The H.D. Book (38 page)

Helen Fairwood’s hallucination or vision or presentational immediacy of the little birth-house or temple or tomb it seems to her, “set square with no imperfection or break in its excellent contour, like some exquisite square of yellow honeycomb” in the court at Karnak, is an effort to tell about this other actual presentation. Phantasy, tradition, surround it, and it almost seems a moment of what Cocteau so loves—the eternal return. But this is not, we realize, made up, as Helen Fairwood’s surrounding associations are a make-up, but—that is the danger, the madness—come from a source independent of our creative mind, our conscious daydream. The word rhymes with all the surrounding pattern we had been weaving but it comes as if of itself.

Festugière in
La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste
comments that the evaluation of such presentations as a higher good or reality is a trait of the Hellenistic period, distinctly contrasting with our own sense of such presentations as mental disorders. Epilepsy, paranoia, or heat-stroke in the Egyptian desert—the Mi’Raj, the visionary trance, the writing on the wall, has been declared beyond our ken, out of bounds.

MARCH
11,
SATURDAY
. 1961. (1963)

I have been reading recently along a line in the German romantic tradition, perhaps with a vague sense of relation to this search that has a beginning and an end in the entity H.D., but at the same time it seemed to me a rest or a change from my daily preoccupation to read these romantic tales and phantasies in the evening before sleep. Then I found myself following clues of what I sought for in these tales of man’s psyche in the northern forest world. Long ago, as a child, I had known Tieck’s
The Elves,
and after years I had read it again, but now—in the light, that for some must seem the shadow, of the
materia poetica
as I have begun to see it in my study—Tieck’s fairy tale told its story anew. That folk that live in the fir-ground—“the dingy fir-trees with the smoky huts behind them, the ruined stalls, the brook flowing past with a sluggish melancholy,” “as if bewitched and excommunicated, so that even our wildest fellows will not venture into it” it appears to most eyes—that is really the ground at once of an enchantment and of a fructifying source, seem now the people of a despised way of life, gypsies they appear in the story, pagan remnant or Albigensian outcasts they may be; now the people of some outcast area of the psyche itself, of a repressed content that to the conscious mind seems the home of “a miserable crew that steal and cheat in other quarters, and have their hoard and hiding-place here” but that is in the unconscious a wonderland, the hidden
garden of an other nature; now the people of the romantic impulse, mistrusted and disowned—the romantic fallacy, the right-minded call it. The magic of this source, whether it be an actual company, of poets or heretics, or a hidden area of the psyche, or a source of the poem, lies in its being secret to all who have not entered into its inner life. Once it is explained, shown up for what it is, once the Secret is told that man’s life has its abundance and blessing in this fearful, rejected ground, and that good fortune perishes. “Beware of telling any one of our existence; or we must fly this land, and thou and all around will lose the happiness and blessing of our neighborhood,” the Elfin Lady tells Mary in the story. And in the end, in anger at her husband’s injustice to those people that he sees as a nuisance to the country and their huts a blight, Mary cries out “Hush! for they are benefactors to thee and to every one of us,” “and as Andres at every word grew more incredulous, and shook his head in mockery,” she discloses the existence of the Elves.

Now all enchantment falls, and it is not only the Elvin world that disappears, illusion that it is, so that all night a host passes out of the neighborhood, and in the morning all is still. But also the illusion of the actual world fades:

The freshness of the wood was gone; the hills were shrunk, the brooks were flowing languidly with scanty streams, the sky seemed gray; and when you turned to the Firs, they were standing there no darker or more dreary than the other trees. The huts behind them were no longer frightful; and several inhabitants of the village came and told about the fearful night, and how they had been across the spot where the gipsies had lived, how these people must have left the place at last, for their huts were standing empty, and within had quite a common look, just like the dwellings of other poor people.

The Square of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in “Narthex” exists in Raymonde’s seeing into it the way she does, not seeing thru it. “Crawl into Saint Mark’s Cathedral like a bee into a furled flower head”; but “It was true that you could slit the thing to tatters, it had none of that quality Gareth liked . . . reality.”

The dark and the light, the fearful and the lovely, belong to the romantic illusion and disillusion. The “O wind, rend open the heat”
with which we began belonged to the same world of romance-living as Tieck and Wagner. My sense is that we are coming from what were once national traditions, “German” or “English” or church orthodoxies of belief and doctrine or progressive views into something else, a community of meanings, where we are to inherit—all things seen now as works of the imagination of what man is—a thread of being in which there are many strands. A psyche will be formed having roots in all the old cultures; and—this seems to me one of the truths I owe most to Charles Olson’s poetry—the old roots will stir again. But this sense of impending inheritance is in the thought itself; for long before us, in the nineteenth century, Carlyle, Emerson, or George MacDonald took their thought in Novalis, Tieck, or Hoffmann as we do now.

So, last night, in this sequence of German Romantics—Tieck’s stories translated by Carlyle, Wagner’s
Ring
cycle, and then the “Helen Phantasmagoria” of Goethe’s
Faust—
I went on to Hoffmann’s
Don Juan
and with
Don Juan
this morning my thought takes its lead.

E. T. A. Hoffmann. It had been “E. T. W
.
”; the biographical note by Christopher Lazare says that “the Amadeus, later substituted for Wilhelm, was a Mozartean afterthought.” Hoffmann, we read, “yearned for some signal from the unknown.”

In “Don Juan or A Fabulous Adventure That Befell a Music Enthusiast on His Travels,” the narrator is an author (we take him for the author then) who wakes from deep sleep in a strange inn to the sound of an overture. He is told when he rings for the valet that a door opens from his bed-chamber into the theater itself, where
Don Juan
by the famous Maestro Mozart of Vienna is being presented. He attends then, sitting in this special visitor’s loge that opens off of his room.

During the opera he hears in the loge beside him “the rustle of a silken garment,” senses “a gentle, perfumed breath of air close to me.” In the intermission he turns from his enchantment in the Mozart opera where he had been most drawn to the actress singing Donna Anna to find . . . to face the Lady of the play herself. “The possibility,” the author of the story writes:

The possibility of explaining how she could, at one and the same time, be both on stage and in my loge never occurred to me. Just as a happy
dream brings together the strangest events and our instinctive belief freely accepts it, in all its incongruity, as a phenomenon of life, so did I somnambulistically accept the presence of this marvelous creature. More than that, I realized, all at once, that there were secret bonds which tied me so closely to her, that she could not keep away from me even when she appeared on the stage.

Then:

She said that music was her only reality, and that she often believed she could understand in song much that was mystically hidden or evaded expression in life.

There follows a moment of hallucinatory revelation in which Hoff mann, the author of the story (“the Amadeus, substituted for Wilhelm . . . a Mozartean afterthought”) in a sleight of name is also the author of the opera, is Mozart. It depends upon the old afterthought, the possibility of the actual name
Amadeus
held in common:

‘I know the frenzy and yearning of love’ [Donna Anna confides] ‘that were in your heart, when you wrote the part . . . in your last opera. I understood you. Your soul was laid bare to me in song! Yes,’ (here she called me by my first name) ‘Naturally, I have sung you. I am your melodies.’

Here again, as in Tieck’s
The Elves,
the secret life is betrayed and the world of illusion dies. “As from a great distance, accompanied by the harmonica of an aerial orchestra” the author seems to hear Anna’s voice: “
Non mi dir bell’ idol mio!
”; then, in the
Epilogue,
Clever Man and Mulatto-Face, the Mid-Day critics discuss the death of the singer: “But that is what comes of overacting.” “Yes, yes. I warned her time and time again! The role of Donna Anna always affected her oddly. Yesterday, she carried on like one possessed.”

For the author the opera had been “as though the most esoteric thoughts of a bewitched soul had become fixed in sound and had taken form and shape, standing out in relief against a remarkable concept”; his very life seems to have its source in the stage. Writing to his friend,
Theodore, he says “This conflict between the divine and demoniac powers begets the notion of life on earth, just as the ensuing victory begets the notion of life above earth.” But this “notion of life” we see is the story of a ghost, an afterthought, that appears between our being and the other life that we know on the stage, in the story, in legend, in the poem, in the vision of painting and sculpture.

I
.

Our figures of the patrons in late medieval painting belong to two worlds. We know not in
The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin
whether the
Patron
is in
Her
presence or She is in
his
house. In Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, Joos Vydt kneels in the life in contrast to the facing figure of St. John the Baptist who stands in the painting of stone, having the presence of a work of art within the Altarpiece itself. The patron, the donner, in the painting takes on flesh of flie, an illusion, in paint that seems life-like in contrast to the illusion of stone in the painting of the saint.

In back of that
Adoration of the Lamb,
the great central figure of the Ghent Altarpiece, is another play of images, a cult or afterthought of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, a fifteenth-century charade—the Order of the Golden Fleece, where his court played Knights of the Round Table and Argonauts in one mystery. The blood of Flanders shed at Ghent, out of which Burgundy had great wealth, flows from the Lamb into the Grail. Christian figures—the Lamb, John the Baptist, the Bleeding Heart, the Cup—become one with the wool that was the source of the wealth; with the theatrical ideal of chivalry; became one, in turn, with Greek legend.

It took wealth. It was in turn the creation of wealth. In this relationship between the artist and the patron, the artist—the true alchemist—transformed money into richness. For Colchis to be present in the court of Burgundy; for Karnak to be present in London or the glory that was Greece to be brought to Bryher. So, the Van Eycks painted for Philippe le Bon, tableaux of the chivalric mysteries, woven in turn into tapestries to transform the streets of Sluys where his bride Ysabel of Portugal
landed in 1428, enhancing the actual world with another reality of the imagined world. And that imagined world of the Van Eycks takes on a solidity from properties of the patron’s world: the jeweled crown, the sumptuous robe, the golden throne, the burnished chandelier, the laver and basin have a greater immediacy. For the artist himself, Jan Van Eyck, had been brought into such a world by his patron, as ambassador of Philippe to the court of Portugal must have worn such robes.

The reality that Gareth poses against Raymonde’s other world of lure and involvement or enrichment is the seeing thru lure to the things of common sense and hard cash. It is the Protestant ethic described by Weber in
The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism
that gives Gareth her one dimensional resistance. Putting together this picture of the patron Bryher, from “Narthex,” from “Let Zeus Record”—but also now three years after my first draft, from Bryher’s
Heart to Artemis
—I see how typically she resists luxury, phantasy; to keep money virtuous. It was the image of Artemis, the ardent spare beauty in which some ascetic necessity was satisfied that drew Bryher to H.D.’s poetry. For the artist it meant the beauty possible for one with limited means. For the patron it meant the beauty permissible for one who would maintain the responsibilities of capital, avoiding luxury and waste.

Remembering McAlmon’s “Money Breeds Complications,” we remember too that the artist breeds complications in order to enrich: the intertwining and doubled images of marginal illuminations, the underpainting and mixing of tones in the luxuriance of Titian, the elaborations of the poet worked in interchanges of vowels and consonants, undermeanings and overmeanings. So Joyce, presented with the largest gift of the century by his patroness Harriet Weaver, developed and complicated his
Finnegans Wake
—a jeweled, overworked texture that only the extravagantly endowed artist could venture. Miss Weaver was dismayed for she had wanted some reiteration of the solid achievement Joyce had secured in
Ulysses,
her money’s worth; not this fairy gold or counterfeit of values.

“Compare the ‘Phaedra’ and the ‘Hippolytus’ series which were actually written in Greece,” Bryher says in reviewing
Hymen
in 1922: “with ‘Cuckoo Song
,
’ ‘Thetis,’ ‘Evadne.’ Apart from an added intensity of color—the ‘lizard blue’ water, the ‘red sands’ of Crete” . . . but in
“Phaedra” there was not only the added intensity of color, there was also the appearance of a counter force, protestant to Phaedra’s passion:

For art undreamt in Crete,
strange art and dire,
in counter-charm prevents my charm
limits my power: