The H.D. Book (34 page)

Eliot represented a high sophistication, as Noel Coward represented a low sophistication for those who were not serious-minded. He gave a histrionic remove. The poem suffered in its very success. It had been cut and reorganized to succeed, and had lost in its conscious form whatever unconscious form had made for the confusion of sequence, the “miscellaneous pieces” that did not seem to fit. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Out of whatever real ruin that threatened, Pound and Eliot had agreed finally upon the monumental artifice of a ruin, a ruin with an outline. “Complimenti, you bitch,” Pound writes Eliot: “I am wracked by the seven jealousies, and cogitating an excuse for always exuding my deformative secretions in my own stuff, and never getting an outline. I go into nacre and objets d’art.”

The heart of the poem was the unbearable mixing of things. The ruins were the ruins rising from adultery and rage, “when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting,” of the cuckold cursing “Co co rico” and of finding the way thru, the meaning of what must be undergone. The agony of the adulterous marriage is seen as the agony of the earth in the corruption and desire of Spring. The curse burns the earth back and then in the waste land there is finally the prayer for rain. The Shantih shantih shantih at the close is the cry of the stricken heart.

In the fashionable reading the
mise en scène
took over. The fame of the poet itself had triumphed over the pain of the poem. Eliot was not, in the outcome, stricken but celebrated. The poem, once the Depression years were there, seemed to be an historical prophecy. And in the twenties, in circles like the little group that inhabits Mary Butts’s
Armed with Madness,
the game of the poem was taken up in a social magic, the charging of things with symbolic powers, the ritual mixture of Christianity and another cult of adulterous suffering, with the help of the new cult of psychoanalysis. “The glasses turn to chalices,” Pound had written off gleefully to Eliot in those initial letters:

The glasses turn to chalices
In his fumbling analysis

The Waste Land,
anyway, is part of our story. In my first years at the University of California, in 1937 and 1938, when there was no
knowledge at all—if there is any now—of H.D.’s post-Imagist work,
Palimpsest, Red Roses for Bronze,
or
Ion,
in the reading lists of modern lit., when William Carlos Williams was unknown, and Ezra Pound with his
Cantos
relegated to the dubious territory of the “experimental” along with Stein and
Finnegans Wake;
Eliot and
The Waste Land
were established, along with Archibald MacLeish and W. H. Auden. With the difference—and so it is part of our story—that back of the literary aspect of the poem was another aspect, back of the respectability there was something shady. A rite, a dramatization of life, that was something more.

William Carlos Williams could take Eliot as his challenge, and against the cult of Europe, in the year of
The Hollow Men
1925, seek to define the issue with
In the American Grain.
Against the Old World. Red Eric. “Rather the ice than their way: to take what is mine by single strength,” he begins. “The worst is that weak, still, somehow, they are strong: they in effect have the power, by hook or by crook.”

Did he see his own lot in Edgar Allan Poe, an exile in his homeland? “But in poetry he was at the edge—there was nothing—”:

Here in poetry, where it is said ‘we approach the gods,’ Poe was caught, instead, in his time . . .

Had he lived in a world where love throve, his poems might have grown differently. But living where he did, surrounded as he was by that world of unreality, a formless ‘population’—drifting and feeding—a huge terror possessed him.

Disarmed, in his poetry the place itself comes through. This is the New World. It is this that it does, as if—

That year H.D. published a
Collected Poems.
She had been known in
Poetry
and in
The Egoist
since that moment in 1912 when Ezra Pound had written off to Harriet Monroe “it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes, even if the subject is classic,” as an Imagist. She had been featured in Pound’s
Des Imagistes,
and then with her husband, Richard Aldington, had taken part in the later Imagist Anthologies of 1915, 1916, 1917. The word was set in whatever public mind: H.D., Imagist. Miss May Sinclair had said in
The Egoist
that H.D. was
the
Imagist. That was 1914. It did not mean what it has come to mean. In the confusion
of Amy Lowell’s sponsorship, the movement came to include impressionism, not a heightening but a broadening of sensitivity. The taut line of H.D.’s verse was coupled now in the uninformed mind with the loosely conceived line of popularizers. Certain poems—“Sea Rose” or “Heat” or “Orchard”—became set pieces with “Patterns” among anthologizers. For H.D. in the public mind seemed a more refined Amy Lowell, capturing images.

Writing on
Sea Garden
in 1917, John Gould Fletcher said: “To penetrate H.D.’s inner meaning, it is only necessary that we approach her poetry with an open and responsive mind.” Imagist, Imagist, Imagist—the cuckoo sang in the ears of the day from his anthology nest. “It is really about the soul,” Fletcher warned, “or the primal intelligence, or the
Nous,
or whatever we choose to call that link that binds us to the unseen and uncreated.” But the possibility that the image was no mere impression but had to do with the Platonic image or might come full round to the
Imago Christi
went unheeded.

Then there was, for those who saw beyond the “Imagism,” the cult of something called Greece. Along with her earliest poems appeared translations from Euripides,
Iphigeneia in Aulis
and
Hippolytus.

Artemis dominates: “She fronts the coast.” Say it is no more than a translation, a task set to learn the lineaments and spirit of Euripides. The “we” in H.D. will always then be in part the choral consciousness of the Greek drama; the way “we” are a true folk, and our individual fates appear to us as if they were enacted upon a stage for our common sense as audience. There is an “I” each of us, as a member of a chorus of citizens, artists, or folk witnesses, has:

I crossed sand-hills.
I stand among the sea-drift before Aulis

a knowledge of the people. “At least H.D. has lived with these things since childhood,” Pound says in that letter to Harriet Monroe. And the chorus tells “what happened”; the myth, the hearsay, comes from them. The heroes or the participants in the great fate do not see the myth—what the hearsay tells. They are projections of what the chorus fears will happen.

But Iphigeneia commanding the chorus:

Stand silent, you Greeks.
The fire kindles.

is also the inspired actor in the play. She is the genius, fired by the chorus, and thus hints go out of a likeness to the genius of the poem itself:

For I come to do sacrifice,
To break the might of the curse,
To honour the queen, if she permit,
The great one, with my death.

And out from Iphigeneia’s “death,” from her “fame”:

. . . spears will clash in the contest,

the waves dash upon the coasts of Chalkis. Remembering, “She fronts the coast.”

In 1916 “The Shrine” appeared in
Some Imagist Poets
with the subscription “She Watches Over the Sea.” The “She” of the poem may be the lure, that has grandeur too, of a woman, a
femme fatale:

It was evil—evil
when they found you,
when the quiet men looked at you—

Certainly the sequences of “shelter,” “full and sweet,” “tempting the quiet,” “evil” and then:

But you—you are unsheltered,
cut with the weight of wind—
you shudder when it strikes,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
when the tides swirl
your boulders cut and wreck

all of this can, and does, once we recognize the possibility, more than an age of an exposed headland, refer to a persona or mask of the emotional regularity in women, of sudden “treacherous” moods and passions that
make Scylla—or here may it not be Artemis-Scylla—a prototype. “She” of the Shrine does appear in all her savage splendor back of Iphigeneia.

You brought me to the Greek light
And I will not hold you guilty
For my death

Iphigeneia says, addressing her father. But some ambiguous play may move here, for at first I mistook the address and had thought it was the Goddess she addressed:

Alas, day, you brought light,
You trailed splendour,
You showed us god:

“Artemis, rejoicer in blood-sacrifice,” the chorus calls the Goddess. As Iphigeneia volunteers to the sacrifice, she enters her “fate,” which is also her “fame”; she becomes both the blood-sacrifice and the rejoicer in blood sacrifice.

“Alas,” the chorus cries:

she steps forward

To destroy Ilium and the Phrygians.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

She comes to meet death,
To stain the altar of the goddess

Where we may also read: “In order that there be a stain on the altar of the goddess.”

H.D. found her meter, drew her characteristic taut intense line from her translations, as she drew too upon the Melic poets for the lyric mode she wanted, as in painting Picasso drew upon classic sources. They were—Pound or H.D. or Joyce—most modern in their appropriation of the past. The stylization of their verse had its counterpart in Satie’s
Socrate
or the Greek style of Cocteau. We have only to consider how close to the spirit of
Sea Garden
or
Heliodora
Braque’s late drawings for Hesiod are. Or the “Alexandrian” portraits of Derain.

But H.D. found in Euripides not only form but content. They were
one. And in Iphigeneia, Helen, Thetis, Artemis, Helios, Achilles she saw the personae or masks of her own life story. In the work of her old age, in
Helen in Egypt,
she weaves, as ever, the revelation of “these things since childhood” in the terms of Homer and Euripides.

Greece in the story is the homeland or mother-land, where, if we read as we do in dreams, we see that it is America that was H.D.’s Greece. She was most American in her “Hellenism,” as Edward Sapir saw in his review of
Collected Poems
in 1926: “The impatience of the rhythms and the voluptuous harshness and bleakness of the sea and shore and woodland images manifest it. Such violent restraint, such a passionate pleasure in the beauty of the denuded scene and the cutting thrust, themselves but inverse symbols of caress, could only develop in a culture that hungers for what it despises.” It was “in the American grain.”

But there were few who read deeply. For most there was, past the “image” thing, the “Greek perfection” thing. She had found her style not only in translating but in pruning. “While the sense of the Greek has been strictly kept,” she wrote in
The Egoist
in 1915: “it is necessary to point out that the repetition of useless ornamental adjectives is a heavy strain on a translator’s ingenuity. This is only one instance from many where the Homeric Epithet degenerates into what the French call a
remplissage
—an expression to fill up a line. Such phrases have been paraphrased or omitted.” And in her
Ion of Euripides
in 1937 she notes: “The broken, exclamatory or evocative
vers-libre
which I have chosen to translate the two-line dialogue, throughout the play, is the exact antithesis of the original.”

There are times when she herself characterizes her art as cold and removed—what those who denigrated her Hellenism most accused her of—as in “Wash of Cold River”:

to mould a clear
and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine.

For most readers, the Hellenic thing in H.D. was all “clear,” “frigid,” “pure,” “beautiful,” “inaccessible.” It set her apart.

•

Writing to Williams in 1916, H.D. pled against his impurities: “I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies . . . I think there is
real
beauty—the real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the wind at the very last . . . I feel the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivative tendency which to me, is not
you
—not your very self . . . ”

The words rankled. “We look for deliverance,” Williams came back, “from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style.”

“Hilda Doolittle before she began to write poetry,” he tells us in the 1920 Prologue to
Kora in Hell,
“or at least before she began to show it to anyone would say: ‘You’re not satisfied with me, are you Billy? There’s something lacking, isn’t there?’ When I was with her my feet always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be walking on the tips of the grass stems.”

When was that? “One in particular struck me,” he writes home to his brother in 1905:

She is tall, about as tall as I am, young, about eighteen and, well, not round and willowy, but rather bony, no that doesn’t express it, just a little clumsy but all to the mustard . . .

We went over fields, through woods, climbed fences, jumped streams, and laughed and talked till everyone simply had to get into the game. Well, this lasted hours, then Miss Doolittle, that’s her name, found some flowers and sat down beside them to protect them from the rest of the party. I sat down beside her and the rest passed on. We began talking of flowers, when she said she knew a place where hepaticas grew so thick the ground was blue with them. I said I would like to see it, and we being at the tail end of the crowd turned aside and went into the woods. Needless to say we lost the crowd and had a great two hours walk by ourselves. Oh, Ed, but she is a fine girl, no false modesty and all that, she is absolutely free and innocent. We talked of the finest things: of Shakespeare, of flowers, trees, books, & pictures and meanwhile climbed fences and
walked through woods and climbed little hills till it began to grow just dusky when we arrived at our destination. We had by this time, as you imagine, gotten pretty well acquainted. She said I was Rosalind in
As You Like It
and she was Celia, so I called her that, although her real name is Hilda . . . I got home at twelve, covered with some mud, a little glory and oceans of a fine comfortable happy feeling inside of me somewhere.