The H.D. Book (16 page)

The image of a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another may also be the image of an identity where one person has been erased to make room for another, a life or lives erased to make room for another life. The doctrine of reincarnation is itself not only in the context of our contemporary scientific orthodoxy but in the earlier context of Christian orthodoxies a belief that, where it comes to the surface, leaks through as an erased writing. Even in
the world of fictions, the theme of reincarnation can demote a work as being ultimately beyond the pale of serious concern. But that what once was has an objective existence in what is, is a concept current in the thought of science and philosophy as well as in the possibly vagrant imaginations of certain poets. Whitehead pictures the personal identity of a man so, as “a matrix for all transitions of life” that “is changed and variously figured by the things that enter it.” “If we talk of the tradition today,” W. H. Auden writes:

we no longer mean what the eighteenth century meant, a way of working handed down from one generation to the next; we mean a consciousness of the whole of the past in the present.

To come into such a continuum of human life in which our identity contains the past is to find a new dimension of personal life. As we drew the figures of successive stages of Eros in history, we had to do with reincarnations of Eros in writing upon writing, a palimpsest of scriptures entering our thought, to change and figure what we are then once we entertain the mere idea, and becoming the working force, in reading, of an objective reality.

The sensory clues or cues that lead Proust in his
Remembrance of Things Past
to the images from which the fullness of a lost life flows back into consciousness, or the dream data and double meanings which Freud follows to bring up into consciousness events of a repressed—erased—experience, these are sought out as one might seek out the underlying script in reading a palimpsest. To reclaim life’s first content. As Freud detects or calls up primal scenes of man’s prehistory in
Civilization and Its Discontents
and in
Moses and Monotheism
to picture, as before he had pictured the return of the repressed in the individual life, the return of the murder of the father in the life of a collective unconscious, and as Jung proceeds to elaborate the eternal return of the dramatis personae in the theatre of the imagination, which he sees as archetypes of the unconscious, back of these ideas of a recapitulation of primal experience in the experience of each individual of the species there is a reincarnation of an everlasting identity in changing events and forms. The figure of Eros, then, is not only that of an idea in evolution but also that
of an identity constantly revealing itself, reinstating itself. As we begin to take our identity, beyond the fiction of personality, in the idea of Man, the variety of persons Man has been may begin to inhabit what we are as we impersonate Him. Divine or daemonic forces appearing in dreams seem to appear as illustrations of the depths of our own being—a being now that includes all that we have come to know Man to have been—and behind their faces we read the faces of father or mother, sister or brother, actual figures of our own
erased
lives within our present lifetime. Their appearance within us is more significant than their appearance before our imagination.

In Poetry, between the
Dramatis Personae
of Robert Browning and the
personae
of the Imagists’ dramatic lyrics, the mask comes to reveal the poet’s inner self. The mode of Pound and of H.D., and probably of D. H. Lawrence, is derived from that of Browning. In reviewing Charlotte Mew’s
The Farmer’s Bride
in 1916, H.D. writes:

In this, our present day, literary Alexandria, even the most ‘original’ among us may take a sort of perverse delight in finding a new writer daring to discard his personality to follow, remotely or unconsciously perhaps, the tradition of an earlier generation. . . . In England there have been few masters among the poets, but those few so supreme that they stamped, created as it were, a mould for generations of frailer, if not less beautiful, spirits to follow. We have Dekker and Fletcher, and countless others, but the summits and depths of the English language is Shakespeare. And so, drawing nearer to our own generation, the dramatic poem is Browning, and Browning the dramatic poem.

Where she sees her own time as “Alexandria,” H.D.’s classicism is that of Plutarch and Philo Judaeus, and her lyricism is dramatic, not personal, where she would take Shakespeare and Browning to be masters of her art. The writer “daring to discard his personality” not only follows a tradition but is created in it; he must take on personality now as an actor does from the theater in a drama of Poetry. The idea of generating masters or fathers casting a stamp or mould upon generations of spirits, like the idea Imagists had of expressing their generation or time, is related to older religious concepts of reincarnation—the
metempsychosis
or transmigration of soul, the
metangismos
or transfusion—the pouring
of soul from one body into another—of the Greeks, or the
gilgul
of the Jewish tradition, in the Alexandrian world. But it is also here the author of the play giving the actors their parts.

Browning is such a generating master, for he had developed a form for the poet’s dramatic participation in other personalities in other times. It was a magic of affinities. “Remotely or unconsciously perhaps,” the poet reincarnated himself along the lines of a tradition or spiritual family tree. So, there would appear correspondences between poems of which the poets might be unaware and unintending, for poems were related generically and images came from the fountains of a collective imagination as souls were drawn from the fountain of life. “One is particularly obsessed with this idea in first reading Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer’s beautiful poem ‘Heaven’,” H.D. continues, referring to Robert Browning as the source of the dramatic poem:

But Mr. Hueffer says that he never read Browning. Therefore Mr. Hueffer has followed the Browning mould unconsciously—as unconsciously and inevitably as Miss Charlotte Mew in her poem “The Fête,” and in her other poem, the wracked, tortured “Madeleine in Church.” When one reads of ‘the white geraniums in the dusk’ one feels that Madeleine has wandered in that same garden where the moth and moth kiss brushed the heavy flower petals—and the ‘portrait of my mother at nineteen’ brings to one’s oversophisticated imagination the Duchess with her unappreciated, wan smile and her branch of cherries.

“It is part of our pleasure in art in these days to imagine such things
,
” H.D. concludes, “and the lines lose none of their poignancy, none of their personal flavor for this fine, subtle association
.
” But it is also something more than a cultivated association, for the idea lingers that “that same garden” comes into the poem by Charlotte Mew that came into Browning’s poem and that the portrait of the poetess’s mother at nineteen and the portrait of Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” are significantly related, that there is, back of poetry, some collective poetic unconscious.

In the voices of Pound or H.D., the poet’s personal identity is involved in the projection of the poem, and, in this, they are different from the dramatic monologs of Robert Browning. Pound derives
his own personal legend from Odysseus, Peire Vidal, Homer, Kung; he identifies with them in impersonating them. So too H.D. is to be confused with Sappho or Helen, with the priestess of Artemis in whom Artemis speaks. D. H. Lawrence undergoes a self-conversion in his poetic projection of Dionysos. In this the poets are most contemporary with the psychologists who begin to see the work of art as well as the dream as a projection of the individual psyche in which an unconscious content seeks to reveal itself.

The masks of Robert Browning’s
dramatis personae
lead directly to the masks of the Imagists, but the poetic persona is no longer discrete. The concept of person itself has undergone a crucial change in the work of Symbolists, and, for all of their reform of Symbolist ways the Imagists are heirs of their work. Where the poem was once theatrical, it is now more and more viewed as a process of psychological information, related to dream-work.

In his magic-lantern art, Robert Browning calls up Verona, as in the poem
Sordello,
not out of his subconscious but by virtue of his theatrical power, and:

Lo, the past is hurled
In twain: up-thrust, out-staggering on the world,
Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears
Its outline, kindles at the core, appears
Verona . . .

The darkness that rears and kindles at the core, in which the scene is evoked, suggests to us the unconscious; but for Robert Browning it remains a machinery of a stage midway between the phantom-shows of Doctor Faustus, where we but see Helen of Troy as a display, and the shadow-screens of the motion picture to come. So Browning also dismisses his phantoms: “The ghost is gone, and the story ends
.
” This is an art in which the poet calls up
image
and
persona,
keeping at the same time his distance, and our own, the magician’s pentacle within which he stands.

“The consciousness of some seems to rest,” Pound says in “Psychology and Troubadours,” “or to have its center more properly, in what the Greek psychologists called the
phantastikon.
Their minds are, that is,
circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosmos.” Here image was
phanopoeia,
“a casting of images upon the visual imagination
.
” The Imagists in the beginning worked towards a new
phantastikon.
We are not to underestimate the role that this magic of reflections has in even the later works of Pound or H.D. But there was another, higher poetic power, it seemed to Pound, in the “germinal” consciousness. The image or persona—what is seen in the world “outside” or in the mind’s world “inside”—no longer is a show of that world only, but is a seed, a generative point of the inner and outer. This is a world not of mere appearance, but of a vital process.

•

The images and persons of
Palimpsest
work through each other, as if story were written over story. So too the sequence of times works in a set of superimpositions. The palimpsest is not only that of image over image or person over person, but of time over time. Within London 1926 is wartime London of 1916. But also, within the Hellenistic world of wartime Rome in the story “Hipparchia” is the underscript of wartime London. It is the palimpsest of a layered consciousness in which all times and worlds are to be found. Not only may the past be back of the present, but the present may be back of the account of the past. So too as Edward Sapir, reviewing H.D.’s poetry, pointed out, back of her Hellenism is the subscript of an American experience and character:

Personal and remote as are her images, there breathes through her work a spirit which it would not be easy to come upon in any other quarter of the globe. 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.

Sapir is reading H.D. in terms of what he sees the American spirit to be—at once the expression of a Puritan heritage and of the physical environment of a forbidding continent. Hipparchia, exiled from Greece, dreaming of her lost homeland in wartime Rome, reminds us of H.D. in wartime London, haunted by dreams of lost or forgotten
coasts of New Jersey. For the generation of the twenties abroad, the American spirit was thought of as being in exile; and the America of the childhood late nineteenth-century, “lost.” Raymonde Ransome in the story “Murex,” an autobiographical portrait, sees her room in postwar London as a palimpsest in which memories survive:

such a tiny room to hold so much, so many superimposed people. And she was happy alone here and didn’t want to go away. They were passing, would always be passing and she would remember them; as an
American
she would remember them.

Helen Fairwood in “Secret Name” presents another autobiographical portrait, moving through an Egyptian scene haunted by overscripts or underscripts of Greece and America:

This was Egypt. America had been wiped out, she had thought, even before the heavy down-weight of London’s five war years . . . But it wasn’t. It stared at her in an English country-house bedroom, in a New England seaside village bedroom with four-poster draped with white of mosquito gauze, with strip of rug, and pottery Devon-like jugs.

“I spent most of my childhood
,
” she tells Captain Rafton, “(although you won’t accept it that I’m American) along the gigantic stretches of New Jersey. Sand and scrub-bushes. So the incurve of the sand about these sphinxes is familiar
.
” The scene itself, as she walks by moonlight to visit the ruins of Karnak, is a palimpsest:

Her past merged, moon eclipse, black crystal; the marshes of New Jersey low-flowering wax and wortle-berry brushed the shimmer of the robe of dragon-fly blue texture of some incredibly slender Graeco-Egyptian. A Graeco-Egyptian was wandering across New Jersey marshes in search of those famous (even in Egypt) ivory pointed, saffron centered lily lotuses.

Raymonde Ransome’s mind in “Murex” searches out along currents of association to draw a magic, a poem actually, out of the depths. But they are depths not only of her own life, the memory of a labor and the loss of her child at birth, while behind the scenes there was her lover’s adultery and desertion during her pregnancy, but depths also
of human history that must be healed. The interior monologue itself provides a medium into which all things can flow as into one sea, from whose depths the murex may be brought up, and Raymonde Ransome’s mind returns again and again to the thought of the writer James Joyce, hinting that back of this writing—another sense of the name
palimpsest
—is the writing of Joyce’s
Ulysses:
“Art was magic—but it had lost—had lost—its savour. Joyce was right. It had lost.” In
Ulysses,
back of Bloom’s day in Dublin, magically, had been earlier Greek presences, a writing we almost read through the print we actually read. Signs appear in the stream of consciousness that back of Bloom’s personality is that of Odysseus. Back of the stream of consciousness mode is Robert Browning’s dramatic monolog. Faces and masks are interchanged in a masque of identities. “Faces, people, London,” Raymonde Ransome recalls: