The H.D. Book (75 page)

•

H.D.’s Romance then may have been—given the angels, the Christ of the mysteries, the doctrine of reality seen in vision and dream—false doctrine. The Roman Catholic and the established Protestant churches had cast out such heresies. By the nineteenth century to deal with such matters was to be a Rosicrucian or Theosophist or worse. “This is incantation,” Fitts concludes in his attack on
Tribute to the Angels,
“but of an irresponsible, even perverse, kind.” The rational and professional orthodoxy that had replaced the church authority concurred in outlawing Romance. So, the arbitrating voice of
The New Yorker
noted that “H.D.’s mysticism, once implicit in her Imagist poems dealing with Greek symbols, is rather thin and shrill in this collection of her later works, what with their Biblical
background and their redemption-by-suffering theme”; and when Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur, two of the younger members of the new poem-writing caste, came to edit Untermeyer’s
Anthology of British and American Poetry,
H.D.’s work was eliminated from the canon.

•

“Thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us”—the concept of a revealed poetry was not in tune with the mode of the great literary reviews of the forties. The new critics were partisans of what they called the rational imagination against whatever cults of experience—or the “irrational” as they put it. Poems were interpreted as products of sensibility and intelligence operating in language, solving problems and surpassing in tests in ambiguity and higher semantics, with special dispensations for exuberance as in Dylan Thomas. Back of it all was a model of the cultivated and urbane professor, of the protestant moderator victorious.

“Inspiration,” “spell,” “rapture”—the constant terms of The War Trilogy—are not accepted virtues in the classroom, where Dream or Vision are disruptive of a student’s attentions. But more than that, these new professors of literature were descendants of those ministers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, holding out against the magic of poetry as once they had held out—by burning or ridicule—against the magic-religion of the witch-cults, the theurgy of Renaissance Hermeticists, or the saint-worship of ecstatic Catholicism. “The fact is,” John Crowe Ransom writes in “Why Critics Don’t Go Mad,” “that Brooks and I were about as alike as two peas from the same pod in respect to our native region, our stock (we were sons of ministers of the same faith, and equally had theology in our blood), the kind of homes we lived in, the kind of small towns. . . . ”

•

The Rational Imagination then meant the respectable, bounded by the fears and proprieties of the townsman’s uses and means. It excluded something else, some irrational imagination; it excluded heathenish ways; it excluded highfalutin’ ideas, putting on airs.

•

“The dimness of the religious light,” Ransom writes in that same essay, “is an anti-Platonic image which seems to me entirely Miltonic. And it is much to my own taste. I am hurt by the glare to which Plato’s philosophers coming out of the human cave are subjected; or for that matter Dante’s Pilgrim coming perilously close in his Heavenly Vision; even in imagination my eyes cannot take it in.”

•

Randall Jarrell’s “more than a little silly” may have been meant to reprove the Platonic theosophy of H.D. Pound, Williams, and H.D. belonged to Pagany; they brought back in their poetry the spirit of Eleusis; against theology and metaphysics, an art that sought routes in experience to the divine. “Say it, no ideas but in things,” Williams wrote in the earliest beginnings of
Paterson.
“Nothing but the blank faces of houses,” he continues, but read further: “—into the body of the light.”

•

The light of Dante or of Plato, the spiritual light whereby men saw in dreams or in thought, but also the matter of the ancient world, the mothering Life or Great Mother, the dark mysteries of the underworld, offended the Protestant ethos.
Seely
which had meant “spiritually blessed,” “pious, holy, good” was shortened to
silly
as the interests of the mercantile and capitalist class took over the direction of society and profitable works won out against grace as a measure of value. All traces of the earlier numinous meaning of
seely-silly
were replaced by the meaning of “lacking in judgment or common sense; foolish, senseless, empty-headed” or “feeble-minded, imbecile.” The small town closed round its marketplace and customs, closed round its mind against silly things, and grew fearful of man’s inner nature as it grew fearful or grew from fear of the nature outside.

•

The New Criticism, from the generation of Ransom or Yvor Winters to the generation of Jarrell or James Dickey, the critical small-town reaction, must strive against the Romantic tradition. The gods of
The
Cantos
or of The War Trilogy are out of order for any monotheistic conviction. The immediate address to Thoth, to Amen-Father, to whatever eternal ones of the dream or of the imagination, must be unconvincing and offensive to the monotheistic cult of Reason as it had been to the monotheistic cult of Jehovah. The hint in H.D.’s persuasion that we might not be bound by the Covenant:

not in the higher air
of Algorab, Regulus or Deneb

shall we cry
for help—or shall we?

or Pound’s broken prayer in
The Pisan Cantos
(LXXIX) “O Lynx keep watch on my fire,” if they were not silly, were irresponsible and might be dangerous, a breaking thru of old ways. The prayers and invocations to angelic powers, as if they had a ground in reality, a validity, comparable to “God,” and this “God”-ness in turn, when it was not a metaphysical proposition but an experienced reality—the Christ actually appearing in the bare meeting-room of the Dream in
The Walls Do Not Fall
or the Lady’s Presence in
Tribute to the Angels
—such things exceed the tolerance of the right-minded critic: it was idolatry or presumption. Beyond Imagism H.D., like Pound, had traveled the dangerous courses of image and the Divine Image, of idea and Eidolon. The schoolmen of literary taste took their stand with the schoolmen of modern Protestantism; the ground of experience was in divorce from God. Hadn’t modern science turned the earth to its uses? Nature was not a Mother.

•

So for Jarrell or Fitts words were not powers but “counters” Fitts called them. “Pretty, expected, shopworn” if they were not smartly turned out. “This search,” H.D. had anticipated their reaction of ennui, “has been done to death before.” And she had answered that she meant not to rehearse
the
search for spiritual realities but to communicate her own particular way:

but my mind (yours)
has its peculiar ego-centric

personal approach

•

Where words thought of as generative or as in
The Walls Do Not Fall
mediative between the reality of Dream and Vision and the reality of the actual, moving to give birth to feeling and thought, language is our Mother-Tongue. We see not only gods but words anew: “their secret is stored / in man’s very speech, / in the trivial or / the real dream
.
” This sense that everything is meaningful if one learn to read must have drawn H.D. to Freud as a teacher. Certainly, her belief that the poet does not give meaning to the word but draws meaning from it, touches meaning or participates in meaning there, must have deepened in the psychoanalytic work. The power of the artist that Freud revered most was his daring to work more than he knew. The unconscious Freud called the source, but it was only in the world of consciousness that the depths of this experience could be read: the dream, the story, the work of art, was a manifest matter. Back of Freud was the tradition of earlier Jewish mysticism that sought in every thing and even in the universe a revelation of Being. Words were shop-worn only to shop-wearing eyes. “I know, I feel,” H.D. writes—it is a condition of method in
The Walls Do Not Fall:

the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies . . .

•

Against the idea of the mothering language in which our psyche is continually reborn, the matrix of meanings, of evolving thought and feeling, the critical reaction raises its semantic boundaries, its language as gesture or equation or statement. “Discipline,” “control,” “responsibility” assume prohibitive definition, striving to exorcize the medium.

•

The very mother tongue was
“l’éternelle Vénus”
for the man tormented by the conscience of Church dogma or of middle-class regulations. The Great Mother was
“une des formes séduisantes du diable.”
The city limits surrounded the marketplace empty of God and filled with a rabble then where men contended to set up standards of trade and values. Outside, there was the countryside where caprice, hysteria, fantasy—a female whorishness—swarmed in Nature in place of Truth.

MARCH
25, 1961. Saturday.

What is the truth of the matter. The gospel truth. For the truth of what actually happened we need a jury, “the recollection of adults,” which Freud in the early essay “Screen Memories” would call upon to test the truth of childhood memories. Fact is one kind of truth of the matter. But the facts of memories, Freud began to suspect, have been reassembled into a fiction of the living. Each psyche strives in its account of the facts to present its peculiar experience; here the facts are not true in themselves but become true as factors of the fiction to which they contribute. When we have assembled from a group of witnesses—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—an account of the facts, only an ardent faith can coordinate the historical evidence in which every recounted fact is gospel truth of an actuality and the spiritual evidence in which every parable and revelation is gospel truth of a dogmatic reality.

•

The life experience of any individual is not simply a matter of its actualities but of its realities. The man who would present himself without the dimensions of dream and fantasy, much less the experience of illusion and error, who would render the true from the false by voiding the fictional and the doubtful, diminishes the human experience. In the extreme state of such an anxiety for what truth can be held with certainty, he has left only the terms defined by logical positivism with
which to communicate; the rest is poetry, the made-up world—the forging of the conscience of his race.

•

In classifying “the various worlds of deliberate fable”—the world of the
Iliad,
of
King Lear,
of
The Pickwick Papers
—with the various worlds of faith—the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the world of Swedenborg’s
visa et audita
—William James proposes that such fictions must each be “a consistent system” within which certain definite relations can be ascertained. “It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe did not
really
marry Rebecca, as Thackeray
falsely
makes him do. The real Ivanhoe world is the one which Scott wrote down for us.
In that world
Ivanhoe does
not
marry Rebecca.” It is curious, given his pluralism, that just here James cannot allow that after the Ivanhoe world of Sir Walter Scott another Ivanhoe world could have reality. The history of Christianity is a history of bloody persecutions and wars waged in the high mania of true against false doctrines of what Jesus was and what the Christ was.

In the classical case, there is a strong tradition in Greek thought that Homer falsified the story of Helen. The poet Stesichorus was blinded (blind like Homer to the truth) after writing his
Helen
and wrote then a recantation of
Palinôdia
of which only a fragment remains: “That tale was never true! Thy foot never stepped on the benched galley, nor crossed to the towers of Troy.” Whereupon, as the legend goes, he recovered his sight. The historian Herodotus tells us that he learned from the priests in Egypt that Helen was given refuge at the court of Proteus in Memphis thruout the war. “Within the enclosure stands a temple, which is called that of Aphrodite the Stranger,” Herodotus testifies: “I conjecture the building to have been erected to Helen, the daughter of Tyndarus.” And at the conclusion of the Egyptian account, Herodotus proceeds to give his own reasons as an historian for finding this tradition convincing. So too, Helen in Euripides’ great drama testifies that she was never at Troy: “Let me tell you the truth / of what has happened to me.” (Following here Richmond Lattimore’s translation that carries into our tongue something of high poetry):

But Hera, angry that she was not given the prize,
made void the love that might have been for Paris and me
and gave him, not me, but in my likeness fashioning
a breathing image out of the sky’s air, bestowed
this on King Priam’s son, who thinks he holds me now
but holds a vanity which is not I.

Euripides does not recant the Homeric account of Troy but imagines in his drama the fiction of an historical Helen and a spiritual Helen, the one in Egypt and the other in Troy, the one the real body and the other an eidolon.

•

Yet James would stress the definite and consistent within each system of reality. “Neptune’s trident, e.g., has no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven; but within the classic Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not.” “The various worlds themselves, however, appear to most men’s minds in no very definitely conceived relation to each other,” he continues, speaking here of the larger sub-universes of reality—the world of sense, the world of science, the world of ideal relations, as well as the world of creative fictions: “and our attention, when it turns to one, is apt to drop the others for the time being out of its account.” But even within the world of fictions, as James’s own trouble with Thackeray’s Ivanhoe exhibits, men find it difficult to entertain contradictory accounts it would seem, much less to imagine new syntheses in which all accounts can be seen as contributing to the truth. Both the historical telling of Jesus and the spiritual account of the Christ in the New Testament present inconsistencies that must be held in one system, and a Robert Graves who is obsessed with reducing the variety of realities to what really happened must labor to establish a true Nazarene Gospel by clearing away what he would persuade us is false in the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.