The H.D. Book (74 page)

•

“We have them always with us,” Pound wrote in
The Spirit of Romance:
“They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry, especially lyric poetry, must be simple; that you must get the meaning while the man sings it.” Against the
trobar clus,
against Truth veiled in charm or in a woman’s smile. In the tradition of the mystery poem that Pound traces from Apuleius to Dante the figure of a woman is central: Isis, then the Venus of the
Pervigilium Veneris,
the Lady of the troubadours, and Beatrice. They are ancestresses of our Bride of Quietness, Truth at the Well of the fairy tales, and the language of this poetry is the old speech, the
lingua materna,
as Dante called the Provençal.

•

In the lure of Beauty, Truth seems untrue. And wisdom likewise is a lure, so that in Gnostic cults wisdom is a woman. The Brotherhood of Poetry answering the Fellowship of the Sword in
The Walls Do Not Fall
are no better than women, asserting against the realities of work and war, against the claim that crisis makes in truth, a way of alluring promise. Recalling another passage in Dorothy Richardson’s
Pilgrimage
where, following upon thoughts of the toiling masses in their struggle for socialism against exploitation, the thought of Yeats comes to Miriam’s mind, “the halting, half man’s half woman’s adoration he gave to the world he saw, his only reality.”

•

In the face of what we call reality, the poets in H.D.’s Trilogy claim a prior reality. They are pretenders to a throne in Truth that does not seem real to common sense:

we are the keepers of the secret,
the carriers, the spinners

of the rare intangible thread
that binds all humanity

to ancient wisdom,
to antiquity;

our joy is unique, to us,
grape, knife, cup, wheat

are symbols in eternity . . .

•

“A list of facts,” Pound had written to Williams of the old themes of poetry, “on which I and 9,000,000 other poets have spieled endlessly.” Spring, Love, Trees, Wind. This voice of sound sense putting the merely poetic in its place will often take over in Pound. But in another vein, a rare intangible thread or umbilical cord binding him to the womb of pre-history, to the Mutterrecht, Pound loses the “spiel” of the American businessman who knows that poetry is a commodity among commodities. Then he sings, not with 9,000,000 other poets, but with those few who practise the
trobar clus,
for whom Spring, Trees, Love, Wind have enduring and hidden meaning. As in
The Pisan Cantos
he will recall: “in the hall of the forebears / as from the beginning of wonders. . . . The wind is part of the process.” In the Rock-Drill he will present an ideogram of hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. These things, like the “grape, knife, cup, wheat” of H.D.’s poem, like “the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and meditation of our forefathers had entered” of Rilke’s letter to Von Hulewicz, are not a list of facts but are “vessels in which they found and stored humanity
.
”

•

This art, Pound writes in
The Spirit of Romance
is good “as the high mass is good art
.
”

Man-to-man the poetic voice had broken with embarrassment in our American self-consciousness. In the generation to which Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams belonged there was still the break between man-talk, that presented a show of even brutality in defense against any hint of vulnerability—it was the tone required for the competition and profiteering of the capitalist society—and the woman-talk to which all things that required inner feeling and sensitivity had been relegated. Poetry belonged among womanish things, a song Herakles sang while sewing for Omphale.

•

The
trobar clus
was outlawed. The Spirit or the sacred in man’s being appeared in the old order as a woman, an angelic presence or Truth in which a man took his being, as Dante took his being in Beatrice. Bound by the rare thread to—“the ancient wisdom,” H.D. calls it—some unmanly otherness.

Pound and Williams, whose art belonged to the
trobar clus,
in their dis-ease were often ashamed of their Spirit. In
Paterson
the split, that in H.D.’s War Trilogy comes between the official society of church or army and the secret society of the poet, appears as a divorce within the language itself, a hidden divorce between man and woman. In
The Cantos,
where Pound is concerned with economics or politics, “men’s affairs,” he will put on the man-in-the-street persona or, as in early Hell
Cantos
or in
Canto
XCI, break into a subliminal voice from some barracks or locker-room—“The petrified terd that was Verres,” “fahrting through silk,” “frigging a tinpenny whistle,” “
sh-t.
”

•

Even for women, areas of poetic feeling must contend with limits that social attitudes would set within the psyche itself against womanish excess. In
The Walls Do Not Fall
H.D.’s accounting of her experience is an accounting for such an excess:

so mind dispersed, dared occult lore

found secret doors unlocked,
floundered, was lost in sea-depth,

We are prepared—Freud and Jung have prepared us—for what “depth” means in the contemporary cult of analysis. It is as real as “hell” once was. And in the depth, where the earliest human time stirs us, we know that wisdom and occult lore are an old wives’ tale—“sub-conscious ocean where Fish / move two-ways and devour.” Then a self-mocking voice begins, where H.D. anticipates the reproof of the utilitarian realist: “jottings on a margin, / indecipherable palimpsest scribbled over / with too many contradictory emotions.”

The accusation of the Poet and another accusation of the Woman fuse in a third accusation of the heterodox tradition. She dramatizes the desecration of the psyche in the definitions of reality set by the Protestant ethic, as later, in
Tribute to the Angels,
she dramatizes the desecration of woman’s and the poet’s spirit in the
Venus-venery-venereous-venerate-venerator
passage. “Stumbling toward / vague cosmic expression,” H.D. continues now in imitation of the mercantile skeptic voice:

obvious sentiment,
folder round a spiritual bank-account,

with credit-loss too starkly indicated,
a riot of unpruned imagination,

•

She was not wrong in so picturing her adverse critic’s reaction. “Felt queer, sincere, more than a little silly,” Randall Jarrell wrote in
Partisan Review:
“the smashed unenclosing walls jut raggedly from the level debris of her thought (which accepts all that comes from heaven as unquestioningly as the houses of London). H.D. is history and misunderstands a later stage of herself so spectacularly that her poem exists primarily as an anachronism.”

•

“Wandering among barbarians, patching what religious scraps she can pick up,” he wrote a year later when
Tribute to the Angels
appeared: “Imagism was a
reductio ad absurdum
upon which it is hard to base a later style: H.D.’s new poem is one for those who enjoy any poem by H.D., or for those collectors who enjoy any poem that includes the Virgin, Raphael, Azrael, Uriel, John on Patmos, Hermes Trismegistus and the Bona Dea.”

What lies back of Jarrell’s advantage here, his taking it for granted that the less said of this kind of thing the better, is not an idiosyncratic stand (though some personal contempt finds occasion for expression), not a special disrespect (though his impressions of the texts in question are glib almost to the point of disrespect), but an orthodoxy of view. Jarrell’s great forte was that he successfully impersonated and then genuinely represented the needs and attitudes of the new educated literary class that was making its way in the English Departments of American colleges and universities, an increasingly important and established group of professor-poets concerned with what poetry should be admitted as part of its official culture. His appeal in rejecting even the “felt” and “sincere” where it was “queer” and “more than a little silly” was an appeal to some right proper and respectable range of thought and feeling that any member of a university faculty must keep in order to maintain his position. It is not at all clear in Jarrell’s reviews what H.D.’s work is, but it is most clear, if we accept unquestioningly all that comes from his authority, that whatever it is it is “silly,” “level debris,” “anachronism”—not to be countenanced by reasonable men.

And Jarrell’s judgment here as elsewhere stood for that of his class. Dudley Fitts found
The Flowering of the Rod
a play of “pretty, expected and shopworn” counters. He had found
Tribute to the Angels
“compact of brought-down-to-date Pre-Raphaelism: angels and archangels, lutes and cytharists, musks, embroideries, mystical etymologies, and the like,” and now, again, in the new work: “the reader is off on an uneasy Dolben-cum-Morris jaunt that starts vaguely from somewhere and ends barely more convincingly, in Bethlehem. I do not wish to be brutal; I should be a fool to pretend that H.D.’s intentions—her conceptions, even—are other than the highest; but it does seem clear to me that her whole method in these poems is false. For one thing, the diction
is as pseudo-naive as the imagery is pseudo-medieval.” We begin to sense that something more is at stake than the question of what is academically respectable. Where the whole method is false, intention and conception which give rise to method must be false. Fitts would dismiss all the things of the poem as “counters,” inferring that they have no more real (true) nature in experience. It may be that the very claim to experience in terms of the heterodox tradition made thruout the poem seems false to him.

•

There are no lutes and cytharists in The War Trilogy. Mr. Fitts was a little carried away in his zeal to portray the distasteful Pre-Raphaelite mode of the poem. In another work under attack in those years, where Pound sang in
The Pisan Cantos
and the hounds of the
Partisan Review
bayed in protest, I find: “Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?” Pound has always been attacked for the medieval and the pseudo-medieval.

But the suspicion that disturbs Fitts is not mistaken; Pre-Raphaelism brought-down-to-date “and the like” does enter in. Back of H.D., as back of Pound or of Yeats, was the cult of romance that Rossetti and then Morris had derived from Dante and his circle, the
Fedeli d’amore,
and revived in the Victorian era. The Christ of H.D.’s trilogy is not the Christ of church prescription but of the imagination, related to the Christ of the mysteries, the Christos-Angelos of Gnostic myth and the Angel Amor of the
Vita Nuova;
and here again, the elder Rossetti and then Dante Gabriel in their revival of Dante had played their part. Beatrice in the Christian mystery cult of Amor may have been herself a presentation of the Christos-Angelos. Gabriel Rossetti tells us in his
Early Italian Poets
that Dante had identified the Lady with Love Himself.

•

“This Figure imposes itself in the imperious manner of a central symbol,” Henry Corbin writes in
Avicenna and the Visionary Recital:
“appearing to man’s mental vision under the complementary feminine aspect that makes his being a total being.” The crisis in angelology came in the Western World in the thirteenth century when William of Auvergne led the attack against the Avicennan notion of natures operating in
virtue of an inner necessity and according to the law of their essences and especially against the concept of the soul’s finding its inner necessity and the law of its essence in awakening thru love to the presence of its Angel, the Active Intelligence. In the Moslem world as well as in the Christian world this concept of being united with the divine reality by a love union with the Angel who is present in the person of the Beloved becomes a prime heresy. Fitts’s “angels and archangels . . . mystical etymologies, and the like” would dismiss any such vision with something like the contempt of medieval theologians—for there were critics in the middle ages who raged in Provence against the lutes and cytharists, troubadours and catharists, against musks and embroideries and the pseudo-medieval. But, as Henry Corbin proposes of Avicenna: “our whole effort was bent to another end than explaining Avicenna as a ‘man of his time.’ Avicenna’s time,
his own time,
has not here been put in the past tense; it has presented itself to us as an immediacy. It originates not in the chronology of a history of philosophy, but in the threefold ecstasy by which the archangelic Intelligences each give origin to a world and to consciousness of a world, which is the consciousness of a desire, and this desire is hypostatized in the Soul that is the motive energy of that world.” Corbin would read Avicenna’s recitals not as plays with counters but as visionary experiences. “The union that joins the possible intellect of the human soul with the Active Intelligence as
Dator formarum,
Angel of Knowledge or Wisdom-Sophia, is visualized and experienced as a love union. It is a striking illustration of the relation of personal devotion that we have attempted to bring out here and that shows itself to proceed from an experience so fundamental that it can defy the combined efforts of science and theology against angelology.” What the dogma of science with its imagination of the world in terms of use and manipulation for profit and the dogma of theology with its view of reality in terms of authority and system oppose in the cult of angels is the absolute value given to the individual experience that would imagine the universe in terms of love, desire, devotion, and ecstasy, emotions which men who seek practical ends find most disruptive. “In symbolic terms, let us say,” Henry Corbin comments: “that the Avicennan champion will always find himself faced by the descendants
of William of Auvergne, even, and not a whit the less, when those descendants are perfectly ‘laicized.’ ”

•

The hostile reader will find that all visions start “vaguely from somewhere Biblical” or like Dante’s from somewhere Virgilian and end up “barely more convincingly, in Bethlehem” or like Dante’s in the high fantasy of the luminous eye of God. Dante and his circle, Corbin makes clear, were deep in this matter of angels “and the like.” The whole method, William of Auvergne almost a century before Dante had shown clearly and with telling scorn, was false. But the poets followed the tradition of Provence, not the convincing arguments of the University of Paris. What Dante drew from translated Sufi texts as well as from the songs of Toulouse and Albi where such Images of the First Beloved appeared was the Spirit of Romance. Corbin admits too to an Avicennan romanticism. “Nothing could be clearer then the identity of this ‘amorosa Madonna Intelligenza’ who has her residence in the soul, and with whose celestial beauty the poet has fallen in love. Here is perhaps one of the most beautiful chapters in the very long ‘history’ of the Active Intelligence, which still remains to be written, and which is certainly not a ‘history’ in the accepted sense of the word, because it takes place entirely in the souls of poets and philosophers.”