Asphodel
Page 2
Asphodel is unashamedly about pain and suffering. The novel’s deceptively idyllic title actually implies the very opposite of contentment and easy optimism, as the epigraph taken from Walter Savage Landor makes clear: “There are no fields of asphodel this side of the grave.” In Landor’s imaginary conversation “Aesop and Rhodope,” the aged fabulist lectures the young slave Rhodope on the advantages of an early death:
Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodope! that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.16
H.D.’s substitution of “asphodel” for “amaranth” is typical of her quotational style and may have been unintentional.17 The entire passage from Landor is relevant, for it contains several themes that haunt the pages of Asphodel: premature death; the impermanence of love and of the beloved; the elusiveness of the present moment and its lack of meaning apart from what precedes and follows it; the desire to transcend pain in the here and now tempered by an awareness that no such transcendence is possible this side of eternity—except perhaps in the activity of the artistic imagination, as Landor’s rich cadences suggest, and as Hermione herself concludes at one point: “Imagination is stronger than reality” (p. 136).18
Aesop’s sobering counsels about the inevitability of suffering represent one aspect of Asphodel. But this modern bildungsroman is also about a woman’s realization that undeserved agony must end before a productive life can begin: “You suffer toward sea-change but there was an end to legitimate suffering, this suffering of Hermione’s was illegitimate” (p. 199). The pun on “illegitimate” hints at one source of Hermione’s pain—Jerrold’s refusal to register Phoebe as his child—but this same infant, while it drives a wedge between Hermione and her husband, helps solidify the bond between her and Beryl: a little child shall lead them. By the end of the novel Phoebe has become an outward and visible sign of Hermione’s inward and spiritual rebirth, her emergence from the cocoon of her past. Asphodel takes H.D.’s life up to 1919—a crucial year in her personal fortunes—halting just short of one of the most prolific decades of her artistic life, the decade that gave birth to Asphodel itself.
A Note on the Text
The sole extant version of Asphodel is a typescript of just under 400 pages at the Beinecke Library, Yale University; no draft material or notes have come to light, and references to Asphodel in H.D.’s letters are rare and of little use for textual editing. The typescript is a complete, legible carbon copy on ordinary typing bond; no ribbon copy has survived. Various statements by H.D. suggest that Asphodel was first composed in 1921–1922 and then revised a few years later, but the precise date of the surviving typescript is uncertain, as is the identity of the typist.19 While part 1 has a few revisions in H.D.’s hand, part 2 contains none; minor corrections are typed over erasures on the carbon throughout. It is not clear how polished a draft this typescript represents, but the large number of spelling and typing errors suggests that this copy did not receive the usual scrutiny and revision that late typings of other works by H.D. reveal. It is possible that changes made to the lost ribbon copy were not transferred to the carbon copy.
As the Beinecke typescript was the sole possible basis for this edition, the usual avenues of editorial problem-solving, such as collation of editions and comparison of alternative manuscript readings, were closed to me.20 Total authority for editorial changes brings with it total answerability for those changes, and I have tried to exercise caution for H.D.’s sake and for my own. Whenever possible, I consulted other published works by H.D., in particular lifetime editions, for analogous or related textual details, although I regarded these peripheral texts as heuristic rather than binding. Occasionally the typescript contains a word or phrase that seems garbled; in these cases I have relied on my judgment, taking care to avoid over-ingenious solutions.
H.D.’s spelling offers a special challenge. She frequently misspelled both common and uncommon words, including foreign words, which she sometimes rendered phonetically. She was aware of this tendency and expressed concern over it, writing Marianne Moore as late as 1952: “I still have a sort of Puritan complex, I must spell correctly.”21 I have corrected approximately 300 misspellings (around 170 different words) for this edition. I have retained certain unusual spellings, however, either because they are attested variant spellings or because they are especially characteristic of H.D. and appear in other texts by her (some published during her lifetime): “blurr,” “hybiscus,” “hypatica,” “cotton wadging,” “baptismal fount,” “carn,” “unwieldly,” “etherialized,” and others. Although British spelling predominates in the typescript, certain words fluctuate between British and American spelling (“realised” and “realized,” for example); I have not altered these spellings, regarding them as a significant manifestation of H.D.’s expatriate temperament.
Due to H.D.’s spotty revision of the typescript, some proper names and place-names waver in spelling (“Hermione”/“Hermoine”; “Lowndes”/“Lowdnes”), or appear in variant versions (“Captain Tim Kent”/“Captain Ned Trent”); I have regularized these spellings and variants. In general, I have treated misspelled names as ordinary misspellings, changing “Shelly” to “Shelley,” and “Houkashi” to “Hokusai,” for example. I have occasionally allowed the external, historical referent of a name to determine spelling when it seemed clear that H.D. had that referent in mind. For example, I have altered “Milais” to “Millet” (the painter of the Angelus); “Sir John Sloane” to “Sir John Soane” (the founder of the Soane Museum in London); “Cryseus” to “Chrysis” (the character in Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite); “Quai des Fleus” to “Quai aux Fleurs”; “Monte Solario” to “Monte Solaro.” But even this category contains exceptions. For example, in part 2, Hermione thinks of General Trent of “Ladyburg,” and though she clearly means the famous siege of “Ladysmith” during the Boer War, the possibility of comic wordplay made me reluctant to interfere. In certain cases, H.D. intends a name or place-name to be typical rather than historical, as when she gives “Krissenden” and “Chissingham” as towns in Buckinghamshire. I have not tampered with these names.
Literary quotations and allusions in Asphodel are often free and imprecise, and I have made no changes in these passages except to correct spelling and other accidentals. As noted above, the title of the novel itself is the result of “misquotation,” and the line between error and creativity in such cases is hard to draw. Occasionally H.D.’s citational habits produce an awkward phrase—as when, recalling Poe’s “To Helen,” Hermione thinks of “those Nemean barks of yore” instead of “those Nicean barks of yore,” or when Jean Valjean is referred to as “Jean Jean”—but such “errors” are allowed to stand.
Similarly, I have made relatively few alterations in H.D.’s punctuation. To grant H.D. her punctuation is to respect her syntax, the special rhythms and “voices” of her text. Her use of commas is loose and impressionistic, a practice appropriate to the free, experimental style of Asphodel. The narrative has a fluent, intimately “spoken” quality, and commas often indicate a voice pause or an emotional hiatus rather than a division of syntax; in this they are not unlike Emily Dickinson’s dashes. Only in cases of unusual awkwardness—about two dozen in all—have I added or subtracted commas.22 H.D.’s liberal use of hyphens (“scape-goat,” “super-natural,” “cock-tails”), along with her related tendency to split certain words into two (“court yard,” “any more,” “al fresco”), has been retained almost without exception. H.D.’s form of the dash—a si
ngle hyphen flanked by spaces—has been altered to American style. Dialogue passages in Asphodel are long and complex, occasionally blurring the distinction between speakers. H.D. (or her typist) evidently had difficulty with these passages as well, for quotation marks are omitted or misattributed in about ninety places. These I have corrected, taking context as my guide. Except in instances where hasty typing and inattentive revision resulted in obvious errors, I have retained H.D.’s italicization and capitalization. At this period she tended to italicize quoted phrases and passages, especially of poetry, but usually left foreign words and phrases unitalicized. Accents in foreign words have been added or corrected where appropriate. H.D.’s intricately rambling paragraphs and her spacing between chapter sections are reproduced exactly as in the typescript.
In general, I have proceeded in terms of a flexible notion of H.D.’s “sensibility,” a heuristic concept that has allowed me to accept a traditional model of authorial intention while remaining alert to the exigencies of an experimental modern text and sensitive to current theories of feminine writing. My decision to correct H.D.’s spelling but to leave her punctuation virtually unaltered—to regard the former as error and the latter as creative idiosyncrasy—is of course artificial to a certain extent.23 But the resulting text is, I believe, one faithful to H.D.’s intentions, insofar as these can be inferred or reasonably posited, and to the spirit of her prose writing as registered in the typescript of Asphodel and other published and unpublished works by her.24
R.S.
Notes
1. See especially Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 3 (“Madrigals: Love, War, and the Return of the Repressed”).
2. H.D. to John Cournos, July 9 [ca. 1920–1921?], in “Art and Ardor in World War One: Selected Letters from H.D. to John Cournos,” ed. Donna Krolik Hollenberg, The Iowa Review 16(1986): 147–48. This letter may have been written in 1918 or 1919.
3. Friedman, p. 141.
4. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 276.
5. H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton [Notes on Recent Writing],” ed. Adalaide Morris, The Iowa Review 16(1986): 180.
6. H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, October 14, 1959, unpublished letter, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
7. Ibid.
8. H.D. to Bryher, from Lausanne, April 18, 1949, unpublished letter, Beinecke Library.
9. H.D. to Pearson, October 14, 1959. Even as she urges Pearson and Bryher to destroy “carbons” of Her and Asphodel, she indicates that there are “MSS.” of the novels in her possession. She seems to have been worried about the existence of multiple copies and obsolete versions, but there is no indication that she wished to destroy all copies. The letter to Pearson reveals that she had her own typescript of Asphodel as late as 1959, two years before her death.
10. H.D. to George Plank, March 31, 1925, unpublished letter, Beinecke Library. For a detailed account of the complexly interrelated novels of H.D.’s “Madrigal Cycle” (Paint It To-Day, Asphodel, Madrigal), see Friedman, ch. 3.
11. H.D. and the Greggs left for France in the summer of 1911; Asphodel is less precise about this date, at one point suggesting that it may have been 1912.
12. H.D. to Bryher, April 18, 1949.
13. See Robert Spoo, “H.D.’s Dating of Asphodel: A Reassessment,” H.D. Newsletter 4(Winter 1991): 31–40.
14. Cf. Friedman, pp. 107, 171–72.
15. From “L’Art Philosophique,” in Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1961), p. 1099. “What is pure art according to the modern conception? It is the creation of a suggestive magic simultaneously embracing both object and subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself” (my translation).
16. Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations: A Selection, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 13–14.
17. The covering sheet and title page of Asphodel contain three versions of the title, all based on the quotation from Landor: “Asphodel,” “Fields of Asphodel,” and “This Side of the Grave.” The last mentioned was struck out by H.D., leaving the first two as options. I have chosen “Asphodel” because it is the tide H.D. used most often when alluding to the novel in letters and memoirs. “Asphodel” probably also refers, as Friedman points out, “to Odysseus’s descent to the Underworld, where he sees the shade of Achilles stride off into ‘fields of asphodel,’ ” and to certain early poems by Aldington (p. 386n). H.D. used the title “Amaranth” for one of the trilogy of poems she wrote in 1916 about her relationship with Aldington.
18. William Carlos Williams also noted the interdependence of love, death, and the imagination in his late poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”
19. H.D.’s composition process typically began with rough pencil drafts in notebooks, followed by her own typed draft of the material she had written. She then had her typist prepare a fair copy. The typescript of Asphodel may be the work of her typist.
20. Two small exceptions should be noted. The typescript of Asphodel contains two versions of page 147 of part 1; both are carbon copies on identical typing paper, one page containing a sentence which the other omits. I have retained the sentence. Also, a short selection from chapter 15 of part 1 was published in an appendix to Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910–1912, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988). I have taken this published excerpt into account and have departed from its text (which I also edited) in a few minor readings.
21. H.D. to Marianne Moore, January 19, 1952, unpublished letter, Marianne Moore Papers, V:23:33, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.
22. Late in life, at the urging of Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. went through her published and unpublished writings and attempted to regularize comma usage and other accidentals, though at times she found the task uncongenial and left it to Pearson. I have decided not to impose this late practice on a work H.D. produced in the 1920s, when her creative assumptions and attitudes toward publishing were different.
23. Readers may wish to compare this edition of Asphodel with the text of the first four chapters of Paint It To-Day, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis and published in Contemporary Literature 27(1986): 440–74. With some slight differences, they implicitly make the same distinction I have made between H.D.’s orthography and her punctuation.
24. A comprehensive list of significant editorial changes to the Asphodel typescript will be published in the H.D. Newsletter, ed. Eileen Gregory (Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture).
ASPHODEL
“There are no fields of asphodel this side of the grave.” W. S. Landor
PART I
1
France. France swirled under her feet for now that the boat was static it seemed, inappositely, that the earth must roll, revolve and whirl. Hermione clutched the railings of the stairs and the broad flight of stairs leading upstairs whirled and turned with her as the narrow cabin step ladder of steps leading down into the sordid ship’s belly had never, it appeared, even in its worst days, done. The memories of sea storm were pacific compared with this thing: stairs that inappositely whirled under her and a bed that when she flung herself upon it, heaved and swayed under her, heaving and swaying and swaying with the heave and sway of faded rose buds in loops that was the almost effaced but still reliable pattern of the salmon-coloured paper of the wall she stared at. Stairs in her imagination heaved and sank under her. She seemed about to float away, lax, bodiless.
“There is nothing wrong with you.” Madame Dupont, their boat acquaintance, had stayed with them, had the room down the corridor one remove from the rooms of Hermione and the two Rabbs. “There is nothing wrong with you.” Hermione managed to heave aloft on one elbow and by a determined and valiant effort keep the bed steady under her elbow while she listened. “There is nothing wrong with you.” A dark figure stood
in the doorway. It drew nearer. It was clothed like a sister of charity in black, it had a black hat pulled over its eyes, the very hat they had all so bargained over this morning, shopping in Havre with Madame Dupont. Madame Dupont, had insisted on it. “My sister and my brother-in-law will be so shocked to see me back from New York without the proper black things. I didn’t get them in New York as they are so expensive.” Madame Dupont had arranged her mourning to suit her purse and her convenience. Was it French simply? Putting on black when she got to Havre, saving her best black, not wearing black on the boat. This mourning de convenance seemed suddenly to Hermione inconsolably amusing. She would begin to laugh and laugh and laugh. She would never be consoled. Imaginez vous, buying the things in Havre where it was cheaper . . . cheaper for someone you cared for, but Madame Dupont hadn’t even cared for her mother. Said so. Told them frankly “you see . . . he was a very old man. But even that . . . in France . . . But you see . . .” and she had whispered the tale of her dot-less marriage with a rich old man who had (whispers) and her mother knew it. French. France already on the boat had come true . . . just that horrible story, true. Things happened out of de Maupassant, any de Maupassant story might come true, Boule de Suife, fat pretty cocotte in the railway carriage going to bed with the Parisian officer (Bouile de Souife was it?) and then everyone cutting her afterwards . . . that was France, de Maupassant was true. Literature was true. If de Maupassant was true then life and letters met, were not sub-divided, hermetically shut apart. Helen thy beauty is to me was still hermetically sealed and a star, but de Maupassant in one terrible instant became real, a reality. Terrible and strong. They said it was Flaubert’s illegitimate child. Writing. How marvellous. Writing. She must write. Hermione must write. She must write this: salmon-coloured wall paper . . . faded; elegant Louis Seize gilt clock (on the elegantly empty mantel piece) that doesn’t go; standing in the door-way a grotesque figure, stiffly erect, in the correct posture of her new cheap mourning, Madame Dupont saying, “but there is nothing wrong with you.”