The H.D. Book (77 page)

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“And Heraclitus rebukes the poet who says, ‘would that strife might perish from among gods and men.’ They understand not how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the harp.”

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The crucifixion was not only a punishment (as those who judged Him saw it), not only a sacrifice, passion, and endurance, in the name of the world’s sin (as the cult of pain-worship saw it), not only a compassion (as
the cult of the Redeemer saw it), but also not a punishment, not a suffering, but, if one saw it as a thing in itself, a drama enacted, it was a play of revelation, or a dance. “To each and all it is given to dance,” the Christ tells John at Ephesus: “He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event.”

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The eighteenth century Christ of the dream in The War Trilogy has its origins in the very figure we see in the work of Bosch and in the Gnostic Christ of St. John at Ephesus, in the heterodox tradition. The critical opposition—where those of orthodox persuasion considered The War Trilogy at all—had its origins too in the contentions raised against such a Christ of the Eternal Present, as if the truth of Grünewald’s Christ must mean the falsity, the “irresponsible even perverse” and “naive” counter of Bosch. For the heretic sects, as often for mystics within the environs of the established Catholic and Protestant churches, the pain, death, and judgment of Christ were a dramatic reality in their own persecution, a ground for vision and meaning. He was a persona not of a contention in history but of an eternal event. The Christ of Bosch is not a victim but an actor in a mystery.

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It is against the very idea of the Eternal that the critics of The War Trilogy strike. Jarrell’s quip that “H.D. is History and misunderstands a later stage of herself so spectacularly that her poem exists primarily as an anachronism,” [and] Fitts’s outrage at the incantation (the music of the dance), knowingly or unknowingly echo the outrage and contempt of Church Fathers for deviate ideas of Christ outside the History of the Church.

Attacking the “Myth” of H.D.’s Christos-Amen, H. H. Watts wrote: “Whatever, then, the sources of the poet’s view, it amounts to this: any man may, in his life, draw the inspired circle with a full sense that it coincides exactly with other circles drawn by past men, since they too were touched by the Vision that came from the Healer”—a view of H.D.’s sense of the past at work within the present that would seem to dismiss without consideration her insistence that each experience “differs from every other / in minute particulars.” But Watts is concerned to dismiss, not to explore, the mythopoeic ground of H.D.’s thought.
Having established to his satisfaction that her method is mistaken, Watts expresses his contempt in his conclusion: “Very moving, if there be such a composite figure as Amen-Christos, such a fixed point, such an as-if. But one does not put a roof to bare ruined walls by means of an intensely felt metaphor or, to be quite fair, an emotional
aperçu
that is apparently the product of serious, extensive reading in comparative religion.” Is there back of this the outrage of a man who in his own belief knows the true Christ, the one that really is, against the false images of the Christ that the human creativity raises? Or is there the outrage of the rational atheist who will have no traffic with things of the imagination at all?

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H.D., Pound, and Lawrence, in their poetic vision saw the art-craft image as the god played false. Where what had been a passion is reduced to a lynching or a martyrdom as the social realist imagination sees the man as a victim, Christ beatnik or Christ under-dog. What goes false here is that these figures made real for the one-way literal mind, cleared of all intensely felt metaphor or as-if, act to block further activity of the imagination. The art-craft junk-shop and the scholastic criticism (biblical or literary) concur in their stand against the possibility of resonance and meaning.

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This is not “our” Christos, H.D. insists. Her generation had a distaste for the warped emotionality of the cultivated sense of sin and suffering in the generation preceding theirs. The very aesthetic of the modern with its clean line and direct image was a reaction against morbidity. “This more or less masochistic and hell-breeding belief is always accompanied,” Pound wrote in “Cavalcanti” of the prejudice against the body, “by bad and niggled sculpture (Angoulême or Bengal).”

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They drew from everywhere it seemed, from “extensive reading in comparative religion,” cooperative with many sources, to create a new composition that would stand against the public culture and its images. As Augustine had brought his City of God to stand in place of the actual
Rome, they brought inner images and evocations of the divine world to stand against the actual megalopolis. Not only H.D., but Lawrence, Pound, Joyce, and, for all his claim for orthodoxy, Eliot, strive for a composite art to embody the individual composite. “A man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody,” Williams proposes in
Paterson
and, for all his claim for the local against the international, Williams’s America is a composite of times and places: “if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.”

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The Christs of public worship then that embody the convictions of Roman Catholic power or of Protestant capitalism, the art-craft gods of the manufacturers and consumers of commodities are false to the inner convictions of the poet. Pound and Joyce avoid Christ entirely, and Lawrence and H.D. must recreate Him. But the Christ of Lawrence and H.D. is of the same order as the Helios or the crystal body of Aphrodite in Pound’s
Cantos,
or the Living God of Lawrence’s last poems. The Divine Beings of our poets are presentations of their most intimate conviction—the creative imagination. Aphrodite and Pomona attend Pound in his Pisan cell as a higher reality. “I assure you that the eyes / of Velasquez’ crucified,” H.D. tells us:

now look straight at you,
and they are amber and they are fire.

I
.

She had “gay blue eyes,” William Carlos Williams tells us, and the Priestess of Isis in Lawrence’s
The Man Who Died
who looks up at him “with her wondering blue eyes” may recall H.D. Not only readings in comparative religion but scenes from actual life enter into the composite to become the matter in which the divine presents itself. H.D., in picturing the confrontation of Mary Magdalene and Kaspar, and
Lawrence, in picturing the confrontation between his Man-Who-Died and the priestess, may each draw from their own confrontation in the Bloomsbury days, creating from each his model a new reality.

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“Has Isis brought thee home to herself?” the woman asks the Christ of Lawrence’s story. “I know not,” he says.

“But the woman was pondering that this was the lost Osiris,” Lawrence continues: “She felt it in the quick of her soul. And her agitation was intense.” It was Orpheus that H.D. in her agitation saw Lawrence as; but Orpheus too was torn into many fragments and scattered.

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It is Christ-Osiris in The War Trilogy whose eyes open, as in Lawrence’s novella the eyes of the Man-Who-Died open “upon the other life, the greater day of the human consciousness.” “To charge with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” Pound had asked of the poem. For Lawrence, as for H.D. and Pound, the revulsion for the Christ as Sin-Bearer is a revulsion for the way He sees life.
The Man Who Died
rises from nausea and disillusion. The Christ-life had been a sickness, of soul and body: “I wanted to be greater than the limits of my hands and feet, so I brought betrayal on myself. And I know I wronged Judas, my poor Judas . . . But Judas and the high priests saved me from my own salvation.” For Lawrence, the revelation was not in the Passion on the Cross but in the Man re-born. The priestess of Isis had been told: “Rare women wait for the re-born man. For the lotus, as you know, will not answer to all the bright heat of the sun. But she curves her dark, hidden head in the depths, and stirs not. Till, in the night, one of these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more, rises among the stars in unseen purple.”

II
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Pound in the early period of
The Spirit of Romance
and the Cavalcanti essay, perhaps in his close association with Yeats, is concerned with an art that would “revive the mind of the reader . . . with some form
of ecstasy, by some splendor of thought, some presentation of sheer beauty.” In
The Cantos,
Cypris-Aphrodite, Dionysos, Kuthera, and Kore attend at Pisa, and in
Thrones,
“the boat of Ra-Set moves with the sun,” but he will not let Christ move. Pound, mentor and monitor of
Kulchur,
bending his mind to furnish his “Chronology for school use,” avoids the question of Christ and of the ecstatic.

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In 1916 his mind was more open. “Christianity and all other forms of ecstatic religion,” Pound writes in
Psychology and Troubadours,
“are not in inception dogma or propaganda of something called the
one truth
. . . their general object appears to be to stimulate a sort of confidence in the life-force.” In “Cavalcanti” he writes again: “There is a residue of perception, perception of something which requires a human being to produce it. Which even may require a certain individual to produce it. This really complicates the aesthetic. You deal with an interactive force: the
virtu
in short.”

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Lawrence’s
Man Who Died
and H.D.’s “over Love, a new Master” are creative projections, new images of a force or
virtu,
imagined along the line of interaction between the poet and the inspiring world, a life-force between percept and concept.

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The personification that for Hulme was a literary device related to the conceit to heighten impression, to remove the thing seen from its common associations and to render it divergent and interesting:

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer

—for H.D. or for Lawrence was something quite different, coming into being along the route of a conversion, a feeling towards the deeper reality of the thing seen. They sought not originality but to recover a commune of spirit in the image. The “Make It New” that Pound took as his motto could stand for the old renewed as well as for the new replacing
the old. Not only the experiment for novelty but also the psyche in its metamorphosis and the phoenix.

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The truth here is the truth of what feeds the life of the organism where “prompted by hunger, / it opens to the tide-flow” but in its openness conservative of the poet’s range of feeling. “But infinity? no,” H.D. warns: “of nothing-too-much: I sense my own limit
.
” As in
The Man Who Died,
Lawrence’s persona resolves, “Now I know my own limits. Now I can live without striving to sway others any more. For my reach ends in my finger-tips and my stride is no longer than the ends of my shoes.”

We sense it right away when a poet or painter is using a doll of Christ to project a given attitude, for the figure postures to present suffering or brotherly love and has no other life of its own. Even a master like El Greco, obsessed with attitude, will lose the persona. The doll of Christ becomes the occasion of a sanctified grievance that can easily be allied with the sanctions the artist or his patron would give to his own grievance. The exchange or interaction within What Is is closed off, and an inflation of attitude is drawn from the hubris involved.

In the exchange, the man makes a place for the God to be. In himself—the stigmata of a Saint Francis appear in the intensity of the compassion. Or the man as artist makes a place in his work for the God to be.

In the inflation, the man makes a place for his self, his grievance or guilt, to be deified in the doll.

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We know the difference between the gods of vanity and the gods of desire. But my sense here is that in every event of his art man dwells in mixed possibilities of inflation and inspiration. Hence the constant warnings Dante must receive from Virgil and then from Beatrice. The locus of the Vision must be clearly given at the opening. The dark wood, the she-wolf, the leopard, and the lion may be allegorical figures of Dante’s own times, of the Papal See, the city of Florence, and the
Royal House of France; but they are also, most certainly, real figures of Dante’s own psyche, his acknowledgment of his own limits.

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Dante’s sense of his own place is the foundation of the Dream, the locus of its Truth. “Thou art my master and my author,” he addresses Virgil—it is the Permission of the poet Dante in the man Dante. The glory is to be universal, not personal. The poet must not—it is the commandment of vision—usurp authority in his office. This is what Blake in turn means when he tells us “the authors are in eternity.” Dante’s master and author, Blake’s authors, are counterparts of Thoth and the New Master, not only over Love but over the Poem, in H.D.’s Trilogy. These things, the poet testifies, I did not see by my own virtues, but they were revealed to me.

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In the tenth circle of the
Inferno,
where the falsifiers of word and coinage contend, Dante loses his locus as poet. “I was standing all intent to hear them,” he tells us—he had been lost in the contests of the damned; some personal wish of his feeding upon the wrathful spectacle: “when the Master said to me: ‘Now keep looking, a little longer and I quarrel with thee!’ ” “
For the wish to hear it,
” Virgil adds, “
is a vulgar wish.
”

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All Paradise and Saint Peter wax red in a famous scene of the
Paradiso
at the thought of how Boniface VIII uses the Office of Pope as a personal power. “He who usurpeth upon earth my place, my place, my place,” Peter exclaims: “
il loco mio, il loco mio, il loco mio.
” It is the wrath of the Office misused.