ASPHODEL
ASPHODEL
H. D.
Edited with an Introduction and Biographical Notes
by
ROBERT SPOO
Duke University Press Durham and London 1992
© 1992 Duke University Press
Second printing, 1992.
Previously unpublished material by Hilda Doolittle is copyright © 1992 by Perdita Schaffner; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Asphodel
Part I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Part II
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Appendix
About the Editor
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Perdita Schaffner and the New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to publish Asphodel. I also wish to thank Mrs. Schaffner and the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, for permission to quote from unpublished H.D. material in the Introduction and Appendix.
Any serious editing project is a collaborative effort, and I have benefited from the advice of many persons within and outside the community of H.D. scholars. From the start, the wisdom and support of Susan Stanford Friedman and Louis H. Silverstein have been invaluable; they read drafts of the introductory material and made suggestions about problematic details in H.D.’s text. I am also grateful for the kind encouragement of Perdita Schaffner.
I would like to thank D. Thomas Benediktson and Eileen Gregory for information about H.D.’s classical allusions; Corinna del Greco Lobner, Jane Nicholson, and Vibeke Petersen for advice about H.D.’s use of foreign languages; and Louis H. Silverstein, Charles Timbrell, and Caroline Zilboorg for biographical information about H.D. and her friends. Thanks also to Joanne Cornell, Michael Davis, Lars Engle, Norman Grabo, Monty Montee, Mary O’Toole, and Omar Pound for reading portions of this text and providing helpful criticisms. It was Gary Burnett who first made me aware of Asphodel; our early conversations about H.D. were an inspiration and a spur.
Thanks also to Diana Collecott, Joseph A. Kestner, David Kramer, A. Walton Litz, John Logan, Claus Melchior, Adalaide Morris, Lawrence Rainey, Caroline Rittenhouse, Kathy A. Sears, and Patricia Willis. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Steve Jones and the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Sidney F. Huttner and the staff at Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; and Leslie A. Morris and the staff at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.
I also want to express my gratitude to Duke University Press and its editors for their excellent work. This edition would not have been possible without the advice and sensitive collaboration of Joanne Ferguson, who supported this project from its inception.
Special thanks to the owners and proprietors of Silverleigh for their friendship, hospitality, and conversation, and to Monty Montee for his patience and refreshingly ironic smile.
A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 1989 provided a crucial early impetus and allowed me to travel to archives.
Introduction
H.D.’s Asphodel is a work with a strangely disembodied reputation, a sort of phantom novel that makes frequent appearances in the criticism on H.D. yet, until now, has had no public, practical existence. Although it has occasioned important exegesis,1Asphodel itself has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s, a modernist text akin in its experimental form and spirit to Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage. Its absence from the canon has created a significant historical and aesthetic lacuna, impeding a full appreciation of H.D.’s life and work. Although most serious students of H.D. can outline the plot of Asphodel, only those who have read the manuscript at Yale University know more of the actual text than the fragments reproduced in the criticism. It might have intrigued H.D. to learn that this novel of lesbian and heterosexual love would one day have a status curiously similar to that of the poems of her beloved Sappho.
Along with Paint It To-Day (written in 1921), Asphodel represents one of the earliest surviving examples of the sustained experiments in autobiographical fiction that H.D. began in an effort to free herself from “an old tangle”2 of troubled thinking about the events of her past—in particular those of World War I—and to move beyond the “H.D. Imagiste” role which seemed to tighten about her after the publication of her first volume of poetry, Sea Garden, in 1916. Asphodel is in many ways the aesthetic antithesis of the crystalline imagist poem: quirky and nebulous rather than tightly focused and exquisitely controlled; repetitious and recursive instead of immediate in its effect; intensely personal and psychological rather than “objective” in its dramatization of the perceiving mind. Like H.D.’s later prose writings—but perhaps even more broodingly and insistently—Asphodel repeats charged images and idées fixes, altering them incrementally as the narrative proceeds, pushing them painfully and reluctantly toward what Susan Stanford Friedman has referred to as “the analytic clearing of understanding and control,”3 or what the novel calls, more skeptically perhaps, those “fields of asphodel” not met with on this side of the grave. Gertrude Stein described a related process in The Making of Americans: “Always repeating is all of living, everything that is being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding.”4
First composed in 1921–1922 and probably revised a few years later, Asphodel is, from one perspective, an early version of the quite different autobiographical novel H.D. completed decades later under the title of Madrigal (published in 1960 as Bid Me to Live [A Madrigal]). H.D. considered Madrigal the final, most satisfying version of her “story of War I,” a story she had been evolving for decades: “I had been writing or trying to write this story, since 1921. I wrote in various styles, simply or elaborately, stream-of-consciousness or straight narrative. I re-wrote this story under various titles, in London and in Switzerland.”5 In 1959 she told her friend and literary agent Norman Holmes Pearson that “[Madrigal] Phoenix-ed out of Asphodel that was put far away & deliberately ‘forgotten’ ”6 Her retrospective characterization of Asphodel as an early “version” or “edition” of Madrigal, together with her belief that it lacked the latter’s “daemonic drive or . . . daemon” (one of H.D.’s words for “genius”),7 made her reluctant to preserve copies of Asphodel. In 1949 she asked her companion Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman)—somewhat tentatively—to “destroy” the copy of the manuscript in her possession;8 a decade later she wrote Pearson: “If carbons [of Her and Asphodel] ever turn up, please destroy them.”9
Fortunately, for us and for H.D., one copy survived, despite the fact that its title page also bears the instruction “DESTROY” scrawled in H.D.’s hand. It is true that part of Asphodel overlaps with the period covered by Madrigal—the later years of World War I�
�and both novels contain characters based on H.D.’s husband Richard Aldington and her lover Cecil Gray. But much of Madrigal focuses on the D. H. Lawrence figure, Rico, who never appears in the earlier novel; and Asphodel, which traces H.D.’s life from her departure for Europe in 1911 to the birth of her daughter in 1919, has a temporal scope and a range of characters Madrigal never attempts. Like Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Bryher’s novel-sequence Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923), Asphodel is an autobiographical bildungsroman, a work whose fidelity to the actual events of H.D.’s life, while it should never be taken entirely for granted, is on the whole remarkable. She explained in 1925 that “the things I write are all indirectly (when not directly) inspired by my experiences.”10 (See the Appendix for capsule biographies of the persons behind the fictions of Asphodel.)
Asphodel follows Hermione Gart (the H.D. figure), Fayne Rabb (Frances Gregg, H.D.’s friend from Philadelphia), and Fayne’s mother, Clara, on their trip to Europe in 1911–1912,11 first to France and then to London where Hermione contends with the domineering George Lowndes (Ezra Pound), the young American poet to whom she had been engaged for a time back home and who now introduces her to his circle of literary friends in London. Asphodel is a valuable and intimate account of female expatriation, a portrait of young artists whose experiences are very different from those of their male counterparts. More vulnerable than men to familial threats and manipulation, deracinated female artists feel a correspondingly greater pressure to marry and legitimate their expatriation, to purchase freedom with yet another compromise with patriarchy.
Rather than succumb to this pressure, Hermione urges Fayne, who is planning to return to America, to live with her in London in a bohemian ménage of their own fashioning. The impassioned speech in which Hermione affirms her love for Fayne (“ ‘I, Hermione, tell you I love you Fayne Rabb’ ” [p. 52]) and defends the lesbian lifestyle she imagines for them is the climax of part 1. Despite her eloquence, however, she fails to persuade the defensively spiteful Fayne, and her shock is soon compounded when Fayne writes from America that she is going to be married to a respectable lecturer on literature. Part 1 of Asphodel ends with the ominous suicide in Paris of a friend of George’s, an unmarried American expatriate named Shirley Thornton (based on Margaret Cravens, who killed herself in June 1912) who had come to France to study piano. The final paragraphs of part 1 hint at Hermione’s temptation to avoid Shirley’s fate by marrying a young English poet she has met, Jerrold Darrington (Richard Aldington).
Part 2 jumps ahead to 1915. Now married to Jerrold, Hermione is recovering from the stillbirth of her child. The war has been raging for some time, splitting consciousness into what Hermione calls “pre-chasm” and “chasm” thinking, a fissure that is dramatically figured by the temporal gap between parts 1 and 2. Like Rose Macaulays Non-Combatants and Others and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Asphodel is in part a war novel that focuses on women’s lives at the home front. It also traces, as other works by H.D. do, the transformation of the Aldington figure, after his enlistment in the army, from androgynous “faun” and poetic brother into a jaunty, lascivious Mars who is unfaithful to Hermione. It seems to Hermione that Jerrold’s civilian self—the person who had restored her confidence in her writing—has been buried beneath a lava flow, along with other prewar treasures like art, beauty, and love; life is now a matter of zeppelin raids, tabloid jingoism, and “guns, guns, guns, guns.” Estranged from Jerrold, Hermione joins Cyril Vane (the Cecil Gray figure) in Cornwall and soon learns she is pregnant with Vane’s child.
Inspired by legends of Druids and Phoenicians, Hermione fancies herself a “Morgan le Fay” and her child the product of a visit from the god Helios—a private myth that gives Hermione a kind of Madonna/witch identity, restoring to her some of the playfully subversive innocence she had enjoyed with Fayne. (George had said in part 1 that she and Fayne would have been “burned in Salem for witches” [p. 50].) Hermione decides to keep the baby and, following a period of solitary self-communion, meets the wealthy but troubled Beryl de Rothfeldt (the Bryher figure), who helps her during the later stages of her pregnancy. After a frightening encounter with a jealous, vengeful Darrington back from the trenches, Hermione succeeds in breaking away from him and establishing with Beryl the very ménage that Fayne Rabb had earlier renounced, except that this one is augmented by Phoebe, Hermione’s daughter, whom Beryl promises to take care of as if the child were a “puppy.” Salvation is mutual at the end of Asphodel: Hermione has escaped a series of destructive relationships, and Beryl has promised to stop threatening suicide.
Even so brief a synopsis as this suggests that Asphodel is less an early version of Madrigal than a snugly fitting sequel to H.D.’s autobiographical novel Her (written in 1926–1927 and first published by New Directions in 1981 as HERmione), the story of Hermione’s life in Philadelphia in the period before her departure for Europe. H.D. herself called Asphodel “a continuation of HER,”12 and there is evidence that she revised Asphodel around 1926–1927, possibly to recast the 1921–1922 version as an aesthetically consistent sequel to Her.13 Asphodel completes the Ezra Pound and Frances Gregg stories begun in Her, and extends and consummates that novel’s madrigal-like rhythm of relationships, the weaving in and out of variations on the beloved. The ambiguous image of Fayne Rabb waiting alone in Hermione’s “little workroom” at the end of Her is clarified in Asphodel, where Fayne indeed continues to blight Hermione’s artistic hopes and her emotional life, just as George Lowndes has done. It is not until Beryl arrives on the scene that Hermione can begin to connect her art with her emotional and domestic needs. Hermione’s lonely walk through the snow at the end of Her is rewritten at the conclusion of Asphodel by a new domestic economy that converts the demoralizing love triangles in which she has been enmeshed into the “triptych,” to use the novels phrase, of Hermione, Beryl, and the infant Phoebe, an unlikely holy family but a mutually supportive one. In this sense, the Her-Asphodel sequence is an extended tribute to Bryher. That Asphodel has a candid lesbian theme may have been one reason that H.D. wanted typescripts of the novel destroyed; that it is the story of H.D.’s journey to a life with Bryher probably made the two women reluctant to put a match to all copies.
In terms of aesthetic construction, Asphodel, like many works of high modernism, reveals a dual impulse toward strong formal control and experimental abandon. For example, the two parts of Asphodel are almost geometrically balanced, each containing fifteen chapters of comparable dramatic and thematic development. Yet the writing style is dense, elusive, digressive; paragraphs are unusually long, more like movements of a musical composition than units of narrative; dialogue is expressively congested and often not clearly attributed. Authorial voice and point of view are generated almost entirely from Hermione’s perspective, from her intense, sometimes feverish stream of consciousness. Asphodel is an important experiment in “stream-of-consciousness” technique, yet H.D. adopted neither the psychological immediacy of Joyce’s “interior monologue” nor the authorially mediated, third-person-limited voice of Woolf, but rather a fluid, shifting combination of these modes, a style capable of veering in the space of a few pages from third-person-limited narration (“she was somehow dehumanised and he was seeing it” [p. 141]) to a generic, historical “you” (“Wine went to your brain and you knew there was no division now” [p. 142]) to first-person memoir (“We were two angels with no wings to speak of” [p. 142]) to sudden, visceral interior monologue (“God sends things to people” [p. 143]).
This kaleidoscopic (or perhaps cinematic) effect is occasionally punctuated by passages of direct, urgent authorial address to the reader, particularly when war is the subject: “some god had set a head there in a restaurant (imagine it but I know you can’t quite realize it) in that odd 18, 18, 18. Do you know what I mean? In 1918 there was one head. . . .” (p. 141). These oscillations of authorial voice reflect the uncertain boundary between autobiographical fiction and personal memoir, between the
writing subject and the self as a projected, dramatized “other.”14 On the whole, H.D. moves skillfully between these narrative positions or stances of the self, so skillfully that she seems to fulfill one of Baudelaire’s conditions for modern art: “Qu’est-ce que l’art pur suivant la conception moderne? C’est créer une magie suggestive contenant à la fois l’objet et le sujet, le monde extérieur à l’artiste et l’artiste lui-même.”15
This unfettered authorial voice, with its variety of moods and inflections, is well adapted to a story that proceeds by repeated motifs and situations. An especially insistent pattern is that of the woman endangered by a hostile, uncomprehending society. From Hermione’s doleful meditations on loan of Arc and Marie Antoinette to the very real perils besetting her relationship with Fayne Rabb, to the suicidal thoughts of Shirley Thornton and Beryl, women in Asphodel frequently feel threatened with some form of punishment or death, especially if they are “odd” visionaries with artistic inclinations (“Shirley was like Cassandra smitten by the sun-god” [p. 103]). Hermione experiences guilt after the death of Shirley, for she feels that she might have averted the tragedy if she had reached across to “this authentic sister, tangled in a worse web than she was” (p. 105). Yet Hermione’s failed friendship with Shirley at the end of part 1 is structurally balanced by the sisterhood she achieves with Beryl at the end of part 2. Like Shirley, Beryl is a thwarted artist who contemplates suicide; both women have wide, staring eyes filled with pain and private obsession. Hermione’s offer of love together with the opportunity to care for her baby cures Beryl’s frightened eyes, restoring them to “child’s eyes, gone wide and fair with gladness” (p. 206).
Beryl represents the happy culmination, the telos perhaps, of a long series of love affairs in Hermione’s life, each an approximation to the ideal but not its realization. Together, Her and Asphodel offer a variegated pageant of beloveds: George Lowndes, Fayne Rabb, Jerrold Darrington, Cyril Vane, Beryl. In a moving passage in Asphodel, Hermione thinks of her lovers as flowers woven into “a veil, the veil of Aphrodite” (p. 136). This “veil of Loves,” a product of imagination’s triumph over personal hurt, is fashioned so as to exclude no one, for “one flower cannot disown another” (p. 136). This strange, generous fabric is an image of the Her-Asphodel sequence itself, a figure for H.D.’s textual weaving and reweaving of her past. Despite her intense, demanding nature, Beryl comes to occupy a privileged place in Hermione’s veil of Loves, offering an end to torment and the beginning of a new domestic and artistic life in a financially secure relationship. The Bryher figure would not fare quite so well in H.D.’s fiction of the later 20s and 30s—H.D.’s veil of Loves was as honest as it was inclusive—but here at the end of Asphodel flaws and inadequacies are lost in the glow of Beryl’s eyes, “the eyes of an eagle in a trigo triptych” (p. 206).
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