The H.D. Book (69 page)

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Sometime in the Spring of 1942 I chanced upon a copy of Laura Riding’s
Progress of Stories
and within the year had come so under the spell of her authority or the authority of her spell—she confounded the two—that I could feel her scorn over my poetic fumblings until I ceased, the poet in me abashed as the force of her seeing thru what poets made of poetry became more persuasive. In the characters of Lilith Outcome, Lady Port-Huntlady, Frances Cat, or the Indescribable Witch, Laura Riding projected masks of herself as their creatrix, a woman self-banished into a female critical mentality to stand opposite the male humanity of God in a creation removed into a humorous existence by or from the Creation. In “Their Last Interview,” God is “tired as ever of his uncompletedness,” “his ministry of sympathies,” and “anxious to fade back into humanity”; Miss Lilith Outcome is delighted by his tolerance of her existence. “Then you quite forgive me for being more correct?” she asks. “I haven’t your authoritative touch,” He replies.

Miss Riding would have nothing to do with talk of Muses; it was, she argued, a dishonesty that obscured the right reasons of poetry.
“Poets have attributed the compulsion of poetry to forces outside themselves—” she wrote in the Preface to her
Collected Poems
in 1938, “to divinities, muses, and, finally, even to such humanistic muses as Politics . . . The nineteenth-century lament was: ‘Where is the Bard?’ The twentieth-century version is: ‘Where is the Muse?’ In America: ‘where is the Myth?’ ”

In her argumenting Laura Riding could play the Old Sow of Maenawr Penarrd very well indeed, devouring the world if need be. She liked playing Witch, Mrs. Story, Dame Death, and Poetry Herself, and talking with men who would be poets like an older and naturally superior sister. In Graves’s life between 1927 and the outbreak of the Second World War, she was Queen Tyrant of his thought. “There was thereupon a unity to which you and I pledged our faith,” he writes in the “Dedicatory Epilogue to Laura Riding” from the 1930 edition of
Goodbye to All That:
“How we went together to the land where the dead parade the streets and there met demons and returned with demons still treading behind. And how they drove us up and down the land.” Before the White Goddess was, Laura Riding was.

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There was a way of gaining correctness and authority that Laura Riding sought in putting away uncompletedness, humanity, the ministry of sympathies. She became obsessed with the proper use of poetic faculties, the right reasons for poetry, and sometime after her
Collected Poems
in 1938 writing poetry at all came to seem impossible. She set about making a dictionary to free words from their corrupting associations, still driven up and down the land by demons.

I
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There was the trouble with names and bound up with that the trouble with what a man and a woman was. Beyond the democratic man-voice of Williams or the exalted or ecstatic woman-voice of H.D., there was in one direction the possibility Laura Riding exemplifies—the tyranny of style over the matter of life, the poet’s removal from the
contaminating medium, where eventually the language itself seems an Augean stable of meanings one does not want to mean. Graves too in his grammar of myth strives to restore—“the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute”—the true language of poetry from the corruptions of other men’s uses. “What ails Christianity is that the old Mother-Goddess religious theme and the new Almighty-God theme are fundamentally irreconcilable. Catholicism is not a religion based squarely on a single myth; it is a complex of juridical decisions, often contradictory, made under political pressure in an age-long law suit between Goddess and God.” This fundamentalism, intolerance of contradictions, single-mindedness, sets Laura Riding and Robert Graves at odds with the pluralistic, many-minded poetry of Pound, Williams, or H.D., where there is not one myth alone but a gathering of myths. Here the poet does not see the language as a system but as a community of meanings as deep and as wide as the nature of man has been, and he seeks not rightness but the surrender of style to the feeling of words and associations. To become impure with life, if need be.

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In the “suddenly we saw your name / desecrated” passage of
Tribute to the Angels
xi-xii in an alchemical alembic of the poem a flame burns between the star Venus and venery or “desire is venereous” to sublimate the name until the word “to venerate, / venerator” is restored. But following the word “venereous” the name passes thru the blackness of its contradiction:

while the very root of the word shrieks
like a mandrake when foul witches pull

its stem at midnight,
and rare mandragora itself

is full, they say, of poison,
food for the witches’ den.

The poet may have meant to rescue the name Venus from its desecrations—“knaves and fools / have done you impious wrong,” she protests; but in the actual operation of the poem not only is the name brought
to its sublimation but it has been brought thru its
nigredo.
We are meant to remember the lurid scene of witches’ sex magic in which the root of the word (Venus) appears as a phallic mandrake full of seminal poison—an image from the underworld of the mind, the more potent because we may remember now also from Hesiod’s account of the origin of Aphrodite that she grew from the white foam of the penis of Ouranos which Chronos had cut off and cast in the sea, and that men called her Philomedes “member-loving” “because she sprang from the members.”

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The important thing here is not only the sublimation but the accumulation of experience in that sublimation, the union of opposites, yes, but also the having passed thru the dialectic of these opposites. Here again we are in the tradition of the Gnostic cults that in The War Trilogy has begun to inform H.D.’s mythopoeic thought. Hans Jonas in
The Gnostic Religion
gives us from Irenaeus’s report the teaching of Carpocrates that “the souls in their transmigrations through bodies must pass through every kind of life and every kind of action” and, again: “their souls before departing must have made use of every mode of life and must have left no remainder of any sort still to be performed: lest they must again be sent into another body because there is still something lacking to their freedom.” We might see in a new light the evolution thru the spiral of animal forms that the Psyche claims in
The Walls Do Not Fall
and the passionate yearning for opposites—“the insatiable longing / in winter, for palm-shadow / and sand and burnt sea-drift”—in
The Flowering of the Rod.
This doctrine of salvation as freedom thru the fulfillment of all servitudes under all powers is at least near the concept of The War Trilogy. Jonas points out that the doctrine of Carpocrates is one of the antecedents of mediaeval Satanism and of the Renaissance Faustian myth. My reading of the mandrake-mandragora passage then not as a protest but as a bringing in of the phallic
nigredo
to the poem has in mind H.D.’s Freudian persuasion and also her Gnostic sympathies. We may read in the light (or darkness) of the Carpocration creed the “parasite, I find nourishment: / when you cry in disgust, / a worm on the leaf” in
The Walls Do Not Fall;
the “I am yet unrepentant” is not a
cry of defiance against the Father in a Protestant belief that sin is an act against God, but a resolution of acceptance of experience in a Gnostic belief that all human life is a manifestation of the Father’s creative will. Mary Magdalene in
The Flowering of the Rod
does not repent to put away, but the demons cast out of her, the poem tells us, “were now unalterably part of the picture.” Lilith, the carrion owl-goddess, the Satanic female, is “forgiven,” taken into the new dispensation.

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The imagination raises images of what a man is or what a woman is again and again in order to come into the shape of our actual life; or it seems in order that we come to live in terms of imagined being where we act not in our own best interest but in order to create fate or beauty or drama. The Christos and the Magdalene-Ishtar of The War Trilogy are persons in whom the divine may become real for H.D.; they are begotten in a matrix of the word’s “mediation” where “Dream” and “Vision” are at work. They are begotten in the operation of the poem in which they occur then, thru which they come into our consciousness, and H.D. is very much aware of this. Reality is not only received but also created, a creation in which the poet, the language, the beings who have arisen in man’s dreams and vision as far as we know them, all participate as creators of a higher reality.

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Robert Graves is most consciously concerned in
King Jesus
or in
The White Goddess
with correcting the image of Jesus from its creative flux; the mode of his Muse is argumentative. He protests that his Jesus is not an entity of the imagination—tho for him dream and vision are the sources of authority, and his Jesus is drawn as is H.D.’s from Gnostic and cabbalistic traditions—but an actual entity to be discovered only once righteous reason has rendered him free from imaginative accretions. In Grave’s knotted reason, like most Christians he cannot accept the Christos Who belongs entirely to the realm of desire and creative will but he demands the verification of an historical Jesus.

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The Christos in The War Trilogy and the persona of Mary Magdalene, though they arise from a common ground of lore with Graves’s Jesus and Mary Magdalene, are closer to the story entities of D. H. Lawrence’s
The Man Who Died,
where we are concerned with the imaginary life of Jesus as “Reborn, he was in the other life, the greater day of the human consciousness.” In this new life, the Lawrencian Jesus turns away from his being the Master, putting away “the young, flamy, unphysical exalter,” and living in a nausea, awaiting his physical awakening. In Lawrence’s Madeleine we see not the aloof lady of
The Flowering of the Rod
but another person of H.D.’s, the “I” of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
who cries in
The Man Who Died,
“Master! . . . Oh, we have wept for you! And will you come back to us?” In the curious turn of Lawrence’s vision, the spiritual man—but Lawrence does not say the spiritual man, he says the “unphysical” man—is the old dead self and the physical man, the indwelling in the body’s awareness, is the new. For Madeleine, the woman who worships him as the Messiah, he has pity and revulsion, a nausea of disillusion. In the new life a second figure of the woman appears, the priestess of Isis, who attends not his image but the image of the woman’s powers. In the first part of
The Man Who Died
the crow of the cock may be the Word, the young cock Master of his hens “tipping his head, listening to the challenge of far-off unseen cocks, in the unknown world. Ghost voices, crowing at him mysteriously out of limbo.” When the Lady of Isis presses him to her in the ritual of healing the wounds: “the wailing died out altogether, and there was a stillness, and darkness in his soul, unbroken dark stillness, wholeness.”

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So at last he saw the light of her silk lanthorn swinging, coming intermittent between the trees, yet coming swiftly. She was alone, and near, the light softly swishing on her mantle-hem. And he trembled with fear and with joy, saying to himself: I am almost more afraid of this touch than I was of death. For I am more nakedly exposed to it.

Life, here, is the revelation of Isis thru her priestess: “dimlit, the goddess-statue stood surging forward, a little fearsome, like a great woman-presence
urging.” Not in their selves but in the presences of Isis and Osiris they meet.

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He had been, before, the Messiah, the spirit of the crisis in self, the great Critic or Savior, but now, as he tells Madeleine: “I am glad it is over, and the day of my interference is done.” Beyond lies the other, “the greater day of the human consciousness.” “My public life is over,” he says, “the life of my self-importance.”

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In
The Walls Do Not Fall
the Messiah or the Christ is not the embodiment of a self-importance or Messianic inflation of the ego that Lawrence saw in him. Love, itself, was for D. H. Lawrence mixed with the day of interference. For H.D. He comes as a new Master over Love; but this Christos, like Lawrence’s
Man Who Died,
must be freed from “old thought, old convention,” the nausea of His false image “of pain-worship and death-symbol”; and, like Lawrence’s Christ again, H.D.’s Christ passes thru this stage to be united with the person of Osiris. As, in turn, we can see the Mary Magdala of
The Flowering of the Rod
as the psyche-woman “I” transformed in the magic of the daemons of womanhood—Isis among them—like the Priestess in
The Man Who Died,
belonging to the greater day of the human consciousness.

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The more correctness, the authoritative touch of Laura Riding’s Lilith Outcome, the “mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men” in which Lawrence’s
Man Who Died
had had his share—and the concern with what shall and shall not be included in literature, with arbitration and the exemplary, that has made for our Age of Criticism—this critical superego is embodied in H.D.’s Simon, as the Poet may be embodied in Kaspar.

But Simon the host thought,
we must draw the line somewhere;

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It is not fair, H.D. tells us, to compare Simon with Kaspar, for Simon

was not conditioned to know
that these very devils or
daemons,

as Kaspar would have called them,
were now unalterably part of the picture;

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We are concerned here with the
daemons
or
genii
of the woman, her powers as a creative artist. Simon, like Kaspar, in the poem is one of the dramatis personae—he, too, is unalterably part of the story. In the conception of the whole fabric there is, unalterably part, a contentious demon, an adversary—the “Dev-ill” of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
“tricked up like Jehovah.” We hear his voice in the legion that the poet answers in her passages of apology. He appears in the third person plural
they
of “charms are not, they said, grace” and of “we fight, they say, for breath, / so what good are your scribblings?” Is he then, the Spirit of our New Criticism, the one addressed as “Sword” in
The Walls Do Not Fall?