The H.D. Book (61 page)

As we cannot experience pleasure but by means of others who experience either pleasure or pain thro’ us, And as all of us on earth are united in thought, for it is impossible to think without images of somewhat on earth—So it is impossible to know God or heavenly things without conjunction with those who know God & heavenly things; therefore all who converse in the spirit, converse with spirits . . .

Such tricks hath strong imagination
That if it would but apprehend some joy
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

There is a story that when Blake was making a drawing of “The Ghost of a Flea” the sitter inconsiderately opened his mouth. The artist, “prevented from proceeding with the first sketch,” listened to the Flea’s conversation and made a separate study of the open mouth.

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Joey lives in the Imagination deprived of the current of human friendship except for the love and care invested in the machines about him. He does not retreat to become a ‘mechanical boy’ (“because he did not dare to be human,” Bettelheim sees it)—but he advances in the one initiation into human spirit opened to him, the area of achievement and wish embodied in the operations of electrical and plumbing systems, even as in words it is the human work embodied that makes possible the formation of consciousness. The shapes of Homer, Dante, Milton gathered in the mind in the magic of Blake’s intense reading, as a person of the electric fan—the human invention—gathered in Joey’s mind in the magic of his intense taking apart and putting together again, cast shadows “superior to the common height of men,” as Joey was convinced, Bettelheim tells us, that machines were superior to people,
or Plato that ideas were superior to things. “If madness and absurdity be synonyms, which they are not, then Blake would be as ‘mad as a March hare’,” Samuel Palmer wrote to Mrs. Gilchrist in 1862: “for his love of art was so great that he would see nothing
but art
in anything he loved.” So Joey in his love for mechanism saw nothing but mechanism in what he loved. Language may mean all to me, more than art, for the universe seems striving to speak and the burden of life to be to understand what is being said in words that are things and persons and events about us.

“Not every child who possesses a fantasy world is possessed by it,” Bettelheim observes: “Normal children may retreat into realms of imaginary glory or magic powers, but they are easily recalled from these excursions. Disturbed children are not always able to make the return trip.” And those who know no disturbance of reality, we would add, cannot make the trip out at all.

The shaman’s trip to the Other World, the medium’s trip to the Astral field, the poet’s trip to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, is a counterpart of the dreamer’s trip to the dream or the child’s trip to the land he plays. In the process of realization, the Creator must so go into the whole of His Creation in order to create it that it becomes the most real and He becomes most real in it. In the full power of the Imagination, Creation is all, and Who had been Creator is now Creature. God is immanent in the Universe, and incarnate in a person. This is one of the mysteries of the human Christos. Here too there must be a round-trip, the return to God, but it must also be not easy but the least easy of all recallings, for Christ’s apotheosis in hubris must be fulfilled in crucifixion. In the full Christian persuasion—most high divine madness—there is a triumph of creativity: the Eternal insists that He has had a life-time and death in history; the Supreme Fiction insists that It has had a personality in the nonfictional Jesus.

October 1, 1964

To be easily recalled from these excursions, to possess a fantasy world and not to be possessed by it—the way of normal children—is achieved by keeping in mind that the imaginary is not real, that such areas of the psyche’s life are no more than child’s play, that it is no more than
a story. Here, in the fairy tale, taking place in whatever far country and having that time between once upon a time and forever after, stored away for children in the minds of their old nurses and, since the seventeenth century, in a new literary form initiated by the
Contes de ma mère l’oie
of Charles Perrault, the nursery romance, the subversive force of man’s creativity hides in an amusement.
“In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat”
—in the old times, when Wishing still could help—the German folk
Märchen
begins, and in the guise of entertainment, the old woman imparts to her infant audience news of the underworld of man’s nature, of betrayals and cheats, of ogres and murderers, thieves and shape-changers. They learn to mistrust the real, but they learn also the wishes and powers of old religions and states that have fallen away. The fairy tale is the immortal residue of the spirit that seeks to find its place in the hearts of each generation. As in the twelfth century, religious mysteries and erotic formulations found immortal life in the high romances of the Arthurian cycles, so the folk world perpetuated itself in the yarns spun at the hearthside, and even now, when the spinning wheel has gone from the household way and the fireplace has lost its central function there, the
märchen
has survived in book form, rescued by the devoted Brothers Grimm. As, again, in the court nurseries of
le Roi Soleil,
like bees secreting the royal jelly to feed the possibility of a queen, imparting style and sentiment, plot and wish, to life, a group of courtiers, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, as if apprehending the death of their way—Perrault, then the Countesses de Murat, d’Aulnoy, d’Auneuil, and the Count de Caylus—write their
Cabinets des Fées.
When the dust of the revolutionary tumbrels and the blood of the guillotine have come and gone, and the bourgeoisie, the merchants, industrialists, and managers of our age have taken over, Perrault’s Cinderella, like the Queen of Elfland who carried away Thomas of Erceldoune, would carry away the young from the common sense and capitalist reality into her irresponsible romance, the unreal of falling in love and being loved. Early in the process of the Christian era, Augustine, inspired by a most Puritanical demon of righteousness, had warned against such a corporeal light that “seasoneth the life of this world for her blind lovers, with an enticing and dangerous sweetness”
and deplored the lot of those who are misled by requited love. Yet the ghosts of the dead, of defeated forces in history, survive in the fascination of the living. When the last nobility had died out in the nobility and the rule of public utilities succeeded, Beauty and The Beast from Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s eighteenth century tale, as well as Oedipus from the drama of Sophocles, revive in the art of Cocteau.

March 15, Wednesday. 1961
“Hellenic perfection of style . . . ”

•

In the book
The Hedgehog,
written at Vaud, 1925, the Greek gods belong to the story-world, and, in turn, the little girl Madge, who may be, as H.D.’s daughter Perdita was that year, six, who lives then in an age previous to reading, figures out the actual world with information from stories her mother has told her so that her own experience becomes a story. “The stories weren’t just stories,” Madge’s mother tells her, “but there was something in them like the light in the lamp that isn’t the lamp.” She sees things in story-light, and in this light Pan, Weltgeist, Our-Father-Which-Art, are lights in turn in the world about her which is a lamp to see by.

•

Madge in her story is searching for a secret word. It is a matter of the open secret of Goethe, there, everywhere, a word everyone uses, but only experience unlocks the meaning “
Hérisson.
” Don’t find the word too quickly; mistake it in order to look for it. The girl Madge knows French, but she does not know what this word
hérisson
is. “Vipers!” Madame Beaupère exclaims, “you should have a hedgehog”—but she is French—“
Hérisson
” she says. Madge “somehow for the moment couldn’t remember just what was a
hérisson.
” “ ‘Ah,’ said Madge knowingly, ‘but yes, the very thing, a hedgehog.’ She said hedgehog in French, not knowing what it meant.” She must set out in quest of the word in the world.

•

In
Tribute to the Angels,
twenty years later, we find just such a riddle or search for a name again:

it lives, it breathes,
it gives off—fragrance?

I do not know what it gives,
a vibration that we can not name

for there is no name for it;
my patron said, ‘name it’;

I said, I can not name it,
there is no name;

he said,
‘invent it.’

•

So in 1912 Pound had given a name “Imagism” to something required in poetry, and returning to the propositions of the 1912 Credo we can see in “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” and in “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” the directive towards an art that strives to find in the image a secret name or password in which “thing” and “word” will become presentation. But this name “Imagism” bound. There was an excitement of introducing the new Imagist poets in
The Egoist
and the excitement too of not knowing what it meant. May Sinclair said that H.D. was
the
Imagist, an epitome. Had she achieved the definitive Imagist poem? But then, Pound had said that he launched the word to define the poetry of H.D. And he had meant too to confine her work to what he had admired.

•

The idea of H.D.’s cut-stone, pure, terse line was her own version in part, a demand of her temperament that fitted the Credo’s demand for a literary functionalism, a clean line against ornament. In her note to the Euripides translations that appear in
The Egoist
in 1915 she writes that she sought “rhymeless hard rhythms” to capture “the sharp edges and irregular cadence of the original.” But these hard rhythms, sharp edges,
and irregular cadences are not only of the original but of a modernist aesthetic in painting, music, and architecture, where ornament, as in poetry rhetoric, was coming to be a term of derogation.

•

Early poems like “The Contest” with its “you are chiselled like rocks / that are eaten into by the sea” or “Sea Lily,” where the flower petal is “with hard edge, / like flint / on a bright stone” operate to define the meaning of the Imagist poem as well as the quality of the immediate image; as early titles “Hymen” or “Heliodora” contributed to the idea of a new Hellenism. Idea and ideal are as essential to the image as the immediate sensory presentation. To dig the poem we must be receptive, back of these images of free wild elements in nature, and of sheltered gardens, of delicate stony flowers, and of flowers torn and trampled under foot, of unruly surfs, not only to presences of gods and daemons, the elementary idols of the poem, but to the temper of the verse itself, the ideal of human spirit presented. “Posing,” the unkind were likely to judge it, but for her kind H.D.’s tone presented a key in which to live. This ideal is what in my generation Charles Olson has called a stance. Poetic will is involved, awkwardly at first, trying, in what we call style or tone, but it would go beyond manner, to take over and make its own definition of poetry, where we strive to exemplify something we desire in our nature. “There was about her,” Williams writes of H.D. in his
Autobiography:
“that which is found in wild animals at times, a breathless impatience, almost a silly unwillingness to come to the point.” But now, seeing past Williams’s meaning to convince us that he was not taken in by H.D. and even, we are aware, to stir up our disaffections—seeing, past that, the content here with the role in mind that idea and ideal have in the artist’s search for a definition of what he is to be, Williams does give us telling details. “She said that when she wrote it was a great help, she’d splash ink on her clothes to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference toward the mere means of the writing.”

•

If in Imagist poems like “Heat” there had been, as well as the perfectionism, the intense realization of an instant in time, the prayer for life
beyond perfection and realization, in
The Hedgehog,
having “almost a silly unwillingness to come to the point,” the mode of story exorcizing the mode of image, there is a first statement as early as 1925 of the sense of life as an intellectual and spiritual adventure that is to become the dominant mode of H.D.’s imagination in the major phase that begins with The War Trilogy. We have taken
Ion
as a turning point, with its commentary that incorporates poetic experience and psychoanalytic experience to give depth and complexity of meaning to form and content: now, not only an intensity of image, not only a style, but also a perception in organization, a way, is to be essential in the creative force of her work. We may take
The Hedgehog
as an announcement. It seems isolated, her only children’s book; the Greek world in story is so different from the Greek world in the “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” that the Imagist Credo demanded. And it is different too from the exalted, enthralled, or ecstatic voice of the personae of H.D., whether of the poems of the Lawrencian period—“Adonis,” “Pygmalion,” or “Eurydice”—or of the Sapphic fragments, or of the prose of
Palimpsest;
for a new voice, the common sense of the wise nurse telling what life is like to the child, or the questing sense of the child seeking in a story to find out what is going on, enters in. H.D. will all her life be concerned in her work with conveying to our sympathy the fact that agony seems to be in the very nature of deep experience, that in every instant there is a painful—painful in its intensity—revelation. In
Palimpsest,
Hipparchia, Raymonde, and Helen Fairwood agonize; the interior monologue means to communicate the impact of ineffable experience. But in
The Hedgehog,
Madge’s interior monologue is talking to herself in search of a language. The meaning of
hérisson
is not beyond finding out, but it is postponed until Madge can gather, asking from everyone and from everything, the most common sense—the communality—of what it is. In the very opening of the book, the lead is given.
Quoi donc?
And then: “Which means,” Madge recognizes: “well what do you mean by trying to tell me that anything like that means what you seem to think it means.” The adventure is the old guessing game
I am thinking of a word; What is it?
and Madge seeks to find out a definition that does not confine.