The H.D. Book (72 page)

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H.D. does no more than indicate a relationship between the world of her poem and the world of the Zinzendorfian Brethren. We no sooner see the eighteenth-century meeting house than we are told that He, the Christ of the poem, looks with “the eyes / of Velasquez’ crucified”; we have passed from the reality of the religious enthusiast to the reality of the painter. All around us in the poem is the atmosphere of religion, numinal suggestion. What, in the terms of the art itself, is this “fleck of light,” this “grain” or “flaw or speck” where:

the speck, fleck, grain or seed
opened like a flower.

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The religious serves in the poem to tell us something about the nature of the poetic experience; as we come to recognize shifting depths of myth or of mystic doctrine in the images of the poem we begin to feel
the world as H.D. does, as a ground of such depth. Life itself is revealed to the poet as to us in light—the immediate flash—of a particular reality, where metaphor, multiple reference, rhyme and melody, quicken and organize time and the spatial world in which the reality exists.

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And the flower, thus contained
in the infinitely tiny grain or seed

opened petal by petal . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and the circle went on widening

and would go on opening,
he knew, to infinity.

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Do we believe that? the germ of William Harvey? the tiny speck of material containing the code-script of Schrödinger? the universe expanding from its primal atom?

IV
.

I do not believe, for I am a poet: I imagine as I make it up. Or my thought goes along lines of imagination here as it will, guided by the feeling of what fits, what informs or what promises form; where it knows only pain and trouble in working where belief is needed. These rumors ring true or are true to a form towards which I move. “I go where I belong, inexorably,” H.D. writes in
The Flowering of the Rod:

In resurrection, there is confusion
if we start to argue; if we stand and stare,

we do not know where to go;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
does the first wild-goose care
whether the others follow or not?

I don’t think so—he is so happy to be off—
he knows where he is going;

so we must be drawn or we must fly . . .

•

The wild-goose flight has the truth of inner impulse, taking thought in the flight itself, true to a wish when we know only its felt imperative. The affirmations of inner nature, of biological instinctual reality—what we call “blind” instinct—in the opening pages of the poem have prepared our recognition here, and then in the spirit of the poem our assent, that in this life-will we are moved by the deepest imperative. The imperative of the poem towards its own order is of this kind for H.D., a feeling she must follow and cannot direct, taking command over her from within the process of its creation as she works. She compares the soul’s objectification with “the stone marvel” of the mollusc, “hewn from within,” but it may represent a spiritual force of the cosmos beyond the biological. This “life”-will towards objective form is ultimately related to an animal crystallization, and the images of jewel, crystal, “as every snowflake / has its particular star, coral or prism shape” suggest that there is—not an inertia but a calling thruout the universe towards concretion. The poet in the imminence of a poem (what now after Olson we may see as the
projection
) answering such a calling as a saint has his calling or a hero his fate. “Inexorably.”

“It is geometry on the wing,” H.D. has it in section x of
The Flowering of the Rod;
“not patterned,” she adds, where she means that this imperative, the deepest imperative of the poetic-urge then, is not pre-planned but created in a trajectory that will not, must not, be satisfied until it reaches
Paradise.
The ecstasy of the poem, an intimation of—the Hesperides, the Isles of the Dead, heaven, Atlantis: H.D. gives the various names that the hidden promise of Paradise has been given from Homer to the Renaissance syncretists that discarded and even despised by sophisticated modern scientific orthodoxy has been left to be cherished only by occultists and heretical minds. And again, we find this inner impulse is called by H.D. “that smallest grain,” the mustard seed invisible to the conscious consideration that moving the
consciousness “grows branches / where the birds rest” and “becometh a tree.”

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A wild-goose chase the projective must always seem to men who want prescribed directions and ends and who must fight to put down impulse towards whatever kingdom not of this world as an enemy of conventional or social values.

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In the nineteenth century the last echoes of such a kingdom not of this world sounded in the call of socialism, communism, and anarchism, as in the eighteenth century it had sounded in the creative fiction of liberty. In the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” the command of the loving Father in the new dispensation of His Christ; in the communalization of property the individuality held as a little child—the lingering dream of Christendom. But in Russia, Marxian communism gave rise to the specter of the wrathful Father, the old pre-Christian tyranny, in the Bolshevik dictatorship. In America, democracy gave rise to the second diabolic specter—for in the Satanism of industrial capitalism, the large forge of the General Economy days in Zinzendorf ’s little colony of the Mustard Seed was developed into the present Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

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H.D.’s War Trilogy came to me in the period after the Second World War as a revelation of truth, true to a life or consciousness sought. As in the war years, I found in Dorothy Richardson’s
Pilgrimage
such a work. The outrage of the critics of the day was similar to the outrage of like minds when confronted by The War Trilogy. “I very much dislike this work,” Lionel Trilling forthrightly began his put-down in the
Kenyon Review:
“
Pilgrimage,
of all the ambitious works of our time, is the least fruitful and the least charming.” It was like Proust without sex, the more abruptly sophisticated
Time
magazine line went. Trilling bridled at Miriam’s thought that “By every word they use,
men and women mean different things,” mistaking it not as an operative element in the process of the character’s inner reality but as an article in the author’s doctrine of militant feminism. “However close Miss Richardson may stand to Virginia Woolf,” he continued, allowing that Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen before her, might be of Dorothy Richardson’s ilk, it was offensive that Miss Richardson felt an affinity in her work, that she had the presumption to claim in 1938 an affinity with Joyce, Proust, and James. “There is between her and the work of these three masculine writers a very real and important difference,” he warns and proceeds to argue and rationalize towards the conclusion that “speaking from the literary point of view, it [the emotional solipsism of Richardson’s interior monolog] has produced a literary manner private without being personal, arbitrary without being original, making a demand upon the reader which is not rewarded as demands of equal difficulty are rewarded by the three men we have spoken of, in the reader’s enhanced sentiment of reality.” The distaste that governs Trilling’s reading might be a prototype of the critical distaste for H.D.’s work as early as
Palimpsest
but especially for the poetry of the major phase. Was there some link that bound in one syndrome—from our text we might call it the Simon complex—a religious orthodoxy and a literary orthodoxy in a guise of criticism that must “draw the line somewhere” to exclude the female revelation?

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But from the opening pages of “Pointed Roofs,” thru the valors and shames of Miriam’s girlish experience, haunted by some “break in consciousness” that cast up dark moods and images, into the troubled depths of Miriam’s
selva oscura
in
Deadlock, Revolving Lights,
and
The Trap,
I had gathered what the outraged critic had so specifically denied the reader would find—my enhanced sentiment of reality. There was in Miriam’s consciousness the presence ever immanent of an illumination in experience itself, a grief or agony ready to leap up into reality to add its color to her impressions, and, bound in with this, an apprehension at moments in climbing a stair or in the opening of a door of an awaited ascension into the light. Her mind strained after it; her spirit came to
be sure of it or to be sure in the thought of it. Then there would be moments of epiphany, pure sensations of the light in rooms, that I too had known. I took community in the work of Dorothy Richardson even as in the criticism of men like Trilling I was aware that that community was despised in the world of the great reviews.

•

“There was glory hidden in that old darkness,” Miriam thinks coming home late at night from a socialist meeting. “Within the radiance, troops of people marched ahead, with springing footsteps; the sound of song in their ceaselessly talking voices; the forward march of a unanimous, light-hearted humanity along a pathway of white morning light.” Like Dante, Dorothy Richardson pre-dates the present of her work (1900) so that she can work with foreshadowings. Miriam’s thought grows darker; in their unity she feels her own isolation and now the socialists appear as “
Men,
” she capitalizes and italicizes the word, Russian revolutionaries (her suitor Michael Shatov). “Their scornful revolutionary eyes watched her glance about among her hoard of contradictory ideas. . . . ” Miriam, like Stephen Dedalus or Proust’s hero, is a self recaptured, a creation of the author’s youth, and as in Stephen’s thought we find germs of something like Joyce’s later concepts, so in Miriam’s stream-of-consciousness propositions of
Pilgrimage
appear. “She offered them,” Miriam thinks, “a comprehensive glimpse of the many pools of thought in which she had plunged, using from each in turn, to recover the bank and repudiate; unless a channel could be driven, that would make all their waters meet. They laughed when she cried out at the helplessness of uniting them. ‘All these things are nothing’.” There are religious undertones in the uniting of waters, and now Miriam’s repressed memories of the break-up of her childhood begin to take over and more ancient or atavistic ways of thought, of
eros
and
thanatos,
take over:

“There was a glory hidden in that old darkness, but they did not know it; though they followed it”—the socialists, but they are now also Miriam’s parents in their marriage, working in the darkness of history or of the wedding-bed, appear now as a “they,” a hidden order like the
“they” of H.D.’s work: “Accepting them, plunging into their darkness, she would never be able to keep from finding the bright devil and wandering wrapped in gloom, but forgetful, perpetually in the bright spaces within the darkness
.
” It is her father’s death and the trauma of her mother’s death by cancer that give hidden direction to her thought. “But even if factories were abolished and the unpleasant kinds of work shared out so that they pressed upon nobody,” she thinks, “how could the kingdom of heaven come upon earth as long as there were childbirth and cancer?”

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Joyce’s
Portrait,
with its closing passages in Stephen’s diary where
eros
and
thanatos
again move his thought, had had this quality of a revelation for me earlier. The dark disorder of “I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night
. . .
” setting off the flame of the close, which Joyce in
Finnegans Wake
playing upon his troubled sense of “
forge
” and “
forgery
” was to darken. But we took Stephen’s resurrection as an affirmation of our own youthful intent.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

The figures of the artificer Daedalus and of his unfortunate son, tricked out in wings of wax, haunt with irony the high resolution, but Joyce contrives to be true not only to the later knowledge but to his youthful inspiration as well.

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Emotionally true? Psychologically true?

In “The Serious Artist,” Pound wrote: “The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of
mankind, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature.” Then: “By good art I mean art that bears true witness.”

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True witness, where I have found it, to the troubled psyche, the searching, yearning heart and mind, to the instability of opinions, to the grandeur of fate, to the states of another consciousness of being at one, to the solitude that is a condition of communion, to the “is there one who understands me?” cry of a
Finnegans Wake,
to the sense of a melody in experience itself that transcends argument, true witness to the immediacy of life is contrasted with that other aim in writing exemplified by Dryden’s correction of Shakespeare to suit “what reasonable men have long since concluded.”

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Truth in Richardson, Joyce, or Proust, as in Pound, Williams, or H.D. arises as the truth of “what the heart is and what it feels.” Close to confession then, but the intent is not to unburden the soul. It is to project the wholeness of his experience—in this way close to the psychoanalytic process—as the content of a work that will present the scales, the ratios, chords and discords of the soul’s own creative order.

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“Let us just for the moment feel the pulses of
Ulysses
and of Miss Dorothy Richardson and M. Marcel Proust, on the earnest side of Briareus,” D. H. Lawrence wrote in “Surgery for the Novel—Or a Bomb.” He loathed their portentous search for self or accounting for their lives: