The H.D. Book (58 page)

The exaltation of H.D.’s early art and her feeling for the perfect, her “real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation” in that letter to Williams, was not integral in itself, but reactive, a front held against the tides of the time, the agoraphobia of a temper that strives to preserve its fine edge in a mêlée, but the temper itself an element of that mêlée. She was not “Greek” but ultimately, as Sapir saw, American. Her intensity was the intensity of her feeling of the war-time society and its claims not only upon her but within her. She was at war with war.

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“Counter-cutting winds strike against me,” Williams had sung in “March”: “refreshing their fury!”

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In every area the process of mixing, of adultery, breaking down the inner reserve and private claim of the individual, toward public uses, goes on. Look at the process again, and it leads to a higher integration. Beyond the terms of the private and public, in the great terms of Self and Mankind, there is the vision of a larger and freer cooperation. The reality of both views remains.

For the modern artist the mixing of classes, the mixing of races and cultures, the mixing of gods, the mixing of economies and industries, has provided an open material, but it has also demanded almost cultish gestures for the artist’s purposes to survive. “We,” “They”—the intensity of opposition grows as we all but despair of any equilibrium to be worked out in the mass. Something public-minded resists as overly sensitive, histrionic, even hysterical, the private and unpopular tone of H.D.’s review of Marianne Moore in
The Egoist.
Doesn’t she lack a sense of proportion, in the midst of a World War with its very real battles, to speak of “a battle against squalor and commercialism.” The claim of the mass of men, projected by the manufacturers, the politicians,
and the military caste, who work in terms of that mass, would seem to have ultimate reality, before which all other terms of individual human reality are declared unrealistic—pretentious then, defensive, or vainly idealistic. H.D.’s “We are all fighting the same battle,” can ring with a valor that the very profit and wage-centered world it faces has persuaded us to scorn or to be ashamed of in ourselves, for it has been rung false in the familiar atmosphere of public rhetoric and private contempt, of mean men protesting noble virtues. When H.D. continues: “we must strengthen each other in this one absolute bond, our devotion to the beautiful English language,” her resolve sounds high, even isolated and shrill, pathetic then, above the uses of practical speech. Pound and Williams were quick to hear in such declarations tones of a poetic earnestness that seemed unmanly or female, before which they bridle, protesting their not being taken in by such sensitivities. “Alexandrine Greek bunk,” Pound calls it in a letter to Williams: “to conform to the ideas of that refined, charming, and utterly narrow minded she-bard ‘H.D.,’ ” as in the same letter he refers to “the spinsterly aversion” of Marianne Moore’s “I will not touch or have to do with things which I detest” and to the “perfumed shit” of Amy Lowell’s sensitivities. The male poets are most concerned to disown refinement, fastidiousness, sensitivity—whatever has been identified as poetic and effeminate among men of sound business sense.

But this high or beautiful English language to which H.D. refers is not the language of the genteel or elite or of grammarians and the literary academy; it is the noble vernacular of Dante’s
De Vulgari Eloquentia,
“which we acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses.” It is the language we found beautiful when first we began to distinguish words. Nobler, Dante argued, “as being natural to us” than the secondary speech, “which the Romans called grammar.” And these our nurses, in turn, were not, it should be clear in Dante, the hired help of a middle-class well-to-do household, but they were women having a vernacular nobility, the nobility of man’s common nature. True vulgar eloquence was speaking one’s own language, beyond class, beyond nationality, without affect, as if it were the common language of all men in their humanity.

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In Williams and in Pound, often self-conscious of poetic voice as if it were not natural but were a putting on of airs, another kind of vulgarity appears, not a dialect of the language of humanity but, in reaction to the felt accusation of having high-flown speech, a jargon of the “low.” “It filled a gap I did not know how better to fill at the time,” Williams said in 1920. A gap in language, but it was also a gap in humanity itself, a gap in consciousness. In
Paterson,
almost three decades after the poem “March” in which H.D. had found that tendency which she felt was not Williams’s “very self,” Williams faces that gap still, now as a divorce between man and woman, now as a divorce in the language—a divorce:

Some say
it is the decay of the middle class
making an impossible moat between the high
and the low where
the life once flourished .

In a letter to Robert Lowell in 1952, he sees the division of high and low in the artistic consciousness itself, speaking of Eliot and Pound: “They both belonged to an alien world, a world perhaps more elevated than mine, more removed from my rigors. I have always felt as if I were sweating it out somewhere low, among the reptiles, hidden in the underbrush, hearing the monkeys overhead. Their defeats were my defeats. . . . ”

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This conflict of high and low is an inner conflict, felt as a gap, or felt as a war of ideas in the poet’s mind; as in “Narthex,” the earlier one-dimensional Ionic purity contests for place with the post-war modern complicity. But as early as 1917, Pound had warned against the possibility of such a muddle in H.D.’s work: “(under I suppose the flow-contamination of Amy and Fletcher),” he advised the editor of
The Little Review,
“she has . . . let loose dilutions and repetitions, so that she has spoiled the ‘few but perfect’ position which she might have held on to.” Was he thinking of the poem “The Tribute,” which had appeared in November 1916 in
The Egoist,
with its litany, repeating the beginning line of stanza after stanza: “Squalor spreads its hideous length,”
“Squalor blights and makes hideous / our lives,” “Squalor spreads its hideous length” and at the close the choruses of “Could beauty be done to death,” “Could beauty be caught and hurt?” But as early as July of 1914, along with the first Imagist poems, the poem “Cities” had been published, anticipating the type of “The Tribute.” What Pound disliked may have been the beginnings of H.D.’s thought in poetry, for in “Cities” and in “The Tribute,” beyond the pure sensation of a poem like “Oread,” the poem moves toward a concept of City, artist, war. “H.D. is all right,” Pound writes to Margaret Anderson in an earlier letter in 1917: “but shouldn’t write criticism.”

In that literary eminence she might have held, had she kept to poems of the type approved by Pound and still favored by anthologies at large—“Oread,” “The Pool,” or “Hermes of the Ways”—perfection had arisen along lines of resistance to the surrounding elements, as later in “Narthex” she was to describe the would-be single image of a lily rising in the midst of an agonized flood of images and impressions, where “Her own brain now was static, cloud of outward circumstance had so contrived it. Her own mind rising, a lily on tall stem out of hysteria,” and there is the felt divorce between contending aspects of experience finally: “Dream is the reaching out feelers like a snail’s horns. Reality is the shell or the thing of crystal boxes. We must have the two together.”

In her “few but perfect” type of poem, image had been worn against image, as lines were perfected against lines, toward only what resisted erosion, what met the test and survived. The harsh flower of “Sea Rose,” “sparse of leaf,” surviving surf and wind-driven sand, that is then “more precious / than a wet rose / single on a stem” is at once the image of the emotion that survives after passionate confusion and of the poem itself, sparse of line. Brought toward the exceptional luster of the ecstatic moment, in the rubble of tumbling stones, the poem is refined; but this perfect moment is an agony in consciousness, held in contest with the rest of the field of experience from which it has been won.

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Racing, as in “Pursuit,” “Huntress,” or unable to move, as in “Mid-Day,” “Sheltered Garden,” “Heat”; the swirling tides of “The Shrine” or the other sea “unmoving, quiet” of “The Gift”—these alternates or
opposites are stated over and over again in the early poems, repetitions but also insistences of a note demanding melodic satisfaction. “I endure from moment to moment—” she says in “The Gift”:

days pass all alike,
tortured, intense.

Perhaps, as Pound argued, to have isolated the ecstatic and kept its almost hallucinatory intensity would have insured her poetic repute, but poems do not rise from nor toward poetic repute. The stillness in her poetry is charged with the energy of an impending movement, the exactness of tone does not exist out of place but in relation to an expected rime. Not only the philosophers but the poets too faced a total world of which their art must take account, and the alternates or opposites, the kinds of poems of a poet, represent approaches to totality that require a pluralistic statement if it not be circumscribed. If dilution and repetition appear as routes toward the felt totality, the poet will dilute and repeat, or, like Williams, work in the hey-ding-ding touch, “derivative,” to give content to the gap in composition. It’s just here, in what is most unsatisfactory, that the urgency of life to be satisfied, to find melody and rhyme is strongest. The perfection, the shell or crystal, is incidental, a product of the life that springs from the unsatisfied imperfection, the poet’s necessity to struggle with language driven by wish, “Dream . . . the reaching out feelers like a snail’s horns” H.D. calls it in “Narthex,” hunger or the gap in feeling that all imagination and invention strives to transform into the totality of feeling required. The poet strives to know the terms of his defeat, not to escape from them or to be cured of them—but to work with them. Here H.D. was a student or disciple not a patient of Freud’s. In the rhapsodic passages of The War Trilogy, she is exalted, as if in love, in the very split in feeling that had been traumatic before, in “this duality, this double nostalgia,” “the insatiable longing” and the pattern of alternating moods.

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There is a decisive change but there is also a continuity, for it is a change in patterning not in content, between the early work with its alternates
of static image and turbulent feeling, and the later work, where the duality has been brought into the continuity of a single poem. Analysis has shown no image to be static; this was the contribution of Freud that any image was the key to meanings in associational depth, back of what was seen, and again the link to meanings in an historical drama, a hieroglyph in a sentence unfolding. So, in The War Trilogy figure discloses figure: “ruin opens,” “the shrine lies open to the sky,” “the fallen roof / leaves the sealed room / open to the air”—these images at the beginning of
The Walls Do Not Fall
are initial proposals of a world in which even sealed moments are not perfect in themselves only but imperfect to give way into all areas of life, where even desolation and despair are not closings of feeling but doors to something beyond, where defeat prepares. The earlier image of the gem as sculpture, the stone of the poet’s emotion shaped in resistance under the attack of his passion—Pound’s “only emotion endures” proposition—that gave rise to the questions of “Pygmalion” in 1917:

Shall I let myself be caught
in my own light?
shall I let myself be broken
in my own heat?
or shall I cleft the rock as of old
and break my own fire
with its surface?

the questions that relate to H.D.’s transition in concept from Imagism to an art related to the Vorticism of Gaudier-Brzeska: working in language as if in stone, striking sparks of feeling in the hardness of words, is replaced in the work of
Ion
and after by the concept of the poem as being analogous to weaving, those sparks or intense images, the ecstatic moments, now knots in the fabric of experience and medium in one. The work of art no longer stands apart, clear in being separated from its material, but comes into existence in a process of involvement, information—revealed in the depths of the material.

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The image of the living animal “reaching out feelers like a snail’s horns”—the life-dream—and of the shell it makes reappears in
Ion
where the way “in which shell-fish may work outward to patterns of exquisite variety and unity,” is compared to Ionic art in which: “The conscious mind of man had achieved kinship with unconscious forces of most subtle definition.” Now she sees the forms of high art “no matter how dissimilar, had yet one fundamental inner force that framed them, projected them . . . as a certain genus of deep-sea fish may project its shell.” There is the hint (“The human mind dehumanized itself,” she says) that the imperative to form belongs to the life force, beyond humanity as it is beyond personality—it will operate at the cost of humanity or personality, an instinct for mathematical ratios and equations, for sequences and continuities of disequilibrium so that the requirements of number—the gestalt—supersede the psychological forces. Here, she seems to anticipate the primacy Charles Olson will give in his concept of a
projective verse
to the cosmic imperative of form over the psychic need for fulfillment or story. But in The War Trilogy, the cosmos itself is humanized, as returning to the concept of planetary regents, she personalizes the immediate solar system; and returning to the concept of the Christos as the incarnation of Helios, most real or only real in His manhood, she gives primacy to the quest of the Psyche, to “wish fulfillment” over the beauty or perfection of the mathematical imperative. In
Helen in Egypt
finally the entire universe of the poem will be the psychic reality, that realm of the primacy of fear and wish that the theosophists call the Astral World.

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Beginning with The War Trilogy, H.D.’s works in poetry project part, I think, of a pluralistic concept of the total world, where statement supplements—not contradicts or corrects—statement. And if we take into this composite account “thus composed of the realities plus the fancies and illusions,” to recall William James’s requirement for our sense of the total world, the suggestion of an inner fundamental force toward perfection from her notes to
Ion,
we have a brief statement of the physical reality of our existence, with its primary imperative toward the perfection of order and inertia; then in The War Trilogy the statement
of individuation as a biological reality, where the forces of hunger and creation of identity are primary. The shell as work of art is seen now not as a battle of the artist against the squalor about him to create beauty, but as part of the process of the artist deriving his inner life from the outside world. At once a wall that does not fall: