The H.D. Book (11 page)

Writing these opening pages of a book “On H.D.” or “For H.D.,” a tribute and a study, I came at this point to see this first part or movement of the book as relating how I had found my life in poetry through the agency of certain women and how I had then perhaps a special estimation not only of the masters of that art but of its mistresses, so that certain women writers came to be central in importance for me. Miss Keough reading to us in that high school English class long ago the poem “Heat,” so that there was an actual voice that I loved in the voice of the poem for me; Athalie and Lili listening as I read aloud “I hear an army charging upon the land,” so that there was the voice of my own loving that found itself in the voice of the poem—these had emerged as first awakenings to the informing and transforming powers of Poetry. In the very beginning, in the awakening of childhood back of this later awakening of the man I was to be, there had been my mother’s voice reading the fairy tales and myths that were to remain the charged ground of my poetic reality.

I have written elsewhere that I am unbaptized, uninitiated, ungraduated, unanalyzed. I had in mind that my worship belonged to no church, that my mysteries belonged to no cult, that my learning belonged to no institution, that my imagination of my self belonged to no philosophic system. My thought must be without sanction. Yet to be a poet is to be reborn—to be baptized, initiated, graduated, analyzed. The Muses—for me in my adolescent days, these women, my teacher and my companions—admit
the poet to their company. But we are drawn to them, as if in the beginning we were of their kind, kin of Poetry with them.

Back of the Muses, so the old teaching goes, is Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muses. Freud, too, teaches that the Art has something to do with restoring, re-membering the Mother. Poetry itself may then be the Mother of those who have destroyed their mothers. But no—The image Freud projects of dismembering and remembering is the image of his own creative process in Psychoanalysis, which he reads into all Arts. Mnemosyne, the Mother-Memory of Poetry, is our made-up life, the matrix of fictions. Poetry is the Mother of those who have created their own mothers.

Given the memory of Miss Keough reading “Heat” and then of Athalie and Lili attending my reading of Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” a third memory claimed its place, and in the relations of these three scenes the formal image of the book comes: the first part developing along the lines of three stages and their attendant women—my falling in love or conversion, my loving or company in the art, and then, something quite different it would seem, setting all into a new motion, my first intimations of an historical task with the modernist imperative. For my directive to
The Cantos
of Ezra Pound, and at the same time a directive to work not from preconceived form but toward a form yet to be created, came from another woman. She was a poet, perhaps what is called a poetaster, for nothing came of her writing later, but, importantly, she was an arbiter of the modern. She had taste, an autocratic sense of the right things—Stein, Sitwell, Proust, Joyce. They were the set fashionable authors for a literary snobbism of the time, but they were also to be formative and lasting sources for my life as a poet. “What should he read—” her paramour asked as we walked toward the campus the day of our first meeting—“Should he read Eliot—?” “No,” she made her pronouncement, speaking of me in the third person—it was as if he had enquired on my behalf at Delphi of the oracle: “His work is too melodramatic as it is. He should read Pound.”

Just here, with this memory, a third scene, I had the sense of a missing element of my story coming into the picture. It was at once the weakest in its claim to being a living reality—just as the claim of a stylish mode in itself can seem a weak ground indeed. But the reality of art
was to be for me always a matter of love
and
taste, Eros and Form. Had that arbiter not been so purely a creature of taste or fashion, of an even snobbish sense of what was
right,
and so little—it was my entire impression of her—a creature of
soul,
I might have mistaken taste for liking. Liking, being fond of like things and people, was itself a mimic of love, and could be then a mimic too of judgment. But taste—even the snob’s presumption—excited in me another apprehension, the lure of a quality in a work in itself that demanded something of me, beyond the recognition of my own feelings expressed in an artist’s work, the recognition of feelings that were demanded by the form of the work itself. Love and the sense of Form or Judgment—passion and law—know nothing of liking or disliking. The modern taste, the exacting predilection, beyond likes, was, just here, a third aspect—my involvement with the structural drama of H.D.’s art. I was as a poet to be not only a Romantic but also a Formalist.

Form is the mode of the spirit, as Romance is the mode of the soul. In liking and disliking there was a beginning of creating one’s soul life, determining in recognizing what would be kindred and what alien to one’s inner feeling of things, making a likeness of one’s self in which the person would develop. In taste, almost the vanity of taste, there were intimations of the formal demand the spirit would make to shape all matter to its energies, to tune the world about it to the mode of an imagined music.

In my conversion to Poetry I was to find anew the world of Romance that I had known in earliest childhood in fairy tale and daydream and in the romantic fictions of the household in which I grew up. I had set out upon a soul-journey in my falling in love with my teacher in which she set me upon the quest of the spirit in Poetry, that reappeared later disguised in this foolish, even vain, presentation of a lady of fashionable tastes who demanded of me the secret of form hidden in the modernist style. The high adventure was to be for me the romance of forms, haunted by its own course, its own secret unfolding form, relating to some great form of many phases to which it belonged. The crux of my work was still to be melodramatic—if we remember the meaning of that word as being “a stage-play (usually romantic and sensational in plot and incident) in which songs are interspersed, and in which the
action is accompanied by orchestral music.” But the elements of stage and play, of romance and sensation, that are usually taken to belong to the psyche-drama, were to come more and more to be seen to belong to, to illustrate and accompany, the musical structure. So the world of the spirit hidden in the experience of soul and body becomes dominant, informing romance and sensation with a third possibility, even as soul dramatizes or enacts body and spirit, or as body incarnates as a living idea propositions of spirit and soul. The orchestration no longer accompanies but leads the dance.

•

A kindred earnest regard, ready and with the joy of self-discovery, had leaped up towards a life, a larger play of vitalities, quickened in the ardor with which a young teacher—in her early thirties perhaps when I was sixteen—read and loved the work of H.D., of D. H. Lawrence, and of Virginia Woolf. It was, wasn’t it, that in these the inner consciousness saw a clue to its part or work in the world? The intense truthfulness to conception, the communication of self, because she had so loved this, was to be the key, the way.

I drew now upon my teacher’s own romance, her hero worship or daydream of the role of the writer. The important thing for her was that the writer awakened a greater demand in life, that the tips of consciousness, the nervous susceptibility, be kept bare, sympathetic, ready, as a condition for reality. Coming to realize something is a creative imperative, for we must ourselves make it real. She was not wrong that truth was romantic, that the life of the writer was a romance. There is no physical reality that is not a psychic or spiritual creation, for the universe has just that reality for us that we extend to it as the dreams of body, soul, and spirit become one dream; and what is most terrible about the world that men have made is that it so embodies the dreams, the soul and spirit, of mean and vain imaginations. She was not wrong to daydream of the writer. The hero, the saint or poet, moves in such a confusion or cooperation of modes in one great mode that we call Reality or Vision, a romance that must create its own terms of existence in the midst of dreams of empire and commerce that seem to most men patently realistic.

“The study of literature is hero-worship,” Pound writes in
The Spirit
of Romance.
Carlyle’s vision of the poet haunts Pound’s thought here. But “hero” for my teacher did not mean the sublime ego, the great man that figured in Carlyle’s thought of Dante or Goethe. It meant the courage to live with sensitivity. All that was sensitive to qualities and finenesses in impulse most needed courage, heroic resolve, in towns like Bakersfield where I was growing up. It needed daring to live by the imagination.

Miss Keough was Irish. She was consciously Celtic. She found me out, tried me with James Stephens’s
Deirdre
and
Crock of Gold,
with books of Fionn and of the old world of glamors and wishes. “Escape literature” such works are called by those who patrol the borders of our realities to keep us grounded in the viabilities of practical reality, and even border guards of the realm of imagination would draw a line where fancy began and true imagination ended. Such official boundary lines grow confused before the eye when we enter the territories of the Celtic twilight. Pound will acclaim the gods and crystalline body of light “come forth / from the fire,” but he won’t take Yeats’s “spooks.” And even for some of those who will go along with Yeats wherever Red Hanrahan or Michael Robartes lead, Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s daughter will be beyond the pale.

Folklore, myth, and phantasy shared a territory with the reality of the personal imagination of Lawrence’s
The Man Who Died
or Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves.
There was in all the element of pretend turned most serious. We must take in earnest the Christ and priestess of Isis in Lawrence’s story, even as their reality grows confusing upon the borderline of his story-telling and his being. Do they illustrate something he has to tell us, or do they impersonate his true being more intensely than his actual personality, as if Lawrence had his life in his writing? “I have survived the day and the death of my interference, and am still a man.” Is this Christ, Lawrence? He indwells in his Christ, but also in his priestess of Isis in that story. He takes presence in what he creates for us, as the Celtic bard Taliesin claimed presence wherever he sang of the time of Man: “I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene,” he sings. In Virginia Woolf’s or H.D.’s imagination the scene is filled with presence, so that flowers, rocks, sea, night and day, seem to embody self, a revelation of identity, more potent than the
writer’s proper personality. The proprioceptive grows hallucinatory, for the proper body of the author presents itself in the surrounding scene. The cooperation of fantasy and reality, the correspondence and then the identity felt between one’s being and the events of the outer world, the interchange of being, is very like the affinity that Celtic art has for interweaving forms, shape-changings, letters that are alive with animals and flowerings, reincarnations, in an art where figure and ground may be exchanged as the artist works. H.D. addressing the “meagre flower, thin, / sparse of leaf” in the poem “Sea Rose” is also addressing some person, we realize, and, beyond that, this figure of the sea rose is meant to present the image of some self-creation both of her art and of her own being, an idea or ideal in the image, “caught in the drift”—it is a witchcraft or spell.

Let these things be terms of your life, and you will come into the things that I love—that was what my teacher seemed to say in her presentation of the poem or novel. She had come herself to Bakersfield from Berkeley, from what was for me the outside world, leaving behind associations where she had been close to the community of poets or at least at the margins of poetry. She had had a link among her friends in a gaunt, beautiful, touched, old woman, Ella Young, whom I in turn as a student at Berkeley once heard tell of those Irish circles, of poets who practiced magic, of women who saw into what was beyond the common sense, of that folk who dwelt upon the margins of fairy. But all men are “folk” in their dwelling there, as men are businessmen in their dwelling upon money and its affairs. Professional men lived on the margins of their careers; literati upon the margins of the world of letters; public figures upon the margins of public affairs. As poets lived upon the margins of poetry. For “folk,” “money,” careers,” “letters,” “the public,” are all realms that men in their phantasies invest with reality.

This was the operation of what was called a “story.” “A story” in childhood meant a fib. “That was just a story” meant it wasn’t true or that it wasn’t worth worrying about. “You made it up,” that, too, meant it was a falsehood. But “story” meant also an entertainment, in the afternoon or evening, close upon naptime or bedtime, close upon dreaming then.

Miss Keough had left behind some time of her life when she had
dreamed of living in a world of writers and artists. And on vacations from college, she had gone to Carmel and to Taos, because Jeffers and Lawrence were there, that she had been to
their
places was part of her story. The fame of the poet was an actual presence or power for her, a charm. The town she had come to teach in was protestant against charm. It knew no news nor wanted to know any of an other life. Yet, just in this, it was most like those towns in fairy tales, where men are always blinded by greed and realistic ends to the vision of a world beyond their ken. The burden of the 1930s, the hardship she must have known during Depression years to support her mother and to finish her education—these too were terms of the old stories. She had, along with her resignation to the terms of her job, a romance of teaching. She enacted her role in a folk rite of the soul’s awakening. She brought news and waited for news of any who had known or might come to know the life of the poets. Just beyond the news, just beyond the troubled vision of an
other
life raised by the poets who were heroes for her, lay the old questions of the mysteries: “Do you know who you are?” “Do you know where you are going?”