The H.D. Book (35 page)

Williams was 22 that year. And in the manly earnest speech of the letter there is another youthfulness or innocence, of America itself before the War.

In the
Autobiography
in 1951 the picture has changed or something has been betrayed in the picture:

There was about her that which is found in wild animals at times, a breathless impatience, almost a silly unwillingness to come to the point. She had a young girl’s giggle and shrug which somehow in one so tall and angular seemed a little absurd.

Ezra was wonderfully in love with her and I thought exaggerated her beauty ridiculously. To me she was just a good guy and I enjoyed, uncomfortably, being with her.

‘For God’s sake,’ I told him, ‘I’m not in love with Hilda nor she with me. She’s your girl and I know it. Don’t be an ass.’

Once I went alone for a walk with Hilda, one April I suppose, in that really lyrical Upper Darby country of those days. I particularly remember the grape hyacinths in a gully beside the road, deep blue, a flower with which I was completely unfamiliar. Hilda told me she was studying Greek and that she had heard that I too was writing poetry. That hurt. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, for as a matter of fact I had in my own opinion produced nothing. Ezra, of course, was the hero.

Oh, well, she added, to help me along I suppose, I’ve been writing too. Some translations, she added—to escape blame. We wandered along. She with the back of her skirt dragging, no hips, no nothing, just Hilda, through the deep grass, over fences, barbed wire (I remember how Edmonson once told me, after a group walk one day, a fellow can’t help but look sometimes! she was that careless).

As we went along—talking of what?—I could see that we were in for a storm and suggested that we turn back.

Ha!

She asked me if when I started to write I had to have my desk neat and everything in its place, if I had to prepare the paraphernalia, or if I just sat down and wrote.

I said I liked to have things neat.

Ha, ha!

She said that when she wrote it was a great help, she thought and practiced it, if taking some ink on her pen, she’d splash it on her clothes to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference toward the mere means of the writing.

Well—if you like it.

There were some thunderclaps to the west and I could see that it really was going to rain damned soon and hard. We were at the brink of a grassy pasture facing west, quite in the open, and the wind preceding the storm was in our faces. Of course it was her party and I went along with her.

Instead of running or even walking toward a tree Hilda sat down in the grass at the edge of the hill and let it come.

‘Come, beautiful rain,’ she said, holding out her arms. ‘Beautiful rain, welcome.’ And I behind her feeling not inclined to join in her mood. And let me tell you it rained, plenty. It didn’t improve her beauty or my opinion of her—but I had to admire her if that’s what she wanted.

“Hellenism,” Williams wrote in the Prologue to
Kora in Hell,
“especially the modern sort, is too staid, too chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world.”

The reproof of H.D. rankled. And the other sore spot of the
Autobiography
—Eliot’s role—rankles here too. Before
The Waste Land
then. “T. S. Eliot and his
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
” Was it Pound’s unqualified admiration for Eliot? “For what the statement is worth, Mr. Eliot’s work interests me more than that of any other poet now writing in English,” Pound had declared in reviewing
Prufrock
in 1917. And there may have been a cut-back that hit Williams more directly: “His men in shirt-sleeves, and his society ladies, are not a local manifestation; they are the stuff of our modern world, and true of more countries than one.” “And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever to rate highly his eternal Eliot,” Williams exclaims.

III
.

The first, the opening scene with its grouping, the three young would-be poets—H.D., Ezra Pound, Williams—remains a kind of announcement of the drama of modern poetry. Germinal, germane. Where we see these had their own Ion, firstness of spirit, and a flower. William Carlos Williams in “Postlude” with its

O, prayers in the dark!
O, incense to Poseidon!
Calm in Atlantis.

or in “First Praise”:

Lady of dusk-wood fastnesses,

      Thou art my Lady.

I have known the crisp, splintering leaf-tread with thee on before,

is close indeed to H.D. Seems almost to answer or to belong to “Pursuit”:

this and a dead leaf-spine,
split across,
show where you passed.

“(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems),” H.D. wrote of “Postlude” in that letter of 1916.

“Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness,” Pound sings in “A Virginal.” The volume the poem appears in,
Ripostes,
1912, is dedicated to William Carlos Williams.

To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.

In the end, that germinal grouping will reappear. The War Trilogy,
The Pisan Cantos, Paterson
—and more especially later poems of Williams like “To Daphne and Virginia” or “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”—can be compared because they are of a kind, having that common generation, that first spirit or Ion of the beginning scene, revealed at last.

So, “the box odor” from “To Daphne and Virginia” may be our first flower too:

The box odor

       is the odor of that of which

              partaking separately,

each to herself

       I partake also

               . . separately.

But meanwhile there are, “sanctioned by the form of the play,” divisions, separations. In the Imagist period itself, when Pound, H.D., and Williams first appear as a group in
The Egoist,
there are new groupings. Pound is close to Yeats, as Williams and H.D. are not. H.D. is close to Lawrence, and Williams in time finds a kinship with Lawrence, as Pound never does. “Each represents an entrance”—Eliot enters the picture—“an exit”—H.D. leaves the picture—“a change in inner mood and external grouping of the characters.”

In London, always keeping his correspondence with Williams, Pound goes on, after Imagism, to his “Vortex,” a new grouping where Williams never fits. “If I am introducing anybody to Kulchur,” Pound writes in
Kulchur,
“let ’em take the two phases, the nineteen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in
Blast,
and the next phase, the 1920’s.”

“The sorting out, the
rappel à l’ordre,
and thirdly the new synthesis, the totalitarian.” For Ezra Pound in the twenties Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis gave definition.
The Cantos, The Waste Land, Ulysses
and
The Apes of God
formed the
Quadrivium
of a modern education.

In New York another grouping appears, defined by their mutual sympathies. It was not a program. They were not concerned with culture, with a Kultur, but with the art of the poem. Amateurs in a sense. Looking back, we find them standing out in
Others,
the American
anthology of 1917: William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. “One has to keep looking for poetry as Renoir looked for colors,” Stevens writes to Williams after
Al Que Quiere
in 1920, “in old walls, wood-work and so on. Your place is”

—among children

Leaping around a dead dog.

The group in London were culture-heroes. Not only was the Imagism of Eliot, Pound, and H.D. an attack upon the literature but upon the deeper culture of England, forcing new roots in the revival of ancient matter. The counter-group in America were artists, relating themselves now to an aesthetic, to the poem as an art object. There would be the objectivism of Williams’s work in the 1920s; there would be Wallace Stevens’s fictive musics and still-lifes; there would be Marianne Moore’s found objects and practised connoisseurship. Where Pound also always had a secret or not so secret aesthetic allegiance. The poem, for him too, was a work of art, to be compared with Brancusi or Bartók. For didn’t he have, beyond the purposes of his
Kulchur,
his “nacre and objets d’art”? Where Eliot’s verse had literary overtones, Pound’s had luminosities and the musical phrase.

In the groupings of Eliot, Pound, H.D. in London, and Williams, Stevens, Marianne Moore in New York, I am led on by something else at play, a dynamic figure. Is there “a heart-shaped space,” some all but intangible form that we sense as something happening in the separations and reformations, the overlappings and differences among the members. Once the whole play is there, with its prologue in America, “in that really lyrical Upper Darby country of those days,” “before the War,” where Williams, Pound, H.D. meet in one grouping, and Marianne Moore is near but not included, and then, its first scene in the Imagist Movement, in the four years or so between 1912 and 1914; with its epilogue in the second configuration in the Second World War, each of the members is seen in a new division between those who are to go on to a major phase in their old age that will change the ground or culture of Poetry itself, and those who are seen as having no dialectical role. Under fire of life’s either coming into a new creative phase in old
age, larger and deeper, challenging a new generation of poets, or coming to the summation of the work of a personal artist as a thing in itself, the work of Williams, like that of Pound and H.D., takes on new scope. Williams, in this second exposure, is revealed as no connoisseur of the poem as art object in itself but as a visionary, reawakening in poetry once more transcendent themes and implications. As if in the dynamics of some ideoplasty there were an exchange between the two superimposed configurations in which the heart of poetry appears, Eliot now belongs clearly on the side of Stevens and Marianne Moore. He regrets the Notes to
The Waste Land
that had suggested any involvement with Jessie Weston’s
Ritual to Romance
or the cult of the Tarot cards, and in his
Four Quartets
we find that even religious matters are literary in their character, having the proper artistic distance. In the thing happening between the two figures is a central thread, a germinal figure, in which the emerging task of our own poetry is given.

Threads are spun out and are woven, from event into event. Hands work the dancing shuttles of a close net to make things real, to realize what is happening. A tapestry of a life appears in the mesh of many lives, a play. But just as when we weave a complex of lines a cloud or atmosphere appears, a texture or cloth, something more than the threads told, and out of that texture appear, not only the figures we were translating into our design, but other figures of the ground itself; so a “life” appears in the work itself. The weaving or the painting or the writing is “subjective,” is an act out of however we can do it; the “subject matter” is “objective,” is some thing or event as actual as ourselves which we reach out to capture, to draw into a texture with ourselves. In the medium, our work and this thing become mixed, changed then. A ground appears as a new condition of what we are doing.

Say we work loosely; we do not know quite how to secure our object, and gaps appear in the work. They have become, these makeshift elements, qualities of the whole, of the real. “The hey-ding-ding touch
was
derivative,” Williams writes in his Prologue to
Kora in Hell,
“but it filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time.”

The stars are a fishing net, as men fish in heaven for what they are. The design was to fill in the gap of the sky, of space and time. But then, man has so shaped himself in his imagination of the stars, that
Astrology, even when we know more, know how falsely the stars are shown in its diagrams, shows us still a typology of character. “It might be said,” Williams goes on about the hey-ding-ding touch, “that that touch is the prototype of the improvisations.”

History is a close-weave. Fishing for the event.

The dragon is created in the creation of the net. It is as She is bound that we trace out the figure of Tiamat. So, too, the imagination is flung out to come into its figures. Naming actual things, persons, places, and times about us, we make our terms in which our design will be realized. Just beyond “our” design, because we do not ourselves name these things but come to these things thru names given in the beginnings of man’s story, as the light of a star comes to us across “light-years,” the thing in the word comes to us across “language-years.” All the things of our lives came to us, first, before words, into focus, out of a commune of things, an already human world around us, where we were already happening; came out of a surrounding of words we did not understand but came to understand. Where there are meanings, here, too, we send the threads out towards one point, draw them back into another.

When we first come into the attraction of words in poetry, it is the craft of the net, the novelty of usage, the knot effect, often, that strikes us. We mistake the effect for the art. Style and signature most valuable, and the direct, uncharacterized speech, uninteresting. The “flippancy,” the up-to-dateness or regular guy voice of Williams’s language—the risk of those knots, the craft, the thing posed—appears interesting in itself. To be original. To challenge the communal thing. Will he make it?

To tie fancy knots and to contrive a greater show of our abilities. But all these original knottings are mistaken, are “hey-ding-ding”—“lead nowhere” the common sense is—if they are all novelty, things of 1920, not lasting forces. The knots that are flames are not originalities, but origins.

“I think you have the ‘spark’,” H.D. writes in her letter to Williams, “and when you speak
direct
are a poet.” The
spark
lies in, is, the word wherever it is spoken direct, directs what we are then, for we involve ourselves in what is said. Direct. Even this being Bill Williams is a persona, a mask of a man. The interesting effects, the devices that give personality, are part of it; but they are not the work of the other, the
poet, whose urgency it is to speak regardless of this person. In poetry we strive to make things real by working with every word as coming direct from an inner voice, as the immediate condition of or presence of the poem itself.