The H.D. Book

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

  Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,

  All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,

  as the physical realities of sex, referred to in the language of the Protestant ethic as “privates” or “secrets,” begin to be thought of as communal goods, the words for organs and acts begin to appear in works no longer written for private circulation but to be “published.” “James Joyce was right,” rings as a refrain in the prose of “Murex” which follows the mode of the interior monolog, but, though H.D. is a poet for whom the revelation of inner truth is primary, delineating changes of erotic emotion from tensions of withholding to raptures of release, she does not and perhaps could not refer to the sexual parts of the body openly. Not until Denise Levertov’s “Hypocrite Women” and “Our Bodies” in 1963 will the right Joyce had won be claimed by a woman and the words “cunt” and “balls” take their place with “hands,” “eyes,” “mouth,” “feet” in the language of the physical body in a woman’s poetry.

  But not only sexual names had been banished by the Protestant ethic. Indeed, the names flourished wherever they were used to express scorn or irreverence. Back of the sexual organs and the names, more feared and hated were the sexual mysteries and powers. Calling up Lilith, “and one born before Lilith,” and Eve, Isis, Astarte, Cyprus in The Flowering of the Rod, H.D. would bring back other banished names in which the daemonic sexual nature of woman is evoked. The Puritanism of Augustine in the 4th century or of Calvin in the sixteenth would censor spiritual as well as physical possibilities. So, Mary Magdalene in The Flowering of the Rod, “outcast,” “unseemly,” is City-goddess of Magdala and also “myrrh-tree of the gentiles” and also a Siren of the sea—a numinous power of the ancient Mother-world—as well as a whore. She returns like the very sacred and taboo divinity of Woman as ruler of sexual mysteries that in the nineteenth century began to be called pornography. Having called up:

  a word most bitter, marah

  a word bitterer still, mar

  H.D., in turn, invokes the star of morning, Lucifier above:

  Phosphorus at sun-rise,

  Hesperus at sun-set.

  Then she calls upon the disturbance below, what Boehme called the Turba:

  xi

  O swiftly, relight the flame

  before the substance cool,

  for suddenly we saw your name

  desecrated; knave and fools

  have done you impious wrong,

  Venus, for venery stands for impurity

  and Venus as desire

  is venereous, lascivious,

  while the very root of the word shrieks

  like a mandrake when foul witches pull

  its stem at midnight . . .

  thru to:

  O holiest one,

  Venus whose name is kin

  to venerate,

  venerator.

  •

  It is this trouble with names, or this trouble of a name, that is followed by the section we have already considered when I wrote about searching for the name of something, of hérisson:

  it lives, it breathes,

  it gives off—fragrance?

  but then:

  I do not know what it gives,

  The patron who said “name it,” who said, “if you cannot, if there is no name, invent it,” was, if not Freud himself, very like Freud.

  •

  A long way round. “Beating about the bush” is our common expression. I gather what I mean as I go. And must write as if I gathered my sense as a man would gather water in a sieve.

  •

  Lady Chatterley “had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul washed transparent.”

  •

  Yes, it is true. Writing in this book on that Saturday, just after I had smashed my finger, I was out of touch with the pain. The finger, insulted as it was, after all, hooted.

  What I was going to write but dissented, but still must go on with, is that in the higher orders they do not hear the hooters? they are not offended? but “perfectly still,” “washed transparent”? A realm of ideas that is above the distraction of an injured finger.

  •

  Dame Edith Sitwell has turned like an outraged falconess from the higher orders swooping down, distracted, clawing and tearing at the self-esteem of petty critics and versifiers, at the journalistic smirk and hoot. Is it—lady like?

  •

  Where the hooting is, there is a division between the upper and the lower; there is a war in the void.

  •

  Working towards this study, I have found H.D.’s deriders, hooters of the daily press, of the current literary reviews. It is part of the polemic, the store of outrage, my hearing at times not the Michael, Raphael, Gabriel of the angelic orders, not the bell-notes over the waters, over the medium of language where those great rimes sound, but the derisive Monday morning reproofs, denials, and smirks of Randall Jarrell, Louise Bogan, Robert Hillyer, industrious literary businessmen, and back of them, the conspiracy of silence. Into the texture of the poem H.D. has woven their voices, as life does weave into the tissue of our physical bodies memories that make for a lasting resistance against insult, for possibilities of repair.

  •

  The poem takes as its condition of being its liabilities,

  and fixed indigestible matter

  such as shell, pearl; imagery

  done to death; perilous ascent,

  ridiculous descent . . .

  where the poet lets the voice of the adversary play and list against her work just those qualities that rescue the work from what is correct and invulnerable.

  •

  The war, the actual bombing of London, the daily attacks, the lies and ambitions of wartime politics, may have made real and immediate again the experience of attacks and strategies of literary wars the writer had known.

  This search for historical parallels,

  research into psychic affinities,

  has been done to death before . . .

  •

  “The meaning that words hide” remains. And where—sick, tired, I imagine her, tired of these voices—she came to Freud in 1933, in the exhaustion of her first creative tide that had carried her high in 1916 and the early twenties, in the waning of her critical reputation in which Red Roses for Bronze of 1931 and Ion of 1937 appeared, there was not only a personal but a creative need for a new Master over Love.

  •

  “To greet the return of the Gods,” she wrote on a card, sending gardenias to Freud upon his arrival in London after the Nazis’ taking of Vienna in 1938. One of the high orders, the Princess George of Greece had arranged for Freud’s collection of Greek and Egyptian antiquities to follow him to London. “Other people read: Goods,” he wrote in reply.

  •

  They had in common our ardent “high-minded” (as Pound might have called her, as he called her in that letter to Williams “narrow-minded”), our high-minded poetess who sought the return of the gods and our earnest “low-minded” (as Pound would have called him, as Pound called him in the Rock-Drill Cantos “a kike”) psychoanalyst who sought the return of the goods—not only genius but the derisive voices of critics in their ears. They excited antipathies. Science like art had provided smirks of distaste. Art like science had shown its conspiracy of silence.

  •

  In the trilogy, in the three panels of the poem, there is a narrative of the old order entering into the new, the despised becoming part of the revered—as the all but forgotten “Red Roses for Bronze” is remembered in H.D.’s last work, Hermetic Definitions of 1960. Kaspar, a mage of the old pagany (of the stars), in The Walls Do Not Fall no more than a promise of the story:

  His, the Genius in the jar

  which the Fisherman finds,

  He is Mage,

  bringing myrrh.

  that might also for a moment have been the story of Arabian Nights fame, brings forward a jar (it is the heart, the Word
, the Star), stars, hearts, words—containing—“the Genius in the jar,” she says; “bringing myrrh,” she says. Containing life, meaning, light.

  •

  Life, meaning, light are in the jar. But then a woman enters the picture; as in the alchemical passage of the alembic or the witchcraft passage of the cauldron—in “the crucible,” from marah, bitterness, an operation begins as brine and tears of the sea join:

  and change and alter,

  mer, mere, mere, mater, Maia, Mary.

  Kaspar, admitting her at all, admits the Siren-seductress, even the pornographic—“disordered, disheveled,” “unseemly” and in the disorder, “the light on her hair like moonlight on a lost river” he has a vision of the old orders. There is vision then in the jar, he sees the Islands of Paradise. “I am that myrrh tree of the gentiles,” the woman declares, and she shows in her speech a glimmer back of paradise of unseemly sexual rites:

  there are idolators,

  even in Phrygia and Cappadocia,

  who kneel before mutilated images

  and burn incense to the Mother of Mutilations,

  that contain the image to come of Mary weeping bitterly over the mutilated body of the Christ.

  •

  Seven devils that had been cast out are part of the story, the marah itself, perhaps, “were now unalterably part of the picture”

  Lilith born before Eve

  and one born before Lilith,

  and Eve; we three are forgiven,

  we are three of the seven

  daemons cast out of her.

  •

  It was in hiding away the daemons, the sexualities, even the armpits and ass-hole of our bodies, in guilt or shame, divorcing them from the goods (for only that is a good that is communal and above-board), taking them away from God into the claim of secret or private property, that they became evils, lords “over” us.

  •

  In his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexual Love of 1912, Freud tells us that besides the realm of eros, where men and women become lovers, discovering their bodies anew, and come into the drama of their romantic phantasies, he found another falling in love, with pieces and parts, where there was no reciprocity. Beneath the surface, hidden in the heart, repressed from consciousness, he detected perversions, sexual acts and appetites in exile.

  “The highest and the lowest in sexuality are everywhere most intimately connected,” he observed.

  •

  Kaspar, who may have been Abraham, the poem tells us, is the old patriarchal order, Mage of the star-world above; as Mary Magdala represents the powers of the matriarchal world. In their meeting, an exchange takes place—he is initiated into the revelation of the sea, as she in turn has prepared for her becoming one of those whom the Son will bring with Him into the new Paradise. But now the persons change and Freud, the image of the sea-world of the unconscious, the initiate of the Libido, takes the place of Kaspar, and the poetess evoking the heavenly powers takes the place of the Sea-priestess. Between the man and the woman a work is begun, to bring up into the light certain banished elements of our being, to bring up the full confession of the heart into joy. “The Wedding of Heaven and Hell” Blake proposed. The mixture of many things in the configuration of the poem, the associational method in the psychoanalysis, bring the above into the below, the below into the above; and in time, we see they bring over the primal Paradise into the new.

  •

  In the weaving under and over of threads we bring these things from the light of the verso that men call Night into the Light of the face that men call Day.

  •

  Already, the hooters, who had hooted at Freud because they would keep sexual matters in the dark, use Freudian hoots to cast shame and darkness once more over our nature.

  Rand or round? “It’s a German word,” Jess said, and searched out the dictionary to draw the sorts. “Will you draw the sorts?” “No! I don’t want to know!” I replied, and then: “Yes. Give me the German.”

  : edge, brink / margin (of a book)

  Sally Rand was marginal then. aus Rand und Band sein, be out of bounds, out of hand, be unmanageable.

  den Rand halten: hold one’s tongue, shut up.

  bis zum Rande voll : brim-full.

  Chapter 9

  MARCH 22, 1961. Wednesday.

  “Ne pas oublier un grand chapitre sur l’art de la divination par l’eau, les cartes, l’inspection de la main, etc.” So Baudelaire writes in Mon coeur mis à nu, which now that it has come up, I begin to use in my own divinations. Finding my rhyme in the opening propositions of Baudelaire’s essay: “De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi.” Where he, too, proposes to start “n’importe où, n’importe comment, et le continuer au jour le jour, suivant l’inspiration du jour et de la circonstance, pourvu que l’inspiration soit vivre.”

  •

  To bring one thing into another as, primary to art, the painter draws from life until the object or person or scene selected informs his eye and hand, the painting a colloquy entertained. But I have in mind now the great conversation—conversion—of painting within painting: Picasso’s bringing up Velasquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas where the elements of that painting speak at Picasso’s talking table, as in the beginning of his work Picasso had spoken in the language of El Greco to draw sentiments of hunger and cold, figures of an agony, from his own life in Montmartre. The martyrs of the religious heresy of art, of Bohemia, in the wake of Baudelaire and the Romantic agon appearing in the very style of those martyrs of the Catholic world that writhe in the canvases of El Greco in the wake of the Renaissance, where the sensuality of the pagan revival and the all but Manichaean spirituality of the Reformation contend. As later, king now over a Spanish empire of painting, Picasso reiterates the splendor of the Prado in the splendor of his own palace La Californie. “The dog we see in his study of The Maids of Honor,” Jaime Sabartes tells us, “is not the dog painted by Velasquez, but Picasso’s dog. . . . Here and there, features of his intimates show up in the face of the Infanta or the faces of other figures. . . . When we look closely at these ‘studies,’ we have the feeling we are looking over Picasso’s shoulder as he works, one day in a dark mood, relaxed on another, but always preoccupied in pursuit of an idea, a fugitive thought. . . . ”

  •

  Picasso would divine his life in the depths of Velasquez’s painting—but this life is his own sight in creation as the chiromancer would divine the lines of a life in the hand, following from figures seen towards fugitive ideas, or as any old gypsy reading the cards would call up the cast and numbers of scenes in which a play will begin. “Whenever I examined this painting closely,” Sabartes says of the Velasquez in the Prado, “I always had the impression I was looking at a scene from a play. Was this because of the characters represented, their gestures and attitudes, and the court costumes of another epoch? Was it because of Velasquez’s way of representing them, some suspicion of his motives in grouping them as he did?” Bringing into play a confusion of immediacies and mirrors of immediacies, Velasquez presents the eyes with a mystery of their point of view: behind the painter’s back the figures of Philip IV and his queen appear reflected in a mirror so that we begin to realize that they must stand where we do, facing the painter—outside the canvas in its own representation, for we see in the painting the verso of the painting facing us and the painter’s face is towards us as if he worked in a mirror; upon the walls of the room in the picture are copies (mirrors) by Mazo of originals by Rubens now in the hand of Velasquez.

  •

  Divination is working with things to release the content and form of a future or fate, sometimes bringing up what we choose upon a conscious impulse, sometimes drawing the sorts by chance to bring a foreign element into action. Here sorting and mixing are functions of a higher organization in which, troubled by my thought of Baudelaire’s Mon coeur mis à nu, I begin to take thought in Baudelaire’s thought. “ De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi,
” appears reflected almost as if contrived to fit the composition of my own reflections. And as I read Baudelaire the specter of my trouble with his trouble begins to come forward, as if in a mirror behind me as I work. He is a voice set into motion from a deck of fifty-two playing cards or from a tarot deck of seventy-eight, but this deck is another, of playing poets or voices of poetry. He has been brought into play as if by hazard; but in the configuration of the fifty-two cards or seventy-eight names of God, interrelated sequences and sets have been imagined that form such a tradition or interpretation of what Poetry is that every number moves towards order. Kurt Seligmann in The Mirror of Magic argues that the Tarot’s “entire magic theory rests upon the belief that in nature there is no accident—that every happening in the universe is caused by a pre-established law,” but in the poetic theory of our Tarot there is no accident, yet there is no pre-established law, for every happening destroys the law before it, moving as it does towards the creation of a law that will be established only in the composition of the whole.

  •

  When I spoke of H.D.’s being the Poetess and recalled too the charge of Pound’s so-long-ago “refined, charming and utterly narrow-minded she-bard” and of Williams’s “Hellenic perfection of style,” I had in mind another specter—the genius of a woman that men would propitiate or exorcise. The Poetess was an enormous persona like the hieratic figures of women in the major arcana of the Tarot—l’Impératrice, la Papesse—who with the Juggler, the Emperor, the Pope, the Hermit, and the Fool, belong to a series of types brought forward from the later Medieval World (in which la Papesse may well be not Pope Joan but the Albigensian Esclarmonde, and the Fool may be the Parsival-Hero of twelfth century romances and fairy tales) into the Renaissance configuration. The Tarot, like the Hermetic charades of Catherine de Medici or the alchemical romances of the seventeenth century, provided the ground for the creative imagination to work in and its figures are projects of that creation. Poetry is another such matrix of surviving, evolving, and changing entities, and the Tarot, like Poetry, has periods and reformations. The Tarot I had in mind is not the Tarot of Marseilles, but the presentation belonging to the London of 1910 and the mysteries of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Tarot drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith following A. E. Waite’s prescriptions. La Papesse now is The High Priestess, recalling not Esclarmonde, but MacGregor Mathers’s wife, Henri Bergson’s sister, as Isis. The scenes on the lesser arcana might be from the great prose romances of William Morris, and in the idealization of its women, Birdalone and Elfhild mingle with the cult figures of Art Nouveau. Egyptianized to become the Book of Thoth in the eighteenth century, Hebrewized to become a Cabalistic text in the nineteenth, the cast of the original play survives, however costumed, in Waite’s deck, but now the abstract numbers and impersonal face cards give way to illustrations, the cryptogram of numerical symbols becomes directly a romance or fairytale in moving pictures. Even as in poetry the Imagists were beginning to demand a clairvoyant art and to project scenes of enigmatic content—primary vision or insight, as in Pound’s “April”: