The H.D. Book

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

  I.

  THE DREAM: A manufacturer had commissioned me to do a rug. The rug it turns out is the rug that I began in 1954 for Jess and finished in Mallorca in 1956, having no cartoon previous to the work but in each phase of the work the form being conceived. Writing the date for this chapter or vigil, I had started “4:20 A.M. March 20, 195–” I had put down the 5 of 1954, but recalled that it was 1961, going on, but knowing that now in the course of the work I would have to account for that 1954.

  In the dream scene, going to the factory to see the reproduction of my work I found a mint reproduction. Yes. That was the disturbing thing in the dream: that they had arrived at their copy by some translation from my concept, as if it were mint, so unlike the rug I knew that I could not account for what had happened. Was it for what had happened to the rug since the 1954? Had there been then an alternate rug, a form from which not towards which I had worked?

  The copy was mostly lavender, a color which is minor in the original (here it may have been changed by the painting by Tom Field that I had during the spring and summer of 1956 at Black Mountain), but it had the inconclusive asymmetrical order that I work towards. Yet it had not been built up of intricate color localities—“when/wheres” I’ve called them in this study; “orchestrations” they seemed to me when I was working on “The Venice Poem” in 1948, for I was following impulses towards design that haunted me in listening to the Danses Concertantes and the Symphony in Three Movements of Stravinsky where it seemed to me that form impended thruout, that every particular of the structure was charged by the numen of the whole. Having no musical literacy, certainly having only an analogical understanding, I derived certainties of my own aesthetic, and then of a poetic, of a theory of forms and of the nature of making itself, as I have derived understandings from sciences I do not “really understand.”

  •

  I had wanted to describe the “orchestration” of H.D.’s work, the intricate resonances of particulars that contribute to the symphonic whole.

  •

  The manufacturer had, anyway, “lied” about the model. And the rug that must stand for the original work, that must do to represent what I had done, when I tried to find grounds for acceptance, bewildered. They had “missed” thruout. Maybe they had evaded.

  •

  “You will want to take credit,” the official of the company said. Representative? There were two officials, anyway: a foreman who was an efficient woman explaining to me as I stood, undone as I was by what they had done, that the rug still needed cutting, was first. Here it seemed to me she meant they had taken some aspect of my total concept as if it were only a texture and had used it for long runners of weaving that were trimmed to fit the original. There had been, hadn’t there? I remembered in my dream, or now writing, remember, such complexly textured rag-rugs in halls long ago at home. She explained too that there had been some of my colors they hadn’t been able to get.

  •

  I could not visualize in these terms what their reproduction would be like.

  •

  The other official, the business manager, was discussing with me my agreement with the company to accept the reproduction. Yes, that was unavoidable. There was no way, I felt, to account for my disagreement which was actually the disagreement between the image (my rug) and the copy. But the manager was discussing our terms. I would want to take credit, he was saying. “Oh yes,” I replied, “as I always do on books and records.” But even as I said it I was puzzled or uneasy about what I assumed when I said “records” and was substantiating the claim in my mind with credit I did not mean as true. I wanted to be paid, I said, as I always do want, on the basis of royalties. “That way,” I said, “if the work is disliked or liked, I have not been underpaid or overpaid.”

  •

  But the impossible thing thruout was my claim in relation to the rug they were releasing as mine. In no way could I see it even looked like my work.

  •

  Earlier in the dream, just back of this manufacturing scene, had been another scene of Landis and his friend stealing from the corner grocery, which I read upon waking as relating to stealing in writing. There may have been some translation between taking food without paying, without crediting it? and the credit-payment theme of the manufacturer’s episode. The product the company offered somehow copied my work without the stealing, the installment and credit planning, that had been essential in its conception.

  II.

  Recording the dream, I find myself repeating the perplexity of the dream-situation. I cannot reproduce it, as the manufacturers in the dream could not reproduce the rug, because I cannot or will not supply the particulars. Now, I have lost, perhaps, the “message” that lingered in my mind when I woke at four. It had to do with the key to H.D.’s poetics that was my own.

  •

  That in working this book, it must be built up, risking the composition of the whole (where I incur some critical failure in the book’s not resembling what literary criticism calls for today) in order to, but also because I must, take the directive of the immediate sense, as in Charles Olson’s “instanter” movement that projective verse demands.

  •

  “Overlook.”

  As one oversees and then naturally overlooks the “when/where” if one follows a plan. Overlook is what the director (both the fore-woman and the manager) does in the dream.

  •

  Supplying the particulars. That may be in the “they wrote parts of color,” as I remember the line in my longer invention on the Adam. As hooking in each tuft of colored wool to become a new term of my vision of the whole design, I came to think of life itself being so worked: if one determined to take up one’s vision of life from each immediate happening.

  •

  Between the chapter of March 15th and this chapter there is the break that I must work with then. In the midst of the first series of days, on the 10th, Saturday, hitch-hiking to the other side of Tamalpais to see my cousin Carol as Sabine in Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth, getting out of a foreign car, a Renault, I smashed the little finger on my writing hand. By Wednesday it was infected, by Thursday the swelling, the swelling pain had taken over. It had to be lanced. To drain away the intolerable accumulation. And last night, again, the finger was lanced to clear up the foreign matter.

  •

  Is everything of account? There is in the poetic of H.D.’s later work an aesthetic of accounting, of keeping record? A vision in terms of what-is that is built up into a poetry of what counts? Where everything counts—impossible to reproduce. The atomic in writing is, as Olson gives it in “Projective Verse,” the immediate sound particle. But for me the resonance of the particle infects everything.

  •

  The rug was hooked-work (“Stolen” then), the whole vision emerging from individual determinate after individual determinate as I put in bits of color.

  •

  And in that work too there would be periods, even long periods, of waiting on the work. I would wonder about the total design, trying out in my mind various paths. How the whole thing looked if I were to make a large yellow area “there” or carry out a continuous flowing line “here.”

  •

  Or I would desert the work, lose track of it. There were times when there was nothing I could do. Or nothing I would do.

  •

  In the work itself the multiplicity of wonderings makes for impulse after impulse towards larger form, broken by other apprehended forms. It is in the departures from what is forming that the poetic of the rug appears—a form disturbed thruout by the directive of many forms. It was in the process of coming to know what I was doing and just there letting go, breaking, even rebelling, so that I might come to what I did not know I was doing. The making of the rug seems now to relate to the concept of a universe of many realities I have drawn from William James.

  •

  In any immediate area, if the articulation be made, an almost single directive might be kept
(a rendering then, a clarification of issues, to make a definition of what is) with minimum confusion (mixing of one sense of the real with another). But the challenge for the artist is to find his equilibriums in the mixed matter.

  III.

  What I rose to write here I lost. But as I got just here to the word “rose,” I remembered the idea or key I had gotten out of bed in the early morning dark, searched out the notebook in the study, to start with:

  It was “aroused”; and then, hadn’t I been thinking of the word “excited” just before that? “Excited” was the feeling of being a terrier on the track of something, of sensing, of sniffing, getting the scent, being sent. “Aroused” was this too but was also that I was aroused from sleep by the dream and then the beginnings of ideas, was also that I was angry. Curiosity and anger certainly are part of what I have had to deal with in this approach to reality. The line of my prose sought sentences that would hunt down, track out another line of something I wanted to find. There was also impatience then, how often I wanted to win something before I won thru. That was an element in the crisis of anger.

  •

  This is an age of criticism, so the critics tell us. An age that has sought to denature and exhaust its time of crisis in bringing philosophy, the arts, human psyche, historical spirit, and the inspiration of the divine world into the terms acceptable to academic aspirations. To undertake this study I must go against the grain of values and rationalities established in my lifetime by a new official literary world. Finding their livelihood in American universities, a new class of schoolteachers has arisen, setting up critical standards and grading responses to fit the anxieties and self-satisfactions of their professional roles and writing verses to exemplify these ideals. In Hound & Horn they begin to appear. In The Southern Review, Partisan Review, and Kenyon Review they take over. An age of criticism does not mean Pound’s Cavalcanti essay, Cocteau’s “Call to Order,” Dame Edith Sitwell’s notebooks or H.D.’s “The Guest,” Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” or Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare, for these are concerned with the inner nature and process of poetry itself. The university versifiers mistrust or despise equally the ardor of the scholar where it appears, Lowes’s Road to Xanadu or Pater’s Renaissance studies. What they seek is not the course of some passionate intuition that men have called inspiration or divine fire or the inner melody of things; these very words are signals for critical contempt. We may recognize or feel what men call the divine fire but we cannot grade or weigh it. We cannot make it count or assign it its place in literary affairs.

  •

  My vision of poetry has been drawn from Carlyle as well as from Whitman, from Dante, from Burckhardt, from Pater and Symonds as well as from Pound or Olson—wherever another man’s vision leads my spirit towards a larger feeling. And there has been a fire, a fire of anger that rose, as I found the Romantic spirit and back of that the Spirit of Romance and back of that the cult of life as a romance of the spirit belonged to an order that was under attack or was under boycott. There was another, an official, an authoritative order of “poets”: Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Louise Bogan for whom poetry was not a process or nature of life but a disciplining. And after them, Randall Jarrell, Brooks, and Warren. Their name is legion; they swarmed and swarm in competition with one another to establish an idea cut each to his own limitation for the poet.

  •

  It is an anger that pressed up to take over the direction of my writing on H.D. against slights and insults to her work. The polemic urge was there, to take offense wherever it was found in the context of old abuses, neglects, and mistakings of the poetry. Randall Jarrell’s “H.D. is silly in the head” response to The Walls Do Not Fall or Louise Bogan’s revelatory contempt for the Notes to Ion—these are telling efforts on their part. In Untermeyer’s anthology with Wilbur and Jarrell as editors H.D.’s work no longer appears.

  •

  Yet how mistaken the anger seems. The War Trilogy was not written, any more than Paterson or The Pisan Cantos were, for classrooms, anthologies, or the new reviews. Jarrell and Louise Bogan were most right in their recognition that H.D. was not for them.

  •

  What remains is the first thought on waking. The word “aroused,” and back of that “excited,” may lead too to the word “inspired”—a key to how the body built up its tone or mode (mood) for writing. Here, on the physical level, the cooperation of different systems is demanded. “Aroused”—our visceral participation. “Excited”—our nervous participation. “Inspired”—our respiratory participation (heart and lungs). Then—But what is the word that applies to the circulatory (heart and brain)? I cannot find the word—a word in the series “aroused,” “excited,” “inspired.” Is “ardent” the word? “Fired”? There was the ardor of Lowes or of Pater that gave their prose the heat of high art. Was anger, angry the pain of something burning one, part of it? The ardor for The Cantos, for Journey to Love, for H.D.’s work, being a fire that burned in another way when I came into contact with derogatory critics.

  IV.

  In his commission, the germ of this book, Norman Holmes Pearson started in my mind an “original” of this book that I thought of as a task, to ride out on quest or trial, for the Lady. He did not ask for that. We had discussed her work in correspondence, and then, he had asked—would I try a book, a tribute on the occasion of H.D.’s seventy-fifth birthday, October 24, 1961. I did not mistake what he hoped for, a small book, a critical appreciation, but I knew too, I warned him, that I must be involved, if I get at what H.D.’s work meant to me, in the unresolved matter of my own poetics. I must increase the risk of her reputation in grounds of my own reading, drawn as I was to just those elements of Alexandrian, Renaissance, and twentieth century theosophy and of Romanticism that among orthodox theologians and literary critics are held most disreputable.

  I must make up for the critical disregard, I thought. To take up arms for her honor? There was, is, anyway this being aroused to defense, to offense, to fight for her cause that I saw as my own. To wear this challenge on my sleeve.

  •

  Nor could there ever have been a small, a proper book. H.D. did not stand alone, but her work, like that of Pound and Williams, belonged to a nucleus of the poetics in which I had my own beginnings; as also I saw Lawrence and H.D. forming another nucleus. In the inheritance of the art, each poet released complex chromosomes, forces that entered into new syntheses of poetic individuality. There were agreements, reinforcements of one poet’s imagination in another’s. But also, I found their disagreements were crises in the formation as I worked, contending with Pound and Williams where they took issue with her or with each other, searching out the issue to be my own.

  •

  Then I began to see the book as being not only the story of a poetics but of the role of women as muses and even, as Robert Graves does, as deities over Poetry, but the term poetess was derogatory. The relation of a man to the idea of mother or sister or wife raised the specter of the female will to trouble his idea of woman’s genius. So, Marianne Moore in her modesty claiming no more than an honest craft was commended and even admired, but H.D. or Dame Edith Sitwell, writing in the personae of the inspired seer, pretenders to the throne of Poetry that gives voice to divine will in an age which mistrusts even the metaphor, excited contempt. I had heard Randall Jarrell and Richard Wilbur give voice to their outrage at the pretension of Edith Sitwell or had read Hugh Kenner who placed her among the starters of crazes, the mountebanks of literature. As, in The Flowering of the Rod, Simon thinks:

  we must draw the line somewhere;

  he had seen something like this

  in a heathen picture . . .

  harkening back to a prehistory in which there was mother rule. In our diagram of the orders of Poetry, the Poetess appears, as the Empress appears in the configuration of the Empire, or the Priestess or Pope Joan in the orders of the Church, having the majesty of a first power.

 
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman might form in my mind a generative figure of American poetry in the nineteenth century.

  •

  “H.D. / Ezra Pound?” In her accounting of her personal life she goes back again and again to her marriage with Aldington and his leaving her; in her old age she will still try to tell the story, keeping alive a hurt, a being betrayed that can surround her sense of having lost. But for H.D. too there was a sense of herself in relation to Pound, to Lawrence, and in her Hermetic Definitions, written in 1960, to St.-John Perse as poetess or seeress in a mystical marriage with a poet or seer, Mary Magdalene in The Flowering of the Rod who, in going over to the Christ, brings her seven demonic powers into His power, or Helen of Helen in Egypt in her encounters with Achilles, Paris, Theseus. Nowhere does H.D. refer to Williams, but in his own record from the initial letter of 1905 until the bitter recounting of that meeting in his Autobiography in 1951 Williams’s thought goes back to his encounter with her.

  •

  Mother and father of our poetry I keep trying to project. Reproduction, “that was the disturbing thing in the dream,” I wrote. And then later, “Where everything counts—impossible to reproduce.” The fact is that Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, H.D., Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, are not mothers and fathers to us but lonely isolate spirits, akin only as we read. The fact is that our contemporary diagram demands these three, H.D., Pound, and William Carlos Williams, only as The War Trilogy, The Pisan Cantos, and Paterson were battlegrounds in our own struggle towards the realization of a poetry that was to appear in the early fifties. “Aroused,” “excited,” “inspired,” “fired,” we found ourselves contending for these masterpieces against those for whom our own work was never to have a place.

  •

  When, as following the method of H.D.’s later work, of a day by day account, I began this section, I have imagined another intent in which the matter of H.D. is taken as a mantra, my thought ever returning thereto and taking its way anew. And the book becomes, not some challenge to the literary lists—as if I might win a place for her honor in establishing (by my authority, by being an author in that sense) a place in men’s minds of active concern—but another original, in my thought (for Norman Pearson had suggested a gift for her herself), the gift of itself love seeks to make.