{"id":110507,"date":"2017-05-03T16:05:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T20:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110507"},"modified":"2017-05-03T16:54:07","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T20:54:07","slug":"h-d-notebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/03\/h-d-notebook\/","title":{"rendered":"H.D. Notebook"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

H.D.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last year, having been invited to participate in a public discussion of the poet H.D., I decided to explore H.D.\u2019s fictional works, virtually none of which appeared during her lifetime. Many of these, even just ten years ago, were available only to scholars willing to visit the Beinecke at Yale, where most of her manuscripts and papers are housed. But almost everything\u2019s in print now.<\/p>\n

Though I admire H.D.\u2019s poems,\u00a0I did not expect my prose project to be pleasurable, and it wasn\u2019t. I don\u2019t know how many of her novels and novellas I read, but I found all of them (with one exception, dealt with below) annoying. Mainly they are exactly what people mean by \u201cself-indulgent.\u201d The reader is exposed to the spectacle of the writer hunting around for a style worthy of her personal melodrama. Inefficiency and joyless obscurity abound. Even the one I liked is not a great book or anything.<\/p>\n

But none of this matters. I say I didn\u2019t find the project pleasurable, but I did find it engrossing. I became very invested in coming to some kind of reckoning with H.D.\u2019s\u00a0personality<\/em>, mainly because I saw that over the years I\u2019ve known and been friends with quite a few H.D.s\u2014at least four. The key difference being that the H.D.s in my life could never have written any of H.D.\u2019s mature poetry. But all of them could have written her novels. Except for\u00a0Bid Me to Live<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The public discussion came and went, and I have not stopped reading H.D. I can\u2019t wait till this semester is over so I can read some of these satellite materials\u00a0that keep getting themselves mentioned in footnotes.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, what follows is merely a set of hints and ideas and judgments I\u2019ve been accumulating. Call it \u201cH.D. Notebook: Part I.\u201d I\u2019ll post Part 2 in June.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u2767 1.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m teaching a course called Twentieth-Century USA Poetry. We got to H.D. I suggested we all try to write some\u00a0Sea Garden\u00a0<\/em>poems. We looked closely at three or four famous pieces in an old Norton Anthology. \u201cSea Rose,\u201d et cetera. Then I laid down five rules:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Poem must be this big (thumb and forefinger form a \u201cC\u201d)<\/li>\n
  2. Itty-bitty choppy lines<\/li>\n
  3. Violent monosyllabic verbs<\/li>\n
  4. Apostrophe (i.e., talk to something you\u2019re not supposed to talk to)<\/li>\n
  5. Turn all wussy assumptions about beauty on their heads<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Result? Ten people in the seminar, ten\u00a0Sea Garden\u00a0<\/em>poems\u2014all of \u2019em different, all of \u2019em more or less unmistakably written by H.D. in 1915. Apparently we had hit upon the right recipe.<\/p>\n

    This kind of thing would never work in a million years with\u00a0Trilogy\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Helen in Egypt<\/em>. That it worked with\u00a0Sea Garden\u00a0<\/em>makes me uneasy. The same thing could be done with my poems.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767\u00a02.<\/p>\n

    Lots of people read\u00a0Sea Garden<\/em>, then stop. This, even though they weren\u2019t fatigued or annoyed. They liked the book, but they go no further. I have a hypothesis as to why.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s what happened to me with the first Smiths record. I intuited it would always be better simply to listen to\u00a0The Smiths\u00a0<\/em>again rather than move on to whatever their second record was called, because (a) it seemed medically impossible the next album was going to be better and (b) in some sense, I always had unfinished business with the first album. I hadn\u2019t sufficiently digested it.<\/p>\n

    Sea Garden\u00a0<\/em>is like that. The poems are so similar to each other that you get the idea no growth is possible. And the poems are so pregnant with meaning, one never feels one has done them justice simply by reading them. One never really \u201cknows one\u2019s way around\u201d\u00a0Sea Garden<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    (How many people have read\u00a077 Dream Songs\u00a0<\/em>many times and never moved on to\u00a0His Toy, His Dream, His Rest<\/em>\u2014?)<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767\u00a03.<\/p>\n

    I don\u2019t like biographies wherein the subject has no stupid ideas, is never self-deceived, and is never a source of legitimate grievance to anyone. To watch a biographer\u00a0protect\u00a0<\/em>her subject from all negative interpretations, and even from the other characters in the story\u2014this is a most unedifying spectacle.<\/p>\n

    Janice Robinson<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>sheltering H.D. from Pound, for instance. Or urging H.D. into hand-holding with D. H. Lawrence. Massaging facts so they can have gone to bed, those two exotic, beautiful creatures. Caroline Zilboorg<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>explaining away four fifths of Richard Aldington\u2019s character, so his marriage with H.D. can be viewed as a deep and mutually rewarding enterprise. And of course trashing Bryher.<\/p>\n

    Standing very far apart from those two is Barbara Guest<\/a>\u2019s biography (Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World<\/em>, 1985). Guest, whose own poetry I find unreadable, plays perfectly (to my mind) the part of the mature critic. She respects H.D., but H.D. is not her darling. Guest\u2019s tone is that appropriate to a conversation between friends A and B about absent friend C, whom they both love\u2014but<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    That, anyway, is the conversation I want to overhear. Not two people trashing a third, but two people soberly comparing notes, the better to understand the yes and the no of the person.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767\u00a04.<\/p>\n

    The photo on the back of Zilboorg\u2019s\u00a0Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(2003) is almost too vulnerable to mention. A naked Richard Aldington, sitting in surf,\u00a0fused\u00a0<\/em>with a photo of naked H.D., standing in what looks like the same water but which is actually a path through some woods. The original photos are provided in the book. Cropped out: the naked woman with whom Aldington was actually bathing, also the fact that Aldington was three thousand miles away when the H.D. photo was snapped.<\/p>\n

    Back cover of Robinson\u2019s bio is really something, too. Four men: Pound, Lawrence, Aldington, and then, taking up more space than those three put together: Freud.\u00a0There\u2019s nothing else on the back cover.\u00a0<\/em>(Where\u2019s Bryher?)<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767\u00a05.<\/p>\n

    A great many people felt the need to record and publish their impressions of H.D. during her lifetime. It\u2019s stimulating that these works were, generally speaking, satirical. The most famous of these is William Carlos Williams\u2019s bits about H.D. in his\u00a0Autobiography\u00a0<\/em>(1951). He makes her out to be the kind of drama-queeny yo-yo who lifts her arms as it\u2019s beginning to rain and says, \u201cCome, beautiful rain!\u201d and insists on getting drenched.<\/p>\n

    She seems to have inspired rather a lot of this kind of portraiture. Lawrence put some ineffectual, indecisive, thwarted version of her into\u00a0Aaron\u2019s Rod<\/em>; John Cournos (who had also been a close friend) wrote a whole satirical novel about her (Miranda Masters<\/em>, 1926); and even Frances Gregg, who was supposedly the female love of H.D.\u2019s life (I forget who says this, but I pretty much buy it) wrote, in tandem with her husband, some long piece of fictional nastiness about H.D.\u00a0Can\u2019t remember\u00a0the title; it\u2019s hard to keep track of all this.<\/p>\n

    Seems\u00a0everyone in her private life treated her roughly at some point, but the three people who at least never treated her roughly\u00a0in public writing\u00a0<\/em>are Pound, Aldington, and Bryher. These last two genuinely revered her, thought she was a \u201cgenius\u201d and all that crap. Surprisingly, only Pound seems to have declined to satirize her simply because he had better things to do. Or maybe she just somehow didn\u2019t annoy him as much as she annoyed other people. She drove Aldington and Bryher up the wall and into the chandelier.<\/p>\n

    Actually, I feel like underscoring a point very easy to miss. You can say what you like about Pound; at least he never wrote a\u00a0roman \u00e0 clef. Everyone else in that circle wrote a bunch of \u2019em. H.D. herself wrote at least six.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767\u00a06.<\/p>\n

    Part of why she made everybody crazy is she combined two traits that seldom come together: narcissism (intense self-fascination, intense self-approval) and what I want to call personal pacifism\u2014the unwillingness to fight with (or ever to interfere with) others. She simply never\u00a0attacks\u00a0<\/em>anyone or anything for any reason. Not with malice, not with ideas, not with helpfulness.\u00a0It\u2019s just\u00a0not her way. And it\u2019s not because she\u2019s sweet; she wasn\u2019t. Anyone who thinks she was nice should read her novel\u00a0Hermione\u00a0<\/em>(sometimes called\u00a0HERmione\u00a0<\/em>and sometimes called\u00a0Her<\/em>). But this is what I\u2019m saying. Most people who are as not nice as she was end up Susan Sontagging their way through life, dogmatizing and being contradicted, battling their way in and out of people\u2019s consciousness.<\/p>\n

    The mystery, the membrane-irritating mystery, is how someone with H.D.\u2019s resources of elitism and self-love manages not to be\u00a0aggressive<\/em>.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767\u00a07.<\/p>\n

    She was a believer; she was born to believe. Anything ancient. Anything that looked like hieroglyphics, including a Ouija board. She was the kind of person who, in the car on the way to her wedding, might see a sign advertising a shoe outlet: WHY PAY MORE? DON\u2019T DO IT!<\/small> That \u201cdon\u2019t do it\u201d could cause her to pull over and have a long, panicked, tearful meditation.<\/p>\n

    Any kind of chance homonymy. A pear tree would also necessarily be a \u201cpair\u201d tree. Hmm. Pair of what.\u00a0Also people should consider carefully before they call a place \u201cPennsylvania.\u201d\u00a0Sylvania\u2014woods. Hmm.<\/p>\n

    She really was like this. Horoscopes, s\u00e9ances. Egyptological crapola in every flavor. And yet: mysticism doesn\u2019t have any kind of\u00a0sustained presence in any of her books except\u00a0The Sword Went Out to Sea\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Magic Ring<\/em>, neither of which were published in her lifetime (not that she didn\u2019t try).<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s like with Pound\u2019s fascism. It was supposedly so important to him, but the\u00a0Cantos<\/em>, if you actually bother to read them, are like a gallon jar of jelly beans with six or seven evil licorice ones in the whole jar. I never know what to make of this. It\u2019s certainly not that he was ashamed to own his views in front of the public. H.D.\u2019s case\u2014the shyness surrounding her mysticism\u2014is probably easier to understand.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u2767 8.<\/p>\n

    The most presentable face of her will-to-believe was Freudian psychoanalysis, a\u00a0thing about which she knew quite a lot, having had no small number of sessions with Sigmund Freud himself. She regarded herself as one of his star pupils.<\/p>\n

    Freud\u2019s \u201cteachings\u201d were a\u00a0context in which a \u201cpair\u201d tree, dreams about biblical kitsch, and etchings of the Temple of Karnak were all entitled to give long speeches.\u00a0They had standing; they had authority.\u00a0And Freud himself\u00a0was a charismatic cult leader on the verge of death who might pass to H.D. the robes of the new religion. A religion, be it noted, whose only flaw was its insistence that God and gods and ghosts and heaven-haven were illusions without which mankind would be better off. This, of course,\u00a0is where the \u201cProfessor\u201d was sadly mistaken.\u00a0H.D. hoped to make the necessary adjustments \u2026<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Anthony Madrid<\/a> lives in Victoria, Texas. <\/em>His second book of poems is called <\/em>Try Never<\/a>\u00a0(Canarium Books, 2017). He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The poems are so pregnant with meaning, one never feels one has done them justice simply by reading them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[12855,199,28652,3115,10670,19401,11718,7021,747,7221,165,2047,17144,28651,492,9605],"class_list":["post-110507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-biographers","tag-biography","tag-bryher","tag-ezra-pound","tag-h-d","tag-hilda-doolittle","tag-notebooks","tag-notes","tag-novels","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poets","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-sea-garden","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-superstition"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNotes on H.D. and Her Biographers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Anthony Madrid on H.D.: \u201cthe poems are so pregnant with meaning, one never feels one has done them justice simply by reading them.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/03\/h-d-notebook\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"H.D. 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