The H.D. Book (70 page)

you are the younger brother, the latter-born,

your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over.

•

In
The Flowering of the Rod
Kaspar, who knows the story the stars tell, what is “now unalterably part of the picture,” knows:

the first actually to witness His life-after-death,
was an unbalanced, neurotic woman,

The myrrh which he carries in the jar is also the genius and the gospel or lore of the poem itself. In
The Walls Do Not Fall
words, we were told, were little boxes that hid or kept meaning; as stars were “little jars of that indisputable / and absolute Healer, Apothecary . . . to hold further / unguent, myrrh.” So, now:

though the jars were sealed,
the fragrance got out somehow,

and the rumour was bruited about,

“fragrance” and “rumor” are identified. Kaspar, the Mage, bringing his gifts in recognition of the birth of the Christ Child brings (fragrance/rumor) the gospel of the Christ-Life as a present in the beginning:

or another—Kaspar could not remember;

but Kaspar thought, there were always two jars,
the two were always together,

why didn’t I bring both?
or should I have chosen the other?

•

The two myrrhs or two genii refer on one level to the two traditions of Christ—the Christ of the exoteric Church and the Christ of the esoteric Mysteries. They may refer too to the Law of the Father-God and to the Realm of the Mothers; for Kaspar brings his essence from the tradition of patriarchal Zoroastrian shepherd kings, and the essence which Mary Magdalene comes for, related to “those alabaster boxes / of the Princesses of the Hyksos Kings,” is the odor of her own, “incense-flower of the incense-tree,” and of the sea. The two not at war but mixed; once separated, but now reunited in the birth of the Christ-Child.

So Proclus in his Commentaries upon Plato’s myth of Atlantis tells us that it is a myth of two orders in the ancient world: “beginning from the Gods, of Olympian and Titanic divinities” or

beginning from the intellect, of permanency and motion, or sameness and difference; or from souls, of the rational and irrational; or from bodies, of heaven and generation; or in whatever other way you may divide essences, according to all divisions, all the genus of those within the pillars of Hercules will be analogous to the better, but of those without to the less excellent co-ordination of things.

“It was always maintained / that one jar was better than the other,” Kaspar remembers in the poem:

but he grumbled and shook his head,

no one can tell which is which,
now your great-grandfather is dead.

For H.D. heralds the mingling of the essences, the confusion of the traditions, in the first century, echoing the neo-Platonic confusions of the fifth century, in the twentieth century. “Hence,” Proclus concludes:

whether you are willing Orphically to arrange the Olympian and Titanic genera in opposition to each other, and to celebrate the former as subduing the latter; or Pythagorically, to perceive the two co-ordinations proceeding from on high, as far as to the last of things, and the better adorning the subordinate rank; or Platonically, to survey much of infinity and much of bound in the universe, as we learn in the Philebus, and the whole of infinity in conjunction with the measures of bound, producing generation, which extends through all mundane natures,—from all these, you may assume one thing, that the whole composition of the world is co-harmonized from this contrariety.

•

Kaspar, like Simon, was disturbed by the thought of a woman, but he cannot exclude her. In the mingling of the myrrhs in one jar there was the mingling of sexes: the Christ uniting not only the contrary orders of history and prehistory, Athens and Atlantis, but as the new Adam uniting again the Eve and Adam. Nowhere does H.D. fuse male and female in one body, except in the implied fusion here in the identity of the Child. Not only Simon, who abhors the female, but Kaspar, who is troubled by her but moved to ecstasy in her presence, remains male; as Mary Magdalene remains ultimately female. Yet “though the jars were sealed, / the fragrance got out somehow / and the rumour was bruited about”—in the most real the two were always at one. H.D. would have found such a tradition in the neo-Platonists, or in the Kabbalistic tradition of the
Adama Kadmon;
she must have come upon it in the period of her psychoanalytic conversion, for the psychic bi-sexuality of man is an
axiom of Freud’s. There was also, more immediate to our study here, the fact that a woman’s genius had come into the genius of the Poet thru her own operations as poet in this work.

•

In
Tribute to Freud,
writing of the signet or “sign-manual—the royal signature, usually only the initials of the sovereign’s name,” she suddenly sees that her writing signet, her H.D., has something “remotely suggesting sovereignty or the royal manner.” The initials H.D. present the suggestion of a hidden identity, something more poetic certainly than the immediate plainness of Hilda Doolittle. But were those initials in the beginning not only this but also to suggest the Poet, without suggesting a woman, to help the reader to overlook or confuse the gender of the writer?

•

“Averse to personal publicity,” Charlotte Bronte wrote in her 1850 preface to Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights,
“we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine. We had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.”

•

Aroused to battle by the claims of
genius
wherever they are made—for
genius
is itself of the old titanic order—male guardians of the literary Olympus have been the more aroused when the titaness appears, with the sense that

it was unseemly that a woman
appear disordered, dishevelled;

it was unseemly that a woman
appear at all.

for the dominance of man’s rules must be maintained over woman’s realm. Woman, identified with the whole Atlantean sequence of disorder,
irrationality, change—Dame Mutabilitie herself—may be permitted to operate in her place, if it is clear that hers is the inferior claim. Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Dame Edith Sitwell, H.D., Mary Butts, coactive in the avant-garde of the nineteen-twenties with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams, form in the conventional estimate a second rank, and where their work has exceeded that allotment their presumption has been bitterly attacked and derided. Marianne Moore who established early and definitely the propriety of her claims has escaped the worst censure. Laura Riding who argued the superiority of her reasons in Poetry over the false and distorted reasons of other poets was ridden out of town. With Dame Edith Sitwell her presumption of noble class as well as of sibylline genius and gender added to the fury of status-conscious verse-writing and reviewing professors of English Literature. Even Virginia Woolf, wrapped round as she was by the genteel literary guarantee of the Bloomsbury group and writing as a sensitive and sensible adherent of their high civilization, smarted under the goads that would keep woman in her place.

•

But there is, too, a deeper suspicion, not only that men are prejudiced to keep their dominance in the society but that men find genius itself unwomanly, unmanly. Women too have had that fear and then envy or hostility towards genius in men. Strindberg, Joyce, Lawrence, Williams have given expression of their creative isolation even in marriage, and defend or apologize for the shadowy other daemonic male being.

In sexual love between man and man, where there is creative genius, where the lovers have their daemons, there may be a counterpart to the Isis between the man and the woman in Lawrence’s
The Man Who Died
or to the new Master over Love in H.D.’s Trilogy—a God, governor of the creative powers in whom they love. Thus, Socrates, who has his daemon, argues that love is most true when addressed in the name of the First Beloved, the One because of Whom we love. He, like Christ, is a Sun, or is the Love the Sun has for us. Apollo Musagêtes, Leader of the Muses, of the female powers, and Director of the Genii, of the male powers. Whitman called him “the President of Regulation.”

So too, in sexual love between man and woman Christian magic teaches not falling in love but rising in love to a mutual love in God, where Christ is the First Beloved. To exorcize the daemonic or to compose the daemonic.

•

The narrative of The War Trilogy is the story of the restitution, of the daemonic and of woman, cursed by the Fathers, into the sight of God or among the Goods. It is the story told in George MacDonald’s
Lilith
in the nineteenth century. The bringing up into the fullness of the Self of the most disturbing contents, of what the persona most fears.

As poets in the romantic tradition have identified with Lucifer (Milton unconsciously, Blake and Hugo, then, consciously) and sought the wedding of heaven and hell, the poetess H.D. identifies with a Mary Magdalen who brings up all outcast spirit into the new dispensation.

It is the prostitute; it is
venery, venereous, venerate, venerator
in the star Venus, the same light that shines so brilliantly just after the sun has gone down or just before the sun rises, Hesperus at sundown or Phosphorus at dawn, Lucifer-Venus. It is the card of our Tarot reading then—
L’Étoile.
It is Mary of Magdala, where:

through my will and my power,
Mary shall be myrrh;

•

But this will and this power, this Mary and this myrrh is the genius of the poem, the genius of the jar.

It is not only Mary in the presence of the Wise Man, seeing as he does “it was unseemly that a woman / appear at all
. . .
,” it is the poetic or daemonic creativity of the woman. “Turned towards the world,” Jung writes in
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,
“the anima is fickle, capricious, moody, uncontrolled, and emotional, sometimes gifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful, bitchy, double-faced, and mystical.”

•

“
La femme est
naturelle,
c’est-à-dire abominable
,” Baudelaire confesses. “
Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pederaste.
” “
J’ai toujours été étonné qu’on laissât les femmes entrer dans les eglises.
”

•

It is not only the lady, in whom this gospel says were seven daemons forgiven—Isis, Astarte, Cyprus—Lilith, one born before Lilith, and Eve—and back of them Gemeter or Demeter. Earth-mother and Venus. . . . It is not only this
woman
kissing the feet of Him Whom they call Master, but it is the woman H.D. too, this
poetess,
with her presumption—the poem itself—it is, was, will be to some unseemly that she be there at all.

•

We may see then behind or over or included in the scene between the Wise Man Kaspar and the Fallen Woman Mary another scene. Let us not imagine now a critic—the distaste of the fundamentally unsympathetic and then antagonistic Fitts or Jarrell must not stand for the caution, the discretion, that Kaspar with his tradition and profound gender carries. It must be the poet Williams or the poet Pound or the poet Baudelaire then that confronts the poetess:

he drew aside his robe in a noble manner
but the un-maidenly woman did not take the hint;

she had seen nobility herself at first hand;
nothing impressed her, it was easy to see;

she simply didn’t care whether he acclaimed
or snubbed her—or worse; what are insults?

•

“
De la nécessité de battre les femmes,
” Baudelaire writes. He is not writing here his heart stripped bare. He is not writing that fiery book that Poe had proposed. “No man dares write it,” Poe had said, “true to its title.”

But Baudelaire’s own daemon projects the persona of the dandy; he strives for the telling
mot,
the keys of a Baudelairean attitude. He is a
litterateur.
It is a disease of the French literary world that infects Cocteau in his phantasy and Artaud in his madness alike. They hear or sound the
currency of their own phrases ringing upon a stage and let their masks speak what they will.

But: “
Quelles conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?
” he asks.

•

As Simon in H.D.’s story of the hidden essence, questioning the Master’s allowing her to kiss His feet, may question the gift she brings:

this man if he were a prophet, would have known
who and what manner of woman this is.

II
.

In “Murex” the poetess Raymonde Ransome has a pen-name Ray Bart. We find ourselves in the story in the mixing ground of two persons, the woman and the poet, of what we are in the actual real and what we are in the real of the imagination. There is the atmosphere of London itself: “an ineffable quality of merging so that one never knew the barrier of day or night” that relates to a state of suspension in the story, the “cocoon-blur of not-thinking that was her fixed and static formula for London.”

We are at the inception of a poem. In the stream-of-consciousness two things impend. For Raymonde Ransome there is a recall, the bringing up of an old betrayal with associations involving the loss of a child in birth and with the loss of a lover. For Ray Bart, there is a poem impending, and these losses now are gains in intensity.

•

“Raymonde Ransome had wanted to drift and dream through the obliterating afternoon. Nothing to do but listen, nothing in London to do but wait. Listen to what? Wait for what?”

•

It was, in 1926, a prose prepared to find its way along lines of association. The process we have now in the verb “to dig” had begun. Opening distances back of things, as Proust had, or digging to uncover layers
of meaning as Jane Harrison had in her
Prolegomena
and in
Themis,
or searching out psychological levels as Freud had, writers sought a new syntax that could provide shifting perspectives in consciousness.