The H.D. Book (37 page)

H.D.–Raymonde Ransome–Hipparchia is a Greek in exile among Romans in a Roman world. And then there are others, not Roman or Greek, but Asiatic or Egyptian: the witch Mavis at her mirror, “the incense of some banished Circe that rose in spirals toward an enchantress’ cedar roof so that Greeks (thinking men) were blurred over and forgot their Greek formula” in “Murex,” or Katherine and Alex Mordant, “the late over-ornate winged Sphinx” and “some bearded bull” “Ninevah”—figures of old disastrous affairs, persons of a sexual magic. And in H.D.’s consistent translation into Hellenic parallels, they are figures of the orientalizing cults in the Roman world. “In this, our present day, literary Alexandria,” she had written in 1916. It was
Gareth’s role, not only to rescue Raymonde from death in 1919, but after “those diplomatic dodgings with poor Rockway,” “after five years’ separation,” to rescue Raymonde from evil in 1925 or 1926, from the very midst of this mix-up with Katherine and Mordant.

Who were they? those others? “Once when I painfully unravelled a dingy, carelessly woven strip of tapestry of cause and effect and related to him, in over-careful detail, some none-too-happy friendships,” H.D. writes of Freud, “he waved it all aside . . . But why,’ he asked, ‘did you worry about all this? Why did you think you had to tell me?
Those two didn’t count
’.”

“
Those two didn’t count,
” she continues: “There were two’s and two’s and two’s in my life.” And among these, “there were two countries, America and England as it happened, separated by a wide gap in consciousness and a very wide stretch of sea.” The persons in “Narthex” belong also to two interlocking figures: “They were superimposed like two mystic triangles, the two triangles that make a star, the seal of Solomon. Triangle pointing up, triangle pointing down . . . the seal of utter wisdom. Alex Mordant, Katherine, Raymonde . . . ” this is the triangle not only of what Gareth calls “evil,” the evil in Raymonde, and of what Raymonde thinks of as the orientalizing Greek and the emotions, but also of the pre-war world—Katherine and Mordant and Raymonde, when in their company, are
demodé,
“PreRaphaelite.” Then: “Raymonde again (the Ray Bart of Gareth’s predilection) Gareth and Daniel.”

Later the figure returns to Raymonde’s mind: “The triangle Raymonde, Daniel, Gareth was a sort of platinum-white self-luminous white thing, you couldn’t dissipate it. Iron frame work of burnt out triangle of Katherine, Mordant, Raymonde being burnt out leaves residue of suffering. Gareth was insufferable.” The inner war with her angel has been rising all along, and now it speaks out: “What did Gareth know of the feeling of a burnt out frame work? What did Daniel? Alex Mordant knew things, Katherine was things. Why can’t Gareth leave me alone to become something of the past? . . . Why can’t Gareth leave me to be played out?”

Gareth and Daniel are late-war and post-war eyes. “Garry held true, fibre and valour but with strident inhibitions enough to drive any one,
let alone poor nerve-shattered Rockway, to destruction. Garry had to be like that . . . ” to survive. “Garry links me up to the post-war people,” Raymonde thinks, “I link Garry up to the war people. We have held on sometimes hating each other . . . as now.”

Two countries, two times: H.D. ambiguously American-English, before-the-war / modern, felt her life itself as a link of a larger design, an interweaving of two areas of pattern. Two continents: the Old World and the New World. But then there was also the duality of feeling. In “Narthex,” as years later in The War Trilogy, she builds interlocking patterns of her two’s and three’s, of fours and sevens, to compose the complex of her feelings and thought. “Classic Venice, romantic Venice (Raymonde was debauched with the whole spectacle), poster Venice, post-card Venice, Othello Venice, clap-trap stage Rialto Venice became real . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wagner and Duse and George Sand Venice (she was frankly reeling with it) came true, became so many sets of feeling to cope with.”

It is this very multiphasic association that alienates Raymonde from Gareth. “Garry saw in one dimension . . . outgrown trick of pre-war Raymonde’s.” “Ages kept coming up into ages where they don’t belong, Raymonde was stricken with it, ghost ages like the dove in the light globe, Tintoretto swings, dove-sun into his barn annunciation in the Scuolo di San Rocco.” And Gareth, who does not see this way, is left out. “Propitiate Gareth,” Raymonde commands herself, “get her into it.” “She had spread wide wings and Garry (this was the honor of it) hadn’t. Garry was sulking visibly in sun-light.”

“Garry was staring at her. Be decent, Raymonde. Garry sent you the wire, got you out of vibrant, weary, over-wrought loneliness and tension. Garry paid your fare here. You’re the guest of Gareth. Be decent. You have behaved horribly.” But the fact remained: “Garry couldn’t know, odd dissociated half relationship with Rockway, emotion and all its tangled connotations. Garry moved in one cycle, had just one dial to go by . . . Garry didn’t understand emotion and all its overlayers, the seasons so to speak, marked in zodiacal symbol like those seasons now part of a sort of coronal to the madonna . . . that blue garmented love-mother with time ticking away above it.”

When we read Aldington’s
Life for Life’s Sake,
McAlmon’s
Being
Geniuses Together,
or (this year, 1963) Bryher’s
Heart to Artemis,
these have in common a one-dimensional seeing, no mind for emotion’s overlayers. They seem to be rivals of the poet; both Aldington and Bryher putting down Pound, uninterested finally in the poetry to which H.D.’s work belongs.

“Let Zeus Record,” the sequence in homage to her angel in
Red Roses for Bronze,
may also be in propitiation. For to get her into it, H.D. had made painful disclosures of her inner ambivalence of feeling. These are poems of praise too then, not only for Bryher’s loyalty, her “one dimension,” in the face of H.D.’s mixed emotions, but for her attendance in a time when Love seemed dead:

yet when Love fell
struck down with plague and war,
you lay white myrrh-buds
on the darkened lintel;

you fastened blossom
to the smitten sill;

The dedication of
The Walls Do Not Fall
in 1942 is not a propitiation. In a lifetime the poetess and her patroness had come to the understanding of old companions, living in some recognition of their differences. But it is perhaps a payment of a kind, “for Karnak,” a gift in return for the gift of 1923. A return.

And the poem itself begins as a letter from H.D. in London to Bryher, who was still in Switzerland in 1942. Just here: “from your (and my) old town-square”; but then, imperceptibly, it continues to be written for us, for all her readers.

V
.

“for Karnak 1923”

In 1920 Bryher had made real her promise that “she would herself see that the baby was protected and cherished and she would take me to a
new world, a new life.” She had made Greece possible, “a new world”—but
the
New World was America, the first mother-land. In the latter part of 1920, in fact, Bryher and H.D. had gone to America, to see, as if for a last time, the old New World. So Bryher had been guardian angel, but also nurse or mid-wife, taking H.D. from her old life into a new, a second mother-land that was Greece. “My mother’s name was Helen,” H.D. tells us in
Tribute to Freud.
And the psychoanalyst had interpreted her desire for Greece as a desire for union with her mother. “I was physically in Greece, in Hellas (Helen). I had come home to the glory that was Greece,” H.D. writes.

Geographically, this Greece was Athens or the isles, as in translating, for H.D. it was Euripides or Sappho. But in time, Hellenism meant for H.D. not Athens, the classic period, but the great Hellenic dispersion after Alexander—the city of Alexandria then, and Egypt. Her Hellenic time belongs to the stage that Gilbert Murray in his
Five Stages of Greek Religion
called “The Failure of Nerve,” in the orientalizing Greek world between the third century
B.C
. and the second century
A.D
.

“The world of Hellenism was a changed and enlarged world,” Professor W. W. Tarn writes in his
Hellenistic Civilisation:
“Though the particularism of the Greek city-state was to remain vigorous enough in fact, it had broken down in theory; it was being replaced by universalism and its corollary, individualism. The idea emerges of an oecumene or ‘inhabited world’ as a whole, the common possession of civilised men.” “It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism,” it seems to Murray. “The personality of the individual has free scope,” Professor Tarn observes, but Murray sees: “a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient enquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God.”

For the Hellenistic Greek, such as Plutarch, Egypt was the source of wisdom, at Sais, at Karnak. Helen, in H.D.’s
Helen in Egypt,
is hidden away in an Amen-temple that may be at Karnak, in a “mother” back of Greece, back of America. And in
Palimpsest,
the book in which H.D. in the mid-twenties sought to delineate her Hellenistic consciousness related to the modern period, Ermy in “Murex” is a Jew, but she is also “The East. The lotos of Buddha.” She is “dead, unopened, unawakened”;
she is “Egypt.” What Murray called the Failure of Nerve was also the mixing of Greek with Jewish, Indian, and Egyptian civilisations—the reawakening of the ancient world in the birth of a new. So, in
Palimpsest
the third “chapter” or story is “Secret Name,” “Excavator’s Egypt.”

We too are excavators. In the vulgar eloquentia of our day we have a valuable coinage “to dig,” that may mean in the popular sense “to go in for”; that makes sense, deeper sense, in light of how archaeology has awakened our imagination of origins or sources in time past, as meaning to dig thru layers of what a thing is, to get back to the roots and to reconstruct from fragments. Back of that, the love one must have for the idea of Troy or the Mayan thing to go digging for it.

Here, anyway, is a last find for the day. Some glimpse of another previous world, though it was contemporary also, seen in the genre of “Secret Name.” “Hipparchia” and “Murex” may be compared with the novels and short stories of Mary Butts, to the life of
Speed the Plough,
which appeared in 1923, or of
Ashe of Rings,
which was published by Contact Editions, closely associated thru McAlmon and Bryher with H.D.’s world. And in her later historical novels of the thirties, in
The Macedonian
and
Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra,
Mary Butts portrays the dawn and the height of the Hellenistic spirit. For the connoisseur of
The Little Review, The Dial, Pagany,
or
Life and Letters Today,
Mary Butts and H.D. appeared in one context and must have had their resonances.

In turn, “Secret Name” recalls another writer of the twenties—this time not a member of the avant-garde but a popular writer—Algernon Blackwood. I never asked H.D. if she had read Blackwood. He belonged to the same generation as Yeats, and in
The Centaur
in 1911 he had portrayed a Greece behind Greece itself, an elemental Nature that man knows in dream. If she had never read Blackwood, H.D. was to enter the same thought. “I’ve begun at the wrong end,” O’Malley says in
The Centaur;
“I shall never reach men through their intellects . . . I must get at them
from within.
To reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise up from within. I see the truer way. I must do it
from the other side.
It must come to them—in Beauty . . . I can work it better from the other side—from that old, old Garden which is the Mother’s heart.”

Ghost stories have to do with our feeling about the presence of the
past in the present where we are. Blackwood, like M. L. R. James before him, had a feeling of the evil of the past, the ecstasy of the past as a power over man. James in 1904 had published the first of a series of volumes of such stories that had their fascination, the very real impact, in the real terror and disgust which James, the scholar of heretical documents, had found in those “ghosts” of old ways that lasted on, behind the scenes, in Christian history.

But for Blackwood the beauty was greater than the evil. Like Yeats, he was at home in the occult and supernatural, most alive in the magic of the Eternal Return. To be possessed, in
The Promise of Air
(1918) or
The Bright Messenger
(1922), is to be inspired, flooded by a larger consciousness, an elemental but also an angelic Self. The horror of the orthodox Christian James gives way in the theosophical Hermeticist Blackwood to a floating sympathy with all spiritual imagination.

The story “Secret Name” may have an intermediate kind in the psychological ghost-stories of May Sinclair, but in its central revelation of an
other
world, we are, for the first time in H.D.’s work, clearly in the genre of the theosophical romance.

Memories of childhood and events in the past, and certain dreams, H.D. tells us in
Tribute to Freud,
are “retained with so vivid a detail that they become almost events out of time.” Memories, dreams, and then—it is the core of her memoir—hallucination: the “writing on the wall,” actually projected before her eyes on the wall of a hotel bedroom in Corfu 1920. It was for Freud, she tells us, “the most dangerous or the only actually dangerous ‘symptom’.” It was the essence of Imagism, the immediate presentation.

Not until the Second World War did H.D. come, as Blackwood and Yeats had, into theosophical circles. She may be speaking, in the Freud memoir of 1944, from her later view, but not necessarily, for the concept of second-sight belongs to folk lore at large and the idea of vision to poet lore, before whatever doctrine there may be in theosophical initiation. “For myself,” H.D. continues: “I consider this sort of dream or projected picture or vision as a sort of half-way state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who, for lack of a more definite term, we must call psychics or clairvoyants.” Then later: “I may say that never before and never since have I had an experience of this kind.”