The H.D. Book (39 page)

that may be the same limit that Raymonde sitting in the Square of St. Mark’s faces, the resistance the protestant ethic has against the alchemy, the transmutation of values, of the artist’s impulse. The modern patron, the capitalist patron, may be loyal, generous, conscientious, but he must also be righteous, and the art he sponsors must be valid, credible, creditable. For all of “wish” and “touch,” of “sea-magic” and Circe’s longing for the glance of Odysseus, Bryher in reviewing the poem “Circe” sees her as “any woman of intellect who, with the very sincerity of her vision, turns lesser minds ‘each to his own self’,” an image of the higher capitalist mind. It is not by her inability but by the very strength of her character that Gareth is not taken in by the honeyhorn of St. Mark’s cathedral with its saints and incrustations of wealthy suggestion. Bryher’s H.D. is the high-minded priestess of Artemis—the poetess set apart. But in the twenties, H.D., in the milieu provided by Bryher, changes. Athens was integrity, but now there is not only Athens. Another H.D. emerges in kinship with Venice and finds herself alienated from the earlier “pure” H.D. She has a secret alliance with things and people that Gareth hates. “Mordant brought me those blue hyacinths . . . How Gareth hated Mordant.” Phaedra in her passionate heat for Hippolytus offends Artemis: that is the play of the mid-20s,
Hippolytus Temporizes.
But also, between the artist and the patron, between the one who would transform reality and the one who would use reality, there is a difference of view and even truth that quickens another division within the self of two images where Phaedra and Artemis contend.

In “Narthex” we see for the first time the synthesis that will flower in her later work. In the composite image of St. Mark’s H.D. reaches forward towards a fusion of oriental opulence and Greek spirit in images
now of the Renaissance Christian world. “I had enough of Greek things, I said I wanted something . . . so-called Christian mysticism that finds complete co-relation with so-called classicism,” Raymonde says to Daniel: “I have found it this time and with you, in Venice. I never really understood, accepted the renaissance till this time.”

Entering more and more into the world of Bryher, H.D.’s major expression in this period is in the prose novelette that can provide elaborations and developments. Between 1925 and 1927 there are six published pieces: the three stories of
Palimpsest,
the children’s book
The Hedgehog,
the novel
Hedylus,
and the story “Narthex.” In 1928 and 1930 there are four more: two “Raymonde” stories “The Usual Star” and “Two Americans,” then “Kora and Ka” and “Mira-Mare.” There is a new—“precious” it could be felt—scene now: the cultivated love-life, the emotional transmutations of two’s and three’s, the divisions and multiplications of the authoring personality, the practised sensibilities belong to life in the higher circles of our society, the leisure class. Poems in
Red Roses for Bronze
appear not as works but as gifts or tribute. There is not only Raymonde’s “Say ‘Garry liked my writing,’ what did it mean? It meant, Garry paid my fare here and I have behaved outrageously” but there is also H.D.’s pathos in “Chance Meeting”:

Take from me something,
be it all too fine
and untranslatable and worthless
for your purpose,
take it,
it’s mine;

In the drift of her writing in the twenties, she provides a picture of this world set apart by money from the common lot of working for a living, of the poet living from hand to mouth, and set apart by the post-war modernism from the traditions of the upper class. As the artist sees it: haunted by the unrealized wealth of associations, unreal then in the terms it has made for its reality. A fiction of sensibilities, these stories are related on the one hand to the art of Proust in the period before the war or of James in the golden age of American capitalism.
Raymonde and Daniel in their triangle with Gareth, we find, are like Kate Croy and Merton Densher in their triangle with Milly Theale: “They are far from a common couple, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as befits the remarkable fashion in which fortune was to waylay and opportunity was to distinguish them,” James writes in the introduction to
The Wings of the Dove:
“—the whole strange truth of their response to which opening involves also, in its order, no vulgar art of exhibition; but what they have most to tell us is that, all unconsciously and with the best faith in the world, all by mere force of the terms of their superior passion combined with their superior diplomacy, they are laying a trap for the great innocence to come.”

A fiction of an emotional drifting, these stories related on the other hand to the literature of the “lost” generation, to the
romans-àclef
of Mary Butts, especially
Armed with Madness, The Death of Felicity Taverner,
or
Imaginary Letters,
but also the popular novels of the day, Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
or Fitzgerald’s
Tender is the Night.
The cult of the poem—Imagism—and the “we” H.D. had known in association with poets before the war was replaced now by the cult of the personality in other circles, verging upon the old orders of high society and upon the new orders of café society, little intense groups of ephemera having their day in the brief “modern” wave after the War that would run out in the “crack-up,” as it was for Fitzgerald, of the Depression. “Something not very far off the deification of man is on us now,” Mary Butts wrote in
Traps for Unbelievers
(1932):

not, or not yet, of the kings and millionaires, but, and again, and this is primitive, of the conspicuous young men and women, our sexually desirable ones, whose nature it is to wax and wane and be replaced. Our Year-in-Year-out spirits,
eniautoi daimones,
whose beauty is no stronger than a flower.

So Daniel Kinouel, Gareth’s husband, is an agonizing lure for Raymonde in “Narthex”:

the turn, she could almost feel it, of fine collar bone under the grey or under the dark blue or under the fawn-brown of his shoulders. She had
been so vivid, so certain of what had been there that there had seemed no reason for reaching across, drawing simply as one draws a curtain from before some holy statue, the cloth from those lean shoulders . . .

In the poem “Red Roses for Bronze” the avidity is not so tempered:

but sensing underneath the garment seam
ripple and flash and gleam
of indrawn muscle
and of those more taut,
I feel that I must turn and tear and rip
the fine cloth
from the moulded thigh and hip,
force you to grasp my soul’s sincerity,
and single out
me,
me,
something to challenge,
handle differently.

They turn, twist, test each other to produce flashes of higher emotion. The
noli me tangere,
that is so important a part of D. H. Lawrence’s sexual design, is important here; there is also their living off of their nerves or their erotic excitement, living beyond their means, dependent as they are upon Gareth. Like Lawrence, they use the potentiality of homosexual attractions to heighten the heterosexual bond. In London, Raymonde had held Daniel up to her lover Mordant, as if she fired the one man like a crystal before the furnace heat of the other, it seems to her; and, sitting in Venice, she recalls “this sacrificial thing between them, great bulk of remembered (in London) male body, heavy thighs” of Mordant to key up the idea of Daniel as Hermes. The double triangle image of Katherine-Mordant-Raymonde / Ray Bart–Gareth-Daniel is the instrument of an erotic art. We remember from Williams’s 1905 the naive magic of “She said I was Rosalind in
As You Like It
and she was Celia”; but now more terrible powers are called up to inhabit the drama of life.

Daniel follows to the Cathedral, where Gareth will not go, to fetch
Raymonde: “Gareth is waiting.” They have just this place and time before they must return, before Raymonde says to Daniel “We must go back to Gareth”:

‘Look at the drinking fountain’ meant ‘and how is Garry?’ Daniel knew that the ‘whole renaissance is in this drinking fountain’ meant ‘I am worried about Garry.’ The mind, a lily, rising on tall stem, rose out of confusion, out of hysteria . . . ‘I loved her . . . terribly.’

‘I mean,’ a voice continued, her voice? ‘I have loved . . . terribly. It’s terrible to love and know oneself inadequate and helpless.’ ‘So she says.’ ‘So—?’ ‘Gareth. She says she is sorry for me if . . . I love . . . Ray Bart.’ ‘Being sorry does no good to any one, I am sorry for myself, harassed and lacerated loving . . . Daniel.’ Sparks were drawn into one tall light. One candle burned where inappositely darkness had made cornice and square mosaic shine like gold fish.

The two hermetic lovers practice cruelty as if to strike a light, flint against flint. “I know why people hate you,” Raymonde will flash out: “People hate you for the same reason that they hate me, Daniel.” And Daniel will flash back:

‘You have the tortured silly smile of some archaic statue.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Rather tight. Looking mincing almost.’ ‘I know.’ ‘You don’t know, I’m rather glad you don’t know.’ ‘Why—why glad Daniel?’ ‘It’s—
horrible.
’

In “The Usual Star” (1928), the beauty of Daniel is thematic: “incandescence of swan features and the famous Swedish film star,” it seems to Raymonde; it can also include her, for there is the “incandescence of the two of them, burning with their cerebral intensity”—an identification in beauty. “Raymonde wanted Marc de Brissaic to protect her from intolerable incandescence.” In the twenties the great cult of beauty arises in those lights of the screen, gathering all possible erotic attractions: Garbo or Valentino, existing as they do in an androgynous lure. “Human nature was not meant for that strain,” Mary Butts writes of the cult of person: “The star-dust at Hollywood is full of dead stars.”

In “Two Americans” (1930), the presence of the great negro star Saul Howard awakens in Raymonde some other identification with him as
an artist or an American that exorcises the hold Daniel had had. “ ‘No, it’s altogether this way. You see,’ she was surprised to hear what she said, ‘he’s removed a silver thorn out of my side, called Daniel.’ ”

Outside the charged circle of this “incandescence”—as outside the circle of the Imagist poets—there is a “they,” those who do not understand, who misjudge: the general’s wife, the pro-consul’s widow of the poem “Halcyon.” H.D. must have been aware of how little sympathy the middle-class, more importantly, how little sympathy the professional class had for this disestablished, self-centered life of the rich. Her discomfort can show itself in the sense of vulgarity about her. But there is also the sense of being hated by the vulgar that she had known in another way as a member of the pre-War circle of poets. The “they” now are the economically responsible, the solid and moral middle-class, and Gareth, having her solid upper middle-class attitudes—having after all the “reality” of the hard cash—can seem to belong at times to “them.” In “Halcyon” we find:

‘tinsel’ they said the other lives were,
all those I loved,
I was forgot;

and later:

I never had an illusion,
they hate me,
every one, every one,
but it’s worse for you,

you’re a baby, a lost star,

“Halcyon” is a dramatic monologue, of a poor relation dependent upon “my late cousin, the wool merchant’s wife,” isolated from those who understand her, in exile in a commercial port. But H.D. too, during this period of the late twenties and the thirties was “forgot,” and where she was remembered, her critics were not sympathetic with this work. All the prejudices of the new educated class were to be against just such irresponsibility. Thomas Burnett Swann in 1963, forgetting her, can
note his dissympathy with Raymonde Ransome in summing up the prose of H.D.:

Most of the characters—poets, temptresses, hostesses—are either precious or tedious, and so, too often, is the heroine, although she seems to be intended as a contrast to her superficial friends.

[Dream, April 5, 1963: “There were things I wanted to ask you,” I said. Her attention wavered, yet she was intensely there. There was some impatience with the moment, along with her having all the time in the world. “Did you ever read Blackwood?” I asked, “You must have—” Was her answer there or not? Was she evasive or had it seemed so unimportant that her interest could not recall whether she had or not.

“But I shiver at the thought of you reading the old prose & poems,” she had written in 1960 when she was still alive: “To use Yeats’ phrase, I am ‘dreaming back’ but the intermediate writing now seems an obstruction—of course it was a way of life, of living. Don’t take it too seriously—”

And wasn’t I in asking impatient of her answering now. “I’ve been finding out the—” did I say “split” or “fault”? “—two H.D.’s.” Hilda Doolittle—H.D., Raymonde–Ray Bart.

She looked disappointed in me. But then a flash of fellow feeling was there, a conspiracy of writers. She knew that one used everything to make up one’s work. But didn’t I pose use as if it were less than or opposed to transformation?

“Yes, yes, I think we did,” she said, tentatively, gazing off into space or back into time to see her answer. In the hotel room in New York she had looked past me or beyond me that way, as if clairvoyant, searching some Akashic blank for a sign. I almost caught the titles of books as she searched for them. But I was talking—would I ever hear what
she
had to say? I had to tell her how much I knew as if that could make the bond, awaken the full force of sympathy I wanted.

“Did you ever think how much in this outdoors thing,”—I was thinking of the early poems, the woodlands of “Pursuit,” the sea of “The Shrine” “where rollers shot with blue / cut under deeper blue”—“this
back to the elements, back to nature”—I was recalling that story Williams told in his autobiography:

There had been a storm and the breakers were heavy, pounding in with overpowering force. But Hilda was entranced. I suppose she wasn’t used to the ocean anyhow and didn’t realize what she was about. For without thought or caution she went to meet the waves, walked right into them. I suppose she could swim, I don’t know, but in she went and the first wave knocked her flat, the second rolled her into the undertow, and if Bob Lamberton hadn’t been powerful and there, it might have been worse. They dragged her out unconscious, resuscitated her, and had just taken her up to the house.