The H.D. Book (57 page)

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In
The Flowering of the Rod,
Mary Magdalene passing from her life as a whore into her new life, even as H.D. had passed from her period of passionate love affairs, the emotionalism of
Red Roses for Bronze,
into a new phase, has seven devils cast out of her by the Master, but these are also brought forward into the new self: “these very devils or
daemons,
/ as Kaspar would have called them, / were now unalterably part of the picture.” Acceptance of the new self means also acceptance of the old, forgiven, redeemed, loved. “
Lilith born before Eve / and one born before Lilith, / and Eve; we three are forgiven
. . . . ” The first persona of H.D., the stark white and pure, cold, Ionic perfectionist
daemon
is there then too.

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She had gone whoring after strange gods, among whom the new god Christ appears, or was He Helios? In The War Trilogy His identity multiplies: Ra, Osiris, Amen, Christos, the authentic Jew stepped out from Velasquez. Her identity multiplies: Isis, Aset, Astarte are among the seven daemons who are now unalterably part of the picture of Mara, Mary, Mary Magdalene. Not only the old gods return in this return of the repressed, but the old themes—Spring, Love, Trees, Winds—threaten to come back without the sophistication that modern taste had demanded. “
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?
” “The words return with singular freshness and poignancy,” H.D. writes in
Tribute to Freud,
as Goethe’s song, sung long ago in childhood, comes forward to be part of the picture. Greek aesthetic—white marble—changes now to Greek mystery cult, as Renaissance Hermeticism and the Romantic Revival enter in. The very tradition in which H.D. conceives her work becomes complicated. In
Helen in Egypt,
she will move in a Greek world that is of shadow and astral light, not only the Helen in Egypt, but also the phantom Helen Euripides tells us walked the walls of Troy but also the Helena of Goethe’s “Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria” in
Faust,
who is the lure of Beauty the poet follows. “It is for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things,” Carlyle writes of the Poet in the spirit of Goethe; the very fact of things being the total world of which the philosophers must take account, the
open secret
Goethe had called it: “He is a
Vates,
first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the ‘open secret,’ are one.”

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“What you gave me, was not praise,” Freud wrote to H.D.: “was affection and I need not be ashamed of my satisfaction.”

“Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love.” To admit affection, sentiment and association, and to need not be ashamed would strike at the repression of sincerity in the modern as his admission of the very fact of sexuality hit at the repressions of the nineteenth century.

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Going back to the poem “March” of William Carlos Williams, I find its voice is everywhere sincere not sophisticated. He admits winter, spring, bitterness of wind, as immediate to the very fact of things, without the self-consciousness that will come later. I cannot find what H.D. in that letter so long ago had accused. What she accused, the lack of grace, does flare up in Williams’s answer: “I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please.” The “I” throws up its defiance to hold its own in writing against being taken over by what is not its own, the grace of men’s associations, and the grace of What Is. We sense a mind at war with prohibitions it is making for itself. There was a block in view, an intensification of style that was a necessity for correctness, for modernity. It makes for fits of temper and outrage in both Pound and Williams. The romantic vision was outlawed: “And you do
NOT
get out of such slumps by a Tennyson or a Rilke,” Pound writes in
Kulchur,
or in the London pre-war period of the Imagist movement, in the essay “The Renaissance,” I find, of Goethe: “but outside his lyrics he never comes off his perch. We are tired of men upon perches.” But this is the very perch of the time. Out-of-Bounds signs proliferate. The nineteenth century appeared as a forbidden territory, like the barbarian world outside of Athens, or the savage world outside the Puritan stockade. Giving a figurative account of her turning to Freud, H.D. instinctively uses terms out of Fenimore Cooper: “Say it was a birch-bark canoe. The great forest of the unknown, the supernormal or supernatural, was all around and about us. With the current gathering force, I could at least pull in to the shallows before it was too late, take stock of my very modest possessions of mind and body, and ask the old Hermit who lived on the edge of this vast domain to talk to me, to tell me, if he would, how best to steer my course.” Or now it seems to glide into a passage from one of William Morris’s great romances,
The Wood Beyond The World
or
The Water of the Wondrous Isles
—“those prose romances that became after his death,” Yeats writes in
The Trembling of the Veil,
“so great a joy that they were the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to the end.” The aestheticism of Pound and of H.D. had taken seed in pre-Raphaelite soil, their sense of Beauty haunted by
the slim forms of Burne-Jones and the sylvan lovers of Morris, but the spirit of the modern formed itself in reaction against—“pre-Raphaelite slush disgusting or very nearly so” as Pound was to call it—the erotically enriched, fused, or sentimentalized forms, toward hardness. For the time
The Wood beyond the World
was to be put away with shame.

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“
Per una selva oscura,
” Dante had called it, referring to finding himself in some darkness, lost in a wood. Pound, inheriting Dante from pre-Raphaelite sources, kept that
ben dello intelletto
that he would relate to the crystallizing thought of Plotinus or Erigena, shedding the spirit of romance, and would avoid “the great forest of the unknown, the supernormal or supernatural” that carries H.D. from some memory out of Cooper’s American wilderness into another romantic forest with its Hermit, close upon the marges of Morris or even the forbidden Tennyson. In the modern sensibility romance is divided against itself. In
The Cantos
Pound worries again and again hints of Manichaeism, the good infected by evil. So, too, contemporary studies of the Romance tradition by Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, or Denis de Rougemont are alive to the duality of their material, the ambivalence of love. In our own time, after the Second World War, there appears in the works of Burroughs, Beckett, a black romance, in which the ambivalence has disappeared and hate alone is real.

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“
Tanto è amara, che poco è più morte,
So bitter is it, that scarcely more is death,” Dante says in the opening of
The Inferno;
he is talking not of hell but of the dark wood. Eastertide of the year 1300; Dante was 35. “
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
” he begins.

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H.D. was 47 when she began her analysis with Freud, and the figure read in passing of finding the Hermit in the forest may refer to finding Freud in the increasingly dark woods of the middle years. She will take Freud then as Dante takes Virgil as a guide into the darkness itself. “That fountain which pours abroad so rich a stream of speech” Dante
addresses Virgil, and for H.D. too Freud may have been water-witch, a finder and releaser of speech once more. Something was blocked in her and she sought a new course.

Words can become correct, stylized, she tells us. She had been the perfect stylist—
the
Imagist, May Sinclair had said in the
Egoist
days. The thrust of the soul’s life, of energetic imperfections, was keen against the resistance of her perfectionist style. The writing of H.D. gives way first in the prose of the late 1920s, stemming from May Sinclair perhaps, ultimately then from Henry James, and openly taking up from Joyce—a prose that strives to carry in the stream-of-consciousness mode the burden of a tangling experience.

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We are in the dark thicket itself in the “Murex” section of
Palimpsest,
that grows more confused and lost (
che poco è più morte
) in stories like “Narthex.” It was the time for a call to order, for the Work to begin or all to be lost. The stories are peopled with victims of the modern sophistication—we see them also in the novels and stories of Lawrence and Mary Butts, in the paintings of Marie Laurencin and Kees Van Dongen. Abysses of psychic life, where identity wavers or goes void, open. The mind goes back, back, back, to certain scenes of agony or loss. The present falls into the past tense. In one of her most beautiful later passages, in
The Flowering of the Rod,
H.D. recalls with affirmation this lure of the insistent past event:

for they remember, they remember, as they sway and hover,
what once was—they remember, they remember—

It is the intoxication here of the reiterated yearning. “For theirs is the hunger / for Paradise,” she writes. Where we realize that this Paradise or first Eden survives in its never having yielded satisfaction. A rapture that leaves the poet hungry for rapture.

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“He had brought the past into the present,” H.D. wrote of her teacher or doctor, Freud. The modernity, the up-to-dateness, the sophistication
of the twenties had sought to avoid the consequence of Spirit by living in a time of its own as if there were no current in men’s lives. The Spirit of the Nineteen-Twenties could be defined, given distinction; it would not sweep one up into larger or more complex involvement in human experience.
The Golden Bough, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
and
The Interpretation of Dreams
to the sophisticated reader lead not toward an increased sense of the immanent and numinous in daily life but toward a mythological know-all in which the immanent and numinous was seen-thru. For Yeats or Hardy, fatefulness and the supernatural strengthened the substance of their feeling; at the very threshold of the modern period the fascination of the depths seems to rise to a pitch of intensity. “The Trembling of the Veil” Yeats called his portrait of the nineties: “I found in an old diary a saying from Stéphane Mallarmé that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book, I have chosen
The Trembling of the Veil
for its title.”

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For the next epoch, announced by the works of Darwin early in the century, and then by Frazer, Freud, and James, it is the comparison of all things or the Mixing of the Waters—but this is the thicket. Bushman, shaman of the Lapland wastes, the child at his watercolors, and Michelangelo are brought into one complex concept of Art. In the new Jungian religious psychology, Attis mixes with Christ; Christ mixes with the dream figures of school-teachers in Iowa; the Serpent in the apple tree mixes with Attis and the beneficent Damballah of the Gold Coast.

As peoples mix—toward the Cosmic Man, Wyndham Lewis calls him—so in the new poetry, appearing first it seems in Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
the song of the populated Self, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek enter in to form a cosmopolitan language. Voices, images, times mingle and become transposed in a poetry in which a crowded traffic of ideas moves. It is the obscure medium, the thicket of impressions, of experience suffered without rest. “Ezra is a crowd; a little crowd,” Lewis writes in
Time and Western Man,
attacking this new breakdown of boundaries in time and space in which the individualization of the man is threatened. As in H.D.’s “Murex” or “Narthex” impressions crowd in to
take over the person of the poet; or in “Cities” “packed street after street, / souls live, hideous yet—” the psyche identifying with the cosmopolis finds itself infected by antagonistic elements of the city’s population.

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Williams in that reply of 1920 reveals the internal conflict of the modern sensibility that would use, somehow, anyhow, the terms of the times, even when this public spiritedness hits against the sacred: “
sacred
has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the time,” he writes, and then: “it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.”

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H.D. tells us in
Tribute to Freud:
“I wanted to free myself of repetitive thoughts and experiences—my own and those of many of my contemporaries.” In trying to perfect a form or perfect an experience that has left us dissatisfied we find ourselves coming back to it again and again. In H.D.’s early “Ionic” style, the lines have the polish of their being tried in the ear again and again, the phrases turned as stones are turned in a mill to bring out their high surface, to wear away “imperfection.” The poetry of Williams and of Pound in
The Cantos
attempts to incorporate imperfection even to the accretion of voices antithetical to the poetic voice. “It filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time,” Williams replied to H.D.’s objections to such elements; but these elements were not stop-gap, they had entered the primary matter of our poetry. Or the realm of the poetic consciousness had extended to demand them. The gap too was becoming a primary of the American consciousness. The very elements that Williams, Pound, H.D., and Wallace Stevens find most questionable in each other’s work become in turn generative terms of my generation in poetry. Our admission in consciousness of what must be included in our humanity, in our poetic art, in our history is not only vastly extended and complicated but intensified. The experience of men today is one of overwhelming increase, expansion, and density, of over-population in consciousness as well as in social space, of pollution in culture as well as in industrial production—it is the dramatic force of the creative identity, charged
and overcharged in the abundance of resources, exploitative, glutted, driven on to lay waste or to conserve but to work with the terms of a world mind which has succeeded the nation mind or the city mind or the tribal mind, driven by the command that no individual, no idea, no impression be suffered to die or to be lost.