The H.D. Book (62 page)

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She seeks too to find a definition of her self that does not confine, as H.D. was seeking to do in her own life. And Madge trying out her style can miss. In talking with Madame Beaupère, she speaks “in such a funny unnatural affected little way” at one point that Madame Beaupère is put off, and Madge perceives “that her grown-up manner had not quite worked.” But the ideal is rightly a matter of trial for it is part of the searching out of means towards feeling: “she thought and practiced it, in order to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference,” as later, H.D.’s ideal of the Hellenic tries to reach the feeling of hardness and perfection. And does, for what changes in H.D.’s concept is not that the feeling of hardness and perfection ceases to be desired but that other feelings enter in to the picture. “Echo is easy to find,” Madge knows, “and the boy Narcissus,” but “Some of the light-in-lamp people you look for and never find.”

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In Homer we know it is all a story told, as Shakespeare would remind us, even while we are entranced, that this “life” is a stage upon which actors play. This is their nurse voice, when even the greatest poets amuse us as if they were giant maids and we were children. So Cocteau and Bergman would involve us beyond the being moved in the moving pictures in the knowledge thruout that we entertain their entertainment. It is in the mystery of the Muses that we transcend belief and disbelief and follow the story, for the story-teller has as part of his art not only that he leads us into the magic realms but that he can recall us from the excursion. Where there is no story magic, blood will be blood and pain pain so that misled, carried away, the child is hurt and cries out or is afraid. In Flaherty’s film of Samoan life, I fainted during the tattooing ritual, flooded with the apprehension of pain. But in story, in the self-mutilation of Oedipus or the immolation of Christ, the pain is not a thing in itself but belongs to a configuration of action, fulfills and leads on. My mother would lean over in the dark of the movie house to recall me: “it is only a movie, it is just a movie,” she would whisper. Shakespeare’s actors reminding us that it is but a stage seem finally to be saying that our actual life is only a stage from which we may be recalled at death. And Christ in the testimony of St. John at Ephesus told his
beloved disciple that the death upon the cross was but a figure in a dance—“and if you have not entered the dance, you mistake the event.” “Growing up and last year’s shoes that didn’t fit this year—these were things that were part of a dream, not part of reality,” Madge thinks: “Reality was the Erlking and the moonlight on Bett’s room wall.”

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The story-telling voice of
The Hedgehog
enters into the commentary of “Ion” in whose voice the Greek drama appears in the guise of fairy tale. And the address of the opening of
The Walls Do Not Fall
establishes such a voice in which we are aware of the story-teller and his following, the
I
and a
you
in which the individual reader is but one; “from your (and my) old town square,” belongs to the nurse’s art, drawing us into the realm of her telling. The “we” and the “they” are people of the story, as the “I” is at one time a person of the story—“I sense my own limit” is part of what she has to tell—and the poet who may address her audience as well as the “they” of the poem: “but if you do not even understand what words say, / how can you expect to pass judgment / on what words conceal?” Those of the audience who are with her will think of themselves as “we,” those who are not in it and would interrupt will think of themselves as “they.” And the story-teller anticipates their doubts of the story and exhorts them to surrender: “Let us substitute / enchantment for sentiment.” Yes, she continues: “re-dedicate our gifts / to spiritual realism”; but it is all to be “a Tale told of a Jar or jars,” having the truth of what “we are told.” In
Helen in Egypt,
which H.D. saw as her culminating master work, Helen is entirely a creature of story, having her life in all that has been told of her.

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There remains the actual feeling, a Greece that is all H.D.’s. She evokes a realm of pagan things—hinterlands of the psyche—but also inner qualities of places and times, woodlands, sea-coasts, gardens, mountain ledges. In
Hedylus
the stranger-father-critic says to the young poet: “Your idea of the rock-ridge becoming re-divided into separate efflorescence, according to the altitude, implying, as I judge, a spiritual
comparison as well as a mere natural one, is unique, differing in all particulars from anything I have yet met with.”

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It was not pure beauty, or it was something besides pure beauty, that even the poems that gave rise to H.D.’s repute for the rare and pure strove to capture, but beauty or perfection as it was a key somewhere to the nature of event, and finally, as it played its part in the development of the story.

Yes, but this striving was not only to capture a quality in what she had known, but was to challenge experience itself in turn to yield a quality. “Beauty” was from the first, as in the review of Marianne Moore’s work or in the poem “The Tribute” she makes clear, a battle-cry, a cause. The Image too was a demand as well as a response.

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In December 1916, reviewing Fletcher’s
Goblins and Pagodas
in
The Egoist,
she criticizes or challenges “certain current opinions concerning the so-called new poetry,” and against the proposition of the images upon a Greek vase as things of art, self-contained images, she proposes: “How much more than the direct image to him are the images by shadow and light, the flicker of the purple wine, the glint across the yellow, the depth of the crimson and red. . . . When the wine itself within the great jar stands waiting for him.” Then: “He uses the image, direct it is true, but he seems to use it as a means of evoking other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped into a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of color, of sound.”

There is at least the possibility that whatever battle-cry of “Beauty” or idea of the fine-wrought image, there was also another thing a poem was—“a pebble . . . dropped into a quiet pool” to set up reverberations in life so that “Here,” “there,” Greece and its things, old gods and pagan places or the mode of story, enlivened consciousness in living, made it moving with “wave on wave of light, of color, of sound.” Story, like perspective in painting, may be an invention to satisfy a need in
experience for design, to build a house for feeling in time or space. Does story stand within the actual life or the actual life experience stand within the story as the wine itself is stored in the great jar upon whose surfaces the artist has painted his image of the wine and the jar?

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The threads interweaving create a close intricate field of feeling; and we admire the work in which there is no ornament dismissed but where light flows from what we took to be ornament and proves to be essential. In the shuttle flying under the swift sense of the work, the “incident here and there” gathers so many instances from themselves into a moving significance, unfolding or discovering a design, that we see now the art was to set things into movement, was not only the weaving of a work of art but as if each knot that bound the whole into the quiet of a unity were also the pebble that dropped into that quiet as a pool broke up, was knot but also slipping-of-the-knot, to set up an activity thruout in the work of time and space within time and space.

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The sense that “we are at the cross-roads” then has structural as well as historical and psychological meaning in The War Trilogy. Given the name
Imagiste,
H.D. was never satisfied that it meant what she seemed to think it meant, and even after her analysis with Freud, she did not rest with the Freudian image but went on to the
eidola
of
Helen in Egypt.
What was required was that there be the full power of a double meaning, that the real refuse to be defined. In word and image and then in story her sense was always that “the tide is turning.”

October 8, 1964 [
i.e.,
March 20, 1961. Monday.]

I seek now in working upon the later draft of the book not to correct the original but to live again in its form and content, leaving in successive layers record of reformations and digressions as they come to me. The form realized then is not to be a design immediately striking, like those housing developments and landscapings that rise where disorderly areas of a city have been cleared away, but it may be like an old city—Freud’s picture of Rome upon Rome—in which in the earliest remains, in the diary of March 10th to March 15th, March 20th to March 29th, then May 25th of 1961: later additions may appear, anachronistically like the Gaudi restorations in the gothic cathedral of Palma or the Casa Guell’s art-nouveau romanticism in the midst of old buildings, where we are aware of periods of creative activity and conservative inertia. Altering and using old streets, laying out new districts, surrounding old barrios, willing to carry out the project of a Frank Lloyd Wright palace upon the Grand Canal of my Venice, having most in mind to convey the life of the idea of the city, a book of continuations not of conclusions, I build even as I prepare the book for the publisher at last, living once more as I copy, and take over wherever I see a new possibility in the work.

4:20
A.M
. March 20, 1961. Monday.

A first vigil? I had wanted, after Hoffmann’s
The Golden Pot,
to bring forward the likeness between Hoffmann’s method in that Hermetic
romance of telling the story by “vigils” and H.D.’s keeping her appointment with the sequences of her later work. The ancient time-cult of the gods in which the time of the work had its appointed spirit or genius and the modern appointment of the psychoanalytic hour, each day taking up the work anew and continuing, contribute to the method I would follow here having the continuity of a daily return, having the commitment in each session to whatever may arise there, so that the conscious concern may be immediate to impulse and those felt but not yet articulated senses of what is involved that we call intuition, risking the coherence of the whole in the attention at hand. Going in faith that all such attentions are creative of the whole I seek. Open to impulse, so that I must trust peripheries and undercurrents to lead me.

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Wherever I work the directive increases.

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In this method, the break of four days—from March 15th to today—is not a day of rest but a withdrawal from, and then perhaps a withdrawal of, direction.

I
.

THE DREAM
: A manufacturer had commissioned me to do a rug. The rug it turns out is the rug that I began in 1954 for Jess and finished in Mallorca in 1956, having no cartoon previous to the work but in each phase of the work the form being conceived. Writing the date for this chapter or vigil, I had started “4:20
A.M
. March 20, 195–” I had put down the 5 of 1954, but recalled that it was 1961, going on, but knowing that now in the course of the work I would have to account for that 1954.

In the dream scene, going to the factory to see the reproduction of my work I found a mint reproduction. Yes. That was the disturbing thing in the dream: that they had arrived at their copy by some translation from my concept, as if it were mint, so unlike the rug I knew that
I could not account for what had happened. Was it for what had happened to the rug since the 1954? Had there been then an alternate rug, a form from which not towards which I had worked?

The copy was mostly lavender, a color which is minor in the original (here it may have been changed by the painting by Tom Field that I had during the spring and summer of 1956 at Black Mountain), but it had the inconclusive asymmetrical order that I work towards. Yet it had not been built up of intricate color localities—“when/wheres” I’ve called them in this study; “orchestrations” they seemed to me when I was working on “The Venice Poem” in 1948, for I was following impulses towards design that haunted me in listening to the
Danses Concertantes
and the
Symphony in Three Movements
of Stravinsky where it seemed to me that form impended thruout, that every particular of the structure was charged by the numen of the whole. Having no musical literacy, certainly having only an analogical understanding, I derived certainties of my own aesthetic, and then of a poetic, of a theory of forms and of the nature of making itself, as I have derived understandings from sciences I do not “really understand.”

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I had wanted to describe the “orchestration” of H.D.’s work, the intricate resonances of particulars that contribute to the symphonic whole.

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The manufacturer had, anyway, “lied” about the model. And the rug that must stand for the original work, that must do to represent what I had done, when I tried to find grounds for acceptance, bewildered. They had “missed” thruout. Maybe they had evaded.

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“You will want to take credit,” the official of the company said. Representative? There were two officials, anyway: a foreman who was an efficient woman explaining to me as I stood, undone as I was by what they had done, that the rug still needed cutting, was first. Here it seemed to me she meant they had taken some aspect of my total concept as if it were only a texture and had used it for long runners of
weaving that were trimmed to fit the original. There had been, hadn’t there? I remembered in my dream, or now writing, remember, such complexly textured rag-rugs in halls long ago at home. She explained too that there had been some of my colors they hadn’t been able to get.

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I could not visualize in these terms what their reproduction would be like.

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The other official, the business manager, was discussing with me my agreement with the company to accept the reproduction. Yes, that was unavoidable. There was no way, I felt, to account for my disagreement which was actually the disagreement between the image (my rug) and the copy. But the manager was discussing our terms. I would want to take credit, he was saying. “Oh yes,” I replied, “as I always do on books and records.” But even as I said it I was puzzled or uneasy about what I assumed when I said “records” and was substantiating the claim in my mind with credit I did not mean as true. I wanted to be paid, I said, as I always do want, on the basis of royalties. “That way,” I said, “if the work is disliked or liked, I have not been underpaid or overpaid.”