The H.D. Book (9 page)

Pound was a man of inner conflicts. At once to convey a complex of emotions and to perfect an art. So too, his persuasion was against persuasion. It is characteristic of Pound’s nature in saying, of his river of speech, a currency he has in the common sense where it is most disturbed and disturbing, that words that come up in his contentions—“abstraction,” “rhetoric,” “jew,” or “shit,”—appear deprived of their good sense. “Rhetoric” became a term of derogation in his criticism, just as in
The Cantos
his great river of voices began, sweeping all conflicts up into the persuasion of its Heracleitean flux, having mastery through its triumphant rhetoric. The “one Image in a lifetime,” defined “in an instant of time,” in the life-flow of time is no longer discrete and unique but leads to and inherits depths from other times and places. In each instant of time, the tide of its river impended.

Imagist poems are charged with the drama of this arrest of a time that is like the force of a powerful current in arrest. In the suspended tension of H.D.’s poem “Garden,” there is the threat of movement. So too, in Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” which had appeared in Pound’s anthology
Des Imagistes,
the intellectual and emotional complex does not exist in an instant of time, in a flash of the essential reality, but it is charged with the portent of associations to come. Say that Joyce presents the waves of the sea, made the more vivid because he sees them as the horses and men of an army—these horsemen of the surf are an old Celtic idea—and that, in the close, his cry of despair and loneliness conveys the retreat of the wave. It still remains that what the poem presents leads us as readers on to something that the poem “says” beyond the image. Joyce is also telling us he hears (and everything we know of his genius in the story
The Dead
or in
Ulysses
or in the closing pages of
Finnegans Wake
verifies this sense of
his language) the armies of the dead and the unborn at the shores of consciousness, swarming invasions from a sleeping reservoir that press upon Joyce’s waking mind, as all things of the waking world press upon his sleeping mind. What appears, whatever we see there, answers the call of his declaration of listening: “I hear. . . . ” The beginning of the saying reaches out from the proposition of what it says, and hearing rushes in to illustrate the proposition. The speaker, speaking of his hearing, hears; the hearer sees. Clairaudient to the voice of the poem and then beyond, Joyce becomes clairvoyant. It is all in the medium of saying: second-speech begins; the second-hearing or second-sight comes to meet it.

This complex does not exist in an instant of time but in a language or history out of an increment of times. Where these hosts are also (and all that we remember of what was about to happen in that year 1914 fulfills the prophecy) intimations of the actual armies of the First World War. “I hear an army charging upon the land” is not only an image of the sea breakers but an omen of war, ready to take on reverberations from history, fitting, preparing as it does, our own immediate knowledge of how a world that is now all a sea of armies grew. Place Joyce’s poem alongside of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” or Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” and its rhetoric rings out as of the same order.

It was the rhetoric too, the undercurrent of her speech, that gave meaning to H.D.’s poem. “O wind, rend open the heat—” if we respond in the mode of its address, persuades us to a need in our own being to break the perfection of the instant and restore the disturbing flow of time.

In Pound’s “Metro,” the immediate presentation may be enough, the interchange or correspondence of blossoms wet pressed to a black bough with faces in a crowded subway station. We may grasp the sense in being struck by the likeness. “The proper and perfect symbol is the natural object,” Pound writes in the Credo of his essay “A Retrospect”: “so that
a
sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.” If we ask further, what does the image mean? what are these faces upon what “bough”? why “apparitions”? if we grant
that the immediate image is
a
sense of the poem and yet, following the lead of Pound’s italicizing the indefinite article, we search beyond for an other sense of the poem, are we reading more into the poem than there is there?

In H.D.’s poem “Heat,” the images presented become propositions of a language that spoke of something hidden from me in hearing the poem, an ideogram I could not read yet. Everything that was felt was clearly rendered; what was felt was that something more impended. Not that I knew more than was there but that there was more there than I knew. We, the poet and those of us readers who have the commitment, must, like the knight who would heal the wound of the Fisher King and revive the Waste Land, ask the meaning of “fruit that cannot fall,” of “thickness of air,” of “heat,” and that meaning has only one place in which to gather—our life experience. We must discover correspondences and come in reading the poem to read our own lives.

It may be a sufficient issue of “Metro” or of Flint’s “Swan” to have read the image in the terms of its first instance, to have seen vividly the very clustered faces that are also the crowded blossoms or the swan passing into the dark of an archway. But now, turning back to the poem, I see that Flint would add “into the black depth of my sorrow.” Does it mar the image? “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands
of peace
’,” Pound had instructed the would-be imagist: “It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the
adequate
symbol.”

We may do well enough with “Patterns” to follow the Lady in impersonation and see the scene of the garden with its too-planned patterns as we go, as if it were a sequence from a costume movie of the period, scenario by Sabatini. The poets may have meant these images to satisfy us in their being seen. I have never returned to read Amy Lowell’s poem in any event since high school, here, at least, taking the Pounding prejudice against Amygism as my own.

Let these ratiocinations stand as they are. They present an account of what the propositions of Imagism have come to mean to me as far as they have gone. But a new way of seeing, related to Pound’s later concern with the ideogram, colors my thought of the direct object, the symbol, or the image. The great art of my time is the collagist’s art,
to bring all things into new complexes of meaning, mixing associations. I am the more aware that the figures of wet pale faces that are blossoms upon the black bough of some Tree, that the Swan, that the Lady in the Garden, are not only immediate images struck of particular things in their instant seen by Pound, Flint, or Amy Lowell, proper each to its poem, but are parts now of a composite picture, belonging to one passion in me of Poetry. “Only passion endures,” Pound writes somewhere, “the rest is dross.” And these images are part of an enduring memory. Just so, they have been claimed by my mind among the illustrations of my own life, fitting its vision. My vision then may mistake the poems in part to fit. They have waited there long among the shades of memory, and now perhaps that we have recalled them, the course of this study will bring them forward to a new account, until we must read again the actual texts in the present light. But in the case of Joyce’s poem, as with H.D.’s, the memory and the text have been deeply imprinted with the scene of its first reading. Joyce’s poem belongs to one of the decisive events of my actual life.

•

It may have been in 1938, one of those radiant days that October brings to Berkeley after the fog and even cold of the summer. I sprawled on the grass, the little Black Sun Press book with pages printed in blue italics, lovely and most precious, in my hands; and, as I turned for the first time to read Joyce’s poems, cutting the pages as I went, I read aloud to two girls—young women—whose sense of the world was deeper than mine, I felt, so that I was supported by their listening. For they had known poverty and loneliness in an alien land (the one Italian, the other Jewish, coming from immigrant families). They came from working-class households, close to the burden of labor, it seemed to me, that furnished the essentials of life, food, and clothing, so that they had in my eyes a more immediate sense of the human lot.

Athalie was the young Jewess. Let her be a “Jewess”—for she impersonated a racial elegance, knowingly referring to old ideas of beauty from the Middle East, Levantine or Persian hints that had a mock seductiveness, exciting our sense of the exotic and taunting us in that sense. At the same time she had a bitter knowledge of what to be Jewish
meant—it gave reality to her despair. And, being Polish, she had known the scorn not only of Germans but of German Jews. She would bring to play in Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” overtones of a menace that the history of our own time with the rise of the Nazis seemed but to illustrate, where “Rachel née Rabinovitch / tears at the grapes with murderous paws,” reciting the lines with a terrible kind of humor, an imminent threat, so that the poetry and the history we might have associated with the poem became her own revelation to our company that adored her of the reality of some inner risk. “A woman runs a terrible risk,” she would quote by heart. She had barely made—did not finally succeed in making—the transition from her family, dominated by a fanatic orthodox father, from the folk-world of a Polish ghetto and a poetry world out of ancient Hebrew traditions, to the shores of light she thought to find in philosophy. The mind! Her mind was a fire. James and Dewey might be a new testament, and Pragmatism a new dispensation, but the Old Testament and the Covenant remained. Truth she knew by its disaster. Terror of her mad father, pity for her enduring mother, madness and enduring in her self, the old tribal law that put women among contaminated beings, the old mystery that exalted her as an object into the bridal glory of the Shulamite, the old wisdom way that looked deep into the vanity of all things and cried “Fear God! There is
no
end.”

“Of making many books there is no end”—all was caught up into a wave of hysteria, inspired, impersonating, daemonic in part, with a sense of its own caricature, with a sense of its social outrage. She had histrionics then, delighting in tirade and dramatic gestures. Lighting it all, so that she is still a power in my memory and love, she had intense joys and despairs, a vitality that leaped—as later I was to discover the Hasidim had leaped and danced before the glory or joy of the Lord in the most grievous of times—before the fact of a painting like Picasso’s
Woman in the Mirror
or some scene in reading Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot,
celebrant, before whatever was expressive of a passionate, troubled human soul. And she had a wild affection for whatever in us showed response. To suffer, to undergo, to understand anything, danced in a frenzy. Her consciousness rose, as the consciousness of the world rose in the last years of the Depression toward the mania of the War. The lot of
the Jews, the lot of women—these stood for her as symbols of the real lot of mankind. Imitating Madame Croiza’s inspired howling as Electra in the recording of the Claudel-Milhaud
Oresteia
that we used to listen to ritually in those days, she was projecting something she felt prophetic of herself; and as we came to the ebb tides of the night, she would acclaim Céline’s
Voyage au bout de la nuit,
where she had seen in the furies that maddened the young doctor working in the slums of Paris those furies that pursued her own mind. Something had been revealed in the heart of Paris that was prophetic of our own lot to come. Long before her anticipation of human disaster was illustrated in full in the actual world at Belsen and Buchenwald, before at Nagasaki and Hiroshima we were to see that the evil was not German alone, Athalie had passed from the brilliant wave of her despair and joy, and the wave had gone out, back into the miseries and infantile recesses of dementia praecox. Something once acted had become most actual.

Or, we may say, something set into action. We were, it seems to me now, trying the scene and ourselves to find the plot and our roles therein. We imagined a life as passionate, as full of depths and heightened colors as we found in works of art. The lawn, the sun, the two full-bodied young women with their flowing hair and their sandaled feet, and my reading there, had the command the stage has over all other events when we attend. They were my audience as I read—yes—but they were also—the whole little scene was built up with their composition of it—a chorus. Let these things be fates over me, I had resolved. As I read on, leafing through the pages of Joyce’s
Collected Poems,
which I had just found in a bookshop that day, past the bronze crayon portrait by Augustus John, past poems that did not key in, I was looking for poems that would belong to our own scene. Lines or words in scanning would give the clue: “A merry air,”—no—“Welladay! Welladay!”—I all but despaired finding the voice I wanted. There was a self-mockery in the book, where the title
Chamber Music
had a double meaning in which its author mocked his own sentiment with a possibility of parody, the too-muchness of the song’s manner. One had known something like this in adolescence we were only too close to, striving to cover for shyness and passion and ignorance, enacting one’s painful self-consciousness as if it were a deliberate sophistication, anticipating
social rejection by a self-rejection incorporated in the feeling itself, a safety of irony or not caring that disavowed the fatal original importance of that feeling. The voice I sought was a different voice. There were glimmers of it in certain poems where for a moment Joyce had the courage of his sentiment:

Because your voice was at my side

That sprang into life for me, immediately speaking for what I wanted to say.

There is no word nor any sign

can make amend—

came direct from the emotion of the artist as a young man without the later Joyce’s self-knowing and dissembling pose, and it spoke too as if from my own emotion to say something I had to tell my two companions. Poetry was a communal voice for us—it spoke as we could not speak for ourselves. And there was a voice in me that sought such a communal speech in order to come to feel at all.