The H.D. Book
Page 52
Three spirits came to me
And drew me apart
To where the olive boughs
Lay stripped upon the ground:
Pale carnage beneath bright mist.
Slight as the imagist poem might seem to be, it has also the charge of a vision—it is a card predicting a poetry. In that passage from A Packet for Ezra Pound in which Yeats speaks of The Cantos he sees the sequences of that poem as sequences of cards: “I have often found there,” he writes, “brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order,” and when he tells us that Pound “has scribbled on the back of an envelope certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events . . . then each set of letters repeated, and then A B C D inverted and this repeated, and then a new element X Y Z, then certain letters that never recur . . . and all set whirling together,” where “the Descent and the Metamorphosis—A B C D and J K L M—his fixed elements, took the place of the Zodiac, the archetypal persons—X Y Z—that of the Triumphs, and certain modern events—his letters that do not recur—that of those events in Cosimo Tura’s day,” Yeats envisions the order of The Cantos as being very much indeed like the laying out of cards in a divination.
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Taking the Major Arcana as a set of projected parts for the woman to play in a drama, the Tarot provides us with the two figures in the hierarchical order—the Empress and the Popess, two in the order of virtues or powers—Justice with her scales and sword and the virgin Strength forcing the lion’s mouth. In the Marseilles deck the winged figure of Témperance is a woman; pouring water from one vessel into another, she may be pouring the Soul or Life from one body into another. In the Waite deck this figure has been re-formed to be “neither male nor female.” We see her as a virtue, but she is linked in what we see to one of the two women who appear in the cosmic orders—the World, the figure of a dancing woman (“the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God,” Waite gives us), and the Star, the naked figure of a woman kneeling who pours water from two vessels, like Temperance then, but She returns the water of life or the soul to its elements or sources, from one vessel to the spring and from another to the earth.
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How far abroad have we gone, preoccupied in pursuit of this fugitive idea of the Poetess as a card in divination? H.D. is immersed from the period of The War Trilogy on in the lore of occultism, and it is not surprising that in a poetry that means to keep Hellenistic mysteries alive in the imagination, as in Freudian analysis the repressed is brought forward into the present consciousness, the emblems of Renaissance hermeticists, astrologers, and alchemists who mixed pagan and Christian images play their part. In “Nights,” published in 1935, after H.D.’s analysis then, the protagonist Natalia Saunderson plays the Tarots with Felice Barton “an overblown queen of hearts or (Tarots) queen of cups,” and there is a kind of emotional magic going on: “She tapped something in you,” David says of Mrs. Barton.
“He understood, in his ridiculous way, everything,” it seems to Natalia, “things she herself couldn’t cope with.” “No, she didn’t,” she tells him, “I mean, it was talking about those cards.” And later, Natalia refers again to the cards: “She lent me those German Tarots. We had such fun, we spread out all the cards and that diluted sort of Burne-Jones English set I have.”
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In The War Trilogy, although alchemical and astrological lore enter into its synthesis, there is no use of Tarot. Thoth is evoked as patron of scribes, and in his Hellenistic identification with Hermes, as in Tribute to the Angels, he is patron of thieves and poets, but there is no Book of Thoth, that favorite Tarot fantasy of nineteenth century occultists, in H.D.’s poem, for she is relating faithfully a synthesis in which the Hellenistic Christos was born that knew nothing of Tarot. Though the opening scene of the City under Fire could have been related to the Tower; and the Moon, the Sun, Death, Judgment, the Devil, the Wheel of Fortune, the Lovers—all could have been resurrected in the meaning of the poem; though the High Priestess may correspond to the Lady of Tribute to the Angels, for she too holds a book (“The same—different—the same attributes, / different yet the same as before”), they do not enter in.
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Yet the unfolding of the poem is very like a reading of cards. “An incident here and there” like a hint here and there in the first distribution of cards from which the Seeress will read what is happening. The ruin where the fallen roof leaves the room open to the sky, the tide pool, the worm on the leaf, the track in the sand from a tree in flower to a half-open hut-door, the bare early colonial meeting-house: these do not appear as mise-en-scène or as images in themselves to be captured but as elements of a language to be deciphered, as the chiromancer divines her meanings from the scenes of that deck Pamela Coleman Smith designed in the manner of Burne-Jones. The major arcana of this divination in H.D.’s trilogy will be the great powers of the Semitic, Egyptian, Greek, and Magian worlds that mixed in the alembic of the Alexandrian imagination prepare the syntheses from which the powers of the Christian world will emerge.
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But in this reading the meaning of things, as if conversant in dreams with the Presence or with Our Lady, having some poetic gnosis of the divine world, H.D., like Caedmon, commanded by the angel to sing something, or like the Ploughman, whom Blake saw releasing souls from their seeds to grow into the day, is inspired, reviving in the meaning of poet the spirit of shaman magic and vision. Something of the awesome remove of this order belongs to the imagined card of the Poetess, the title itself having that ambivalence of the sacred in which travesty and honor contend.
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The Poetess like the Popess is a disturbing persona; like the woman Mary of Magdala, who is “a great tower,” she is a demoniac, for her simple humanity is contaminated by genius.
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The daimones of Mary Magdala are female powers—Lilith, Eve, and one before them, from the Hebraic orders, and the great goddesses of the classical world. The one before Lilith and Eve in the teachings of Jewish Gnosticism may be Sophia, the Daughter of God, whom the Samarian Simon claimed reincarnated in his Helen. But, as for man or woman the Muse remains female, the genius is male. As Maker or Poet the man, like God, creates; and the idea of the Poetess as Creatrix is again like the Popess—Pope Joan—the idea of a woman as a pretender to manhood, a disturbing sex magic. Men live uneasily with or under the threat of genius in women.
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In the ballad The Queen O’ Crow Castle the poetess Helen Adam takes over from folklore such a tale of a man winning a possessed queen, where here I would see the drama of sexual love that would conquer a demoniacally inspired woman. The hero has a genius of his own: “He walks wi’ an angel baith morning and night” that casts fear of sex, for “Nae lassie daur step ’neath the stir o’ those wings.” This angel of Callastan’s has his counterpart in the deil of the Queen O’ Crow Castle; both are the solitude, the genius of the poet. To the would-be lover of the Queen her genius appears as a demon-rival:
Fire,
Fire,
Fire fierce and red.
The gay fires o’ danger in the dark o’ her bed.
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“L’eternelle Vénus (caprice, hystérie, fantaisie) est une des formes séduisantes du diable,” Baudelaire writes.
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In Courbet’s great canvas L’atelier du peintre of 1855, humanity is gathered in its types about the studio of the painter. “The metamorphosis of womanhood,” Werner Hofmann tells us in his The Earthly Paradise, “is distributed over various parts of the picture. We have the mother, and not far from her the harlot still dressed in her plain country clothes (to the right behind the grave-digger’s top-hat); and we have the central figure of ‘Truth’.” In addition to these Courbet had originally painted in the elemental female figure, the animal-like femme fatale, giving her the features of Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Baudelaire.
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Mon coeur mis à nu was written between 1859 and 1866. In the high romantic fashion of the day there was a cult of the femme fatale, and for Baudelaire the fascination of women had a powerful and threatening psychic reality. But thruout the nineteenth century, the Popess changing into the High Priestess, this persona is persistent: Helen, Seraphita, Kundry, Lilith, She. In the formative years of H.D.’s generation, women were fighting to free themselves from the bondage they felt in such stereotypes, to take their places as equals of men; yet these were also the high years of Art Nouveau, when the powers of women to charm, to enthrall, and even to enslave, were portrayed everywhere. In the battle for women’s rights, women’s powers would seem like powers of darkness, a tyrannical myth, against which the light of reason must strive. With the World War common sense seemed to have won, and the Mom, the Career-Woman, and the Model to have taken the place of the Eternal Female. The flat planes and straight lines, the functionalism, of the modern seemed to have cast into permanent disrepute the devious courses of Art Nouveau. The analytic functionalism of Freud’s psychology seemed to have exposed at last to the light of day the shadowy demons of hysteria and dream. A new Oedipus had overthrown the Sphinx—for the answer to her dark riddle was “the Oedipus complex”—and Thebes was freed from the pestilence of neurosis. In the twenties and thirties, the emancipated, shedding the passionate masks of man’s ancient dramas, hoped to be cured of tragic fate. So the Old Man in Yeats’s last play The Death of Cuchulain rants against the modern and spits upon the dancers painted by Degas—“above all upon that chambermaid face”—for the women who could dance Emer are gone. “I am old, I belong to mythology,” he says: “I could have got such a dancer once, but she has gone; the tragi-comedian dancer, the tragic dancer, upon the same neck love and loathing, life and death.”
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Not only in art, but with Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht in 1861 in the revision of history the nineteenth century image of woman took hold. Back of the caprice, hysteria, fantasy—the psychic entity in men’s minds of woman as all powerful—and back of the other figure, the pure, higher, suffering Psyche-woman, in the primal myths Bachofen found hints and certainties of a war in which Mother-rule was overthrown by Father-rule. Before the Father-Gods, Jehovah or Zeus, and their law, Bachofen argued, there had been the Mother-Goddess and her law; before History, there had been Nature.
Digging into her realms, under earth, into the prehistory of caves and middenheaps, men searched to bring up once more long forgotten images of what woman was—at Willendorf, at Lespugue. Scholars and archaeologists making finds at Ur and Minos, at Mycenae and Malta, brought a visual reality to the romantic idea of the Mother of the Gods. “Delve into the deepest depths to reach them,” Mephistopheles says to Faust in Goethe’s phantasmagoria when Faust would seek the Mothers—that was in the twenties of the nineteenth century.
So too from old wives’ tales and from heretical texts in the swarming ground of Gnostic and hermetic belief from which Jews, Christians, and Moslems had drawn, scholars of Greek and Coptic found, where texts spoke of deep things, teachings concerning a femality in God, a person who was Mother or Wisdom or Glory, a daughter but also a mother of God. It was as if the oldest mysteries had returned to take up their stand in woman just as the new rationalism of modernity promised to free her. As if an ancient image were taking over, even in the citadel of Roman Catholicism where the Mother of God was to be advanced in the dogma of Her Immaculate Conception and Her Assumption. The giant head of Kore was rising again into the identity of woman.
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With King Jesus in 1946 and The White Goddess in 1948, Robert Graves, a poet antagonistic to Yeats as to Pound—and I would take it ignorant of H.D.’s War Trilogy—advanced a grammar of myth where Mary Magdalene appears as a Great Queen or Fate (“In Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song she is Tom’s Muse—Merry Mad Maud.”) and where that refrain “Lilith born before Eve / and one born before Lilith, and Eve; we three” began to be explicated. According to Graves the Semitic goddess Michal of Hebron was Adam’s creatrix; but then from gnostic sources he goes on to identify the Virgin Mary with Michal and in turn from the Essene Ebionites with a female Holy Spirit. “We have come to be governed by the unholy triumvirate of Pluto god of wealth, Apollo god of science and Mercury god of thieves,” Graves protests. There can be no end to the present miserable condition “until the repressed desire of the Western races, which is for some practical form of Goddess worship, with her love not limited to maternal benevolence and her afterworld not deprived of a Sea, finds satisfaction at last.”
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Horace Gregory tells us in the lore of contemporary poets that Graves and the poetess Laura Riding had inscribed above their bed: “God Is A Woman.” It became the epigraph of my suite of heresies (of gnostic orthodoxies) Medieval Scenes before I had read King Jesus, indeed, before The White Goddess was written. I had found the lore of Morgan le Fay in the Freudian Roheim’s The Riddle of the Sphinx, but then, as this book must have suggested, I had come to live in the ambience of such meanings and H.D.’s twentieth century Gnostic “Tale of a Jar or Jars” had opened the way.
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“Woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing,” Graves argues and then explains that he does not mean that a woman should not write but that she should “either be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence, as Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Derby did, or she should be the Muse in a complete sense; she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penarrd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with antique authority.”
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Sometime in the Spring of 1942 I chanced upon a copy of Laura Riding’s Progress of Stories and within the year had come so under the spell of her authority or the authority of her spell—she confounded the two—that I could feel her scorn over my poetic fumblings until I ceased, the poet in me abashed as the force of her seeing thru what poets made of poetry became more persuasive. In the characters of Lilith Outcome, Lady Port-Huntlady, Frances Cat, or the Indescribable Witch, Laura Riding projected masks of herself as their creatrix, a woman self-banished into a female critical mentality to stand opposite the male humanity of God in a creation removed into a humorous existence by or from the Creation. In “Their Last Interview,” God is “tired as ever of his uncompletedness,” “his ministry of sympathies,” and “anxious to fade back into humanity”; Miss Lilith Outcome is delighted by his tolerance of her existence. “Then you quite forgive me for being more correct?” she asks. “I haven’t your authoritative touch,” He replies.
Miss Riding would have nothing to do with talk of Muses; it was, she argued, a dishonesty that obscured the right reasons of poetry. “Poets have attributed the compulsion of poetry to forces outside themselves—” she wrote in the Preface to her Collected Poems in 1938, “to divinities, muses, and, finally, even to such humanistic muses as Politics . . . The nineteenth-century lament was: ‘Where is the Bard?’ The twentieth-century version is: ‘Where is the Muse?’ In America: ‘where is the Myth?’ ”
In her argumenting Laura Riding could play the Old Sow of Maenawr Penarrd very well indeed, devouring the world if need be. She liked playing Witch, Mrs. Story, Dame Death, and Poetry Herself, and talking with men who would be poets like an older and naturally superior sister. In Graves’s life between 1927 and the outbreak of the Second World War, she was Queen Tyrant of his thought. “There was thereupon a unity to which you and I pledged our faith,” he writes in the “Dedicatory Epilogue to Laura Riding” from the 1930 edition of Goodbye to All That: “How we went together to the land where the dead parade the streets and there met demons and returned with demons still treading behind. And how they drove us up and down the land.” Before the White Goddess was, Laura Riding was.
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There was a way of gaining correctness and authority that Laura Riding sought in putting away uncompletedness, humanity, the ministry of sympat
hies. She became obsessed with the proper use of poetic faculties, the right reasons for poetry, and sometime after her Collected Poems in 1938 writing poetry at all came to seem impossible. She set about making a dictionary to free words from their corrupting associations, still driven up and down the land by demons.
I.
There was the trouble with names and bound up with that the trouble with what a man and a woman was. Beyond the democratic man-voice of Williams or the exalted or ecstatic woman-voice of H.D., there was in one direction the possibility Laura Riding exemplifies—the tyranny of style over the matter of life, the poet’s removal from the contaminating medium, where eventually the language itself seems an Augean stable of meanings one does not want to mean. Graves too in his grammar of myth strives to restore—“the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute”—the true language of poetry from the corruptions of other men’s uses. “What ails Christianity is that the old Mother-Goddess religious theme and the new Almighty-God theme are fundamentally irreconcilable. Catholicism is not a religion based squarely on a single myth; it is a complex of juridical decisions, often contradictory, made under political pressure in an age-long law suit between Goddess and God.” This fundamentalism, intolerance of contradictions, single-mindedness, sets Laura Riding and Robert Graves at odds with the pluralistic, many-minded poetry of Pound, Williams, or H.D., where there is not one myth alone but a gathering of myths. Here the poet does not see the language as a system but as a community of meanings as deep and as wide as the nature of man has been, and he seeks not rightness but the surrender of style to the feeling of words and associations. To become impure with life, if need be.