H.D and Modernity
| , , ,Placing New Worlds: Trilogy as Geographical and Geopolitical Palimpsest1
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- 1 This text is a portion of Chapter 5 of The Geopoetics of Modernism. Reprinted with permission of th (...)
- 2 I. Keighren, Bringing Geography to Book, p. 51-53 and “Reading the Messy Reception,” p. 283.
- 3 Other geographers less well known to the public who worked in an environmental determinist vein in (...)
1My paper begins not with H.D. but with Ellen Churchill Semple, one of the most prominent American geographers of the modernist period and a writer who shared many of H.D.’s sensibilities. For English-speaking audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Semple was an influential figure in formulating environmental determinism, the reigning paradigm in academic geography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was responsible for disseminating it to a wide audience. Her seminal book The Influences of Geographic Environment, published in 1911, was widely reviewed in over 40 academic and popular periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, and she also embarked on an eighteen-month lecture tour around the world to promote the book’s ideas.2 This brand of geography advanced several key ideas: that the features of the landscape and climate were the first stop in any sort of inquiry into human society, that geographical environment influences human society and not necessarily the other way around (landscape first, people second), and that similar physical environments could produce similar cultural and societal outcomes, no matter the physical distance separating them.3 Semple’s Influences of Geographic Environment opens with this formulation:
Man is a product of the earth’s surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust, but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. (Influences…, 1)
2To posit a fundamental, shaping effect of the landscape, environmental determinism proceeds through global comparisons of distant regions in order to differentiate one kind of environmental effect from another, or to cite multiple geographical examples that build a case for particular forms of environmental causality. Semple asserts that comprehending the evolution of human activities such as navigation, trade, and agriculture, as well as “theories of human population,” “can never reach their correct and final statement, unless the data for the conclusions are drawn from every part of the world, and each fact interpreted in the light of the local conditions whence it sprung” (Influences…, 51). Such comparisons, significantly, direct attention away from national boundaries, ideas of national statecraft, or theories of race as significant organizing principles. “The writer’s own method of research,” Semple explains in the preface of Influences, “has been to compare typical peoples of all races and all stages of cultural development, living under similar geographic conditions. If these peoples of different ethnic stocks but similar environments manifested similar or related social, economic, or historical development, it was reasonable to infer that such similarities were due to environment and not to race” (Influences…, vii). These statements signal the methods of global environmental comparison punctuating the work of Semple in which spatial analogies and homologies link geographically distant but climactically similar locales. Such efforts to connect disparate and distant regions through their similar environmental impacts can be seen as generating what we can think of as a kind of landscape transitivity that works against conventional cognitive mappings of the world and against national or geopolitical borders.
- 4 For scholars who have tended to privilege narrative in these discussions, see for example Walkowitz (...)
3We can find in H.D.’s work similar global, comparative tactics that draw together different and disparate geographies and cultures and which invite us to recognize more fully the ways H.D.’s poetry belongs in recent conversations about cosmopolitan modernism, transnationalism, and globality that, with a few notable exceptions, has more often focused on narrative rather than poetry.4
- 5 One contemporary reviewer called it “perhaps the greatest study of the Mediterranean region ever wr (...)
- 6 V. Smyers, “H.D.’s Books in the Bryher Library,” p. 24.
- 7 L. Silverstein, “Planting the Seeds: Selections from The H.D. Chronology”; B. Guest, Herself Define (...)
- 8 B. Guest, ibid., p. 203.
4 It is highly likely that H.D. was among the readers familiar with Semple’s work. Semple’s widely reviewed 1931 book, Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History,5 was owned by H.D. and Bryher6 and one can see why, as it drew heavily upon the ancient Greek literary and philosophical texts H.D. loved so well in order to illuminate the larger economic, technological, and cultural dynamics of the Mediterranean region. Its publication date of 1931 suggests an immediate relevance to H.D. since it appeared just before the 1932 Hellenic cruise H.D. took with her daughter Perdita and Alice Modern (Silverstein “Planting the Seeds”; Guest 205).7 Because Bryher supplied many of the historical and academic texts in preparation for the journey that she and H.D. took to Egypt with H.D.’s mother in 1922, it seems highly plausible that Bryher would have done so with this Hellenic cruise. Although Geography of the Mediterranean Region has been catalogued by Virginia Smyers as a part of Bryher’s library, it would have resided at Kenwin, the Swiss home that Bryher had built for them in 1930-1931, in its “splendid library” that housed novels as well as what Barbara Guest calls “Bryher’s necessary history books,”8 which would have included Semple’s work.
- 9 C. Zilboorg (in Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters, 1918-1961, p. xii) points out t (...)
- 10 A. Debo, The American H.D., p. 20.
5There are several indicators that H.D.’s contact with environmental determinism began much earlier, possibly through Semple’s well-known 1911 Influences of Geographic Environment.9 Environmental determinist ideas appear, for instance, in her 1921 roman à clef, Paint It Today. As Annette Debo has claimed, the natural environment formulates for Midge an essential American identity that follows her to Europe: “Language and tradition do not make a people, but the heat that presses on them, the cold that baffles them, the alternating lengths of night and day.”10 I would add that H.D.’s language here potently echoes Semple’s imagery of the human embodiments of environmental influence: “[the earth] has entered into [man’s] bone and tissue, into his mind and soul” (Influences…, 1). These ideas also inform some of the entries in Bryher’s Picture Geography for Children, published in 1925 by Jonathan Cape, and which Bryher dedicated to Perdita, H.D.’s daughter and Bryher’s adopted daughter.
6H.D. draws upon these geographical linkages between environmental influence and cultural identity in her World War II poem Trilogy, which underwrite the poem’s ability to create two kinds of communal affiliations in “The Walls Do Not Fall,” the first of Trilogy’s three poems. First, H.D.’s appeals to the environmental determinist equation help to create a sense of community in war-torn London in ways that acknowledge, and yet overcome, the potentially divisive questions of national difference that might distance the expatriate American poet-speaker from the British civilian public. Sarah Graham has discussed H.D.’s complex relationship to authority and to the challenges of coalition building, which prompts her to launch a defense of the poet in Trilogy (172-173); I would submit that the ideology of environmental determinism helps H.D. to create standing in her community in canny, subtle ways. If the poet-speaker in Trilogy is of the landscape then she is of the culture and can speak about it. Second, these logics also help to launch H.D.’s use of Egyptian historical and mythological materials so prominent in “The Walls Do Not Fall.”
- 11 See S. Graham, “‘We have a secret. We are alive’: H.D.’s Trilogy as a Response to War,” p. 171- 172 (...)
- 12 See A. Debo, The American H. D.; S. Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain.”
- 13 See S. Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy”; S. Friedman, Psyche Reborn.
7 Trilogy opens, significantly, not with the individual poet or the “companions of the flame” of the poet’s imagined community (Collected Poems, 521) but with the landscape of bombed out London. While this obviously captures the sense of shock and disorientation that war produces, it also follows the logical formula and the formal conventions of environmental determinist writing that places the landscape first, and people second. What happens to the landscape in Trilogy is a primary motor or foreground at the same time as it highlights the question of who can claim a social connection to that landscape: “An incident here and there, /and rails gone (for guns) /from your (and my) old town square.” The possessive pronouns instantly highlight issues of propriety, ownership, and connection.11 These two sets of possessive pronouns differentiate an assumed “native” sense of ownership felt by the British citizenry (the “your”) from that of the poet, a figure for the expatriate H.D. whose sense of Americanness she retained despite her transnational movements.12 The sequential ordering and the use of the parenthetical grant ownership first and foremost to the not-poet “your,” which subordinates the poet’s own parenthetical expression of ownership and turns it into a tentative and secondary development. While feminist critics have celebrated the spiritual community of women brought together in “The Walls Do Not Fall” as “companions of the flame” of World War II’s destruction,13 this is not necessarily an immediate or assumed connection between the poet and her companions/readers. The parenthetical insert “(of my) old town square” works as an interrupting gesture that interjects the idea of the poet’s own right to proprietorship and which starts to pave the way for the creation of an organic community that can include both the poet and her “companions of the flame.”
8H.D. shores up this gap by repeatedly staging dynamics of external, environmental forces impinging upon the poet and her companions. Some of this is couched in explicitly architectural terms, and some of it through representations of climate and geographical terrain. Explicit attention focuses on the environmental effects of war: “over us, Apocryphal fire, /under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor, /slope of a pavement” (Collected Poems, 510). These, admittedly, are man-made environmental conditions unlike those with which the environmental determinist geographer would be concerned. But H.D. adapts these conventions of academic geography by conveying the destruction of war through geological images, which allows the poem’s language to tap into broader sets of geographical assumptions about the relationship between the landscape and human society that would have been familiar to H.D.’s reading public. The “slow flow of terrible lava” and the “crack of volcanic fissure” are things that exert “pressure on heart, lungs, the brain/about to burst its brittle case” (Collected Poems, 510). Community building comes from the “[p] eril, strangely encountered, strangely endured” that “marks us” (Collected Poems, 520). From this perspective, the often-cited articulation of a feminist community that the poem offers, “we nameless initiates, /born of one mother, //companions/of the flame,” can be read as an expression of contingency, hinging upon shared environmental experience. The poet’s community is “born of one mother” precisely because they are “companions/of the flame.” The familial nature of community is enabled through shared environmental conditionings of the landscape.
- 14 M. Bryant and M.A. Eaverly, “Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past,” p. 43 (...)
9One of the many sources of spiritual uplift and of affirmation of the power of perseverance in Trilogy comes from its turn to Egyptian materials in what Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly have called H.D.’s “Egypto-Modernism,” which seizes upon Egypt as a new “monumental past” for the West14 and which challenges “traditional narratives of Western culture by making Egypt its source and spiritual center.” There is more we might do, however, to understand the ways that H.D. navigates her concerns about questions of ethical access regarding Egypt, concerns that appear in texts like H.D.’s “Secret Name: Excavator’s Egypt,” a story from her 1926 trilogy Palimpsest, which portrays Helen Fairwood’s deliberations about her right of entry as she visits an Egyptian tomb.
10In “The Walls Do Not Fall” the comparativist techniques of environmental determinism authorize H.D.’s material and linguistic connections to Egypt by creating links between their architectural environments and even between their seemingly different climates as well. In the process, the poem authorizes the speaker’s access to precisely the forms of Egyptian spiritual regeneration and feminist inspiration that have drawn so many scholars and readers to the poem.
11The transitive properties of environmental determinism mean that the poet’s conditioning by the ruins of London allows the poet to fully access another ruin, the landscape of the temple complexes at Karnak.
mist and mist grey, no colour,
still the Luxor bee, chick, and hare
pursue unalterable purpose
in green, rose-red, lapis;
they continue to prophesy
from the stone papyrus:
there, as here, ruin opens
the tomb, the temple; enter,
there, as here, there are no doors;
the shrine lies open to the sky,
the rain falls, here, there,
sand drifts; eternity endures:
ruin everywhere… (Collected Poems, 509, emphasis mine)
12 The environmental condition of “ruin” constructs the London landscape as one that is open to the poet in the same manner as “the tomb, the temple.” If being conditioned by a particular environment makes you of that environment then by experiencing the same destruction as Karnak’s environment the poet grants herself access to all that that environment produced or represents. The homology of environment between London and Karnak is further accomplished through sight and sound in the near rhyme of “here” and “there” italicized above throughout the opening stanzas. Though a slight dissonance between England and Egypt is distinguishable, the slant rhyme of here/there, or indeed of here/there/hare, suggests that London and Karnak can be made to serve as loose correspondents for each other.
13I am not arguing that H.D. is an environmental determinist through and through, but rather that the hermeneutic and formal properties of this widely disseminated discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century provided H.D. with usable strategies. Indeed, H.D.’s poetics put pressure on the comparativist logic of environmental determinism to the point of rupture by allowing London and Karnak to blend on the space of the page. H.D.’s play with “here” and “there” blurs the geographical distinctions between London and Karnak altogether, making it difficult to determine where one location’s 123 territory stops and the other’s starts. The linkage “there, as here” repeats several times in the poem’s opening; however, they trade positions in the final iteration and lose their directional power:
the shrine lies open to the sky,
the rain falls, here, there [not there, here]
sand drifts; eternity endures:
- 15 D. Hollenberg (ed.), Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, p. (...)
14The comparative tools of academic geography and its narrative techniques enable this sense of spatial enlargement in ways that uncannily align both Semple and H.D. with the “spatial turn” of recent humanities and social studies scholarship and to which Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, and others have contributed. But not surprisingly H.D. reserves supreme agency for the genre of poetry and the power of the poet over the nature of space itself. When her literary executor and friend Norman Holmes Pearson asks her to chronicle the conditions that propel her to write, she deflects his questions with some of her own in the letter she writes in response: “Life? /Poetry? /Times, and places?” “Times, places, dates don’t seem so much to matter. Yet there are the times and places of these fragments, as well as I can time and place them” (12 December 1937).15 H.D. makes wordplay of the question itself, evacuating “time” and “space” as meaningful coordinates in dimensional reality in order to highlight their arbitrary nature as categories constructed by the human mind and which the poet can transform.
15If environmental determinism depends upon a positivist epistemology and upon a stable sense of the ontological nature of geography—there is a “there” to space that is fixed and knowable, and the question is how to best access it—H.D.’s poetic transformations of space radically undermine ontological fixity in ways that pose a direct challenge to academic geography’s central assumptions.
16What are the geopolitical repercussions of H.D.’s geographical palimpsests? Undermining geographic ontologies necessarily challenges the Orientalist binary of us/them, West/non-West and their reigning cultural and political structures of power of the period that would hierarchize England over Egypt. H.D. also to a degree recognizes aspects of contemporary Egypt (Karnak is “already” in ruins, in the present era, and she dedicates “The Walls Do Not Fall” to the Egypt she visited with Bryher in 1923) when Orientalism, as Edward Said would have it, would portray the Orient as obsolete, stuck in the past, or as out of time altogether. And yet the danger is, of course, that Egyptian cultural materials and their specificity are encircled by the poetics of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” a danger that H.D. seems to recognize:
irony is bitter truth
wrapped up in a little joke,
and Hatshepsut’s name is still circled
with what they call the cartouche. (Collected Poems, 518)
17The irony of H.D.’s “bitter truth” may be that Egypt continues to be legible to modern day history but that it is “still circled” by her own usage just as Hatshepsut is still circled by the symbol that Napoleon’s French Expedition, harbingers of Egypt’s modern day European colonization, named the “cartouche.” But in the spirit of H.D.’s unsettling and provocative use of doubleness and return, whatever ironies of H.D.’s appropriation are a bitter truth that is itself wrapped up in a little joke.
Notes
1 This text is a portion of Chapter 5 of The Geopoetics of Modernism. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.
2 I. Keighren, Bringing Geography to Book, p. 51-53 and “Reading the Messy Reception,” p. 283.
3 Other geographers less well known to the public who worked in an environmental determinist vein in the early decades of the twentieth century include Ellsworth Huntington (climatology), Albert Perry Brigham (regional geography), Carl Sauer (geology), as well as Isaiah Bowman whose work eventually shifted to the development of geopolitical geography as an extension of governmental international policy.
4 For scholars who have tended to privilege narrative in these discussions, see for example Walkowitz, Moses, and Berman. The work of Miller and Ramazani are notable exceptions. Ramazani’s “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” discusses the narrative-heavy focus of recent scholarship on globalism.
5 One contemporary reviewer called it “perhaps the greatest study of the Mediterranean region ever written” (Becker 290), and other positive reviews appeared in mainstream periodicals as varied as the British Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator and American magazines like the New Republic.
6 V. Smyers, “H.D.’s Books in the Bryher Library,” p. 24.
7 L. Silverstein, “Planting the Seeds: Selections from The H.D. Chronology”; B. Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet and Her World, p. 205.
8 B. Guest, ibid., p. 203.
9 C. Zilboorg (in Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters, 1918-1961, p. xii) points out that most of the books that are housed in H.D.’s papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale and Bryher’s library in East Hampton, New York largely constitute these writers’ later libraries, leaving a gap in the record about their books from the period before the early 1920s. It is tempting to speculate that earlier texts by Semple were among the earlier lost libraries of H.D. and Bryher.
10 A. Debo, The American H.D., p. 20.
11 See S. Graham, “‘We have a secret. We are alive’: H.D.’s Trilogy as a Response to War,” p. 171- 172. For other discussions that examine Trilogy’s relationship to its World War II context. For other discussions of the poem’s response to the war and to other war-time literary texts, see S. Schweik, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Woman Poets and the Second World War; S. Edmunds, Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis, and Montage in H.D.’s Long Poems; S. Friedman, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle.
12 See A. Debo, The American H. D.; S. Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain.”
13 See S. Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy”; S. Friedman, Psyche Reborn.
14 M. Bryant and M.A. Eaverly, “Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past,” p. 435-453.
15 D. Hollenberg (ed.), Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, p. 8-10.
© Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2014