The H.D. Book (36 page)

For the knots of the net are actual suns; are in poetry, as in dreams, directives in the imagination between actual events and man’s self, are terms of the real, are when-wheres that co-existing in the word and in the world make actual events real. We sense the residue—the culture of Eliot, the slang of Williams, the pedantry of Pound, the remove of H.D.—as impediments in the individual nature to the imagined free voice.

A residue? or an impediment? But we move upon a stage where we must act our unknown “selves” in parts that are given by groupings, to hold our own and to correspond with other members of the scene. And the scene changes. In each grouping our part is somehow altered. What is our own and what is our correspondence we must dare as we can. The actor has his role given him. And the poet too has something given—what the poet is, how to enact the poet. The concept and the project is his creation. Analogous to the individual personality, but different, even contending, for the poet is a person of an order beyond the present scene or grouping. Attendant thereto. To the time and place. The poet of the company. The poet of the hour.

IV
.

“Every hour, every moment,” H.D. tells us in
Tribute to the Angels,
“has its specific attendant Spirit.”

The Renaissance Platonist Ficino had designed a magic to evoke the powers of angelic orders, Regents of the Planets. Incenses, tones, colors, the feel of woods or stones, were organized in a music or rite to awaken the senses or open the senses to shapes and presences beyond the sensual. Each hour had its particular genius, became then a possible work of the art:

but
I make all things new,
said He of the seven stars,

In the “Tribute,” the seven stars are, as stars are in the Cabbalistic imagination of Ficino, angelic powers:
Raphael, Gabriel, Azrael, Uriel, Annael, Michael, Zadkiel.
They are, in their hours, guardians.

The clock ticking becomes the Lady knocking at the door of consciousness:

and she was standing there
actually, at the turn of the stair.

It does not seem so out-of-the-way when we take it that the thought of the Lady came to her:

that I lay awake now on my bed,
that the luminous light

was the phosphorescent face
of my little clock

and the faint knocking
was the clock ticking.

We are most familiar with this way of the subconscious to use things happening about us to project or to evoke its own forms. But in “Sagesse” IV, it is another time magic, not unconscious now but conscious; not using the clock, “this curious mechanical perfection,” in itself, but using its hours in relation to the old orientation of the star map and the figures drawn from the stars that present themselves. Waking in the dark alone, she is not in the dark, she is not alone.

An owl hooted out in the darkness,
so the angel came—what angel and what name?

is it Tara,
Dieu fontaine de sagesse
and the angel Ptébiou? it was his hour

or near his hour, what did he say?

This angel is an attribute of God. The old gods and the new, the Greek world and the Christian-Judaic world, have been found in the synthesis of a poetic-theurgy. As in the Cabbalistic system, the source of the voice, the self, is hidden. These angels-gods-guardians are attendants
of the poetry itself, the voice in its manifestation. Patrons of the hour of writing, of naming the patron of the hour.

The thought of Ezra Pound might have come as an owl hooted in the darkness. Her mind was no nearer to that other grouping of the powers of poetry, to 1905 or 1912, no farther, than it was from this new grouping. In the poem “Stars Wheel in Purple” let the thought of Williams, Pound, Lawrence, and the ghost of her Roman lover Aldington come in the naming of Hesperus, Aldebaran, Sirius, Mars. I should be more bold, for anyone who is not with me here will long ago have ceased to read the book. They are not less real, more real, in the real of the poem than the stars, or these others, the powers that attend the poet.

Where angels appear in the orders of the poem—as they do in Rilke’s
Duino Elegies
or in these poems of H.D.—we remember too in reading their dedications that patrons, Rilke’s friend, the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, or H.D.’s friend, Bryher, are also “angels.” And we see between the higher angel of the imagination and the lower angel of our everyday world, some likeness. We see the figure of the medieval lord as donor kneeling in the presence of
his
Virgin and Child or
his
crucifixion, having a share, a donation, in the work of the artist.

Just as when we wake at some hour of the night and find ourselves not disoriented in the dark, but in the thought of some attribute of God, a particular angel, to see things in that light; so we may find ourselves in the course of a poem also in the thought of some attribute of our Life, a particular person, having also his or her particular time.

These dedications in The War Trilogy—to Bryher, to Osbert Sitwell, to Norman Holmes Pearson—form a part of the concept then, for they are human sponsors of the thought of the poem, just as the seven angels appear as supernatural sponsors of the thought of the poem. These patrons stand in turn as sponsors of the artist’s soul, godmothers or godfathers we call them.

Pound had once stood as such a sponsor, when in the high baptism of poetry he named H.D. and a literary movement in one: “
Imagiste.
” Where she was born into a new identity, that lasted no more than four years—but the name stuck. In the despair and fever of her broken marriage, the still birth of 1915 “from shock and the repercussions of war
news”—“the death of my father followed closely on the news of the death of my older brother in France”—and then the second confinement of 1919, close upon death, stricken with pneumonia, and in the birth of her child, Perdita: H.D., Imagiste, died, and was delivered to life again. Delivered from her old life by Bryher.

The
mythos,
the telling of it, how it is made up is part of our text; the
dromenon,
how it is enacted in the poet’s life is part, what she went thru in the time of the poem. What they tell and what they do, the text and the action, form in turn a
rite de passage,
a way of survival for the poet in the personal life. In
Palimpsest
or in the novelette “Narthex” (published in
The Second American Caravan
in 1928) H.D. begins to tell the myth of what she went thru in 1915 and 1919.

“We travel far in thought, in imagination or in the realm of memory,” she writes in
Tribute to Freud:
“Events happened
as
they happened, not all of them of course but here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, is real, is like a work of art or is a work of art.” Then, just beyond this I find: “For things had happened in my life, pictures, ‘real dreams’ ”—thruout it is the
reality
of a dream, of a memory, of things that happened, that is H.D.’s concern. And that reality lay in a nexus of “actual psychic or occult experiences that were superficially, at least, outside the province of established psychoanalysis” and of psychoanalytic experiences—the novelettes of the mid-twenties, before her analysis, are psychoanalytic-minded; it was the reality of what poetry was. Life, itself, it seemed always to H.D. was “like a work of art” or was “a work of art”—a poetry. What is important here is that she took whatever she could, whatever hint of person or design, color or line, over into her “work.” What was real was what entered the picture.

“Flagrantly creative, how could they endure you?” she addresses Rico (Lawrence) in
Bid Me to Live.
“Creative” here means making-things-up. “Key-of-heaven tree,” Miss Kerr had told her Rico had named the tree in her garden. “Did you make it up, the name of that tree?” she asks in the letter to Rico that she will not send but is making up. “Did you make up Miss Kerr telling me the story, with the signed Henry James above her writing-desk and the petunia curtains?”

In the life of every “creative” writer some life they make up becomes
more real than whatever was there before. “Rafe is not the Marble Faun, not even a second-rate Dionysus,” Julia writes. Richard Aldington remains untouched by H.D.’s imagination. “I wrote that cyclamen poem for him in Dorset, at Corfe Castle, where I wrote your Orpheus. But you are right. He is not Dionysus, you are not Orpheus.” But Lawrence, a creator himself, can be Orpheus; as H.D. can appear in the person of Eurydice.

So Bryher delivering H.D. from her old life into a new enters a picture, becomes one of the figures, not only in the personal life, but, because that life is the matter of a poetry, in the design of a poet. We recognize her in the young Roman, Julia Cornelia Augusta, who attends Hipparchia in
Palimpsest,
whose “small firm hand, detached and hard as ivory, dragged her back, back when she was lax and floating going—gone—.” The old nurse had wakened her: “The young lady has been here the last three days to see you.” “ ‘
Young
lady?’ ” “Worse. She saw now. One of the preposterous new-rich who wanted to polish off (for court purposes) her accent.”

In “Narthex
,
” we see her as Gareth, sometime in the mid-twenties. “Say in the soul I want something,” Raymonde Ransome thinks, “black or white, good or bad, anything just so you want it enough, up or down and something (with Faust it was Mephistopheles) will answer. Perversely at that moment Katherine answered.” But Gareth too is an angel here, for she too had answered in a time of need. “Katherine, Gareth, they were two antique coin sides, Katherine one side, towered head, some Asiatic goddess, many breasted, something monstrous that yet holds authenticity, Gareth the other side, boy Emperor, slightly undershot little chin that gave a baby frailty to the hard clear profile . . . and that frightening intensity . . . late Greek, Graeco-Phoenician” or they are guardians of a door. “Two-fold initiation said the keeper of the gateway, you want to get through a door, doors are Janus-faced.”

Gareth (Bryher) can seem to Raymonde like the angel driving Eve forth from the garden of her affair with the serpent and the apple, Katherine and Mordant, as Gareth rescues Raymonde from her London troubles. “Garry like a sword flashing through late London mist . . . had flayed her forth, out of the ‘sticky drug of the Katherine-Mordant cycle’ into the wilderness.” He who has a servant has a master; so too
liberating angels tyrannize. Garry orders Raymonde off to d’y Vaud to write and then after three months wires for her to join her in Venice “in order to take a boat (they would discuss that later) somewhere.”

“She was connected with great wealth,” Robert McAlmon writes, telling of his marriage to Bryher in
Being Geniuses Together,
and in his eyes, as he titles his opening chapter “Money Breeds Complications,” there were complications.

There was, ever-present, in the Ellerman household the thought of “people knowing one only for money’s sake, and artists seeking to be patronized and financed.” But to be patronized or financed was not exactly the same as to find a patron or to receive a patron. It seemed to Robert McAlmon that Wyndham Lewis’s manner “soon became patronizing.” That was another sense of the word. To look down?

Lewis wanted McAlmon to get Sir John Ellerman to patronize him as an artist. McAlmon did get Ellerman to persuade certain editors to take drawings of Lewis’s, but McAlmon could go no further. Lewis couldn’t understand, McAlmon tells us, “that I was walking very carefully to avoid having Sir John plan my life.”

Bryher had this way of taking things over, he tells us. “I managed to slip away, but she got at the Lump” (H.D.’s child, Perdita) “and through her at H.D. She got at me too, but I knew some day soon I’d go away for good.” Earlier, we find: “Bryher, with her fervor for education, had taken on the upbringing of Hilda Doolittle’s infant.” Bringing someone up, taking someone
over,
is different from looking down. But our patron also may “look down,” as “the angels look down.”

Robert McAlmon, “a coldly intense young man, with hard blue eyes,” as his friend Williams describes him, “an ideal youth’s figure,” would not have seen our angel, for his sights, as we come to know in his writing, would brook no such nonsense. The imagination itself is “nonsense,” any imagination, as far as McAlmon was concerned. He disliked mysticism, he disliked “where Joyce goes Irish-twilighty and uses words for their isolated beauty,” he disliked Mary Butts’s “pretence,” he disliked whatever hint of this malady called imagination and could be sarcastic or angry when confronted by it. “Oh, to hell with Yeats,” he explodes, “and his sugared mysticism,” or sneers when writing of H.D.’s “taking up” with Freud: “It appears that Doctor Freud
discovered that the lady had been shocked upon discovering her father all but killed in a tram accident when she was but ten years old. It had left an impression upon her.” “Such creative and astounding imaginative insight upon the part of these psychoanalysts,” he concludes, “can only leave a layman such as myself breathless with awe.”

He would not have seen—where if we follow here we must see—an angel of the hour present in Bryher’s taking over. He would not have gone along with the idea that some attribute of God begins its work where a young woman may act as godmother. “Post war and late war eyes (unlike the very early shattered generation),” it seems to Raymonde Ransome, “had said ‘hell, what’s the use?’ Robin Rockway with his cap tilted with remembered flying unit grace had flung his ‘hell’ and his ‘hell’ until even Garry, stoic and sympathetic, had recoiled.”

Richard Aldington, Robert McAlmon, and Bryher too, have in common a certain stubborn literal mindedness; they are post-war or late-war eyes, Romans—Marius or Julia Augusta in “Hipparchia
,
” Freddie in “Murex
,
” Robin Rockway and Gareth in “Narthex”—Roman lovers, Roman patrons. Pound, Lawrence, H.D.—the poets—will always be Greek. William Carlos Williams too, McAlmon says, “was inclined to go literary and nostalgic about things Greek”; and Joyce had “a precious and literary nostalgia for the Greek poetizing, word-prettifying qualities dear to Pound’s heart,
melopoeia, logopoeia, phanopoeia.
That is, an interest in words as words for their evocative and suggestive qualities to the extent of being indifferent to the larger qualities of material, content-concept. . . . ”