The H.D. Book

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

  •

  To find the hour and the place, bringing into the fictive creation the particulars of the actual life, is part of the magic of self-transformation, so that the creative fiction enters the sense of actual reality. H.D., like Dante, like John of Patmos, has no experience that is not meaning, that is not, by emblem or rubric, part of feeling beyond her feeling. The events of her life are not only personal, they are also hints of a great universe to which all man’s fictions belong. Dante’s astrological and numerological practices, reading the nine of his fictions into the times of his actual life, take creative thought in actuality as they take action in a creative fiction, akin to H.D.’s practice of astrology and angelology:

  I had been thinking of Gabriel,

  of the moon-cycle, of the moon-shell,

  of the moon-crescent

  and the moon at full:

  It is taking thought where the poet begins to have a heightened sense of time and this life as informed by his Work. But our Work, which may have been the alchemical Work, or the Work in the Art, is now in a larger sense a Life-Work or evolution of Life in which we play our human phase. The poet begins to have a heightened sense of his involvement in a great work beyond his work.

  •

  Ananke, in Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, the law of “in so far as external reality allows it,” reflects all Freud’s sense of how the soul in the throes of creative change was most likely to come thru “touched” or “silly,” maimed or lost, in its new self. He had on his mind too how maimed, lost, silly, souls often were, who had gone thru the alembic of religious conversions.

  But Ananke had a twin in Logos. Ananke/Logos, that Freud proposes to take the place of the old gods of the cathedral, is just, in one guise, the Hell-Heaven that his nurse had sown in his infant mind. Ananke/Logos might also be the Christ-Crucified/Christ-Child. He is Falling-in-Love/Loving. He is the inspiration, the feeling of a divine order that we sense in a directive that is not from our personal bias but from the self we have in a universal community. He is Amor. He is the evolutionary imperative.

  “You would have the state of bliss to begin immediately after death”; Freud writes: “you ask of it the impossible, and you will not surrender the claim of the individual. Of these wishes our god Logos will realize those which external nature permits, but he will do this very gradually, only in the incalculable future and for other children of men. Compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life, he does not promise.” The reality—this is Freud’s sense here that seems most true—the deep reality of actual life is without consolation for the claim of the individual. Dante tells us that in deprivation of the actual Beatrice he wept and then fell asleep “like a beaten sobbing child.” H.D. in the opening passages of The Walls Do Not Fall speaks of her “desolation” and inspiration “stalks” like a threatening hunter so that the poet trembles. Amor, in La Vita Nuova, appears as “a cloud of the hue of flame, within which I discerned the figure of a lord, of fearful aspect to one who should look upon him.”

  Yet the promise, wherever the pain has been known and received as a condition of the Work, is bliss. We had been talking of Kaspar, in H.D.’s poem, for he came to a moment when he knew in a way he was lost. “The seal of the jar was un-broken”—Kaspar was what he was; but “no secret was safe with a woman.” Did he fall in love? He had a high sense of his cause, his proper heat and center:

  he drew aside his robe in a noble manner

  but the un-maidenly woman did not take the hint;

  yet the epiphany of The Flowering of the Rod is his falling in love somehow, falling in with the stars, being inspired. “Kaspar did not recognize her,” H.D. tells us:

  until her scarf slipped to the floor,

  and then, not only did he recognize Mary

  as the stars had told (Venus in the ascendant . . .

  We begin to trace the line of an inspired seizure, from “as the stars had told”—Yes, he felt what Dante called the salutation of the Lady, he felt he had an appointment there, as eyes too may meet in a new light—thru the travail of desire, the courses of the stars:

  and what he saw made his heart so glad

  that it was as if he suffered,

  his heart laboured so

  with his ecstasy

  in his seeing “the fleck of light”:

  like a flaw in the third jewel

  to his right, in the second circlet,

  a grain, a flaw or speck of light.

  •

  Dante tells us that in the vision of Amor, his heart or rather, “the vital spirit which dwelleth in the most secret chamber of the heart” trembled so that “it was horribly apparent in the least of my pulses”; even as “the animal spirit which dwelleth in the high chamber to which the spirits of sense carry their perceptions” began to marvel.

  •

  So that when he comes into the presence of the Christ-Child, Kaspar is inspired to see or to present (for the fragrance that is the Divine Presence is both the myrrh which he brings escaped from the unbroken seal of the jar and also the Child born from the virgin woman) what we have called the promise of falling in love or the revelation of the end of desire. Which the Mother sees or knows is there:

  she said, Sir, it is a most beautiful fragrance,

  as of all flowering things together;

  •

  “It is really about the soul, or the primal intelligence, or the Nous, or whatever we choose to call that link that binds us to the unseen and un-created,” John Gould Fletcher wrote in 1917, reviewing H.D.’s Sea Garden. “A new cadence means a new idea,” the Preface of Some Imagist Poets in 1915 argued. Something Platonic and then neo-Platonic haunts these passages, as it haunts Pound’s definitions of logopoeia, melopoeia and phanopoeia, with hints not only of a theosophy, a lore and wisdom of divine orders, but also a theurgy, an operation of divine orders.

  Fletcher sees H.D.’s work in such terms and tells us we must read her as we read “Plotinus or Dionysius the Areopagite, or Paracelsus, or Behmen, or Swedenborg, or Blake, or any other of the mystics.”

  In the mixing ground of pre-War London where theosophical currents passed thru the talk of Yeats and the lectures of G. R. S. Mead into the main bloodstream of Pound’s thought in The Cantos or, from some aftermath of Blavatsky’s fantastic anthropology and cosmogony, were stored up by D. H. Lawrence to emerge in his Fantasia of the Unconscious, there must have been times when talk of metrics and cadence turned to old theurgic ideas of numbers and evocative measures, where cadence meant a means of vision; where idea, eidolon, and image were closely associated concepts. Allen Upward’s The Divine Mystery with its exposition of poetic genius as shamanistic power and its doctrine that desire thru intuition operates in the actual was read and talked about by the literary following of The Egoist as well as the theosophical following of The Quest.

  But H.D. is not a mystic philosopher. Her genius is fictive and dramatic, not philosophic. When she speaks of “where thought dwells, / and beyond thought and idea, / their begetter, / Dream, Vision,” these—thought, idea, dream, vision—are not concepts or terms of a phenomenology but entities, dramatis personae of her universe. “Sword” and “Word” are poetic counterparts of daimonic beings in neo-Platonic hierarchies, having their creative necessity here in the plasticity of the immediate reality of the poem rather than in the requirements of a philosophic structure. She is searching out the quality of an experience coming into being. There is no reality in H.D.’s sense of things that is not involved in the physical and vital realities around us. “Dream” or “Vision” are creative forces at large, and the Word may enter, as Death enters Cocteau’s world or Bergman’s. Like Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, her sense of the reality of the gods is of a magic to inform the life of her art. She evokes the old gods, and then the new—Christ as Master, the Lady, or the Christ-Child—and attends the tutelary spirits of the hours, her angels, as actual figures of a dramatic intensity. The place “where thought dwells” has at leas
t the reality of Shakespeare’s coast of Bohemia.

  She may interpret on many levels the meaning of their appearance or presence, but she does not present these persons of the poem as ethical or edifying figures. The War Trilogy or Helen in Egypt will not supply metaphysical or even psychological ideas on the nature of Love or of Evil, for H.D. seeks not terms of concept but terms of experience. There is no argument for the good of the union of all things but in the Child, the Mother at the close of the poem finds “a most beautiful fragrance, / as of all flowering things together.”

  •

  In comparing The War Trilogy with La Vita Nuova, we must recognize that, while H.D. has Dante’s concern for psychology, she does not have his philosophic interest: Dante is exploring the concept of Love as well as telling its story and evoking the reality of Love as an experience. Nor does H.D. have the moral concern of Bunyan in his allegory. But for all three, as poets, the primary concern is in the world of experience they create, whatever their philosophy, their morality or learning. It is of the essence that Amor too in La Vita Nuova is not a concept or an allegory but a presence of the poem, who can hold a burning heart in his hand, an eternal being of the dream. As for Bunyan too, who meant allegory, “in the similitude of a DREAM,” Atheist and Ignorance appear with all the force of living creatures and his created world takes on the urgency and immediacy of revelation that the actual world has. It is in this, in our entering a made up reality, rather than in whatever concept, that the specifically poetic lies.

  •

  Every hour, every moment

  has its specific attendant Spirit

  belongs to the metaphysics of Hellenistic and Renaissance star cults that no longer make sense in our contemporary science. Astrology fell into such disrepairs as men no longer were concerned with the actual stars themselves and ceased to observe the precession of the equinoxes and as men were no longer concerned with picturing their nature but turned to telling fortunes. But in The War Trilogy the verses have to do with the stage directions of the drama H.D. means to unfold. In the enchantment in which the Spirits of hours and moments appear, we are led to an inner feeling of things that changes the world about us into the world of the poem. It resists metaphysical concern. Well, it does not rest at all on such a concern but upon a thing seen and heard:

  for it was ticking minute

  by minute (the clock by my bed-head,

  with its dim, luminous disc)

  This is not, in a sense, artful writing, for no wit or sensibility of the poet must appear to distract us from the world of the poem:

  there was no door

  (this was a dream, of course),

  and she was standing there,

  actually, at the turn of the stair.

  •

  It is what is actual to the poem that concerns her. She may follow lines of association, opening new levels of what is happening, exciting reverberations. These unfold in the course of the poem from her deepened and heightened sense of its world, of what is happening. The core of the Imagist ethos is there thruout her work in the last years. “Direct treatment” remains; all the special effects, interesting or sensitive words, similes, metaphors, epithets have been eroded away by the attention to what is going on. The thing in itself had become by 1915 a thing in its surroundings and atmosphere. By the time of The War Trilogy, H.D. is most aware of a many-leveled experience. So, she is drawn back to the old mystery cults—to mystery not to mysticism—to the roots of the drama, back of Euripides, in the secret worships of the Mother, of Dionysos, and to the Christ and the Lady of the Christian mysteries. Where she makes definitions they are operative not logical. These gods or angelic orders are never speculative figures, propositions of God, or members of a metaphysical system; they are actors upon a stage that is the world.

  “Bliss” is a state of the realized moment, as in Bid Me to Live: “walking for the first time, taking the first steps in her life, upright on her feet for the first time alone, or for the first time standing after death (daughter, I say unto thee) she faced the author of this her momentary psychic being, her lover, her husband. It was like that in these moments. She touched paradise.”

  Paradise, like the houses of the Zodiac, can no longer be placed in the dimensions of the physical universe; but all places and gods have entered the imagination and belong as surely to the feeling of things as they ever did, for we have only to step upon the stage of The Tempest to find that Ariel and Caliban are most real and in turn to awaken to such attendant servants about us in our actual life. The world-map of Dante is a curiosity, but the poet in the Paradiso looking deep into the profound and shining being of God, for all his theological schema of the trinity, sees “one by the second as Iris by Iris seemed reflected, and the third seemed a fire breathed equally from one and from the other” and it is not the theology that lasts but this seeming; for looking “entering through the ray of the deep light which in itself is true,” Dante, who is full of discourse, found his vision “mightier than our discourse, which faileth at such sight.” This Paradise, like H.D.’s, that once was a place in the physical universe, now is a place in feeling.

  •

  “The Tuscan demands harmony in something more than the plastic,” Pound wrote in the Cavalcanti essay: “He declines to limit his aesthetic to the impact of light on the eye. It would be misleading to reduce his aesthetic to terms of music, or to distort the analysis of it by analogies to the art of sonority. Man shares plastic with the statue, sound does not require a human being to produce it. The bird, the phonograph, sing. Sound can be exteriorized as completely as plastic. There is the residue of perception, perception of something which requires a human being to produce it. Which even may require a certain individual to produce it.” Then, the passage we have returned to before: “This really complicates the aesthetic. You deal with an interactive force: the virtu in short.” “The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades.”

  “The truth having been Eleusis?” he writes in that same sense in Kulchur, “and a modern Eleusis being possible in the wilds of a man’s mind only?”

  •

  The god that appears to bewilder H.D.’s Pygmalion is the virtu, the interactive force of a creativity between the man as he is a maker who experiences in his making and the world as it is a matter that informs as it is shaped. There is the sculptor’s “own light,” “own heat,” “own fire”; the increasing intelligence is an increasing awareness of instrumentality in which the sense of the work is known as in-formed by the stone, the swirl on swirl of light, by the appearance out of the work. It is experience that is the fire in “does this fire carve me / for its use?” as thirty years later it is the experience of the poem that is the new Master over Love. There is no awareness or being above, beyond, outside of, the interaction of things we experience; and here, in the work of the poet the Master of the poem must be the experience of the Word, the Master of Rime. Our uses are our illuminations.

  Appendix 1 Preliminary Notes toward Book 3 of The H.D. Book

  EXCHANGES

  August 31. reading of Euripides’ Helen translated by Richmond Lattimore. “Introduction” quoted from the Palinode of Stesichorus (6th century):

  That story is not true.

  You never went away in the launched ships.

  You never reached the citadel of Troy.

  We know no more than this fragment; we do not know where Helen did go, until Herodotus tells us he heard from the priests of Hephaestus in Memphis that Paris did steal Helen but, driven by winds to the Egyptian coast, he had to surrender Helen to the keeping of Proteus, King of Egypt, until her husband should claim her.

  So that Menelaus and Agamemnon at Troy are told by the Trojans that they do not have Helen. The war that follows, for the Greeks do not believe the Trojans, is mistaken. Only after the fall of Troy do they find that the Trojans were telling the truth.

  Menelaus sails for Egypt, collects Helen, and (after “disgracing h
imself and Greece by an illicit sacrifice involving two Egyptian boys”) sails home.

  In Homer’s telling of Troy in the Iliad there had been magic substitution: when Diomedes lifting a great stone crushes the thigh of Aineias in battle, Aphrodite, the mother of Aineias, surrounds the hero and “spreads before his face a fold of her radiant vesture”, fleeing with him from Diomedes’ wrath. But Aphrodite, Homer tells us, has no warcraft (powers or mastery in war) “no Athena she nor Enyo, master of cities.” Diomedes, pursuing her, attacks the goddess herself and wounds her hand: “straight through the ambrosial raiment that the Graces themselves had given her pierced the dart into the flesh, above the springing of the palm.”

  •

  In H.D.’s narrative of Helen in Egypt there is a theme of a veil or a scarf. There had been in the magic of Mary Magdalene, setting into motion her glamour in which Kaspar has his “spiritual optical-illusion” or clairvoyance in The Flowering of the Rod, a first gesture that disarmed Kaspar: “and her scarf slipped to the floor.” Not only does the scarf operate here to uncover her hair, but it operates too to put the Mage off guard:

  He who was unquestionably

  master of caravans,

  stooped to the floor;

  he handed her her scarf;

  The disordered, the disheveled element is her hair—H.D. tells us Simon at the feast had seen Mary as a Siren and that she may have been—“wrecks followed the wake of such hair” Simon remembers where

  she was deftly un-weaving

  the long, carefully-braided tresses

  of her extraordinary hair.

  But it is the scarf that is exchanged in the magic “As he stooped for the scarf, he saw this”—the hair may be the revelation in the light “like moon-light on a lost river” and the scarf that seems incidental the magic apparatus that both distracts the man and engages him, and that reveals as it falls.