The H.D. Book

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

  March 15, Wednesday. 1961

  “Hellenic perfection of style . . . ”

  •

  In the book The Hedgehog, written at Vaud, 1925, the Greek gods belong to the story-world, and, in turn, the little girl Madge, who may be, as H.D.’s daughter Perdita was that year, six, who lives then in an age previous to reading, figures out the actual world with information from stories her mother has told her so that her own experience becomes a story. “The stories weren’t just stories,” Madge’s mother tells her, “but there was something in them like the light in the lamp that isn’t the lamp.” She sees things in story-light, and in this light Pan, Weltgeist, Our-Father-Which-Art, are lights in turn in the world about her which is a lamp to see by.

  •

  Madge in her story is searching for a secret word. It is a matter of the open secret of Goethe, there, everywhere, a word everyone uses, but only experience unlocks the meaning “Hérisson.” Don’t find the word too quickly; mistake it in order to look for it. The girl Madge knows French, but she does not know what this word hérisson is. “Vipers!” Madame Beaupère exclaims, “you should have a hedgehog”—but she is French—“Hérisson” she says. Madge “somehow for the moment couldn’t remember just what was a hérisson.” “ ‘Ah,’ said Madge knowingly, ‘but yes, the very thing, a hedgehog.’ She said hedgehog in French, not knowing what it meant.” She must set out in quest of the word in the world.

  •

  In Tribute to the Angels, twenty years later, we find just such a riddle or search for a name again:

  it lives, it breathes,

  it gives off—fragrance?

  I do not know what it gives,

  a vibration that we can not name

  for there is no name for it;

  my patron said, ‘name it’;

  I said, I can not name it,

  there is no name;

  he said,

  ‘invent it.’

  •

  So in 1912 Pound had given a name “Imagism” to something required in poetry, and returning to the propositions of the 1912 Credo we can see in “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” and in “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” the directive towards an art that strives to find in the image a secret name or password in which “thing” and “word” will become presentation. But this name “Imagism” bound. There was an excitement of introducing the new Imagist poets in The Egoist and the excitement too of not knowing what it meant. May Sinclair said that H.D. was the Imagist, an epitome. Had she achieved the definitive Imagist poem? But then, Pound had said that he launched the word to define the poetry of H.D. And he had meant too to confine her work to what he had admired.

  •

  The idea of H.D.’s cut-stone, pure, terse line was her own version in part, a demand of her temperament that fitted the Credo’s demand for a literary functionalism, a clean line against ornament. In her note to the Euripides translations that appear in The Egoist in 1915 she writes that she sought “rhymeless hard rhythms” to capture “the sharp edges and irregular cadence of the original.” But these hard rhythms, sharp edges, and irregular cadences are not only of the original but of a modernist aesthetic in painting, music, and architecture, where ornament, as in poetry rhetoric, was coming to be a term of derogation.

  •

  Early poems like “The Contest” with its “you are chiselled like rocks / that are eaten into by the sea” or “Sea Lily,” where the flower petal is “with hard edge, / like flint / on a bright stone” operate to define the meaning of the Imagist poem as well as the quality of the immediate image; as early titles “Hymen” or “Heliodora” contributed to the idea of a new Hellenism. Idea and ideal are as essential to the image as the immediate sensory presentation. To dig the poem we must be receptive, back of these images of free wild elements in nature, and of sheltered gardens, of delicate stony flowers, and of flowers torn and trampled under foot, of unruly surfs, not only to presences of gods and daemons, the elementary idols of the poem, but to the temper of the verse itself, the ideal of human spirit presented. “Posing,” the unkind were likely to judge it, but for her kind H.D.’s tone presented a key in which to live. This ideal is what in my generation Charles Olson has called a stance. Poetic will is involved, awkwardly at first, trying, in what we call style or tone, but it would go beyond manner, to take over and make its own definition of poetry, where we strive to exemplify something we desire in our nature. “There was about her,” Williams writes of H.D. in his Autobiography: “that which is found in wild animals at times, a breathless impatience, almost a silly unwillingness to come to the point.” But now, seeing past Williams’s meaning to convince us that he was not taken in by H.D. and even, we are aware, to stir up our disaffections—seeing, past that, the content here with the role in mind that idea and ideal have in the artist’s search for a definition of what he is to be, Williams does give us telling details. “She said that when she wrote it was a great help, she’d splash ink on her clothes to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference toward the mere means of the writing.”

  •

  If in Imagist poems like “Heat” there had been, as well as the perfectionism, the intense realization of an instant in time, the prayer for life beyond perfection and realization, in The Hedgehog, having “almost a silly unwillingness to come to the point,” the mode of story exorcizing the mode of image, there is a first statement as early as 1925 of the sense of life as an intellectual and spiritual adventure that is to become the dominant mode of H.D.’s imagination in the major phase that begins with The War Trilogy. We have taken Ion as a turning point, with its commentary that incorporates poetic experience and psychoanalytic experience to give depth and complexity of meaning to form and content: now, not only an intensity of image, not only a style, but also a perception in organization, a way, is to be essential in the creative force of her work. We may take The Hedgehog as an announcement. It seems isolated, her only children’s book; the Greek world in story is so different from the Greek world in the “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” that the Imagist Credo demanded. And it is different too from the exalted, enthralled, or ecstatic voice of the personae of H.D., whether of the poems of the Lawrencian period—“Adonis,” “Pygmalion,” or “Eurydice”—or of the Sapphic fragments, or of the prose of Palimpsest; for a new voice, the common sense of the wise nurse telling what life is like to the child, or the questing sense of the child seeking in a story to find out what is going on, enters in. H.D. will all her life be concerned in her work with conveying to our sympathy the fact that agony seems to be in the very nature of deep experience, that in every instant there is a painful—painful in its intensity—revelation. In Palimpsest, Hipparchia, Raymonde, and Helen Fairwood agonize; the interior monologue means to communicate the impact of ineffable experience. But in The Hedgehog, Madge’s interior monologue is talking to herself in search of a language. The meaning of hérisson is not beyond finding out, but it is postponed until Madge can gather, asking from everyone and from everything, the most common sense—the communality—of what it is. In the very opening of the book, the lead is given. Quoi donc? And then: “Which means,” Madge recognizes: “well what do you mean by trying to tell me that anything like that means what you seem to think it means.” The adventure is the old guessing game I am thinking of a word; What is it? and Madge seeks to find out a definition that does not confine.

  •

  She seeks too to find a definition of her self that does not confine, as H.D. was seeking to do in her own life. And Madge trying out her style can miss. In talking with Madame Beaupère, she speaks “in such a funny unnatural affected little way” at one point that Madame Beaupère is put off, and Madge perceives “that her grown-up manner had not quite worked.” But the ideal is rightly a matter of trial for it is part of the searching out of means towards feeling: “she thought and practiced it, in order to give her a feeling of freedom and indi
fference,” as later, H.D.’s ideal of the Hellenic tries to reach the feeling of hardness and perfection. And does, for what changes in H.D.’s concept is not that the feeling of hardness and perfection ceases to be desired but that other feelings enter in to the picture. “Echo is easy to find,” Madge knows, “and the boy Narcissus,” but “Some of the light-in-lamp people you look for and never find.”

  •

  In Homer we know it is all a story told, as Shakespeare would remind us, even while we are entranced, that this “life” is a stage upon which actors play. This is their nurse voice, when even the greatest poets amuse us as if they were giant maids and we were children. So Cocteau and Bergman would involve us beyond the being moved in the moving pictures in the knowledge thruout that we entertain their entertainment. It is in the mystery of the Muses that we transcend belief and disbelief and follow the story, for the story-teller has as part of his art not only that he leads us into the magic realms but that he can recall us from the excursion. Where there is no story magic, blood will be blood and pain pain so that misled, carried away, the child is hurt and cries out or is afraid. In Flaherty’s film of Samoan life, I fainted during the tattooing ritual, flooded with the apprehension of pain. But in story, in the self-mutilation of Oedipus or the immolation of Christ, the pain is not a thing in itself but belongs to a configuration of action, fulfills and leads on. My mother would lean over in the dark of the movie house to recall me: “it is only a movie, it is just a movie,” she would whisper. Shakespeare’s actors reminding us that it is but a stage seem finally to be saying that our actual life is only a stage from which we may be recalled at death. And Christ in the testimony of St. John at Ephesus told his beloved disciple that the death upon the cross was but a figure in a dance—“and if you have not entered the dance, you mistake the event.” “Growing up and last year’s shoes that didn’t fit this year—these were things that were part of a dream, not part of reality,” Madge thinks: “Reality was the Erlking and the moonlight on Bett’s room wall.”

  •

  The story-telling voice of The Hedgehog enters into the commentary of “Ion” in whose voice the Greek drama appears in the guise of fairy tale. And the address of the opening of The Walls Do Not Fall establishes such a voice in which we are aware of the story-teller and his following, the I and a you in which the individual reader is but one; “from your (and my) old town square,” belongs to the nurse’s art, drawing us into the realm of her telling. The “we” and the “they” are people of the story, as the “I” is at one time a person of the story—“I sense my own limit” is part of what she has to tell—and the poet who may address her audience as well as the “they” of the poem: “but if you do not even understand what words say, / how can you expect to pass judgment / on what words conceal?” Those of the audience who are with her will think of themselves as “we,” those who are not in it and would interrupt will think of themselves as “they.” And the story-teller anticipates their doubts of the story and exhorts them to surrender: “Let us substitute / enchantment for sentiment.” Yes, she continues: “re-dedicate our gifts / to spiritual realism”; but it is all to be “a Tale told of a Jar or jars,” having the truth of what “we are told.” In Helen in Egypt, which H.D. saw as her culminating master work, Helen is entirely a creature of story, having her life in all that has been told of her.

  •

  There remains the actual feeling, a Greece that is all H.D.’s. She evokes a realm of pagan things—hinterlands of the psyche—but also inner qualities of places and times, woodlands, sea-coasts, gardens, mountain ledges. In Hedylus the stranger-father-critic says to the young poet: “Your idea of the rock-ridge becoming re-divided into separate efflorescence, according to the altitude, implying, as I judge, a spiritual comparison as well as a mere natural one, is unique, differing in all particulars from anything I have yet met with.”

  •

  It was not pure beauty, or it was something besides pure beauty, that even the poems that gave rise to H.D.’s repute for the rare and pure strove to capture, but beauty or perfection as it was a key somewhere to the nature of event, and finally, as it played its part in the development of the story.

  Yes, but this striving was not only to capture a quality in what she had known, but was to challenge experience itself in turn to yield a quality. “Beauty” was from the first, as in the review of Marianne Moore’s work or in the poem “The Tribute” she makes clear, a battle-cry, a cause. The Image too was a demand as well as a response.

  •

  In December 1916, reviewing Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas in The Egoist, she criticizes or challenges “certain current opinions concerning the so-called new poetry,” and against the proposition of the images upon a Greek vase as things of art, self-contained images, she proposes: “How much more than the direct image to him are the images by shadow and light, the flicker of the purple wine, the glint across the yellow, the depth of the crimson and red. . . . When the wine itself within the great jar stands waiting for him.” Then: “He uses the image, direct it is true, but he seems to use it as a means of evoking other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped into a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of color, of sound.”

  There is at least the possibility that whatever battle-cry of “Beauty” or idea of the fine-wrought image, there was also another thing a poem was—“a pebble . . . dropped into a quiet pool” to set up reverberations in life so that “Here,” “there,” Greece and its things, old gods and pagan places or the mode of story, enlivened consciousness in living, made it moving with “wave on wave of light, of color, of sound.” Story, like perspective in painting, may be an invention to satisfy a need in experience for design, to build a house for feeling in time or space. Does story stand within the actual life or the actual life experience stand within the story as the wine itself is stored in the great jar upon whose surfaces the artist has painted his image of the wine and the jar?

  •

  The threads interweaving create a close intricate field of feeling; and we admire the work in which there is no ornament dismissed but where light flows from what we took to be ornament and proves to be essential. In the shuttle flying under the swift sense of the work, the “incident here and there” gathers so many instances from themselves into a moving significance, unfolding or discovering a design, that we see now the art was to set things into movement, was not only the weaving of a work of art but as if each knot that bound the whole into the quiet of a unity were also the pebble that dropped into that quiet as a pool broke up, was knot but also slipping-of-the-knot, to set up an activity thruout in the work of time and space within time and space.

  •

  The sense that “we are at the cross-roads” then has structural as well as historical and psychological meaning in The War Trilogy. Given the name Imagiste, H.D. was never satisfied that it meant what she seemed to think it meant, and even after her analysis with Freud, she did not rest with the Freudian image but went on to the eidola of Helen in Egypt. What was required was that there be the full power of a double meaning, that the real refuse to be defined. In word and image and then in story her sense was always that “the tide is turning.”

  Chapter 7

  October 8, 1964 [i.e., March 20, 1961. Monday.]

  I seek now in working upon the later draft of the book not to correct the original but to live again in its form and content, leaving in successive layers record of reformations and digressions as they come to me. The form realized then is not to be a design immediately striking, like those housing developments and landscapings that rise where disorderly areas of a city have been cleared away, but it may be like an old city—Freud’s picture of Rome upon Rome—in which in the earliest remains, in the diary of March 10th to March 15th, March 20th to March 29th, then May 25th of 1961: later additions may appear, anachronistically like the Gaudi restorations in the gothic cathedral of Palma or the Casa Guell’s art-nouve
au romanticism in the midst of old buildings, where we are aware of periods of creative activity and conservative inertia. Altering and using old streets, laying out new districts, surrounding old barrios, willing to carry out the project of a Frank Lloyd Wright palace upon the Grand Canal of my Venice, having most in mind to convey the life of the idea of the city, a book of continuations not of conclusions, I build even as I prepare the book for the publisher at last, living once more as I copy, and take over wherever I see a new possibility in the work.

  4:20 A.M. March 20, 1961. Monday.

  A first vigil? I had wanted, after Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, to bring forward the likeness between Hoffmann’s method in that Hermetic romance of telling the story by “vigils” and H.D.’s keeping her appointment with the sequences of her later work. The ancient time-cult of the gods in which the time of the work had its appointed spirit or genius and the modern appointment of the psychoanalytic hour, each day taking up the work anew and continuing, contribute to the method I would follow here having the continuity of a daily return, having the commitment in each session to whatever may arise there, so that the conscious concern may be immediate to impulse and those felt but not yet articulated senses of what is involved that we call intuition, risking the coherence of the whole in the attention at hand. Going in faith that all such attentions are creative of the whole I seek. Open to impulse, so that I must trust peripheries and undercurrents to lead me.

  •

  Wherever I work the directive increases.

  •

  In this method, the break of four days—from March 15th to today—is not a day of rest but a withdrawal from, and then perhaps a withdrawal of, direction.