The H.D. Book (33 page)

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood
jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance

In “The Gate & the Center” in that same issue Olson writes: “whatever be individuation, there are groupings of us which create kin (‘hungry after my own kind’), limits of, say, Seven Tribes of man, or
whatever—which same limits become vessels of behavior towards
use
of self, & recognition.”

I have taken these as an imaginary kin and their works for me form a network of stars that influence me, as the willing astrologer believes his stars influence him; and hanging over me can seem even an evil at times, such powers I have given to the thought of them, in order perhaps to imagine a powerful kindred. Such a network appears in Olson’s poem “As the Dead Prey Upon Us”:

they are the dead in ourselves,
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,
disentangle the nets of being!

nets, “which hamper at each step of the ladders,” “The nets we are entangled in,” that must be the tissues of life, the network of cells that is our flesh in which we exist. Is that it? to be released from the grievance and ache of the mother-flesh?

Stars, spirits, the dead. Some passage read years ago in Gertrude Levy’s
The Sword from the Rock
had raised in my mind the idea that as men came to know the stars, to name them, and then to draw lines and inferences, netting the whole sky together in a sky-map of constellations, so they came to bind Tiamat, the Dragon of the Formless Heavens. The stars were, in that concept, knots of the net. That bound also, then . . . Tiamat, the Mother of our Formless Nature? the libido?

I had seen old pictures where Christ the Fisher of Men was Orpheus fishing for the fish of the Zodiac, Pisces, with a net. And I knew too that the sum of our wisdom was what the dead knew. Wise with what was dead in us.

But these poems of our first constellation: The War Trilogy,
The Pisan Cantos
and
Paterson
came as living stars. Works that were not only masterpieces, but striking fire that continues to burn and lead on—to the broken insistences, the sublimity, and the rant of Pound’s
Rock-Drill
and
Thrones;
to the melodic distribution of phrases, the phrasing allowing for melodies within a melody, of Williams’s
Desert Music
and
Journey to Love;
to the world-dream woven at the loom of
By Avon River, Tribute to Freud, Bid Me to Live,
and in the far-flung skeins and lights of “Helen
and Achilles” (
Helen in Egypt
). “We have only one course:” Olson tells us in his song:

the nets which entangle us are flames

then:

O souls, burn
alive, burn now

As, in writing, deriving as I do, I burn the nets of my origins.

II
.

An incident here and there
and rails gone (for guns)
from your (and my) old town square

“Here,” “there” are suns, are loci. When-where points of the net. Actual fires. So, the Romans knew there was a genius of the place where we are. There was a point to it.

But “here,” “there,” the dedication of
The Walls Do Not Fall
makes clear are:

To Bryher

A thread is spun out in the loom between two points of the design, two places, two times. Where Bryher appears as patroness.

This is the figure of the kneeling donor, a meaningful element of the rite in painting in the late Middle Ages—the one who makes possible the Opus.

H.D., deserted by Aldington, near death in a London hospital, had been rescued by Bryher, who found her there; and then, rescued from her life in London, from the grievous associations of her marriage with
Aldington, yes, but also from the other trials of her life as a poet in company with Lawrence and Pound. Bryher took her away, or made it possible for her to go away to the Isles of Greece. Athens 1920. Karnak 1923.

In the dedication verse of
Palimpsest
H.D. draws a likeness of Bryher as severe and unidealized as the portrait of the Chancellor Rolin in Van Eyck’s painting of the Madonna. The great stars Hesperus, Aldebaran, Sirius, and Mars, are, we sense, where Bryher too has her star-nature, companions of H.D.’s who failed her in need, who “reel and fall.”

To Bryher

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as Bright Aldebaran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are,
nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others, blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid trist
to freighted ships baffled in wind and blast.

Pregnant with her second child H.D. had been stricken with double pneumonia. “The material and spiritual burden of pulling us out of danger,” she writes in
Tribute to Freud,
“fell upon a young woman whom I had only recently met—anyone who knows me knows who this person is. Her pseudonym is Bryher, and we all call her Bryher. If I got well, she would herself see that the baby was protected and cherished and she would take me to a new world, a new life, to the land, spiritually of my predilection, geographically of my dreams. We would go to Greece, it could be arranged. It was arranged, though we two were the first unofficial visitors to Athens after that war.”

“Anyone who knows me knows who this person is”—“She turned out to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the heaviest taxpayer in England,” William Carlos Williams puts it in his
Autobiography.
Years
later. But the thought of H.D. irritates him; he wants to put her down. “ ‘Wanna see the old gal?’ I asked Bob. ‘Sure. Why not?’ So one afternoon we decided to take in the show. Same old Hilda, all over the place looking as tall and as skinny as usual.” Wherever he remembers her this almost insulting, almost insulted affect colors his voice. He wants to brush Bryher off: “She had with her a small, dark English girl with piercing, intense eyes, whom I noticed and that was about all.” And the thought of Bryher’s proposing to Robert McAlmon and their marriage, McAlmon’s “disastrous story,” as he calls it, rankles. “She turned out to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the heaviest taxpayer in England. Bob fell for it. When he told me, I literally felt the tears come to my eyes, whether from the anticipated loss of the man’s companionship and the assistance of his talents, or joy for his good fortune, I couldn’t decide.”

The fortune itself rankled. Williams wasn’t going to fall for it. Fall under the claim money made. The reality of money, the charm of money. “I could not imagine what to give the wealthy young couple as an adequate present,” he tells us, “until Floss fell on the ideal gift: a box of the rarest orchids we could gather.” “Imagine,” Marsden Hartley laughed at the wedding supper, “what it would look like in the papers tomorrow, the headline:
POETS PAWING ORCHIDS
!”

Several days later, Williams continues, they received a post card “showing several actors, men and women with their hands in a pot of money, and signed, obscurely, D. H., in bold capitals.” He means to get back at something—“I accused H.D. later of being the sender”—of being in on the scene then? “but she violently denied it. I never believed her.”

The rancor is complex in William Carlos Williams; it flashes forth testily in his
Autobiography.
For us, for that constellation of new poets who began to appear in
Origin
in the fifties, where Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and I had our places, Williams was our immediate master. The poet of
The Wedge
in 1944 had broken a new way. The poet of
The Clouds
and then
Paterson
in the late forties had awakened us to our task in the language and had awakened us too to rediscover the poet of
Spring and All.
He seemed so wholly the poet in
Paterson,
the derisive, the defensive, the contending voice seemed so composed, to heighten the pathos of the ideal:

Go home. Write. Compose
Ha!
Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is
the only truth!
Ha!
—the language is worn out.
And She—
You have abandoned me!
—at the magic sound of the stream
she threw herself upon the bed—
a pitiful gesture! lost among the words:

we saw him so as the hero, that it was hard to admit how close to hurt pride he could be, how he contended in his own mind for recognition.

But this place is New York, this year is 1921. There is already a disappointment not an appointment between these two poets who had once read their poetry together. A divorce of feeling. A refusal of recognition.

Looking back,
Spring and All
in 1922 stands a major realization of form. Its twenty-eight poems belonging to an open sequence of feeling, cohering, not in any plan or prescribed theme, but in the essence of their belonging to the pure intuition of the whole. As free as the new music of Webern or the new painting of Kandinsky. The work itself having the insistence of the formal. So much depended upon seeing what was being done. Charged with spring. With the spring of a new poetics. The sequence of discrete, sharply drawn, contrasting poems that are in turn parts of something else, elements thruout of a melodic structure. That can include (as the new art of the collage begins to include):

Wrigley’s, appendicitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup–

or after “The Sea,” “Underneath the sea where it is dark / there is no edge / so two—,” comes XXI “The Red Wheelbarrow
.
” For upon the “so much depends” and upon the “red wheel / barrow” the imagination must have a heightened apprehension of what form means to take hold.

A year of achievement. Surely he must have known what he had done. But it was a year of rancor for Williams too, for what he had done in
Spring and All,
to give simple things a power in the imagination, to compose so in the pure exhilaration of a formal feeling, was not recognized by those closest to him in poetry. Pound, writing on “Dr. Williams’ Position” in 1928, does not mention
Spring and All,
and he seems to be defending an art in its lapse. “Very well, he does not ‘conclude’ ”; Pound writes: “his work has been ‘often formless,’ ‘incoherent,’ opaque, obscure, obfuscated, truncated, etc.”

Williams had struck out to make a new claim for form and it had not been recognized. More than that, the impact of
Spring and All
was obliterated by the timeliness, the
mise en scène,
the very usable attitudes and conclusions of
The Waste Land.

The Waste Land,
as it seemed to the literati of 1922 to voice most to their time, appears now as a period charade; with put-on voices and some epitome of modernism-1922 played against cultural tones, orchestrated with Edgar Allan Poe and the Vedas. The “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So intelligent” we all recognize as a knowing touch of the artist, a stylish manoeuvre.

The modernism-1922 is there in
Spring and All,
in the hey-ding-ding tough-voice of “Shoot It Jimmy!” and “Rapid Transit”

To hell with you and your poetry—

cuts in. But it is there an authentic part of the conflict the poet knows, in its own rights, as the red wheelbarrow is. For what it is. An insistence in the poem.

Yet . . .

Eliot must be part of our picture. He worried about social forms, about being in good form. He was never quite sure about the form, the beginning and the end of that first long poem. About what belonged. As he worried too about who and what belonged in the right thing, in literature, in the true establishment. About what to include. “Do you advise printing ‘Gerontion’ as a prelude in book or pamphlet form?” he writes Pound: “Perhaps better omit Phlebas also??? Certainly omit miscellaneous pieces.” “The
poem,
” Pound wrote Eliot, “ends with the
‘Shantih, shantih, shantih’.” A period charade? But it was the first poem in which the American mind lay so mediumistically open to the wastes of Europe’s agony. “The great catastrophe to our letters,” Williams recalls in his
Autobiography:

I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit . . . I had to watch him carry my world off with him, the fool, to the enemy . . .

Yet . . . “This is not to say that Eliot has not, indirectly, contributed much to the emergence of the next step in metrical construction, but if he had not turned away from the direct attack here, in the western dialect, we might have gone ahead much faster.”

“He might have become our adviser, even our hero,” Williams puts it. But he left the American language, the speech of childhood, the common speech—not for English, but for the language of English literature.

The footnotes may have done the damage, as Eliot believed later. They sent readers to look up the sources, not to find the fountain of feeling back of the poem, but to add to their know-all. For a new class in America that now fills our departments of English, bent upon self-improvement, anxious about what was the right book to refer to, Eliot, having his own like proprieties, became a mentor. “He returned us to the classroom.”
The Waste Land
with its contrasts of an upper cultured world in its anxious aristocracy, “staying at the arch-duke’s, my cousin’s,” to “go south in the winter,” or sitting as the Lady does in “A Game of Chess,” uneasily, in a movie set of traditional rich decor, with another world always threatening to show itself, to show the culture up—dead who will not stay buried, songs that are “ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears”—this contrast fit and fed the literary needs of new young men in the Universities who were no longer climbing in society but climbing in culture, haunted by a world they had come from where their people had not read Kyd or Webster.