The H.D. Book (56 page)

With
Tribute to the Angels
a new notation of time is incorporated in the work at its close: “London / May 17–31, 1944.” We not only know when it was written, but we are led, if we follow the notation to what it implies, to apprehend the order of experience from which the order of the poem arises in which the specific days “count.”

•

The calendar kept in those psychoanalytic sessions becomes now the calendar in poetic sessions. Freud had asked of everything, What does it mean? What is back of
that?
“When?” “Where?” Now, in the realization of the poem, as it had in the first series at Berggasse 19, Wien IX, or at Döbling, place and time begin to tell. It had been Freud’s great “discovery” to bring back into our consciousness how names and numbers as well as images build up references in our feeling of things. It was not new, it was the return of an old Jewish way of the mysteries. Names, numbers, images, events in
The
Z
ohar
of Moses of Leon in the thirteenth century co-operate as puns and hidden meanings to reveal the inner Nature of What Is.

•

“The arrangement for receiving us (at Döbling),” H.D. writes, “was more informal, and one did not have quite the same sense of authenticity
or
reality
as in the Professor’s own home.” Here, the formality of the Professor’s own home is also the specific genius of place and time—the potential
form
the artist feels in the occasion. Authenticity and reality tend to be identified with the appropriate and significant; the artist is searching for compositional openings in a complex experience.

III

The “Ion” of Euripides, Translated with Notes,
was sent to Freud when it was published early in 1937. The translation begun in 1920 had been finished in 1932, but the notes extend the play as if it had been seen anew, after not before the Freudian illumination. In the passage I had taken the dating of the work from: “numerically 1920, 1922 and again (each time, spring) 1932, we touched the stem of a frail sapling, an olive-tree” the notes would seem to be recalling at a later date the work of the translation.

“Deeply moved by the play (which I had not known before),” Freud wrote in thanking her for the gift: “and no less by your comments, especially those referring to the end, where you extol the victory of reason over passions. . . . ” In the play itself lines 1334–5, translated by Ronald Frederick Willetts in
The Complete Greek Tragedies,
edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, as follows:

Ion:
All men are pure who kill their enemies.
Priestess:
No more of that—hear what I have to say.

have been given an import Freud would appreciate in H.D.’s translation:

Ion:
to strike at evil, is pure:
Pythia:
you must know why you strike:

•

In the “Translator’s Note” at the beginning of
Ion
we can see a gain, from the earlier intuitive form, toward a conscious speculation and projection of form. Not only has H.D. articulated the play into felt sections, but she is concerned with the interpretation of her aesthetic feeling. Once the psyche of the person has been analyzed, a new sense
of the psyche of the poet arises along analytic lines as well as the pure stroke of the original inspiration. You must begin to know why the impulse is appropriate.

•

H.D. had found her poetic style in the beginning in the process of rendering choruses from Euripides. She did not exactly find it in the text alone but also in her own critical reaction to the text. Writing in
The Egoist
in 1915, she observed: “It seemed that the rhymeless hard rhythms used in the present version would be most likely to keep the sharp edges and irregular cadence of the original.” But there was also “the repetition of useless ornamental adjectives . . . where the Homeric Epithet degenerates into what the French poets call a
remplissage
—an expression to fill up a line. Such phrases have been paraphrased or omitted.” It was style, the cut-line and facet, the tensions that the modern movement in music and painting as well as poetry demanded, that H.D. was searching out of Euripides in 1915.

Now she returns, after Freud, to search out that workable stuff of Euripides’ text, not the manner that made for a new style in poetry, but deeper, back of that, for the level at which manner and style are seen as form and meaning. She makes much then of Hermes’ entrance to give the Prologue: working now beyond the line-edge for depth. “He might bear a lighted torch,” she notes; there is no stage property specified, but “the torch is symbolical as well as practical. This is Delphi, still night, the sun has not yet risen.”

She wants the opening read from a script, almost chanted. “This would give a rhythmic, hypnotic effect and heighten mystery, in the manner of cathedral litany, heard at the far end of a great vault; our vault, here, is the dome of heaven.” And
Ion
we read is a mystery play; its great god—Apollo, the Sun. And the nineteen divisions into which she has articulated the play are not only then practical, where “Each one represents an entrance, an exit, a change in inner mood and external grouping of the characters,” but in her description of the proportioning of scenes, we read suggestions of an initiatory sequence: “two gods who comment on the beginning and the end; a messenger; in this case,
a servant who is also an outside observer, half-way as it were, between the gods and men; a trinity of father, mother and son; the father, in this instance, being a divinity, has a double in the earthly manifestation of the king of Athens; an old man, a stock figure, and the Pythian priestess who, in the hands of this fifth-century ‘modern’ genius, is freed from all taint of necromancy and seems almost to predict a type made famous by Sienna and Assisi,” then: “The choros in a Greek play is, in a sense, a manifestation of its inner mood, expression, as it were, of group-consciousness; subconscious or superconscious comment on the whole.” Here the formal elements of the play, even the numbers, the twos, the threes, and the many of the chorus, have been extended into meaning.

•

“The word
ION
has a double meaning,” we noted. We were thinking then of the opening of levels of meaning; but here, tracing the development from the first and second series of analytic sessions to the narrative poems written in series, we note too that to have a double meaning is to open up a new sense not only of possible depth in the work but of the work’s possible existence in depth.
ION
extends in two directions or opens up counterpoints in the composition of the whole. Order (“proportion” H.D. calls it) and significance appear as properties of the work itself, not only as acknowledged content, but, just in that, as the feeling for form. Where the Pythian priestess “predicts” St. Catherine or St. Francis, form also is not self-contained but predicts and inherits, is process.

•

The two gods are two points, but also two directives. There is “beginning and end”; there is “half-way as it were.” Geometrical figures begin to appear, for the sense of the when-where map of the diagram is operating—a trinity of counterparts, father above and below, mother and priestess, son who is also our source. Personae have roles in a drama that is a graph: fate = form. Hadn’t Aristotle come close to our sense here? The
mythos
he saw as the plot. To draw, draw out, figure out. To plot the movements and positions of the stars that are points in time.

•

In the beginning H.D. had been an initiate in Poetry, taking Euripides as her Master, as later she was to take Freud. She had found out the imagist manner that was to be her own in translating—“to keep the sharp edges and irregular cadence.” But—there was also in Euripides, disagreeable to the modernist taste, “the repetition of useless ornamental adjectives.” There was
remplissage
—fillings in to make up the measures of the line set by convention. The new temper of the 1920s strove to prune away and to attack ornament,
remplissage,
or sentiment, association, toward a clean, energetic and ascetic beauty. We see it in the austerities of Juan Gris or Brancusi. William Carlos Williams could call it in H.D. “the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style”; but he himself, at the inception of his late period, still speaks in
The Wedge
of a “machine made of words.” “When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem,” he writes in 1944: “I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.”

•

It was Freud’s role in H.D.’s second initiation to bring her from the formative prohibitions that had given rise to the modern style, from the stage which Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” represents, into a work which involved exactly those prohibited areas—repetition,
remplissage,
or sentiment. Associations must here not be cut away, dismissed, paraphrased or omitted, but dealt with, searched out until they yielded under new orders their meanings. Where the modern artist had sought a clean, vital, energetic, ascetic form—repression and compression—Freud sought the profound, delving in unclean thoughts, depressions, neuroses, voluptuous dreams. The Freudian permission or command saw form as a swarming ground.

•

Command, suggestion or permission—Freud helped H.D. to come in her art from a compressed style into an open exploratory form; from the cut-edges of
Sea Garden
to the woven tissue of The War Trilogy. The diagram comes in then, the map, for Freud led the consciousness into territories the mind had forbidden itself. One of the determinants of an art, of our existence as artists, is where the permission is given.
It was not only sexual and erotic knowledge that had been prohibited. For sentiment, association, like repetition and ornament, were distasteful—fearful then, in Freudian terms—to the mind of the twenties. “The impact of a language,” H.D. writes “as well as the impact of an impression may become ‘correct,’ become ‘stylized,’ lose its living qualities.” It was, in this sense, away from style itself toward the act of writing itself that Freud helped H.D.

IV

The Permission is the Grace. God’s Grace, yes; and likewise, the grace of a line or of a melody, a grace note or note of grace. Where, too, there is an art the poet has by the reader’s grace. The style of the artist, his signature or control, is something different, analogous to his character, the operation of energies in repression, of challenge and attack upon the world about him then. The grace of the artist is analogous to his nature, a given thing, the operation of energies in freedom, of response and self derivation from the world. Style, being wrested from Nature, is mastery; Grace, being given, is the service. The Art here being to keep alive in one process mastery in service, service in mastery.

•

H.D. was brought in the Freudian dispensation into a larger permission in writing. Her earlier “pure” style—even among those literary puritans the Imagists, the most “frozen,” “crystallized,” “controlled”—and the fervent, even fevered, voice of the
Red Roses for Bronze
period are followed now by a writing that opens to influences. The early Imagist style is not gone but has awakened; it is the sea-shell of
The Walls Do Not Fall
iv, “bone, stone, marble” as she had often imagined her verse in Imagist days, but now the image is larger, to include “that flabby, amorphous hermit / within,” who “prompted by hunger” “opens to the tide-flow.” The catalogue of adverse criticisms that begins with the “charms are not, they said, grace” announcement in
The Walls Do Not Fall
ii and takes over in xxxi, xxxii, and xxxviii, has been admitted, let into the creative activity of the poetic consciousness itself as a force toward its own structure.

•

We speak of the poet as “gifted,” as having the gift of song or imagination, and we obscure in this the fact that the willingness of the poet to receive, his acceptance of what is given is initial to the gift. The poet must be a host to Poetry, “open to the tide flow,” even as he withholds that area in which experience becomes peculiarly
his.
The unconscious—like God, in George MacDonald’s
Lilith,
Who gives always, everywhere, unconditionally, forgiveness and love—gives ground for the experience of manhood, as words give everywhere their sound and meaning, the open secret of their magic. It is something in us: “Lilith,” MacDonald names Her; the neurotic, Freud describes it—that cannot and will not receive; but it is as important in the etiology of the artist as that which receives: the will to distinction, toward the self-containment of the work of art. The “I sense my own limit” in
The Walls Do Not Fall
ii is humility and leads to the close of xiv:

we have not crawled so very far

up our individual grass-blade
toward our individual star.

but it is also the pride of the artist in his originality, the line of his signature drawn that can be no other, and leads to H.D.’s claim as in xii: “we are proud and chary / of companionship with you others, / our betters. . . . ”

•

Self acceptance may mean then not self defense but the acceptance of a permission recognized, the acceptance of self beyond self. In the process there is an interchange of gifts, for one gives oneself to the experience, to love, to the poem, in being given love or the poem. So too, the visible world always and everywhere would fill the imagination in that interchange in which the imagination would fill the world. Here one has one’s origin in another. “I will be myself and not another!” Lilith, in George MacDonald’s novel determines. “My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!” Unawakened, she would dwell in her own shadow, refusing sleep
and dreams, for in Dream (and here that Life is a Dream takes on new meaning) an other makes us.

•

The new dispensation is not only a new permission but, in that, a new communion. As early as 1928, in the story “Narthex” H.D. had raised an alternative to the purity of Athens (as in
Ion:
“While one Ionic column stands, stark white and pure on the earth, that name shall live”) the impurity of Byzantine Venice, the complex fascination and involvement of the facade of Saint Mark’s. “Loss of identity is the gift of Venice,” it seems to her then: “ ‘Crystallized and over static identity . . . ’ she stumbled. Words when Greek meets Greek mean nothing. ‘You crystallize identity.’ ” But beyond this loss of identity, of self, there is the giving up of self to “this new protection, this going into all things,” into the narthex of Saint Mark’s, into the “power to crawl, snail self up the surface of high window and creep half-hatched moth in among tenuous rootless and dynamic deep earth feelers,” the hard line, the boundary is lost, and from the depth of the confusion of associations and montage the name, the figure, and the words of Christ begin to appear, as in The War Trilogy, some fifteen years later. He will be central; the “new protection” leading to the “new Master” over Love.