace. God’s Grace, yes; and likewise, the grace of a line or of a melody, a grace note or note of grace. Where, too, there is an art the poet has by the reader’s grace. The style of the artist, his signature or control, is something different, analogous to his character, the operation of energies in repression, of challenge and attack upon the world about him then. The grace of the artist is analogous to his nature, a given thing, the operation of energies in freedom, of response and self derivation from the world. Style, being wrested from Nature, is mastery; Grace, being given, is the service. The Art here being to keep alive in one process mastery in service, service in mastery.

  •

  H.D. was brought in the Freudian dispensation into a larger permission in writing. Her earlier “pure” style—even among those literary puritans the Imagists, the most “frozen,” “crystallized,” “controlled”—and the fervent, even fevered, voice of the Red Roses for Bronze period are followed now by a writing that opens to influences. The early Imagist style is not gone but has awakened; it is the sea-shell of The Walls Do Not Fall iv, “bone, stone, marble” as she had often imagined her verse in Imagist days, but now the image is larger, to include “that flabby, amorphous hermit / within,” who “prompted by hunger” “opens to the tide-flow.” The catalogue of adverse criticisms that begins with the “charms are not, they said, grace” announcement in The Walls Do Not Fall ii and takes over in xxxi, xxxii, and xxxviii, has been admitted, let into the creative activity of the poetic consciousness itself as a force toward its own structure.

  •

  We speak of the poet as “gifted,” as having the gift of song or imagination, and we obscure in this the fact that the willingness of the poet to receive, his acceptance of what is given is initial to the gift. The poet must be a host to Poetry, “open to the tide flow,” even as he withholds that area in which experience becomes peculiarly his. The unconscious—like God, in George MacDonald’s Lilith, Who gives always, everywhere, unconditionally, forgiveness and love—gives ground for the experience of manhood, as words give everywhere their sound and meaning, the open secret of their magic. It is something in us: “Lilith,” MacDonald names Her; the neurotic, Freud describes it—that cannot and will not receive; but it is as important in the etiology of the artist as that which receives: the will to distinction, toward the self-containment of the work of art. The “I sense my own limit” in The Walls Do Not Fall ii is humility and leads to the close of xiv:

  we have not crawled so very far

  up our individual grass-blade

  toward our individual star.

  but it is also the pride of the artist in his originality, the line of his signature drawn that can be no other, and leads to H.D.’s claim as in xii: “we are proud and chary / of companionship with you others, / our betters. . . . ”

  •

  Self acceptance may mean then not self defense but the acceptance of a permission recognized, the acceptance of self beyond self. In the process there is an interchange of gifts, for one gives oneself to the experience, to love, to the poem, in being given love or the poem. So too, the visible world always and everywhere would fill the imagination in that interchange in which the imagination would fill the world. Here one has one’s origin in another. “I will be myself and not another!” Lilith, in George MacDonald’s novel determines. “My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!” Unawakened, she would dwell in her own shadow, refusing sleep and dreams, for in Dream (and here that Life is a Dream takes on new meaning) an other makes us.

  •

  The new dispensation is not only a new permission but, in that, a new communion. As early as 1928, in the story “Narthex” H.D. had raised an alternative to the purity of Athens (as in Ion: “While one Ionic column stands, stark white and pure on the earth, that name shall live”) the impurity of Byzantine Venice, the complex fascination and involvement of the facade of Saint Mark’s. “Loss of identity is the gift of Venice,” it seems to her then: “ ‘Crystallized and over static identity . . . ’ she stumbled. Words when Greek meets Greek mean nothing. ‘You crystallize identity.’ ” But beyond this
loss of identity, of self, there is the giving up of self to “this new protection, this going into all things,” into the narthex of Saint Mark’s, into the “power to crawl, snail self up the surface of high window and creep half-hatched moth in among tenuous rootless and dynamic deep earth feelers,” the hard line, the boundary is lost, and from the depth of the confusion of associations and montage the name, the figure, and the words of Christ begin to appear, as in The War Trilogy, some fifteen years later. He will be central; the “new protection” leading to the “new Master” over Love.

  •

  In The Flowering of the Rod, Mary Magdalene passing from her life as a whore into her new life, even as H.D. had passed from her period of passionate love affairs, the emotionalism of Red Roses for Bronze, into a new phase, has seven devils cast out of her by the Master, but these are also brought forward into the new self: “these very devils or daemons, / as Kaspar would have called them, / were now unalterably part of the picture.” Acceptance of the new self means also acceptance of the old, forgiven, redeemed, loved. “Lilith born before Eve / and one born before Lilith, / and Eve; we three are forgiven. . . . ” The first persona of H.D., the stark white and pure, cold, Ionic perfectionist daemon is there then too.

  •

  She had gone whoring after strange gods, among whom the new god Christ appears, or was He Helios? In The War Trilogy His identity multiplies: Ra, Osiris, Amen, Christos, the authentic Jew stepped out from Velasquez. Her identity multiplies: Isis, Aset, Astarte are among the seven daemons who are now unalterably part of the picture of Mara, Mary, Mary Magdalene. Not only the old gods return in this return of the repressed, but the old themes—Spring, Love, Trees, Winds—threaten to come back without the sophistication that modern taste had demanded. “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?” “The words return with singular freshness and poignancy,” H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, as Goethe’s song, sung long ago in childhood, comes forward to be part of the picture. Greek aesthetic—white marble—changes now to Greek mystery cult, as Renaissance Hermeticism and the Romantic Revival enter in. The very tradition in which H.D. conceives her work becomes complicated. In Helen in Egypt, she will move in a Greek world that is of shadow and astral light, not only the Helen in Egypt, but also the phantom Helen Euripides tells us walked the walls of Troy but also the Helena of Goethe’s “Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria” in Faust, who is the lure of Beauty the poet follows. “It is for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things,” Carlyle writes of the Poet in the spirit of Goethe; the very fact of things being the total world of which the philosophers must take account, the open secret Goethe had called it: “He is a Vates, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the ‘open secret,’ are one.”

  •

  “What you gave me, was not praise,” Freud wrote to H.D.: “was affection and I need not be ashamed of my satisfaction.”

  “Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love.” To admit affection, sentiment and association, and to need not be ashamed would strike at the repression of sincerity in the modern as his admission of the very fact of sexuality hit at the repressions of the nineteenth century.

  •

  Going back to the poem “March” of William Carlos Williams, I find its voice is everywhere sincere not sophisticated. He admits winter, spring, bitterness of wind, as immediate to the very fact of things, without the self-consciousness that will come later. I cannot find what H.D. in that letter so long ago had accused. What she accused, the lack of grace, does flare up in Williams’s answer: “I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please.” The “I” throws up its defiance to hold its own in writing against being taken over by what is not its own, the grace of men’s associations, and the grace of What Is. We sense a mind at war with prohibitions it is making for itself. There was a block in view, an intensification of style that was a necessity for correctness, for modernity. It makes for fits of temper and outrage in both Pound and Williams. The romantic vision was outlawed: “And you do NOT get out of such slumps by a Tennyson or a Rilke,” Pound writes in Kulchur, or in the London pre-war period of the Imagist movement, in the essay “The Renaissance,” I find, of Goethe: “but outside his lyrics he never comes off his perch. We are tired of men upon perches.” But this is the very perch of the time. Out-of-Bounds signs proliferate. The nineteenth century appeared as a forbidden territory, like the barbarian world outside of Athens, or the savage world outside the Puritan stockade. Giving a figurative account of her turning to Freud, H.D. instinctively uses terms out of Fenimore Cooper: “Say it was a birch-bark canoe. The great forest of the unknown, the supernormal or supernatural, was all around and about us. With the current gathering force, I could at least pull in to the shallows before it was too late, take stock of my very modest possessions of mind and body, and ask the old Hermit who lived on the edge of this vast domain to talk to me, to tell me, if he would, how best to steer my course.” Or now it seems to glide into a passage from one of William Morris’s great romances, The Wood Beyond The World or The Water of the Wondrous Isles—“those prose romances that became after his death,” Yeats writes in The Trembling of the Veil, “so great a joy that they were the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to the end.” The aestheticism of Pound and of H.D. had taken seed in pre-Raphaelite soil, their sense of Beauty haunted by the slim forms of Burne-Jones and the sylvan lovers of Morris, but the spirit of the modern formed itself in reaction against—“pre-Raphaelite slush disgusting or very nearly so” as Pound was to call it—the erotically enriched, fused, or sentimentalized forms, toward hardness. For the time The Wood beyond the World was to be put away with shame.

  •

  “Per una selva oscura,” Dante had called it, referring to finding himself in some darkness, lost in a wood. Pound, inheriting Dante from pre-Raphaelite sources, kept that ben dello intelletto that he would relate to the crystallizing thought of Plotinus or Erigena, shedding the spirit of romance, and would avoid “the great forest of the unknown, the supernormal or supernatural” that carries H.D. from some memory out of Cooper’s American wilderness into another romantic forest with its Hermit, close upon the marges of Morris or even the forbidden Tennyson. In the modern sensibility romance is divided against itself. In The Cantos Pound worries again and again hints of Manichaeism, the good infected by evil. So, too, contemporary studies of the Romance tradition by Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, or Denis de Rougemont are alive to the duality of their material, the ambivalence of love. In our own time, after the Second World War, there appears in the works of Burroughs, Beckett, a black romance, in which the ambivalence has disappeared and hate alone is real.

  •

  “Tanto è amara, che poco è più morte, So bitter is it, that scarcely more is death,” Dante says in the opening of The Inferno; he is talking not of hell but of the dark wood. Eastertide of the year 1300; Dante was 35. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” he begins.

  •

  H.D. was 47 when she began her analysis with Freud, and the figure read in passing of finding the Hermit in the forest may refer to finding Freud in the increasingly dark woods of the middle years. She will take Freud then as Dante takes Virgil as a guide into the darkness itself. “That fountain which pours abroad so rich a stream of speech” Dante addresses Virgil, and for H.D. too Freud may have been water-witch, a finder and releaser of speech once more. Something was blocked in her and she sought a new course.

  Words can become correct, stylized, she tells us. She had been the perfect stylist—the Imagist, May Sinclair had said in the Egoist days. The thrust of the soul’s life, of energetic imperfections, was keen against the resistance of her perfectionist style. The writing of H.D. gives way first in the prose of the late 1920s, stemming from May Sinclair perhaps, ultimately then from Henry James, and openly taking up from Joyce—a prose that strives to carry in the strea
m-of-consciousness mode the burden of a tangling experience.

  •

  We are in the dark thicket itself in the “Murex” section of Palimpsest, that grows more confused and lost (che poco è più morte) in stories like “Narthex.” It was the time for a call to order, for the Work to begin or all to be lost. The stories are peopled with victims of the modern sophistication—we see them also in the novels and stories of Lawrence and Mary Butts, in the paintings of Marie Laurencin and Kees Van Dongen. Abysses of psychic life, where identity wavers or goes void, open. The mind goes back, back, back, to certain scenes of agony or loss. The present falls into the past tense. In one of her most beautiful later passages, in The Flowering of the Rod, H.D. recalls with affirmation this lure of the insistent past event:

  for they remember, they remember, as they sway and hover,

  what once was—they remember, they remember—

  It is the intoxication here of the reiterated yearning. “For theirs is the hunger / for Paradise,” she writes. Where we realize that this Paradise or first Eden survives in its never having yielded satisfaction. A rapture that leaves the poet hungry for rapture.

  •

  “He had brought the past into the present,” H.D. wrote of her teacher or doctor, Freud. The modernity, the up-to-dateness, the sophistication of the twenties had sought to avoid the consequence of Spirit by living in a time of its own as if there were no current in men’s lives. The Spirit of the Nineteen-Twenties could be defined, given distinction; it would not sweep one up into larger or more complex involvement in human experience. The Golden Bough, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and The Interpretation of Dreams to the sophisticated reader lead not toward an increased sense of the immanent and numinous in daily life but toward a mythological know-all in which the immanent and numinous was seen-thru. For Yeats or Hardy, fatefulness and the supernatural strengthened the substance of their feeling; at the very threshold of the modern period the fascination of the depths seems to rise to a pitch of intensity. “The Trembling of the Veil” Yeats called his portrait of the nineties: “I found in an old diary a saying from Stéphane Mallarmé that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title.”