The H.D. Book (31 page)

It was this same time of year, with Orion overhead, in 1955, when Olson read aloud to Jess and me the beginnings of a new sequence of poems,
O’Ryan.
The scene in the bare room at Black Mountain with its cold and the blazing winter sky at the window springs up as I write. The fugitive hero of that sequence was drawn from Robert Creeley, but he is also in the humor of the poem Hercules the Sun or Son who must pass the twelve houses of the zodiacal initiations: “Overall, mover of the unnumbered”—“who did twelve labors,” Olson names him.

•

He’s also—what else has he to be?—the rueful figure any of us are as the men we are:

who

  told you your flesh is

as rosy as your
baby’s, as rosy as

Rosy, as, your
moth-er’s, as who got you up

and to be up there, sky-high, is also to be “all lit up” as in
O’Ryan
8, and look down, as in 9, “you got a hard on / and it’s / to be made.” But:

I don’t read your face. Or you mine.
By looking up or down. . . .

•

Yet our roots are in the sky. Radical! The Milky Way appears, cross-section of our galaxy. In the earliest news out of heaven, what they said—the
mythos
—was that it was the slain body of the dragon, it was the flow of everlasting mothering milk, it was light, it was rhetoric, river, fluid. A stream of suns.

•

Something of what we are is up in the air, beyond our grasp, and wherever we are not sure of what is going on—as in the heavens then—a phantasy of our selves appeared.

•

Otherwise, other
ways
(as Charles Olson gave me the lead in his “Against Wisdom As Such” that our wise is not more or less than our ways), if there are not these roots in the sky, this place that is also a time of what must be—otherwise poetry is a litter. “Litterature,” Lewis Carroll called his collection of bits and starts out of which he put together
Sylvie and Bruno.
“The reader will overlook my spell,” he added.

•

In our time, Joyce, gathering up his mountain of litter, sorting and resorting, accruing scraps upon scraps, took a patron in that “Dodge-son.”
He too made out of the mound of twenty-five years’ labor a pun upon literature and wrote a crawling language that must enter here, if only to play the adversary, for I have taken thought in this ground too. Like Milton, Joyce was blind.
Finnegans Wake
has its roots among letters and in the body, as if it were not moved by the stars. The work has intestinal fortitude, true to an internal chemistry. Its seasons are rounds of digestion. He had lost sight of the heavens.

•

In a man’s guts there are no gods. There is agony, there is pleasure. Pain that binds the spirit to its own when-where. Pleasure that may be taken, as we may take thought.

In the flight of the imagination, in the reading of the stars, in taking thought, we go out of our selves. Flame out of the wet wood. Out of literature then. Out of matters of pain and pleasure.

•

The consciousness bent down to a literature lives on its wits in a sulfurous burning. And if we come under literary dictates, all is voluptuous or all agony, is a matter of what we like and do not like, of literary taste, of good-and-bad the tongue knows, is hell.

As the other consciousness we see in the light spread out in the heavens. Gods there; and in the darkness, daemonic stars.

•

In the map of stars we began to map our selves. Our projection of what we are was also a first poetry. A first making of a thing or image that projected a spiritual form in what we did not know. Well . . . There must have been another projected spiritual form—not only this but also this—when the adam named their things and kinds of the earth, another network of sticks and stones and names “that never hurt one.” In our literary listings and groupings, we are doing all of that, nothing more. We make constellations in poetry that are, if they be anything, linked by gender, works of our selves then, ideograms of spirit, of when and where what we are is happening.

I
.

This study of H.D.’s work is such an astrology, projecting a net of responses in which points in the sky and lines of feeling suggest figures in a plot at work from day to day. Here each opus is a sun, the locality of an event. An opus in itself—but I have in mind the
Opus
or Work as it appears in the imagination of certain alchemists, something undertaken in which we may discover the way of the soul, begin the romance of our spirit. A romance in Poetry that would be a counterpart of the alchemical romances of the seventeenth century.

So, when I think of H.D.’s later work: The War Trilogy, “The Writing on the Wall”
(Tribute to Freud),
the poem “Good Frend” and the historical essay “The Guest” that form
By Avon River,
and her “Madrigal”—the
roman à clef Bid Me to Live
—that these are masterpieces has a double charge. It means both that she is my master here in the art of writing; and, just in this, that she is my master here in spirit. That this book, in turn, is an apprentice piece. Where, trying my hand, a student, I must often miss and go on as best I can.

Jean Cocteau lists his
Oeuvres
as a king might list the states of his kingdom:
Poésie, Poésie de Roman, Poésie Critique, Poésie de Théâtre, Poésie Graphique, Poésie Cinématographique.
Drawings and movies are conceived as propositions of “Poetry.” As we recognize that Blake’s illustrations, not only of his own books but of Bunyan, Milton, and Dante, belong to the plot of his poetics.

Drawing a picture of his work in this way, articulating not only into prose and verse, but into formal entities—poem, novel, drama, critique, history, translation—the poet creates a syntax of the whole art in which individual works are jointures of a larger structure, not conclusions but functions. Each thing-in-itself is revealed anew as it is seen as the member of possible sequences.

So Joyce conceived
Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses,
and
Finnegans Wake
as a deliberate series of forms in which his work is defined—as characteristic a design as the progress of parts in
Ulysses:
the book of songs, the book of short stories, the memoir, the drama, the book of the conscious mind or Dublin awake, the book of the dreaming mind or Dublin asleep. The
sense of order in Joyce is simple-minded, comparable to that of César Franck; his inventive genius lay in the elaboration and illustration of one-dimensional, one-directional systems.

In Pound’s work too we recognize the conceptual mind of the artist at work in the total design, but here that total design is not, as Joyce’s is, a prescribed convention which the artist solves in a unique variation. Pound’s total form, like the form of any poem or book, is not obvious but hidden, intuited by the artist then as a process, organizing and reorganizing the meaning of what he has done in what he does. “Years ago,” he writes in the “Date Line” for
Make It New
in 1935, “I made the mistake of publishing a volume
(Instigations)
without blatantly telling the reader that the book had a design.” Here design means also intent in an open possibility. In “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” Pound had found the inspiration of a moving syntax (as contrasted with the categorical syntax of Joyce, where parts of speech are things). “A true noun, an isolated thing,” we read in the Fenollosa essay, “does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.”

As the works of the poet are articulated, so too his life is articulated. Phases appear, and immediate impressions and emotions are felt to belong to the ideogram of a body in time. The individual image operates as a manifestation of feeling, as the individual persona operates as a manifestation of identity. Projected in time from a series of works, there is an increment of design. Feelings take on the shape of a created life-experience, the lifetime in Poetry, and the personae take on the shape of a self, the poet.

Images, as the Japanese poet Kitasono proposed to Pound in 1937, take on another dimension in their assembly, and the poet, moving on from the evocation of the immediate image, in the “collection, arrangement and combination” of images becomes involved in a plastic apprehension. “That which we vaguely call poetical effect,” he writes, “means, generally, ideoplasty, which grows out of the result of imagery.” The shape of an imaginary geometry, an aesthetic intuition like the thinking out “to
make a heart-shaped space with two right angles” it seems to Kitasono, begins to haunt the poet as he begins to be aware of the arrangements and combinations possible in his work. A sense of inner orders, of outline, arises. “The relation between imagery and ideoplasty,” he continues, “makes us suppose the heart-shaped space which is born by the connection of the same mysterious two curves.” In this process the aesthetic feeling arises and, in turn: “The phenomena in our life proceed, through our senses to our experiences, and intuitions. It is intuition rationally that provides the essentials for imagery, and it is the method of poetry that materializes intuitions perceptively and combines.”

In H.D.’s early work the evocation of the Greek past and in the Greek past of the god-world, of nature and of her own life-drama in superimposed image and person, the identifications with Sappho and Euripides, and the development of the dramatic monologue and choral modes in sequences, the identification with the spirits of Sappho and Euripides: these are formal intuitions. In
Red Roses for Bronze
in 1931 the forms are clearly realized by the poet. And with
Ion,
translated from Euripides, and the notes to
Ion,
begun in Athens in 1920, there is a turning point—the crowning achievement of her first phase, but also the declaration of her later work. And in the very dedication of the book we see the poet’s formalization of her own creative life. “For B. [Bryher] Athens 1920 / P [her daughter Perdita] Delphi 1932.” In her novel
Palimpsest
in 1926 this suggestion of design in time first appears in the sequence of times given the component parts: “Hipparchia” (circa 75
B.C
.), “Murex” (circa 1916-1926
A.D
.), “Secret Name” (circa 1925
A.D
.). From the flux of possible relationships she has begun to take certain keys in which her own life-experience is plotted and in turn to find between her own time affinities in history. Hipparchia and Raymonde Ransome are members with H.D. herself in a composite figure drawn from H.D.’s two confinements—the first in 1916 when the child died; the second in 1919 when H.D. herself almost died in the influenza epidemic. These identities and contrasts are correlatives of a third form, “a heart-shaped space,” as Kitasono called it, imagined in time by the growing formal sense. These images rhyme with each other by factors of child-birth, of being deserted, of fever, of being found and nursed.

The transitions or notes which H.D. adds in her translation of the
Ion
of Euripides are initial to the major phase of her work that lasts from the inception of The War Trilogy with
The Walls Do Not Fall
in 1942 to the end of her life with
Hermetic Definitions
in 1960. From the vague sense she had had in 1916 that she was not interested in the image as a thing in itself but in something “moving, whirling, drifting,” by 1932 she had come to see movement as inherent in the proportion of Euripides’ work. It is part of H.D.’s interpretation in translation that she divides the whole into “nineteen divisions . . . sanctioned by the form of the play.” It is not only that “each represents an entrance, an exit, a change in inner mood and external grouping of the characters,” but we begin to be aware that back of H.D.’s conception of the play is a complex analysis—historical, ideological, psychological, as well as aesthetic. What is involved is the change from knowing how to do something that might be prescribed into knowing what must be done; from the mastery the craftsman has with his language to the obedience that the initiate must have who has come under the orders of meanings and inner structures he must follow. It is no longer
her
art but The Art.

So, when in her Translator’s Note to
Ion,
H.D. writes: “It is significant that the word
ION
has a double meaning. It may be translated by the Latin word
UNUS
, meaning one, or first, and is also the Greek word for violet, the sacred flower of Athens,” she may not only refer to Ion as initiating a new spirit in Athens but also to her own translated Ion as initiating a new spirit in her work to come.

Ion
is the pivot. But then there is another aspect to the time of the work for it is a time of crisis. In the world at large between 1929 and the Second World War were years of economic depression and then the many crises and apprehensions in which the inevitability of the War was built up. In H.D.’s personal life there may also have been depression, the poet’s coming to himself
“per una selva oscura,”
in a dark wood,
“che la diritta via era smarrita”
—where the straight way is lost. For H.D., the very increased consciousness of the structure, of significance and form, may have been the crisis. She sought and found her way in the psychoanalysis with Freud in 1933 and 1934.

For she stood upon the threshold of an art where she was to take her place with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in the adventure of the higher imagination, in the full risk of the poem in which divine,
human, and animal orders must be revealed. There had been an heroic resolve in
Ion.
“Especially . . . ” Freud wrote H.D. in his appreciation of her notes, “where you extol the victory of reason over passions.” But it is, too, in the play, an address to the passionate intellect.