The H.D. Book (27 page)

Elie Faure in
The Spirit of Forms
(from which, as from Spengler’s
The Decline of the West,
Malraux’s thought would seem to develop) sees all ages and nations as one in a deeper universal art, a grand adventure of spirit in which men have envisioned Man:

We have reached a critical point in history when it becomes impossible for us to think profoundly—or to create, I imagine—if we isolate ourselves in the adventure of our race, if we refuse to demand a confirmation of our
own presentiments from the expression in words or in the arts that other races have given themselves. . . . One of the miracles of this time is that an increasing number of spirits should become capable not only of tasting the delicate or violent savor of these reputedly contradictory works and finding them equally intoxicating [he speaks here of those fetishes and cathedral statues that Malraux in his work was to find “sinister” in their colloquy] . . . even more than that, they can grasp, in the seemingly opposed characters, the inner accords that lead us back to man and show him to us everywhere animated by analogous passions, as witnessed by all the idols, for all of them are marked by the accent of these passions. . . . The critical spirit has become a universal poet. It is necessary to enlarge inordinately, and unceasingly, the circle of its horizon.

This “we” was “an increasing number,” but it was also, Faure saw, a few, an elite—a cult, then, of “the mobility of the spirit, favored by the exigencies of environment and the mixture of the species,” projecting “a limitless visible field of emotion and activity,” toward a cathexis of all that was known of man and the word, in terms of an open and expanding consciousness, as our Aranda initiates project their field of emotion and activity in terms of a tribal consciousness as an enclosure of time and space. For the Australian, the hardness of Nature herself drives him out from his home-place. The Aranda is a man of an actual waste land where he is again and again forced to wander in times of drought and famine when a man in want of water often opens a vein in his arm to drink the blood, and the brotherhood of the tribe must be kept in a constant imagination against the hunger in which men eat each other. Here the “we” is a term of survival itself. The creative fiction—the tribal narrative, the eternal ones of the dream, the spirit doubles, and the immortal sky-mothers—has its intensity of realization in the traumatic experience of the actual environment.

The esoteric tradition in Jewish mysticism again had its intensity in the loss of the home-land and in the long wandering in exile as children of a spirit-Mother, the Shekinah. She was the Glory, but She was also the Queen or Mother or Lady, and She might appear, as She does in
The Zohar,
as a great bird under whose celestial wings the immortal spirit-children of Israel nestled. The Jews, like the Aranda, lived in
a threatening environment that called forth, if they were to survive, an insistent creation, the tenacity of a daydream to outlast the reality principle.

For the Imagists in London in 1912 there had already been exile. Pound, Eliot, and H.D. had sought a new spiritual home among eternal ones of the European dream, among troubadours or the melic poets, in refuge from the squalor and stupidity of the American mercantile, industrial, and capitalist world—“the American dream,” it was called. Joyce had chosen a voluntary exile from Ireland, “dear dirty Dublin”; and Lawrence had fled from his environment in the industrial working class village to wander in exile in search of his own Kingdom of the Sun.

It was the World War that provided the traumatic crisis, the triumph of squalor and stupidity where the cult of profits and the cult of empire combined to exact their tribute, and the other cult-world of the poetic vision was challenged as unrealistic. Only in the imagination would beauty survive.
“I would bid them live,”
Pound sings in his Envoi to
Mauberley
in 1919:

As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time . . .

He addresses in the “Envoi” a “her,” whose “graces give / Life to the moment”—a Lady “that sang me once that song of Lawes,” but also a Mother that the Imagist poets had taken—Beauty. To survive in spirit men must be reborn in Beauty’s magic amber, for the rest were revealed by War where

Died some pro patria, non “dulce” non “et decor” . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy . . .

“Wrong from the start—” Pound describes himself: “No,”:

. . . hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date . . .

•

They did not “belong.” In that feeling, their exile was not voluntary, but a recognition of necessity. In the poem “Cities” published in
The Egoist
in 1914, H.D.’s sense of a “we,” a lonely few, isolated by their common devotion to beauty, and to the goods of the intellect, in the midst of a city of “them” who worship squalor, profit, and war, as the “one god,” is not a phantastic attitude assumed but a feeling rooted in the social reality. “Can we believe,” she proposes,

. . . —by an effort
comfort our hearts:
it is not waste all this,
not placed here in disgust,
street after street,
each patterned alike,
no grace to lighten
a single house of the hundred
crowded into one garden-space.

Two ways of life—the one realized by the Protestant Capitalist cult in its terms of usury, real estate, production for profit, and profitable work, and the other realized by the Military cult, in which old orders of Mithraic and Wotanic cult survived, in terms of Fatherland, death in battle, holocaust, and the hero’s reward in the Valhalla orgy and the memorial days—these two had combined forces in 1914 to make a new world. War was to become, as it is in our own day, the most profitable business, the foundation of the economy, and the economy was to become the cause for which men fought. Not “Light,” as it had been for the Zoroastrian Mithraist, against “Darkness”; but the right of private property in the sense of capitalism against communism or socialism.

H.D. sees war-time London of the First World War in terms of the Platonic myth of the Golden Age and the Iron Age, and also, as in her War Trilogy
,
London of the Second World War in terms of the Gnostic myth of souls from a creation of Light surviving in a second creation
of Darkness. In “Cities,” the maker of cities has made a second city and a second people. This is the hive of the modern metropolis, crowded with cells:

hideous first, hideous now—
spread larvae across them,
not honey but seething life.

And in these dark cells,
packed street after street,
souls live, hideous yet—
O disfigured, defaced,
with no trace of the beauty
men once held so light.

Back of this world is the memory of another, first, city:

with the beauty of temple
and space before temple,
arch upon perfect arch,
of pillars and corridors that led out
to strange court-yards and porches
where sun-light stamped
hyacinth-shadows
black on the pavement.

It is the Poictiers or Verona of the first Cantos, and thirty years later in
The Pisan Cantos
it is “the city of
Deïoces
whose terraces are the colour of stars” and also
Wagadu,
the Mother-City of the Fasa, that four times in their wandering has been lost—“gone to sleep” the epic tale
Gassire’s Lute
puts it, as given by Frobenius in the sixth volume of
African Genesis,
his collection of African folktales and poetry. In the prison camp at Pisa the memory of Wagadu, four times fallen asleep—“once through vanity, once through breach of faith, once through greed, and once through dissension”—with the chorus naming the cities of its four incarnations—“Hoooh! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla—Hoooh! Fasa!”—returned to Pound as the lost city that is also the strength of those who live in the thought of her.

For in herself Wagadu is not of stone, nor of wood, nor of earth. Wagadu is the strength that lives in the hearts of men and that one time can be seen because eyes let her be seen, because ears hear the strike of sword and the clang of shield, and one time is invisible because worn out and beset by the untamable nature of men she has gone fast asleep.

“Now in the mind indestructible,” Pound sings in “Canto LXXIV,” and in “Canto LXXVI”: “now in the heart indestructible.” Wagadu may then be the first city of H.D.’s “Cities,” the Mother that those who are devoted to Beauty remember. “For each man will salvage Wagadu in his heart,” the African epic promises—“
bergen,
”—the German translates, which means
to salvage
or
rescue
and also
to give shelter to, to hold
or
to hide:
“and each woman will keep hidden a Wagadu in her womb.”

The people of that city, the people of a dream of a kind of human life once known that perished as the dominant way and is yet carried forward in the minds and hearts of certain devotees, this people remains, like the “we” of H.D.’s poem, intensely aware of themselves in their allegiance to an invisible city more real than the city in which they are:

Can we think a few old cells
were left—we are left—
grains of honey,
old dust of stray pollen
dull on our torn wings,
we are left to recall the old streets?

To be a poet was to be disowned in terms of the reality values of the new city, to be outcast from the true motherland. In “The Tribute,” published in
The Egoist
in 1916, the First World War and city of London are again seen in terms of an evil state that has taken the place of a good:

Squalor spreads its hideous length
through the carts and the asses’ feet,
squalor coils and reopens
and creeps under barrow
and heap of refuse . . .

“Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’,” Pound had commanded: “It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete.” For a moment the word “squalor,” if we take it as an abstraction, may abstract us from the immediacy of the poem, but the squalor of the city is itself the presentation of a person of the poem. A “personification” it is called by those who believe such things are mere devices of a poetic grammar. But this squalor is the face or mask of an actual entity:

it lengthens and coils
and uncoils and draws back
and recoils
through the crooked streets.

the Evil One Himself, the old serpent or worm, seen by the poet in the seizure of the poem as He has been seen in the vision of saints and Satanists or in the clairvoyance of seers, an astral shape pervading the ways of the city, so that the streets are “crooked,” as in
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
Robert Lowell sees a path “snake” up its hill. Where He wounds us there are “our old hatreds,” and in victory He may blacken the song upon singing lips. The dragon is
Neschek
as He appears in Pound’s fragment of Canto LXXII or Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, whose scales are the corpses of men and whose venom is a corrupting greed and ambition, in whose likeness is the squalor of the slums, the coils of usury, and the murderous arrogance of modern war. In “The Tribute,” the tribute seems first to be the draft of young men into the armies of America and England, and the dragon has triumphed:

with no voice to rebuke—
for the boys have gone out of the city,
the songs withered black on their lips . . .

The “larvae,” the unawakened people of the poem “Cities,” are now the people of the dragon, their “one god”:

They have banished the gods
and the half-gods
from the city streets,

they have turned from the god
of the cross roads,
the god of the hearth,
the god of the sunken well
and the fountain source . . .

and they show their enmity openly toward those who do not hold their values and would oppose the tribute to their war:

Though not one of the city turned,
not one girl but to glance
with contempt toward us.

The few with convictions against the war really did face social ostracism. “The world of men is dreaming,” Lawrence wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1915: “it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.” Two years later, driven out of Cornwall where they had been raided by the police, the Lawrences took refuge with H.D. at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. “London is really very bad: gone mad, in fact,” he wrote Cecil Gray: “People are not people any more; they are factors, really ghastly, like lemures, evil spirits of the dead.” And young men who had already begun their work for beauty’s sake had died, “the songs withered black on their lips”—“
non dulce non et decor
.” In the pages of
The Egoist,
war lists—first of young French and German artists and writers, then of English—had begun to appear.

The “we” of “The Tribute” is a remnant few very like the pitiful group that in Aristophanes’ anti-war
Lysistrata
hold the decimated city:

A few old men rose up
with a few sad women to greet and hail us,
a few lads crept to welcome . . .

And the song was “withered black” upon the lips in another sense. For Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, H.D., Eliot have a black voice when speaking of the contemporary scene, an enduring memory from this First World War that had revealed the deep-going falsehood and evil of the modern
state. These had from their early years as writers a burning sense of the “they” that ran the war and that accepted its premises and of the “we” whose allegiance belonged to a Wagadu hidden in their hearts, among whom now were many ghosts or specters. Wilfred Owen had come as the first great English loss among poets and artists, but Gaudier-Brzeska and Hulme from the immediate circle of
The Egoist
had followed.

At the close of “The Tribute,” a prayer for deliverance begins: