The H.D. Book

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

  The accusation of the Poet and another accusation of the Woman fuse in a third accusation of the heterodox tradition. She dramatizes the desecration of the psyche in the definitions of reality set by the Protestant ethic, as later, in Tribute to the Angels, she dramatizes the desecration of woman’s and the poet’s spirit in the Venus-venery-venereous-venerate-venerator passage. “Stumbling toward / vague cosmic expression,” H.D. continues now in imitation of the mercantile skeptic voice:

  obvious sentiment,

  folder round a spiritual bank-account,

  with credit-loss too starkly indicated,

  a riot of unpruned imagination,

  •

  She was not wrong in so picturing her adverse critic’s reaction. “Felt queer, sincere, more than a little silly,” Randall Jarrell wrote in Partisan Review: “the smashed unenclosing walls jut raggedly from the level debris of her thought (which accepts all that comes from heaven as unquestioningly as the houses of London). H.D. is history and misunderstands a later stage of herself so spectacularly that her poem exists primarily as an anachronism.”

  •

  “Wandering among barbarians, patching what religious scraps she can pick up,” he wrote a year later when Tribute to the Angels appeared: “Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum upon which it is hard to base a later style: H.D.’s new poem is one for those who enjoy any poem by H.D., or for those collectors who enjoy any poem that includes the Virgin, Raphael, Azrael, Uriel, John on Patmos, Hermes Trismegistus and the Bona Dea.”

  What lies back of Jarrell’s advantage here, his taking it for granted that the less said of this kind of thing the better, is not an idiosyncratic stand (though some personal contempt finds occasion for expression), not a special disrespect (though his impressions of the texts in question are glib almost to the point of disrespect), but an orthodoxy of view. Jarrell’s great forte was that he successfully impersonated and then genuinely represented the needs and attitudes of the new educated literary class that was making its way in the English Departments of American colleges and universities, an increasingly important and established group of professor-poets concerned with what poetry should be admitted as part of its official culture. His appeal in rejecting even the “felt” and “sincere” where it was “queer” and “more than a little silly” was an appeal to some right proper and respectable range of thought and feeling that any member of a university faculty must keep in order to maintain his position. It is not at all clear in Jarrell’s reviews what H.D.’s work is, but it is most clear, if we accept unquestioningly all that comes from his authority, that whatever it is it is “silly,” “level debris,” “anachronism”—not to be countenanced by reasonable men.

  And Jarrell’s judgment here as elsewhere stood for that of his class. Dudley Fitts found The Flowering of the Rod a play of “pretty, expected and shopworn” counters. He had found Tribute to the Angels “compact of brought-down-to-date Pre-Raphaelism: angels and archangels, lutes and cytharists, musks, embroideries, mystical etymologies, and the like,” and now, again, in the new work: “the reader is off on an uneasy Dolben-cum-Morris jaunt that starts vaguely from somewhere and ends barely more convincingly, in Bethlehem. I do not wish to be brutal; I should be a fool to pretend that H.D.’s intentions—her conceptions, even—are other than the highest; but it does seem clear to me that her whole method in these poems is false. For one thing, the diction is as pseudo-naive as the imagery is pseudo-medieval.” We begin to sense that something more is at stake than the question of what is academically respectable. Where the whole method is false, intention and conception which give rise to method must be false. Fitts would dismiss all the things of the poem as “counters,” inferring that they have no more real (true) nature in experience. It may be that the very claim to experience in terms of the heterodox tradition made thruout the poem seems false to him.

  •

  There are no lutes and cytharists in The War Trilogy. Mr. Fitts was a little carried away in his zeal to portray the distasteful Pre-Raphaelite mode of the poem. In another work under attack in those years, where Pound sang in The Pisan Cantos and the hounds of the Partisan Review bayed in protest, I find: “Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?” Pound has always been attacked for the medieval and the pseudo-medieval.

  But the suspicion that disturbs Fitts is not mistaken; Pre-Raphaelism brought-down-to-date “and the like” does enter in. Back of H.D., as back of Pound or of Yeats, was the cult of romance that Rossetti and then Morris had derived from Dante and his circle, the Fedeli d’amore, and revived in the Victorian era. The Christ of H.D.’s trilogy is not the Christ of church prescription but of the imagination, related to the Christ of the mysteries, the Christos-Angelos of Gnostic myth and the Angel Amor of the Vita Nuova; and here again, the elder Rossetti and then Dante Gabriel in their revival of Dante had played their part. Beatrice in the Christian mystery cult of Amor may have been herself a presentation of the Christos-Angelos. Gabriel Rossetti tells us in his Early Italian Poets that Dante had identified the Lady with Love Himself.

  •

  “This Figure imposes itself in the imperious manner of a central symbol,” Henry Corbin writes in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital: “appearing to man’s mental vision under the complementary feminine aspect that makes his being a total being.” The crisis in angelology came in the Western World in the thirteenth century when William of Auvergne led the attack against the Avicennan notion of natures operating in virtue of an inner necessity and according to the law of their essences and especially against the concept of the soul’s finding its inner necessity and the law of its essence in awakening thru love to the presence of its Angel, the Active Intelligence. In the Moslem world as well as in the Christian world this concept of being united with the divine reality by a love union with the Angel who is present in the person of the Beloved becomes a prime heresy. Fitts’s “angels and archangels . . . mystical etymologies, and the like” would dismiss any such vision with something like the contempt of medieval theologians—for there were critics in the middle ages who raged in Provence against the lutes and cytharists, troubadours and catharists, against musks and embroideries and the pseudo-medieval. But, as Henry Corbin proposes of Avicenna: “our whole effort was bent to another end than explaining Avicenna as a ‘man of his time.’ Avicenna’s time, his own time, has not here been put in the past tense; it has presented itself to us as an immediacy. It originates not in the chronology of a history of philosophy, but in the threefold ecstasy by which the archangelic Intelligences each give origin to a world and to consciousness of a world, which is the consciousness of a desire, and this desire is hypostatized in the Soul that is the motive energy of that world.” Corbin would read Avicenna’s recitals not as plays with counters but as visionary experiences. “The union that joins the possible intellect of the human soul with the Active Intelligence as Dator formarum, Angel of Knowledge or Wisdom-Sophia, is visualized and experienced as a love union. It is a striking illustration of the relation of personal devotion that we have attempted to bring out here and that shows itself to proceed from an experience so fundamental that it can defy the combined efforts of science and theology against angelology.” What the dogma of science with its imagination of the world in terms of use and manipulation for profit and the dogma of theology with its view of reality in terms of authority and system oppose in the cult of angels is the absolute value given to the individual experience that would imagine the universe in terms of love, desire, devotion, and ecstasy, emotions which men who seek practical ends find most disruptive. “In symbolic terms, let us say,” Henry Corbin comments: “that the Avicennan champion will always find himself faced by the descendants of William of Auvergne, even, and not a whit the less, when those descendants are perfectly ‘laicized.’ ”

  •

  The hostile reader will find that all visions start “vaguely from somewhere Biblical” or like Dante’s from somewhere Virgilian and end up “barely more convincingly, in Be
thlehem” or like Dante’s in the high fantasy of the luminous eye of God. Dante and his circle, Corbin makes clear, were deep in this matter of angels “and the like.” The whole method, William of Auvergne almost a century before Dante had shown clearly and with telling scorn, was false. But the poets followed the tradition of Provence, not the convincing arguments of the University of Paris. What Dante drew from translated Sufi texts as well as from the songs of Toulouse and Albi where such Images of the First Beloved appeared was the Spirit of Romance. Corbin admits too to an Avicennan romanticism. “Nothing could be clearer then the identity of this ‘amorosa Madonna Intelligenza’ who has her residence in the soul, and with whose celestial beauty the poet has fallen in love. Here is perhaps one of the most beautiful chapters in the very long ‘history’ of the Active Intelligence, which still remains to be written, and which is certainly not a ‘history’ in the accepted sense of the word, because it takes place entirely in the souls of poets and philosophers.”

  •

  H.D.’s Romance then may have been—given the angels, the Christ of the mysteries, the doctrine of reality seen in vision and dream—false doctrine. The Roman Catholic and the established Protestant churches had cast out such heresies. By the nineteenth century to deal with such matters was to be a Rosicrucian or Theosophist or worse. “This is incantation,” Fitts concludes in his attack on Tribute to the Angels, “but of an irresponsible, even perverse, kind.” The rational and professional orthodoxy that had replaced the church authority concurred in outlawing Romance. So, the arbitrating voice of The New Yorker noted that “H.D.’s mysticism, once implicit in her Imagist poems dealing with Greek symbols, is rather thin and shrill in this collection of her later works, what with their Biblical background and their redemption-by-suffering theme”; and when Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur, two of the younger members of the new poem-writing caste, came to edit Untermeyer’s Anthology of British and American Poetry, H.D.’s work was eliminated from the canon.

  •

  “Thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us”—the concept of a revealed poetry was not in tune with the mode of the great literary reviews of the forties. The new critics were partisans of what they called the rational imagination against whatever cults of experience—or the “irrational” as they put it. Poems were interpreted as products of sensibility and intelligence operating in language, solving problems and surpassing in tests in ambiguity and higher semantics, with special dispensations for exuberance as in Dylan Thomas. Back of it all was a model of the cultivated and urbane professor, of the protestant moderator victorious.

  “Inspiration,” “spell,” “rapture”—the constant terms of The War Trilogy—are not accepted virtues in the classroom, where Dream or Vision are disruptive of a student’s attentions. But more than that, these new professors of literature were descendants of those ministers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, holding out against the magic of poetry as once they had held out—by burning or ridicule—against the magic-religion of the witch-cults, the theurgy of Renaissance Hermeticists, or the saint-worship of ecstatic Catholicism. “The fact is,” John Crowe Ransom writes in “Why Critics Don’t Go Mad,” “that Brooks and I were about as alike as two peas from the same pod in respect to our native region, our stock (we were sons of ministers of the same faith, and equally had theology in our blood), the kind of homes we lived in, the kind of small towns. . . . ”

  •

  The Rational Imagination then meant the respectable, bounded by the fears and proprieties of the townsman’s uses and means. It excluded something else, some irrational imagination; it excluded heathenish ways; it excluded highfalutin’ ideas, putting on airs.

  •

  “The dimness of the religious light,” Ransom writes in that same essay, “is an anti-Platonic image which seems to me entirely Miltonic. And it is much to my own taste. I am hurt by the glare to which Plato’s philosophers coming out of the human cave are subjected; or for that matter Dante’s Pilgrim coming perilously close in his Heavenly Vision; even in imagination my eyes cannot take it in.”

  •

  Randall Jarrell’s “more than a little silly” may have been meant to reprove the Platonic theosophy of H.D. Pound, Williams, and H.D. belonged to Pagany; they brought back in their poetry the spirit of Eleusis; against theology and metaphysics, an art that sought routes in experience to the divine. “Say it, no ideas but in things,” Williams wrote in the earliest beginnings of Paterson. “Nothing but the blank faces of houses,” he continues, but read further: “—into the body of the light.”

  •

  The light of Dante or of Plato, the spiritual light whereby men saw in dreams or in thought, but also the matter of the ancient world, the mothering Life or Great Mother, the dark mysteries of the underworld, offended the Protestant ethos. Seely which had meant “spiritually blessed,” “pious, holy, good” was shortened to silly as the interests of the mercantile and capitalist class took over the direction of society and profitable works won out against grace as a measure of value. All traces of the earlier numinous meaning of seely-silly were replaced by the meaning of “lacking in judgment or common sense; foolish, senseless, empty-headed” or “feeble-minded, imbecile.” The small town closed round its marketplace and customs, closed round its mind against silly things, and grew fearful of man’s inner nature as it grew fearful or grew from fear of the nature outside.

  •

  The New Criticism, from the generation of Ransom or Yvor Winters to the generation of Jarrell or James Dickey, the critical small-town reaction, must strive against the Romantic tradition. The gods of The Cantos or of The War Trilogy are out of order for any monotheistic conviction. The immediate address to Thoth, to Amen-Father, to whatever eternal ones of the dream or of the imagination, must be unconvincing and offensive to the monotheistic cult of Reason as it had been to the monotheistic cult of Jehovah. The hint in H.D.’s persuasion that we might not be bound by the Covenant:

  not in the higher air

  of Algorab, Regulus or Deneb

  shall we cry

  for help—or shall we?

  or Pound’s broken prayer in The Pisan Cantos (LXXIX) “O Lynx keep watch on my fire,” if they were not silly, were irresponsible and might be dangerous, a breaking thru of old ways. The prayers and invocations to angelic powers, as if they had a ground in reality, a validity, comparable to “God,” and this “God”-ness in turn, when it was not a metaphysical proposition but an experienced reality—the Christ actually appearing in the bare meeting-room of the Dream in The Walls Do Not Fall or the Lady’s Presence in Tribute to the Angels—such things exceed the tolerance of the right-minded critic: it was idolatry or presumption. Beyond Imagism H.D., like Pound, had traveled the dangerous courses of image and the Divine Image, of idea and Eidolon. The schoolmen of literary taste took their stand with the schoolmen of modern Protestantism; the ground of experience was in divorce from God. Hadn’t modern science turned the earth to its uses? Nature was not a Mother.

  •

  So for Jarrell or Fitts words were not powers but “counters” Fitts called them. “Pretty, expected, shopworn” if they were not smartly turned out. “This search,” H.D. had anticipated their reaction of ennui, “has been done to death before.” And she had answered that she meant not to rehearse the search for spiritual realities but to communicate her own particular way:

  but my mind (yours)

  has its peculiar ego-centric

  personal approach

  •

  Where words thought of as generative or as in The Walls Do Not Fall mediative between the reality of Dream and Vision and the reality of the actual, moving to give birth to feeling and thought, language is our Mother-Tongue. We see not only gods but words anew: “their secret is stored / in man’s very speech, / in the trivial or / the real dream.” This sense that everything is meaningful if one learn to read must have drawn H.D. to Freud as a teacher. Certainly, her belief that the poet does not give meani
ng to the word but draws meaning from it, touches meaning or participates in meaning there, must have deepened in the psychoanalytic work. The power of the artist that Freud revered most was his daring to work more than he knew. The unconscious Freud called the source, but it was only in the world of consciousness that the depths of this experience could be read: the dream, the story, the work of art, was a manifest matter. Back of Freud was the tradition of earlier Jewish mysticism that sought in every thing and even in the universe a revelation of Being. Words were shop-worn only to shop-wearing eyes. “I know, I feel,” H.D. writes—it is a condition of method in The Walls Do Not Fall:

  the meaning that words hide;

  they are anagrams, cryptograms,

  little boxes, conditioned

  to hatch butterflies . . .

  •

  Against the idea of the mothering language in which our psyche is continually reborn, the matrix of meanings, of evolving thought and feeling, the critical reaction raises its semantic boundaries, its language as gesture or equation or statement. “Discipline,” “control,” “responsibility” assume prohibitive definition, striving to exorcize the medium.

  •

  The very mother tongue was “l’éternelle Vénus” for the man tormented by the conscience of Church dogma or of middle-class regulations. The Great Mother was “une des formes séduisantes du diable.” The city limits surrounded the marketplace empty of God and filled with a rabble then where men contended to set up standards of trade and values. Outside, there was the countryside where caprice, hysteria, fantasy—a female whorishness—swarmed in Nature in place of Truth.

  Chapter 10

  MARCH 25, 1961. Saturday.

  What is the truth of the matter. The gospel truth. For the truth of what actually happened we need a jury, “the recollection of adults,” which Freud in the early essay “Screen Memories” would call upon to test the truth of childhood memories. Fact is one kind of truth of the matter. But the facts of memories, Freud began to suspect, have been reassembled into a fiction of the living. Each psyche strives in its account of the facts to present its peculiar experience; here the facts are not true in themselves but become true as factors of the fiction to which they contribute. When we have assembled from a group of witnesses—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—an account of the facts, only an ardent faith can coordinate the historical evidence in which every recounted fact is gospel truth of an actuality and the spiritual evidence in which every parable and revelation is gospel truth of a dogmatic reality.