The H.D. Book (44 page)

The history of “in-groups”—Bloomsbury, Villefranche, or Basel—has yet to be studied out. Literary historians are shy, even unhappy, of accounting for the way purely social factors enter in to the picture of the development of the art. We are attracted, moth-mind to the flame, by the brilliance of the company. Within the charmed circle the four reel little drama glows, we are drawn in. To have been included! But just here I falter. From the outside, the circle is an armed exclusion. Raymonde, Gareth, Daniel in H.D.’s novels test each other as if they tested the defenses of a citadel. One could never be certain that circumstances, surroundings—for a moment these walls suggest the other walls of The War Trilogy—would not set one apart among “the wrong sort of things and the wrong sort of attitudes.” Here, as in the web that satisfies and the web that she fears of H.D.’s reply, the attractive social circle is forbidding; fearful within, and fearful without.

The group of Bryher’s friends is involved now, as she is, in films. In
film-talk and film study, and also in the making of a film. For Kenneth Macpherson in 1929 worked on a film with H.D. as star. Somewhere within the charmed circle copies may still exist. The “silver-self” “cast” as a “star” by Narcissus in the poem “Myrtle Bough” takes on a new meaning. And the medium of film is ultimately in the image projected in terms of light, cast upon the screen. Back and forth the puns of being cast in a star-role, being cast on the screen, being cast in a new light dance in bewildering webs of exchange. “The light within light fascinates me,” H.D. wrote. It’s a risky reading that for a moment again another impulse arises linking the flood of light streaming out from the movie projector with “the rain of beauty” of
The Flowering of the Rod
and just beyond with “where great stars pour down / their generating strength.” “The sky is skyey apparition,” Dorothy Richardson writes in
Close Up:
“white searchlight. The book remains the intimate, domestic friend, the golden lamp at the elbow.”

In the book tapestry, painting, film may be evoked as one vision where the mind is weaver, painter, projector. Here images are not seen in locus of the subconscious or locus of the eye’s retina, but they are
visualized,
created in the mind’s light that men have always puzzled over. In the midst of the City under Fire in
The Walls Do Not Fall
there is a light in which the artist works “circled with what they call the
cartouche
.” The
cartouche
in French is an escutcheon upon which or within which figures that are emblematic appear; it is also a cartridge. In Webster’s it says: “2. An oval or oblong figure, especially one on an Egyptian monument containing a sovereign’s name. 3. In some fireworks, the case containing the inflammable materials.” H.D. makes a passing joke about it, a play of words between her art and the rival war: “folio, manuscript, old parchment / will do for cartridge cases”; and then that “Hatshepsut’s name”

        is still circled

with what they call the
cartouche
.

Like the surrealists after Freud, she sets up new movements in the mind by the evocation of puns. Or like Eisenstein in his new language of cinematography where montage, rapid sequences and juxtapositions of
images extend the vocabulary of the film. “The technical possibility,” he writes in
Close Up,
“foolishly called a ‘trick,’ is undoubtedly just as important a factor in the construction of the new cinematography as is the new conception of staging from which it is sprung.” Where it is not their pointedness or cleverness but their power to disturb our set idea, our sense of outline, that counts.

Here the content of the
cartouche,
the Queen’s name, and then the thought of her, so that even in reference she appears to the mind’s eye, is something that threatens the cherished reality of the tangible; as the immediacy of God in evocation or invocation, beyond the sensory or outside the sensory, is something we resist the thought of. Stars, immortals, gods, contained in their cartouche or cartridge, the poem, if they invade our sense of the actual, disturb, are “inflammable materials.”

And The War Trilogy itself in the mode of the apocalyptic revelation contains within the circle of its ecstatic longing and belonging the light of joy that is also the flame-heat of a stored-up wrath. The rain of fire is God’s wrath, and in a curious emanation the “sword” emerges from the “word.” Were it not for men’s thoughts and dreams, we realize, there would have been no war. The realization, once it is there, never ceases to trouble H.D. The terror and evil of the war give power and beauty to the poem.

Never in Rome
so many martyrs fell;

not in Jerusalem,
never in Thebes,

so many stood and watched
chariot-wheels turning,

from the fearful scene a proud music takes over, and the poet’s voice takes on strength and resonance. The poem evoking, summoning forth from where it was hidden, this meaning of war, wrath, and the fulfillment of prophecy—is apocalyptic. Ammunition. A cartouche.

Within the circle of initiates—the “we” that in H.D.’s life had been a group of poets and then an exclusive social group, and now, in wartime London, was a group of occultists—the encircling containment of
an art, a knowledge in which figures become emblematic—we see the double image of a group and their patron or leader. One, among whom H.D. as writer belongs, children of Hermes,

wistful, ironical, willful
who have no part in
new-world reconstruction

take on from the cartouche an Egyptian character. But the cartouche that contains or surrounds the group is also “a spacious bare meetinghouse” where, within the congregation of the dream, a man appears, “upright, slender.” Once, long ago, she had been in love with Him in Daniel. There is no time for that. The whole scene exists in a split-second. The poet was dozing, perhaps . . . anyway: “then I woke with a start / of wonder and asked myself” she says. He is, or might have been, Ra, Osiris, Amen. In the projection, between his circle and the stars, he appears in another avatar as the zodiacal Aries painted in His Zeus glory—the Golden Fleece and the Lamb, as in the late middle ages He had indeed been worshipped at the Court of Burgundy. It is the Christ who impends, and His advent is created in the poem as it was created in history in the alembic of troubled boundaries, superimposed and adulterated civilizations, dissolved religions—a “trick” montage of Greek, Persian, Hindu, Egyptian, Syrian gods in one unorthodox Jewish god, a synthetic realization scandalous to the orthodox, in His incarnation an heretical affront, as H.D.’s realization in The War Trilogy was scandalous to the literary orthodoxy of the day. It was “silly,” “irresponsible,” “compounded of primitive elements yet rather appealing to a sensibility both modern and confused,” to present the world of the poet’s imagination in the old sense of the dream-vision; to be aware thruout that this dream-vision was still the very human mode of thought that Freud had studied; and in it all to insist upon the divine inspiration. Not only the thought of the Master in the dream but His Presence:

In the meeting house, we see who the new Master over Love is, whom the star from the beginning announced:

He might even be the authentic Jew
stepped out from Velasquez;

As long ago the sculptor appeared at work between the stone and the light in the poem “Pygmalion,” creating a medium at once for his art and for the god, and H.D. herself pictured her part as poet in terms of the chiseled line, the tempered and hammered image, now the painter appears at work between the dream and the realization or incarnation, and H.D. names the palette as one with script and letters that:

are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere.

The magic charges the Christ of Velasquez with living Presence; a confusion between what the painter has made and what has inspired the painter in which the work of art has a life of its own. So that the poet recalling the eyes in the painting lowered know that open they “would daze, bewilder,” and in that bewilderment then testifies:

I assure you that the eyes
of Velasquez’ crucified

now look straight at you,
and they are amber and they are fire.

IV
.

“An
image,
in our sense,” Pound writes in his 1916 memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, “is real because we know it directly. If it have an age-old traditional meaning this may serve as proof to the professional student of symbology that we have stood in the deathless light, or that we have walked in some particular arbour of his traditional paradiso, but that is not our affair. It is our affair to render the
image
as we have perceived or conceived it.” In “The Serious Artist” (1913), he saw that the responsibility of the arts was to “bear witness and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man.” “Even this pother about gods reminds one that something is worthwhile,” he went on. And in “Religio” from the same pre-war period, Pound presents the Renaissance neo-paganism of Gemistos Plethon, Ficino, or Pico della Mirandola, the higher humanism in which gods are “eternal states of mind” manifest “when the
states of mind take form” that may appear to the sense of vision or to the sense of knowledge. Gnostic then as well as imagist, but not Christian. “What are the gods of this rite?” Pound asks, and answers: “Apollo, and in some sense Nelios, Diana in some of her phases, also the Cytherean goddess.” “To what other gods is it fitting, in harmony or in adjunction with these rites, to give incense?” “To Kore and to Demeter, also to lares and to oreiads and to certain elemental creatures.”

Form and rite here are not associated by Pound with the image and practice of the poet, though, as in “Religio” it is by beauty that we know the divine forms, in another early essay “The Tradition” (1913) the tradition in poetry is “a beauty which we preserve,” and in passing, Pound tells us “We know that men worshipped Mithra with an arrangement of pure vowel-sounds.” This is as far as Pound goes toward a suggestion of the poet’s creative involvement with the divine world. Listing the reports that the artist must not falsify, Pound in “The Serious Artist” includes that he must not falsify his report “as to the nature of his ideal of this, that or the other, of god”—where Pound has all but put god aside among the random fancies of some men, with “this, that or the other,” as if he wanted to be sure he would not be taken for a Christian sentimentalist or enthusiast. “If god exist,” he adds. And not an “ideal” but a fact: there is no qualification here of “if the life force exist.” “We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy,” Pound argues: “something more or less like electricity or radio-activity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion.”

In “Cavalcanti” Pound speaks directly of the god in the work of art: “The best Egyptian sculpture is magnificent plastic; but its force comes from a non-plastic idea, i.e., the god is inside the statue. . . . The force is arrested, but there is never any question about its latency, about the force being the essential, and the rest ‘accidental’ in the philosophic technical sense. The shape occurs.” We recognize here as we recognize in H.D.’s “Pygmalion” the informing genius of Gaudier-Brzeska. For this driven youth sculpted, wrote, or talked late at night to H.D. and Richard Aldington as he talked to Pound or Hulme—to create again and again in talk his vision of the artist-demiurgos at work in a spiritual
vortex. In his essays and letters the language is charged with the character of his nature and art: “the driving power,” “life in the absolute,” “the intensity of existence.” In H.D.’s early idea of her art, in images of fire and cut stone, the ghost of Gaudier does enter in; as it enters in in Pound’s idea of her art in motives of force and form.

Does Bergson’s
élan vital
enter in here? For Ezra Pound in his first London years the
élan vital
was very much in the air—in the theosophical environs of Yeats, Mead, and
The Quest
lectures, and then again in an entirely other circle, in the philosophical environs of the Bergsonian T. E. Hulme. In his “Prolegomena” and “Credo” of 1912, Pound sees his own turning to the Melic poets and to the Medieval romance-tradition in poetry as vital, not literary: “a man feeling the divorce of life and his art may naturally try to resurrect a forgotten mode if he find in that mode some leaven, or if he think he sees in it some element lacking in contemporary art which might unite that art again to its sustenance, life.”

When Wyndham Lewis’s scorn for the romantic takes over—ranting against what he sees as the cult of Time, the Primitive, and the Child—Bergson will be out of bounds. When Eliot’s pervading concern for respectability introduces its criterion with the rhetoric of a new literary orthodoxy—though Pound’s
élan
will win thru in
The Cantos,
flooding passages with image and presence of light and divine energy—in Pound’s theory kulchur will replace life as the sustenance of art.

But in his first development—pre-war, pre-Eliot and Lewis, Pound’s premises are not ideological but psychological. He insists upon the intellectual and emotional complex where “ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and concomitant emotions, must be in harmony must form an organism.” In poetry “the mind is upborne upon the emotional surge.” This relation of the poem to a wave of life expression is as far as Pound is to go to relate the art to an organic creativity; and in his later criticism even these ideas of emotion and surge become diffident. The Aphrodite of
The Cantos
does not rise as Hesiod would have her from a bloody wave; she is not the goddess of sexual love and life renewal Pound addressed in
The Spirit of Romance
but the Aphrodite of the higher intellect in which Beauty has become a pure essence. The spirit of romance is supplanted by the spirit of the schools. Philosophers,
not poets, form the great tradition; and among philosophers, those who seek the victory of the mind over the passions are now Pound’s masters. So, in
The Pisan Cantos,
Anchises lays hold of the goddess’s “flanks of air / drawing her to him / Cythera potens”; yet even this phantasm of the air is not the very Aphrodite, who is “no cloud, but the crystal body.” In Canto XCI,
Section: Rock-Drill,
she appears again as “the
GREAT CRYSTAL
”—in its capitalization the insistence is clear. “Right reason” takes the place of the earlier “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”; and “from fire to crystal / via the body of light” the Princess Ra-Set “enters protection,”