The H.D. Book (53 page)

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For there is another voice, corresponding perhaps to the regular-guy voice of Williams, that breaks thru, as in the transitions of puberty the voice breaks between boyhood and manhood, and the personality breaks too, between the familial and the communal consciousness, making dramatic the conflict between the new sexual nature and the forces of authority in custom and government that forbid its expression and would compel its expression. The bold-face emphatic, the rant, the caricature of voice, the contentious mode appears, where another Pound roars and pounds on the table to bring Fenollosa or Frobenius, Gaudier-Brzeska or Gesell, whatever had opened the way for new inspiration and life-sense for the poet, to the consideration of government officials and university professors of literature, or reasonable men, to become part of the authoritative. There is hysteria, but we see too that it rises, most markedly in the irritations of Pound and D. H. Lawrence, men who, like H.D., testify to elements in experience that are not accepted in the social norms, just where the man strives to bring his individual awareness and the communal awareness into one.

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The voices of Eliot or of Wallace Stevens do not present us with such disturbances of mode. They preserve thruout a melodious poetic respectability, eminently sane in their restriction of poetic meaning to the bounds of the literary, of symbol and metaphor, but at the cost of avoiding facts and ideas that might disturb. Both the individual and the communal awareness are constricted to fit or adapted to the convenience of an accepted culture. Writing in
The Dial,
January 1928, Eliot finds that Pound might actually believe what is suspect or outside the terms of proper English belief simply unbelievable:

He retains some mediaeval mysticism without belief, this is mixed up with Mr. Yeats’ spooks (excellent creatures in their native bogs); and involved with Dr. Berman’s hormones; and a steam-roller of Confucian rationalism (the Religion of a Gentleman, and therefore an Inferior Religion) has flattened over the whole. So we are left with the question (which the unfinished
Cantos
make more pointed) what does Mr. Pound believe?

Pound, as well as D. H. Lawrence, belonged to the side of those who hankered after strange gods. In the ranks of Poetry itself, and in those ranks among poets who were surely their peers, Pound and Lawrence were heterodox in their cult of the daemonic both in terms of the old orthodoxy of the consensus of religious beliefs within the society and in terms of the new orthodoxy of the consensus of rationalist scientism. From the beginning H.D. had been of the pagan party, and with The War Trilogy she moved as a poet to the battlefront. The full roster of Mr. Eliot’s accusations against Pound, carefully loaded to excite the prejudices of right-thinking critics, was to be applied against her by her critics. Mysticism without the sanction of any church, daemonic and ghostly personae, biological and sexual coordinations, and, in H.D.’s case, Freudian in place of Confucian rationalism.

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It is just the discordant note—the rant of Pound, the male bravado of Williams, the bitter anger of Lawrence, the feverish exaltation and heightened concern with adverse arguments—it is this not only being aware of the loss of community but being involved in the heart of the trouble, undertaking the trouble, that gives to the heterodox their vital meaning, beyond the special culture of the times, in the process of our own art, for they challenge what we would take for granted. The rant, the bravado, the sarcasm, the exaltation are purposeful overcharges that touch again and again to keep our sense alive to the disorder, the demand of experience for a higher order of form. The discord of their modes to the social norm is a therapeutic art.

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Where the individual protest is vehement and then, as with Pound and Lawrence, out raging against the “democratic” norms that oppose and confine the development of man’s inner nature, there is the seed of the totalitarian reaction. Where the individual despairs of his living his own life or finding his own life within the society under the domination of established proprieties, he may give over the struggle for liberation and seek a design for privilege within conformation or strike out for the domination of his own will. A Hitler or a Mussolini, a Lenin or a Stalin, successfully find the way to dominion; surrendering all inner freedom they become possessed and impersonate the absolute authority of the state that was once the enemy. Where a democracy is composed of a people in which the individual conscience and nature is not liberated, so that a common standard or consensus of the majority rules and not the union of each in free volition, the state is already totalitarian.

Pound must protest his right to write “for a few people with special interests.” The hostility of a popularist democracy for “special interests” may be politically directed towards the overweening powers of industrial tycoons, Papist plots, and military lobbies, but it extends too to any sensibility, science, or art, that is not readily available as a commodity to all interests and uses. It is the unpopular sensitivity of the poet, for one thing, that is under attack. Complex or obscure considerations threaten the security and self-esteem of men who take pride in their common sense against any uncommon concern. “They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry must be simple.” That’s part of it. The popular mind resists and resents any extension of awareness beyond the use of public polity, for thought and feeling must cope there with new complexities and obscurities.

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“Could beauty be done to death,” H.D. cries in 1916, during the First World War, in “The Tribute”:

Could beauty be caught and hurt
they had done her to death with their sneers . . .

That, too, is part of it. The beauty of the poem, the poet’s sense of beauty, in itself, that cannot be bought and sold. Beauty, in a society based upon commodity-profit is ambivalently praised and despised. The popular mistrust, the industrial and commercial mistrust, opposes and destroys where it can individual sensitivity, as out of place in the “democracy” of big party politics or in the “community” of the modern city as individualist architecture with its romantic and expressive form, even ornament, is in the plans of the new functionalism.

But the mistrust is within too. The poets turn upon each other and themselves in accusation and guilt—Lawrence accuses Joyce of obscenity; Pound finds Lawrence’s erotic poems “disgusting or very nearly so”; H.D. strikes out against the bravado of Williams; Williams hits back with exacerbated sensitivity against H.D.’s exaltation of the “sacred” (“her real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation”).

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“So what good are your scribblings?” the partisans of the Sword demand in
The Walls Do Not Fall.
The immediate contention means “of what good for the War Effort?,” but the accusation gives rise to answers in the poem that it is her very way of life, her ultimate individuality that is under question. Not only in wartime conditions but thruout the society living for love or living for experience is heretical, so contradictory to the common persuasion of the use of life—to career, to comfort, to security—that it gives rise to defensive affirmations where we feel the “I know, I feel” transcends the question, pushed, in order to survive as a life-purpose, to the ultimate. But the voices of disapproval remain, for they are part of what the poet knows and feels. Deeper, they have been incorporated in the poet’s psyche, taken-to-heart. The old arguments against the cult of beauty, against Imagism, against the ecstatic, against the occult and mytho-poeic, crowd in to impersonate the poet’s own duality between doubt and conviction in writing.

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What I am getting at here is that the man individualizes himself, deriving his individuality from the ideas and possibilities at large of manhood
in a community that includes all that we know of what man is (“Grandeur, horror!” Victor Hugo cries out in his vision of that Leviathan). And the desire to know more of what man is, extending the idea of man beyond the limitations of particular nationalities, races, civilizations, the taking of self in the species, or in the life force, or in the cosmos, is the need for self beyond what can be granted by whatever known community, the need for a manhood big enough to live freely in. The poetic urge, to make a poetry out of the common language, is to make room for the existence of the poet, the artist of free speech. As in the beginning, the sky was divided from the earth below, or Heaven from Hell, to give space, a height and a depth, in human life. He differentiates the area of existence, creating his “own” area, deriving the individuality as much from dissociation as from identification, disowning as well as owning possibilities of his being, making a place for self in the community of his total consciousness which is an inner counterpart of his awareness of the outer community in which he lives. He recognizes in the world about him those contentions he feels within.

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Pound in
Canto
XIV not only attacks in society at large but attacks in his own mind “the betrayers of language . . . those who had lied for hire . . . the perverters of language,” disowning the corrupt language of the press even as he strikes out in the very excesses of that language, having the bigotry to damn “bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria,” allowing them no more understanding than they allowed their enemies, inflamed against inflammatory words. In contrast, the famous Usura Canto (XLV) has a grandeur of tone that would seem to indicate that the poet has no such secret temptation to use his art for profit as he has to use his art for public persuasion and attack, for defamation of character. In the troubled flux of the late
Cantos
“the temple is not for sale” stands with equanimity.

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In
The Walls Do Not Fall,
H.D. gives some assent to the “we fight for life” terms of the Sword’s claim, for she answers here only that Writing
too is part of the fight for life. But the communal pronoun “we” proper is used thruout the poem to refer to the community of a mystery within the larger society: “we know not nor are known,” “we passed the flame,” “they were angry when we were so hungry,” “we reveal our status / with twin-horns, disk, erect serpent,” “we, authentic relic / bearers of the secret wisdom,” “we take them with us [our writings] / beyond death,” “we are proud, / aloof, indifferent to your good and evil,” “we know each other / by secret symbols,” “we know our Name / we nameless initiates”—this is the language of the Holy Spirit cults of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformation, where community as well as self has been dissociated from the society at large and created anew in order to survive as a living reality in the consciousness. H.D. would create not only a life of her own but she would fuse elements of the community of poets, the community of the psychoanalyzed, and the community of Christ, to have a community of her own. In the light of what that community means by Life, the War is not all, mostly is not at all, a fight for life. “I am hungry, the children cry for food / and flaming stones fall on them,” she returns in answer to the Sword’s claim: “our awareness leaves us defenseless.” In
Tribute to the Angels,
those who suffer in the bombings of London are not victims of a fight for their life but of a contention that is not theirs. “Never in Rome / so many martyrs fell,” yes, but the war in the sky is “the battle of the Titans.” In
The Flowering of the Rod,
her dissociation from the purposes of the war, like Pound’s from the purposes of the peace in the Usura Canto, is clear:

the harvester sharpens his steel on the stone;
but this is not our field,

we have not sown this;
pitiless, pitiless, let us leave

The-place-of-a-skull
to those who have fashioned it.

In section x, she declares again: “It is no madness to say / you will fall, you great cities . . . it is simple reckoning.”

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This putting away of allegiance that obstructs the poetic or religious reality is an inner psychic as well as an outer social struggle for life-space, for the identity of the poet and the way of poetry to create itself and find its true community, that is, its freedom, within the mass of a populace where forces rule that care nothing for or are hostile to its existence.

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Even as these poets strove to make a place for their poetry, they had a strong drive to disown those aspects of poetry that might be held up to the derision of the rigorous minded. In a letter to Williams in 1908, Pound writes: “Here is a list of facts on which I and 9,000,000 other poets have spieled endlessly.”
He
at least is not to be taken in by the pretensions of the
poetic.
There follows a list of themes:

1.  Spring is a pleasant season. The flowers, etc. etc. sprout bloom etc. etc.

2.  Young man’s fancy. Lightly, heavily, gaily etc. etc.

3.  Love, a delightsome tickling. Indefinable etc. A) By day, etc. etc. etc. B) By night, etc. etc. etc.

4.  Trees, hills etc. are by a provident nature arranged diversely, in diverse places.

5.  Winds, clouds, rains, etc. flop thru and over ’em.

So. Pound continues. The tone is not simply vernacular, but a sophisticated putting-on of common sense—it protests its being wise to some shame incurred in poetic themes that might be betrayed in its own voice. “Delightsome tickling” covers with male bravado any suspicion of being taken-in by sexual excitement or love, lest the poet be caught in some “unmanly” emotion. Pound, deeply pre-Raphaelite in his affinities, will protest as a modernist in 1913 against Lawrence’s “middling-sensual erotic verses” as “a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so.” Behind his “jesting,” as he calls it, is Pound’s native Puritanical mind in its distaste for the sensual. But deeper going, there is the intellectual disclaimer.

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Compare Dante in
De Vulgari Eloquentia,
speaking also to his peers on the themes of poetry: