The H.D. Book (17 page)

People, faces, Greece. Greece, people, faces. Egypt. James Joyce was right. On, on, on, on, and out of it like some deep-sea jewel pulled up in a net squirming with an enormous catch of variegated squirming tentacled and tendrilled memories, just this, this—

She cannot name it, but the painful “purple” or
murex
is the birth of the child that dies in birth. In the conscious mind it is a poem coming into form: “Verses were the murex. They dyed all existence with their color. Small verses, things that in no way matter
.
” Back of the poem that is coming up in her mind there is something she is listening to, the sound of feet passing up Sloane Street on the way to Victoria Station outside the room where she sits at tea facing a visitor who racks up the memory of Raymonde Ransome’s old life. But it is the sound of young men in that old life, marching to the War. Brzeska, Hulme, Wilfred Owen.
The Egoist
listed the artists and writers newly fallen with each issue in the war years. And there was another, an equally painful death of love.
The Death of a Hero,
Aldington, H.D.’s young husband had entitled his portrait of those years. The war and the adultery are written one on the top of the other, or one obliterating the other, erased to make room for the other. She has lost her child or her lover to the war. “Layer and layer of pain, of odd obliteration had forbidden Raymonde Ransome to
see into the past that to her was further than an Egyptian’s coffin. The past of somewhere about 1917
.
” The marching feet of the young men on their way to the troop trains, the feet of the lost young men, are, we begin to realize, the measuring feet of the poem itself.

Raymonde is very much Hilda or the writing of a portrait in the place of Hilda. In the autobiographical portrait, the person of the author has been erased to make room for the story of the self revealed in a secondary personality. Just as Hilda Doolittle erased her name and wrote in its place the enigmatic H.D., so Raymonde Ransome has the writing name
Ray Bart.

Behind the Botticelli, there was another Botticelli, behind London there was another London, behind Raymonde Ransome there was (odd and slightly crude but somehow ‘taking’ nom-de-guerre) Ray Bart. There was Ray Bart always waiting as there was behind the autumn drift and dream-anodyne of mist, another London. A London of terror and unpremeditated beauty. A London of peril and of famine and of intolerable loveliness. Behind London there was the London of darkened street lamps (of ‘doused’, Freddie used to say, ‘glims’) behind a mist and drift of anodyne in an Italian background of small and precise little pincushion pink roses, there was another Italy, another Venus, another realm of beauty never to be apprehended with the senses.

Recalling in “Murex” the stream of consciousness mode of Joyce’s
Ulysses
or, as in “Secret Name,” Algernon Blackwood’s narratives of occult experience, the prose of
Palimpsest
is not, as contemporary reviewers tended to think it was, impressionistic. Language becomes throughout a ground of suggestion and association, a magic ground, a weaving of phrases echoing in other phrases, a maze of sentences to bind us in its spell, so that we begin to be infected with the sense of other meanings and realms within those presented. The style is obsessional. We must come back and back to the same place and find it subtly altered in each return, like a traveler bewildered by lords of the fairy, until he is filled with a presence he would not otherwise have admitted. Here it is not past time or present time but the blur, the erasure itself, that is the magic ground in which the necessary image may occur.
What we are to see needs a fused light, twilight or moonlight. What the eye must strain to see in the diminishing light takes on the imprint of inner phantasy and becomes newly significant to the soul. In the story “Hipparchia,” Marius sees his mistress’s eyebrows in such a light as a sign, “Black, like the inner hieratic marking on the honey-colored hyacinth,” activating the magic of correspondences:

He saw, in that thickening of the last glow of late sunlight, her eyebrows apart, separated from her being. As Greeks of the old days disregarded the sheer substance of the flower as they perceived (mysterious script) the aie, aie, that tells of lost Adonis or the wail for the dead Spartan. He saw why Greeks inordinately must rule forever, not Rome, but prophetically, the whole world.

“Your eyebrows, Hipparchia,” he tells her then, “penciled for my dismissal are engraved somewhat on my spirit.” Searching out from its dimness the detail, as for the reader, searching out what seems only dimly present in his text, Marius finds it comes to him at last as a content of his own inner experience. He has cooperated in what he has come to see.

Not only the dimness in which suggestion can arise but the circling repetition in which resistance is eroded and transformed is necessary for the author who would cast a spell. The mesmerist must call upon his reader’s assent to a conversion in which words come to have an artistic identity of their own. Readers of Joyce’s
Ulysses
before the impact of that work had been exorcised by the commentaries and appreciations of the professors of literature, where they were resistant to Joyce’s art, often expressed themselves in angry, even hostile, terms regarding the boredom they had experienced. Corresponding to this boredom or pain of resistance experienced by the reader who refused to be taken in by Joyce is the creative fatigue which the reader who is to follow the author’s lead must undergo. The ideal reader of his hypnogogic prose, Joyce suggests, must enter the realm of sleep as an insomniac.

In the story “Secret Name,” Helen Fairwood finds herself prepared by fatigue for her experience of the numinous. The reiteration of the word “fatigue” and the play of the words “curious” and “peculiar” suggest
that both the nervous state and the moonlight are elements of an aura surrounding the event:

all the uncanny perceptions of the early morning, the fatigue, and the uncanny perceptions of the Tomb, nullified, smoothed away, eradicated by this curious moonlight; eradicated, sponged out . . . The intellect was to such an extent off guard, benumbed by her peculiar fatigue.

The prose demands that we yield to its wanderings, its reiterations; and when we yield, it brings us into such a fatigue of intellectual resistance that only an inner emotional acquiescence, and then an alliance with the shifting ground of things that is being prepared keeps us going and takes over, so that for us, as for Helen Fairwood, the sphinxes appear not foreign but most familiar. “Maryland is exactly the sort of child, more or less, I was,” Mrs. Fairwood tells Captain Rafton, “when I first crossed.” “And what kind of child do you think you are now?” he asks. To cross from America to Europe, to cross from childhood into womanhood, to cross from innocence into wisdom or mistrust? We have been confused and we are not sure. To be a child may mean more than we first thought.

What Helen Fairwood comes to feel as she stands with Rafton in the ruins of Karnak, in the blur or erasure of moonlight, is first the incarnation of Greek entities in the scene. Rafton appears to be Zeus as he turns to her who seems now to be “another Leda or Calliope.” But then, deeper—“What kind of child do you think you are now?”—the two see together an appearance out of the moonlight of a “tiny temple or tomb or birth-house,” a Greek shrine within the Egyptian: “It rose as if cut from one block of stone, at that little distance she could not tell of quite what material, with the moon too working its common magic
.
” The miasma of phrases, drifts of meaning within meaning exhausting any literal reading until the prose swarms with seeds of meaning, may be to prepare for the image of a wish. As Mrs. Fairwood and Captain Rafton return from Karnak, it seems to her “as if they stood static and the thud-thud of hoofs was only the heart beat of some close, live body. As if they in some strange exact and precious period of pre-birth, twins, lovers, were held, sheltered beneath some throbbing
heart.” Egypt, the moon, the night, here, may be a mother, and the two, the man and the woman, are for a moment the twin King and Queen, the children in the womb of Egypt. This Egypt, this night, is the Mother, the Imagination, the Dream that—it is the presiding theme of H.D.’s later work—is not only revelatory of but creative of Reality.

Hipparchia, confused in her fever, hears an “odd insistent bird note of anguish” that may be out of the past or of the distance, “a voice from far and far and far webbed over with its pain of actuality.” The pulse of the pain is actual, a condition of her fever. But it is also—the whole is a palimpsest—the script of an earlier pain, the pulse of labor pains that Raymonde Ransome knew in 1917. Hipparchia and Raymonde exist as twins in a womb of time where there is no before and after. They coexist. And Hipparchia in 75
B.C
. remembers, as if it were in the past and also in the future, Raymonde’s labor pains.

“But there is no such thing as a start and a finish of the whole circumference of a circle,” the Hellenistic philosopher Porphyrius argues, and he refers then to the Hellenic philosopher Heraclitus: “Beginning and end in a circle’s circumference are common
.
” Hipparchia, Raymonde, Helen Fairwood, and their author H.D., like Heraclitus’s mortals and immortals, “live in each other’s death, die in each other’s life
.
” For H.D., as for the Greek philosophers, the reality of the world belongs to a unity of creative thought in which it has its origins, the circumference of a divine idea.

But the pain is an actual bird note, “outside,” an insistence of a new figure working in the matrix where identity is in transition. Hipparchia’s actual sickness we see now as something else, the condition in which a new state of consciousness is at work. The birth of a child, the birth of a poem, the birth of a spirit, the birth of self out of self—a host of experiences and fantasies, suffering and wish, gather to charge the epiphany of the little birth house with its particular force. They are rhymes, sounding in each other; so that a bass note accumulates. They are resounding identities belonging to the emergence in their unity of one person. Not only Raymonde in Hipparchia, and Hipparchia in Helen Fairwood, but each of these in turn in a mystery of person are more than a self portrait of H.D., whose personality now is not that of author but that of a member of the cast in the play. The autobiographical has become part of the
fiction of the whole; H.D.’s own personality begins to appear, like the persons of the stories, as an extension of an identity in the process of revealing itself or creating itself.

It seems to Marius as he looks at Hipparchia “as if the very substance of the light webbed in that late sun, in that wanfaced, wild, thin woman was the very gay wedding garment (he searched his mind for a vague remembered image ah—) Medea wrought for Jason. A garment that as he drew it on, clung close and poisoned him with a thousand evil pricklings.” Drawn into the web of associations, it seems to him at first that she is a witch—even as in H.D.’s late work,
Helen in Egypt,
Achilles will cry out at first, “Are you Hecate? are you a witch?” Then it seems to him Pallas Athene is present, only to give way in his mind to another figure out of myth, the weaver who challenged Athene in her art. “Was she simply, put it to the final test, some wayward voice personified?”

He began again the old tiresome and boring circle. The web and web and web that was the illusion of Hipparchia. He said suddenly for, that he could see, no reason, ‘Hipparchia is no Pallas but Arachne.’

In “Secret Name,” the figure of the woman as Arachne, the webspinner, appears again. Helen Fairwood’s over-mind is Athenian, but, below, her thoughts wander and in the dusk of evening take over:

It was utterly Athenian starkly to define, to outline in terms of thought every human emotion, not making allowance for this intermediate state where thought and emotion were delicately merged. Thought and emotion merged delicately now that she had let go, or now that her very evident fatigue had let go for her, that stark analytical hold on things of emotion, on things of intellect. Fire-flies (she couldn’t help feeling) should have darted up, hung between her and the smudged-out smile of the oblong, seated cat-Sekmet, a veil, glimmering of dancing frenzied stars.

The under-mind wandering weaves a complexity in which the fatigue of the over-mind spreads until Athene succumbs to Arachne. Dressing for dinner, Helen finds that “she was in the un-Athenian dusk of the
blurred over Luxor garden, making deep down a web, a fine and subtle surprise for Captain Rafton . . . when the blue slim creature with the heavy blue collar of blue stones should rise, ‘
you
’.” Her upper-mind had thought about Greece and Egypt, about thought and emotion, but her lower-mind all the time had been conceiving how she would veil herself:

She was planning this, in the spider part of her subconsciousness, all this, but her brain had not recognized the plan, had only starkly qualified the empty spaces of the garden with some image, ‘there should be, why aren’t there, knots and star jewels of flaming fire-flies?’ Her brain had formed that precise image but her spider self was weaving, weaving down, down the very, very self she was to offer.

The reoccurrences are rhymes or knots in the web of reality. Suddenly, at the knot of it, we
realize
what is going on. If Pallas Athena may stand for the gnosis, the ultimate knowledge of the cosmic order, Arachne stands for the worker whose work is the realization of What Is. H.D. is to be concerned now—as her Hipparchia, Raymonde, or Helen Fairwood are—with “transitions of life,” with things that enter not only her thought but her identity, which will be changed and figured anew. “Osiris was waiting to recall her,” it seems to Hipparchia. Who the Osiris is still engages H.D.’s imagination twenty years later in
The Walls Do Not Fall:
“Osiris, / the star Sirius,”

relates resurrection myth
and resurrection reality

through the ages . . .