H.D and Modernity
| , , ,H.D.’s Dynamic Imagism or the “Art of the Future”
Texte intégral
1H.D. wrote her memoir The Gift in 1943, when “fear and terror” (“H.D. by Delia Alton”) triggered her desire to search in memory and dreams the spark of life that would illuminate the deadly darkness of her present.
The dream-picture focused and projected by the mind... to “come true”... must photograph the very essence of life, of growth, of the process of growing... The dream must be allowed to sway backward and forward, as if the screen or sheet on which [the dream, the memory] are projected, blows and is rippled in the wind or whatever emotion or idea is entering a door, left open. (The Gift, 83-84)
- 1 I am indebted to Alain Badiou’s Time and the Event for my reading of poetic time as event (événemen (...)
2This quotation underpins what I consider the generative core of H.D.’s imaginative world, from her pre-imagist beginnings to Hermetic Definition. Art, she tells us, should capture life, and life is process, growth and transformation, in which past and future are in constant touch and circulation. Process and transformation, in her writing are embodied in two precise, symbolic words: “wind” and “formula.” Providing an elemental image that is natural and mythical at the same time, the wind embodies the movement of the mind and the construction of an active subject, emotionally engaged with reality, but also enfolds the human being within the mystical workings of the spirit. H.D.’s “formula,” on the other hand, works as an alternative symbol to Pound’s vortex. In it alchemy provides a metaphor for psychic processes, literary texts and their projection in time. It underscores H.D.’s aspiration to a poetry made event, capable, that is, of initiating new time by transforming, and not only testifying to, human and psychic history.1
- 2 B. Viola, “The Porcupine and the Car,” p. 62-63.
3Film was for H.D. the artistic medium that had brought “the classic vibration into line with its own day” ( “Borderline,” 232). Had she lived today, she would have probably chosen contemporary video art and the work of Bill Viola as an example. For Viola cameras are soul keepers, as poetry was for H.D. Using body language, natural elements like wind, fire, and water, mystic references, Italian Renaissance paintings, and slow motion in his video installations, Viola aims at enhancing the experience of self-consciousness. And, like H.D., he draws the spectator’s attention to the spiritual vocation of being human. As in Viola’s videos, in H.D.’s writing, the poem registering movement has its roots in life, but “stillness is” its “basic illusion”.2
4To illustrate the dynamism present in H.D.’s early poetry, and her use of wind, I will focus on two poems, “Helen” and “Hermes of the Ways,” and compare them to Richard Aldington’s “To a Greek Marble” and Pound’s “The Return.” Notwithstanding their shared use of sculpted marble as the model for artistic achievement and metaphor for corporeality, precision, and hardness, H.D.’s poems not only reveal a greater dynamism, but at all levels underscore process and transformation.
5H.D.’s “Helen” is a poem of transformation. In it Helen appears first of all as fetishized body parts, just like Poe’s “Helen.” And yet, the distinct images of her “still eyes,” “white hands” and “white face,” “wan smile,” “cold feet” and erect posture, along the text slowly assemble into a complete statue-like figure (Collected Poems, 154-155). While transmuting Helen from woman into a statue petrified into rigor mortis, H.D. embodies her on the textual screen, making her present. By the end of the poem Helen has not only become a dead woman, but her historical silence has been transformed into a loud voice claiming justice.
- 3 Gautier’s poem is included in Émaux et camées, 1852.
6Published in 1924 after the end of the Imagist experience, “Helen” underpins H.D.’s critique of the Romantic aesthetic of the sublime, of her male modernist friends’ objectifying gaze, and of the immobilizing imagist mould. Despite his use of vers libre and essential lexicon, Aldington’s “To a Greek Marble,” included in Des Imagistes together with H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways” and Pound’s “The Return,” is not exactly “modern” in diction, theme, and cultural awareness. It reveals, instead, a traditional male gendered perspective. By superimposing in the poem the woman and the statue, indeed, Aldington borrows both the symbolist male desiring gaze and Théophile Gautier’s “Le Poème de la femme,” subtitled “Marbre de Paros,” in which the woman’s body is “flesh of marble.” In this way he participates in and contributes to the long Pygmalion discursive tradition.3 But it is precisely this tradition that H.D. rejected.
- 4 T.S. Eliot, American Literature and the American Language, p. 22.
- 5 M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 42.
7 Although H.D.’s early poems were read by contemporary and later critics through the lenses Ezra Pound had provided, those lenses were far from appropriate. What truly mattered for H.D. and Pound was different, so different that it could hardly fit the same ideological and formal paradigm. In End to Torment, H.D. referred time and again to their difference in character, art, achievement, and even to Pound’s “unconscious rivalry.” (41) Antagonistic or not, their artistic relationship was important, and the two poems I selected are what I define, with a blend of English and French words, evenemental poems, marking a turning point in Anglo-American modernist poetry. They are not only distinct instances of their imagist poetry, but also points “de repère,” to borrow Eliot’s words,4 for us today in that they gave “to things their look” and to men and women “their outlook on themselves.”5
- 6 Quotations are respectively from the Orphic Hymn 35 to Leto and Callimachus, Hymn 3 to Artemis.
- 7 See B. Leland, “Psychotic Apotheosis: Visionary and Poet’s Fear in Ezra Pound’s ‘The Return’,” p. 1 (...)
- 8 See F.S. Flint, “Imagisme,” p. 198.
- 9 Unpublished essay in the H.D. Papers at Yale.
8Written in 1912 and first published in Poetry, “The Return” and “Hermes of the Ways” adopt images of mercurial gods to represent their authors’ relation to their own time. Emphatically addressing the self, or perhaps us readers, the speaker in “The Return” invites us to “see” the returning gods he is fronting, slowly coming towards him. Not named, they are possibly the Arcadian twins: Hermes, the god with the winged sandals, and Artemis, the goddess with “winged darts,” roaming the woods with a hunting pack of hounds.6 In the poem the gods’ movement is implied, more than enacted. Against the fiction of sculpted images, we perceive ghostlike, rather than dreamlike, revenant gods that seem to emerge from the netherworld. They are haunting like the hounds, the “souls of blood” that accompany them, which Blake Leland interprets as signifiers of “the limitless vehemence of the poet’s impossible desire to see the unspeakable and speak.”7 If this poem presents a condensed image of the poet’s relation to his time, then the speaker’s turning his gaze towards the past, and the return of a ghostlike past stands for what F.S. Flint called the imagist refusal of “being contemporary,” contemporary, that is, with the poets’ time as he thought the Post-Impressionists and Futurists were.8 The gods, with their bloody hounds, however, may bear witness to the de-humanizing effects of a restrictive reading of the classics, one that H.D. herself exposed in her unpublished notes on “Pausanius.” Quoting from the famous classicist scholar Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, she claimed that specters and ghosts inhabited the Greek texts, asking the readers to give their own blood, their whole being.9
- 10 T.E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays in Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, p. 8.
9 Rather than the classics per se, however, it was the version of archaic truthfulness promoted by such authorities as Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and T.E. Hulme that had proved pernicious. In his promotion of the geometric perfection of ancient Egypt and Attic Greece, Hulme had claimed: “The divine is not life at its intensest. It contains in a way an anti-vital element.”10 Too inexperienced to detect its risks, H.D. herself associated her early classicism with the strictest form of Puritanism and cultural authority.
- 11 See his “Reflections on Violence,” a review of Sorel’s The Illusions of Progress in Speculations.
10H.D., however, did not share Hulme’s anti-democratic, warlike ideology looming behind his anti-humanist classicism.11 Nor was she interested in Hulme and Pound’s scientific interpretation of poetic art, voiced by Pound in “The Serious Artist” of 1913. After all, was she not the person who had defied her father’s science and authority, in 1910, when the Halley Comet had attracted huge numbers of visitors to the Flower Observatory he directed? At the time she had ostentatiously read Camille Flammarion’s books where spiritualism and astronomy went hand in hand (H.D., “Autobiographical Notes”).
- 12 H. Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 191.
- 13 This quotation is taken from Richard Aldington’s translation of “The Poems of Anyte of Tegea” (p. 1 (...)
11According to Hugh Kenner, “The Return” ends in a “sculptured stasis” through which “the poem encompasses a long historical span, as from Sappho’s time to H.D.’s” (191).12 Yet H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways” is far from being “sculptured stasis.” Though including a partial translation of an epigram by Anyte of Tegea with the same title, H.D.’s poem moves beyond its source and beyond the ithyphallic image of Hermes, as the destination and “resting-place for weary men” of the Greek original.13 In her representation the Herma is “Dubious, /Facing three ways, /welcoming wayfarers.” Nothing is static in the poem; all is process and change. “The hard sand breaks,” the river is “flowing below ground,” “the boughs of the trees are twisted,” the sails are “torn,” the sea “foams” and “the sea-grass tangles with/Shore grass.” (Des Imagistes, 21-22). While the paths at the crossroads lead to different directions, everything is animated by the most elemental and spiritual wind. That wind will constantly blow in H.D.’s Sea Garden and in all the poetry that followed. One is reminded of Bill Viola’s 1983 installation Room for St John of the Cross where the wind blows around St. John’s cell to convey the movement of the spirit, out of the closed space into the open where it partakes of nature.
- 14 Letter to Bryher of 23 August 1924 (see S. Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D., p. 219).
12 As an epochal poem, “Hermes of the Ways” relates to its time as one of openings and new possibilities. Hidden by the Greek epigram we can detect an intertextual reference to George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, whose protagonist Diana is “a soul born active, wind beaten.” (15) “Hermes of the Ways” may also be H.D.’s mythical equivalent for London, the city that “left [her] free.”14 A city, however, where she also felt lost: “Drifting. Drifting” (End to Torment, 18). A single woman confronting society’s gendered expectations, and an aspiring poet in a male-dominated literary world, life for her was not easy. She made it clear in Asphodel, where the H.D. character Hermione identifies with the suicidal Margaret Cravens character, “tangled in a worse web than she was” (Asphodel, 105). “Tangled,” like the sea grass and earth grass in “Hermes of the Ways,” where social marginality, emotional liminality and the intricacy of sexual and literary attachments merge.
- 15 Letter of Mary Gawthorpe to Marsden (T. Petrovich, “Modernist Freewomen between Public and Domestic (...)
- 16 “Views and Comments,” “The Art of the Future,” “Beauty and the Senses,” published in the issues 1.9 (...)
- 17 D. Marsden, “Views and Comments,” p. 165-166.
13In one of the short stories H.D. wrote in her first year in London, “The Suffragette,” an American girl having followed the suffragettes along the streets of London, finally understands why women are “rebel [s] under protest.”15 The suffragette in the story, Miss Marston, may or may not have been inspired by Dora Marsden, the suffragette who launched The Freewoman in 1911, the first feminist magazine that in its new incarnations in 1913 as The New Freewoman and in 1914 as The Egoist would become the mouthpiece of the Imagists and the Anglo-American avant-garde. There are affinities between H.D. and Marsden, however, which make Marsden if not the inspirer of the story, someone with whose thought H.D. felt great affinity. Marsden’s request that Pound illustrate the ethical and economic relevance of poetry was at the origin of the series of his articles entitled “The Serious Artist.” Modernist scholars are familiar with the text. They are perhaps less familiar with the comments and two articles that Dora Marsden, unsatisfied with his answers, contributed to the journal in 1913.16 What she wrote, re-echoes in H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision. “There exists nothing save things and the relations between things” (my emphasis), Marsden states in her first comment on Pound’s article, where she also represents the soul as an amorphous being in a shell, “a thing which forages, feeds, dissipates or grows.”17 Playing with words, and using terms that approach Martin Heidegger’s definition of hidden, veiled reality, in “The Art of the Future” she maintains that art should explore “the sphere of the occult,” which “is the sense of the at-present hidden, but discoverable, the at-present unknown, but knowable, capable of being observed” (my emphasis). For her, finally, “Poetry” “is the formula” (183).
14Art as formula returns in H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision, where she writes that the sculpture of “The Delphic Charioteer” “has been created by a formula arrived at consciously or unconsciously.” (26) Poetry as formula is H.D.’s equivalent of Pound’s vortex, for it is what in the poem opens to future time. An equivalent rooted in alchemy rather than in physics or chemistry, in the Hellenistic, syncretic Hermes Trismegistus, rather than in Attic Hermes, in the watery artistic mother, rather than in the hard scientist father. In Palimpsest, her narrative alter ego believes that she “Must get back into art the magic it had had in Egypt, Greece even. Odd line in Egypt spelt exact and scientific formula.... the formula must be re-formulated. Poetry.” (155)
- 18 H.D.’s letter to Bryher (see S. Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, p. 40)
15Later on, in “Tribute to the Angels,” H.D. possibly shaped the poetic persona after the first alchemist, Mary the Jewess, or Mary the Prophetess, “the Sister of Moses” who knew the formula to “whiten the Stone in one day” (Mary the Prophetess). In “The Flowering of the Rod,” she explored the meaning and power of names. Emblematic is the alchemical name-transmutation of Mary (Magdalene) into Myrrh in section 16, where Mary sheds bitter, salty tears, salty like sea-water, and like H.D.’s acronym in which H.D. recognized a formula ( “a sort of chemical like H2O or NACL, ... water, … salt.”18
- 19 “She herself is the writing.” (Helen in Egypt, 22).
16In H.D.’s last poetic text, and her testament, Hermetic Definition, written in 1960-1961, the previous formula for salt water becomes the matrix of spiritual energy which nourishes the writer and, through her, penetrates writing, entrusting it to future times. In a circular process connecting name, work and author,19 we see how the life-generating mythical construction which is H.D.’s work reverberates on its author as a continuous generator of meaning. The image of the literary work as process, of the writer one with her writing, of writing as re-writing of the myths of our culture, has stimulated the critical revival of the past thirty years, and the interpretive discourse of her work, which at the turn of the twenty-first century continues the work of re-vision and re-writing Hilda Doolittle started at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Notes
1 I am indebted to Alain Badiou’s Time and the Event for my reading of poetic time as event (événement).
2 B. Viola, “The Porcupine and the Car,” p. 62-63.
3 Gautier’s poem is included in Émaux et camées, 1852.
4 T.S. Eliot, American Literature and the American Language, p. 22.
5 M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 42.
6 Quotations are respectively from the Orphic Hymn 35 to Leto and Callimachus, Hymn 3 to Artemis.
7 See B. Leland, “Psychotic Apotheosis: Visionary and Poet’s Fear in Ezra Pound’s ‘The Return’,” p. 185.
8 See F.S. Flint, “Imagisme,” p. 198.
9 Unpublished essay in the H.D. Papers at Yale.
10 T.E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays in Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, p. 8.
11 See his “Reflections on Violence,” a review of Sorel’s The Illusions of Progress in Speculations.
12 H. Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 191.
13 This quotation is taken from Richard Aldington’s translation of “The Poems of Anyte of Tegea” (p. 139).
14 Letter to Bryher of 23 August 1924 (see S. Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D., p. 219).
15 Letter of Mary Gawthorpe to Marsden (T. Petrovich, “Modernist Freewomen between Public and Domestic Space in London around 1910,” p. 293). Initially Gawthorpe co-edited The Freewoman.
16 “Views and Comments,” “The Art of the Future,” “Beauty and the Senses,” published in the issues 1.9, 1.10 and 1.11 (1913) of The New Freewoman. On the debate between Pound and Marsden, see M. Camboni, “Dora Marsden and The Freewoman as an Open Space.”
17 D. Marsden, “Views and Comments,” p. 165-166.
18 H.D.’s letter to Bryher (see S. Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, p. 40).
19 “She herself is the writing.” (Helen in Egypt, 22).
© Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2014