The Tree is a twenty-five-character, one-woman auto/biographical play that draws on H.D.’s memoirs, romans à clef, poetry, and letters. Other sources include documents in the H.D. collection at Yale, autobiographies by H.D.’s associates, biographies, and other critical accounts that create an underlay for the script. This immersion in primary and secondary texts and an attention, as much as possible, to textual intentions and the historical record make The Tree what I have referred to as research-based performance. Autobiographical and critical writing both inform and constitute the work, as the play is not just written with an eye on H.D.’s writing and the writing around it but crafted out of these sources.1 This is true both in terms of quotation, which represents the majority of the written text, but also in the collage-like approach, which mirrors H.D.’s own palimpsestic method of pasting time over time, text over text, and scene over scene. The narrative trajectory, moreover, follows the path established by what are critically considered to be H.D.’s most autobiographical works, which are in many ways a multivolume meditation on the emotional and artistic development of the artist. In this sense, the play, like H.D.’s most liferesonant writing, is created in the tradition of the künstlerroman, especially in its attention to early influences and experiences.
Originally and in early performances, I titled this play H.D.: A Life, hoping to provide a representative portrait of each of H.D.’s life stages.2 Performing from this twenty-five-character one-woman show in community and academic settings in North America, Europe, and Asia revealed how this broad scope was less effective than focusing on a particular storyline and specific works. For example, in finalizing material for the adaptation, it became clear that texts including the Madrigal Cycle and End to Torment were much more stage-transmissible than some of H.D.’s other writings, notably works like Palimpsest and Narthex. Those who are familiar with H.D.’s work will realize this means that, while Bryher Ellerman appears as a major character, there is less time spent on this relationship than actual chronology suggests. The relationship between these two women, in its emotional and intellectual dimensions, merits its own play, a project enabled by existing and emerging scholarship about Ellerman. However, the narrative arc that I have chosen here, from H.D.’s emerging sense of herself as a writer in Philadelphia to her late reminiscence as illustrated by her published work, is attached to the figure of Ezra Pound, who was present in body at the beginning and in mind at the end. While some might suggest this emphasis perpetuates the myth of H.D.’s “creation” by Pound or somehow obscures her homosexual commitments, the shifting, evanescent nature of that relationship here acts as a pole whereby we can understand Pound – and by extension canonical modernism – as both someone very near to H.D. and someone about whom she was deeply ambivalent and from whom she strayed very far indeed. In the sense that the play intersects with Poundian history, it also engages other dramatized representations, notably Tom Dulack’s Incommunicado and Timothy Findley’s The Trials of Ezra Pound.3
In addition to providing new audiences with an introduction to H.D. through dramatization, an important part of the performance-based research component of the play was in pursuing H.D.’s most theatrical autobiographical writing, the writing that literally, figuratively, and structurally referenced the stage. In this sense, materials were also chosen in relationship to my research questions, notably: In what sense can the theatre mediate between H.D.’s autobiographical drama and the aesthetics of impersonality that characterize her poetry? How can H.D.’s multi-layered sensibility be physicalized and entered into differently through the staged environment? What does performance, and solo performance in particular, reveal about H.D.’s multiple subjectivities? How can the elements of gender performance encountered in H.D.’s writing be productively explored through performative inquiry? How can we come to understand the implications of H.D.’s theatricality and theatre-based writing through dramatization? In what follows, I engage with some of the critical sources that have drawn out these elements of H.D.’s work in textual criticism and show how these issues have been pursued through dramatic treatment, recognizing that any subsequent stagings will, in a very real sense, create different results depending on emphasis, interpretation, and other variables of the theatre.
To write of H.D.’s theatre is to admit to a contradiction. There is at once what Sarah Bay-Cheng and Barbara Cole have termed “a distinct current of theatricality” (64) running through H.D.’s autobiographical prose and, at the same time, something that at first seems quite anti-theatrical about some of H.D.’s other work – notably the flat presentation and impersonal elements of some of the poetry and the textual imperatives of her plays. That said, the theatrical current is present in H.D.’s classic and contemporary texts, often carrying autobiographical experience into dramatized environments or dramatic structures into life writing. As Bay-Cheng and Cole note of Hippolytus Temporizes, H.D. “translate[s] the experience of modern life into classical poetic theater: life disguised as performance” (64). Similarly, in her classical novels, there is a strong dramatic element at play. The afterword to Hedylus, H.D.’s 1928 novel exploring the conflict between ancient Athens and Alexandria through mother and son poets Hedyle and Hedylus, highlights the dramatized subjectivity of the characters: “Hedylus is vertical, hermetic, idiosyncratic; its world encompasses an externalization of inner states. Its shifts in consciousness follow a psychological stream of awareness; its symbols are visualized projections […] Both its main characters are extreme in self-consciousness, theatrical in a word; their thoughts form themselves readily into interior monologues, approaching at times the soliloquy of drama” (147; original emphasis). Both the “externalization” of the inner world and the formal conventions that approach soliloquy are indicative of a dramatic mode that summons some kind of externalized, dramatized delivery. In Hedylus, as in H.D.’s autobiographical prose, the writing can be so highly wrought that this externalization onstage can feel like both realization and release.
Immediately, this theatricality, along with the personal dimensions of biographical drama, seems to be very much in tension with the distanced aesthetics of the poetry, both the imagism of H.D.’s early writing and the “air and crystal” (End to Torment 35) that characterizes the later work. To exclude the poetry from a biographical dramatization would be reductive; to include it risks subsuming it to “story.” Yet this complication also raises interesting possibilities as to how theatre itself can mediate the tension between H.D.’s most embodied and disembodied writings. In working with this poetry onstage, it became clear that impersonality exists, in H.D.’s work, by matters of degree. Poems like “Fragment Forty” and “Fragment Forty-One” contain a distanced aesthetic that can be translated through a flattening of vocal tone and Greek imagery that can be materialized through visual projection, but also an autobiographical layer that is contextualized by its position within the drama.4 In this sense, tone, visual realization, and the auto/biographical frame provide insight into the layering taking place within the poem through concurrent acts of reception. At the same time, dramatization also provides interpretive possibilities for H.D.’s more resolutely impersonal, philosophical, and historical works that exist outside of the personal sphere, such as the excerpt from Helen in Egypt that appears at the end of the play. What I can only describe as an oracular delivery of this poem, which is to say one in which verse almost seems to be coming from “outside” of the actor, even as it is delivered through the body, can set the poem in relief with the emotive delivery of the autobiographical prose and also connect the poetry to H.D’s ideas of historical channelling. Like Pound, who believed that “souls of all men great / At times pass athrough us, / And we are melted into them, and are not / Save reflexions of their souls” and that he could “for an instant” be Dante or François Villon (“Histrion,” New Selected Poems 8), so H.D. believed in the blurred instant when “a layer out of ourselves, in another sphere of consciousness” could be realized, so that a daily household object could also be “imbued with a quality of long-past, an epic quality” (Asphodel 152). This “giving over” to the historical times and voices, a minimizing of the self in order to summon the historical subject, is a method that H.D. uses in early collections like Heliodora (1924) through to her final epic poem, Helen in Egypt (1961), where it is frequently Helen’s voice that speaks: “You will not understand / what I have taken years / or centuries to experience” (80). When paired with a historical sensibility that responded to ideas of divination or inhabitation, the use of monologue also bears resemblance to the working method of actors who feel they are channelling the voice of another.
In this sense, the malleability and range of voiced expression can allow at once for an auto/biographical narration and, in marked contrast, an enacted withdrawal of subjectivity in moments of historical overcoming or more cerebral forms of composition that represent an important part of H.D.’s artistic process. These variations in delivery respond both to the presentational range we find in H.D.’s work and also, implicitly, to her interests in historical masks and masking central to those works that operate in the sphere of impersonality.5 Diana Collecott, for example, notes that H.D.’s adoption of “fictive and mythic” voices in her more impersonal work allows her to “combine the Imagist requirements of ‘direct treatment of the “thing” […]’ with the ‘indirect method’ of dramatic characterisation” (155). This description of the dramatic lyric highlights the ways the indirect elements of impersonality are cohesive with H.D.’s dramatic structures and forms, both of which can be usefully explored through the theatre.
The blurring of time that historical summoning evokes and the associated condensations of geography and subjectivity that have long been at the centre of H.D. criticism are also particularly suited to renewed attention onstage. As noted, the compositional method of the play is palimpsestic, layering times, characters, and ideas. The multisensory possibilities of the theatre also permit a simultaneity of experience that realizes an important dimension of modernist methodology, generally, and H.D.’s work in particular. Arthur Holmberg writes: “Ever since Cubism, simultaneity has been the war cry of the avant-garde […] By telescoping space and time, by yoking together a kaleidoscope of clashing perspectives, simultaneity enables an artist to create new aesthetic unity without denying the contradictions and chaos of experience” (93). Onstage, overlaps in visual projections and soundscapes provide a great deal of potential for the realization of this avant-gardism and also push against the more constrictive elements of the biographical form. The layered, blurred, and mystical elements of H.D.’s work, which are on many counts difficult to adequately represent in linear criticism, can be captured in ways that contribute not only to a visual aesthetic but also to an atmosphere that pervades H.D.’s work, a disorientation of linear time, a heightened sensibility, which, as in reading H.D., is not just descriptive but felt – a stretching of the imaginative limit at once intriguing and laced with emotive and physical vertigo. Textual criticism has long concerned itself with the visual nature of H.D.’s world, but the stage presents an opportunity to realize it. A palimpsest is, after all, a text that has been written over many times, and this textual layering can be accomplished through an overlap of words and images, just as the “image” itself invites visual play. H.D.’s condensed geographical landscapes that overlay multiple locations, moreover, can be visually inhabited through projection as can the more predictive elements of H.D.’s mysticism, like in the excerpt from Helen in Egypt discussed above:
and the hooves of the stallions
thunder across the plain,
and the plain is dust,
and the battle-field is a heap
of rusty staves and broken chariot-frames
and the rims of the dented shields
and desolation, destruction – for what? (243)
The visual nature of what is presented here summons images of ancient Greek battlefields, and the resonance for H.D. was in the bombing of London. At the same time, for contemporary audiences, “the plain is dust,” “desolation,” and “destruction” in describing wartime rather inescapably summon news images of more recent conflicts like those in Afghanistan and Syria. As a result, directors have a certain amount of interpretive latitude in considering what the poem can accommodate onstage. In this sense, the visual extension provided by staging permits an exploration and representation of H.D.’s visual and multiplied sensibility within its time even as it contains the possibility of bringing the work into dialogue with contemporary contexts and exploring its prophetic tone.
Within The Tree, these external compressions of time and place are mirrored by fissures and compactions in subjectivity explored through the work of the actor, the one woman who performs the twenty-five roles. While this may seem ambitious, solo performance has shown itself to be feasible and particularly useful in illustrating both the mnemonic dimensions of autobiographical reminiscence, taking place, as it does, within the individual mind, and the internal divisions and multiplications we find in H.D.’s work. This visceral fracturing is central to the theory of solo performance. Katherine McLeod, for example, points to Ric Knowles and Jennifer Harvie’s categorization of “dialogic monologue” as “a term that challenges Bakhtin’s notion of drama as striving through an individual speaker towards unitary language and, instead, posits drama as enabling a dialogic monologue that conveys ‘a fractured, incoherent or self-alienated subject through which various voices are heard’” (98). In The Tree, the actor’s division of the self into multiple roles is an embodied exploration of fissures and subjective limits. This is true both for the actor, who must find and accommodate each of the characters within her own body, but also for audiences, who frequently comment that watching a performance unfold is like observing “multiple personalities on stage.” Importantly, in working on H.D., this allows for the elucidation and consequent discussion of fragmentations of the self in H.D.’s work as well as an exploration of its multiplications. As Lara Vetter has noted, in H.D.’s fiction, there are frequently “characters created as composites” (116): “as the narrator states in one such fiction, ‘We’re not three separate people. We’re just one’” (108) – a merging that is made manifest in the play by the containment of these characters within the body of the single actor, enabling distinctly different perspectives on ideas of fractured or multiplied selves and an important glimpse into H.D.’s subjective universe.
While the simultaneity of the stage speaks of its ability to accommodate multiple visual and vocal modalities, the subjective elements are suggestive of other theoretical insight that can be gained through stage work. In considering these other theoretical possibilities, gender and performance loom particularly large. H.D.’s fluctuating identification with various personae and their varied sexualities is coherent with what we now think of as certain types of gender performance and a refusal to conform to set patterns of desire. Those familiar with H.D.’s work will know that in HER, H.D. explores triangulated desire between a female interest, Fayne (Frances Gregg), and her on-again, off-again fiancé, George (Ezra Pound). Paint It Today tells much of the same story, but forsakes Pound, the “hectic, adolescent, blundering, untried, mischievous and irreverent male youth” (7), for a steady erotic fixation on Gregg, which is supplanted, after Gregg’s defection, by an explicitly sexual bond with a character modelled after Bryher Ellerman. Yet in retelling parts of the story many years later in her memoir about Pound, End to Torment, she stresses a heterosexual imperative, describing Pound’s embraces as “electric, magnetic, they do not so much warm, they magnetize, vitalize” (4), a discourse on the magnetism between men and women that returns in Bid Me to Live. Similarly, H.D.’s novels also tend to interrogate gender definitions, refuting dichotomies in favour of more complex formulations. In Asphodel, H.D. claims that both she and Gregg are like Joan of Arc, “a girl who was a boy” (9). The possibilities for gender play are pronounced onstage when one considers that all of these roles are taken on by one actor. “Gender performance” is rarely so acutely visible as when one gender assumes the characteristics and mannerisms of another. The fact that Pound and Aldington, for example, “disappear” suddenly into other characters onstage – the elderly H.D., the young Hilda, the sexually aggressive Brigit Patmore – is a palpable expression of the ways in which personae, particularly those rooted in gender traits, are repertory actions. In this sense, solo performance reflects back on questions of subjectivity, but it is also an embodied vehicle for considering how gender can, quite literally, be taken on and performed by the individual through modifications in voice, tone, stance, and gesture in ways that are cohesive with H.D.’s own sense of gender’s malleability. It is one thing to think about gender performance through the critical text; it is quite another to witness gender performed and, in this sense, performing, and performing H.D. in particular opens up a materialized dimension through which to consider how gender plays both on the body and throughout the body of her work.
In addition to the formal and theoretical insight gained through production, the rehearsal process itself opens different dimensions of H.D.’s compositional method. This is largely as a result of some of the constructive similarities between H.D.’s writing and theatre-making. In corresponding with Norman Holmes Pearson about the collection of her work being compiled at Yale, H.D. wrote: “For me, it was so important, my own LEGEND. Yes, my own LEGEND. Then, to get well and re-create it” (17 June 1951, quoted in Stanford-Friedman, Penelope’s Web 67). As the emphasis on “recreat[ion]” implies, this was not just a matter of telling something once, but telling and retelling, crafting and re-crafting in order to reach a version that best reflected the lived reality. This near obsession, or what Vetter has called a “serial recasting of the same period of her life” (108), is made clear by the ways in which the early novels and many of H.D.’s memoirs turn on and return to the same themes, relationships, and events, particularly through the Madrigal Cycle. Even while there is narrative progress throughout the cycle, the looping back to revisit past scenes creates a circular, internalized chronology that disputes linear time in its insistence on associative, poetic, and emotion-based repetitions. At the same time, as Nephie Christodoulides suggests, H.D. avoids stasis by weaving in new detail and approaches: the “repetitions […] involve additions, ‘becoming detailed with each recurrence’” (24). In this sense, Christodoulides argues, H.D.’s eternal returns are paradoxically generative: “‘The story must create [her]’ and, as if in accordance with Olney, she ‘creates a self in the very act of seeking it’” (23).
In a strikingly similar manner, Harvie and Andy Lavender note that the repetitive act of rehearsal is “never just the learned delivery but the creation of performance” (1). Like rehearsal, H.D.’s repetitions are not static but constitutive. Making lies both in the repetition and in what is generated by repetition, a surplus of effect, like so many turns of a potter’s wheel. In this sense, in mounting a production based in H.D.’s writing, there is a synchronicity between rehearsing the material and the material that is rehearsed. In learning lines, in saying them out loud, in finding and learning blocking patterns, the process is of constant repetition, but repetition with difference. Like in H.D.’s writing, it is this casting and recasting that brings about the final iteration. The processes of the theatre bring knowledge seekers into a relationship with H.D.’s methods, which allows them to arrive at a different understanding of what repetition does – how each reiteration is at once “practice” or “drafting” but also constitutive of the whole. This is an immersive imperative, as much felt as intellectual, and quite different from the critical position that considers the writing at a remove. In this sense, theatrical processes provide experiential insight into H.D.’s work through a rough replication of its making.
Similarly, in both H.D.’s work and the rehearsal process, making relies on not only the act of repetition, but also the hermeneutics of revisitation. As Herbert Blau describes:
“Do it again” you say, but the demoralizing thing in rehearsal – what the French call répétition – is not really knowing what it is, “it all, it all,” as Beckett says, the intangible referent that always escapes you, not that, this, not this, that, nor do you really want to repeat it, not that merely, because it would be the same if it were only the same, it would be nothing but a repetition, not as right as it was, spontaneous, as when it happened for the first time, because the actors were, as they say, “living the moment,” not what was, but what is, while the desire to get at it, whatever it (again) is, drives the rehearsal even more, sometimes driving it crazy. (28)
This description feels very much like H.D.’s prose writing, particularly in its attention to the desire to “get at it, whatever it (again) is.” The repetitions, questioning, and moments of borderline madness reflect H.D.’s attempts to get to the root of her own condition and experience. Importantly, however, Blau is not only talking about rehearsal in this passage but also using it as a metaphor for psychoanalysis: the desire to get at the quintessential thing, the key moment, through the act of returning. In this sense, acts of rehearsal and performance provide tremendous room for considering the interpenetrating realms of autobiography, analysis, and theatre, particularly their linked strategies of repetition, self-narration, and self-disclosure. In The Tree, this nexus is explored through material from Tribute to Freud and framed by scenes from End to Torment and Compassionate Friendship in which H.D. at once relives her history with Pound – which is to say performs the autobiographical self – while also, and quite actively, dramatizing her analytic sessions with Erich Heydt in Küsnacht.
A final way in which the theatre serves H.D.’s writing is by illuminating, in new and very palpable ways, the dramatic structures, tropes, and themes that operate in the work. In considering how theatre functions within H.D.’s novels, critics have centred much of their attention on Bid Me to Live. Susan Stanford-Friedman notes that in providing Holmes Pearson with the “keys” to Bid Me to Live, H.D. called this list of names a “dramatis personae” (Penelope’s Web 71). In a close reading of the layout of H.D.’s apartment at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, where much of the novel takes place, Caroline Zilboorg has addressed how H.D.’s description suggests a kind of double theatre: “the performance, which is H.D.’s narrative and her life, goes on both privately (the room as stage) and publicly (the room as auditorium)” (30). Moreover, in analyzing the structure of Bid Me to Live, Joseph Milicia sketches the novel’s “unpredictable development,” highlighting how the episodes read like a list of scenes in a stage drama featuring H.D. (Julia), Aldington (Rafe), Lawrence (Rico), Arabella (Bella), and Gray (Vane):
Chapters I–III: early morning before one of Rafe’s departures. IV–V: an evening with Rafe.
VI: scene with Rico, interrupted by Elsa and Bella; scene with Bella.
VII: evening with Vane at Julia’s, a café and a cinema.
VIII: farewell to Rafe; farewell to Rico, interrupted by Vane. IX: afternoon walk alone, followed by evening with Vane.
X–XI: monologue to Rico. (280–1)
In addition to the use of scene-based structure, the dramatic action of the novel culminates in a play within a play, a D.H. Lawrence–directed “Bible-ballet” in which Richard and Arabella are Adam and Eve, Frieda Lawrence is the serpent, Gray is the angel at the gate, and H.D. the apple tree. It is from this scene that H.D. merges into her relationship with Gray, a move that is meant to remove the H.D./Julia figure from the “charade” of her relationships with Aldington and Lawrence, even while the fact that she plays and replays the Bible-ballet in her head during her time with Gray suggests that she cannot escape from the drama that has been set in motion.
Theatre within fiction is common enough, but its consistent and constitutive use in Bid Me to Live makes it somewhat unusual as high-modernist composition of the type with which H.D. is generally associated. As Puchner has argued, a suspicion of theatre, theatricality, and embodied representation is frequently found in high-modernist attitudes and aesthetics. While this should be qualified – Pound, for example, certainly had an interest in theatre, notably Noh drama and opera (including his own), started a PhD thesis on the role of jesters in Lope de Vega’s plays, and attended the theatre in London and Paris, as did most of the avant-garde circle – Puchner identifies the resistance to popular theatre with a simultaneous rejection of the “unprecedented celebration of the theatre and of theatricality” in the late nineteenth century (6) and, concurrently, a desire by high modernists to separate themselves from avant-garde theatricalism (7). As noted earlier, we can associate H.D. with the high-modernist tradition of anti-theatricality in several ways. Hippolytus Temporizes is a verse or “closet drama,” which Puchner identifies as resistant to the theatre, partly because it “complicate[s] the conditions of the material stage” (Bay-Cheng and Cole 16). Moreover, at first pass, Bid Me to Live also seems to suffer from “the more traditional, moralizing suspicion that actors are whores” (Puchner 5). In characterizing Aldington’s lover, Arabella Yorke, in unflattering terms, H.D. consistently uses the language of the theatre. Bella (the Yorke character) “predict[s] that later film or stage type […] more fashionable, then, the more determined to selfdestruction […] In any time, lost, the harlot of the middle-age miracleplay” (7–8); “[c]ertainly Bella in her green silk, her rose-paint, her insect black up-darting eyebrows, her simmering narrow dark eyes, was perfectly in character” (95); “in action, stage-business, she over-acted” (20); “[s]he moved with set precision, as if she knew her part very well, but was having stage fright” (96). This emphasis on performance in both a stage and a sexual sense is compounded by the Aldington character, who insists that Bella is “a star-performer” (47). This association echoes H.D.’s earlier connection in Asphodel between actresses and licentious behaviour in her description of the Brigit Patmore character, Merry, as “a slut, a little fox-coloured wench out of some restoration comedy” (131). H.D.’s summoning of theatre and theatre types is complicated, however, not only by a consistent undercutting of the original description – “Bella […] was perfectly in character. But Bella was not all ‘character’” (95); Bella was the harlot “while Julia [H.D.] was almost ridiculously some nun-figure, gaunt, over-intellectualized, of the same play. But Bella was not a harlot, Julia was not a saint” (7–8) – but also by the descriptions of H.D. and the other characters as dramatic types:
Rafe Ashton [Aldington] in his uniform, was dressed-up, playacting, “That’s the stuff to give the troops.” It was all neat, all neatly dated, war-time heroics … And Rico [Lawrence], playing any part, but always, when he entered, taking for granted that his was the centre of the stage. His was the centre of the stage, however tiny the little act he put on, Miss Ames [Amy Lowell] … a sort of prompter in the wings … Vane [Gray] when he came there, fitting into some part already allotted to him … (150)
The theatrical language reveals a fundamental falsity or hypocrisy in the characters’ behaviour and, in this sense, is characteristic of modernist anti-theatrical prejudice. But it also suggests that circumstances, notably the Second World War, create a stage upon which only a limited number of scenarios can play out: “Now Bella had entered. Would everyone else do a little turn, while she watched them, wondering when it would ever be over? (The war would never be over)” (91).
Ultimately, in embodying a stage type, Bella provides the overt clue that the dynamics among the characters are somehow pre-formulated or pre-scripted. But Bella also forces Julia to confront the associations between the theatre and her own aesthetics: “The funny thing was that facing Bella, Julia felt that she was looking at herself in a mirror, another self, another dimension but nevertheless herself. Rafe had brought them together; really they had nothing in common […] She looked vampire-ish, the stage type of mistress, but no. She was eighteenthcentury in that frock, she was something out of a play. They all were” (103). In recognizing Bella as a reflection of herself and in implicating herself in the unfolding play that she herself is writing – “[t]he exits, the entrances. It was all minute, perfect as a play, her play” (151) – H.D. implicitly acknowledges the performativity of her own autobiographical work and its embodied experimentalism, which consciously refutes the high-modernist emphasis on anti-theatricality. Within the novel, this more dominant modernist aesthetic is voiced by Rafe/Aldington, who on reading one of Julia’s drafts says, “A bit dramatic […] It’s Victorian” (54). In associating the “dramatic” with the “Victorian,” Rafe simultaneously dismisses both the heightened language and emotion modernist views ascribed to the “dramatic” as well as its ties to the late nineteenth century. Julia, stung, locks the draft in a jewel box along with a portrait of her mother. “Victorian had he said? […] Inside the box was the portrait of her mother, with the hair dressed high, 1880 and Victorian […] Yes, she was old fashioned (her mother was old-fashioned)” (57–8). By placing together her “dramatic” writing and the picture of her mother, and subsequently playing with a double referent through the ambiguous use of the female pronoun, H.D. seems to make a strong associative statement about the resuscitation of nineteenth-century theatricality in women’s autobiographical writing and the centrality of this working method in creating an alternative to anti-theatrical modernist production.
H.D.’s signalling of Bid Me to Live as “theatre” is highly inviting for actors and directors. The fact that the novel often sounds like a play when read out loud was, in fact, the original impetus for an adaptation that was the beginning of this book. The theatricality of the novel is on many counts best explored onstage: the novel’s dialogue transfers into drama with very little adaptation; the characters translate well; the conflicts are crafted with an eye on dramatic intensity. It is easy to say that H.D.’s writing is structurally and thematically theatrical, but there is something to actually enacting this assertion in a staged environment to see if it can be borne out. And, in H.D.’s case, the stage does bear it out by highlighting the dramatic elements at work, aspects that can be supported by the interpretive skill of an actor capable of an ironic capturing of H.D.’s stagier and more mannered moments – a self-reflexive performance which at once stays true to H.D.’s prose even as it shows itself, as does much of H.D.’s work, as theatre. If, as H.D. seems to suggest, autobiographical theatricality is an important alternative to anti-theatricality – and tangentially related to the theatrical, masked dynamics of impersonality – then so too, as receivers and interpreters of this work, should we look for modes of engagement that provide epistemological alternatives to the anti-theatrical nature of criticism.
1To be sure, the result presented here is not a transparent portrait of the artist. As I discuss below, even while H.D. frequently wrote her own reality, her auto/biographical refractions and complicated auto-constructions make absolute “truth” an impossible, perhaps self-defeating objective even when a great deal of care is given to actual historical and biographical circumstances insofar as they are known. The scenes and quotations presented in The Tree are selected, a two-hour dramatized condensation derived from thousands of pages of writing with all of the editorial choices and elisions that this entails. While significant effort has been made to be sensitive to H.D.’s writing and intentions it is, nonetheless, also the case that the process of adaptation – and a desire to reach audiences that exceed a small number of avant-garde enthusiasts – has resulted in more linear momentum and less interiorized exploration than H.D.’s written work provides us with. Ultimately, this is not the complete portrait of H.D. that she herself would have written or, indeed, did write. For that, readers can – and hopefully new readers of H.D. will – turn to her remarkable and varied corpus of work and the fine critical writing that has served to illuminate it.
2The title The Tree arose out of H.D.’s lifelong identification with trees and tree spirits. Additionally, there is resonance in her early reminiscence of Pound in a treehouse and Pound’s appellation for her, “Dryad”; the fact that H.D. played a tree in the Lawrence drama; and the use of tree imagery in correspondence between H.D. and Bryher.
3The ripples of Pound’s fascism travelled far beyond the confines of his incarceration, and the absorption of this reality is something we see in the writing of both H.D. and Nancy Cunard. Their contrasting reactions – both disappointed and disillusioned, one meditatively so and the other outraged and indignant – are highly illustrative of their own experiences and temperaments. In this sense, these women’s relationships with Pound personalize not only the modernist influence that emerged from his work but also the lived experience of the fascist moment and what it must have been like for this ideology to creep deeply into one’s own circles and become pivotal to the life, thinking, and, ultimately, fate of a friend and former love.
4“Fragment Forty-one … thou flittest to Andromeda” is frequently considered one of H.D.’s best dramatic lyrics, one where Sappho’s epigraph is expanded into a lyric meditation by an abandoned lover. On one level, the poem is a finely wrought elaboration of Sapphic betrayal by a female supplicant, which can be drawn out through the visual projections accompanying the recitation of the poem. And yet, as critics like Louis Martz and Erika Rohrbach have argued, H.D.’s drafting process and coded references within the poem also implicate H.D.’s husband, Richard Aldington, and his affairs with other women.
5As yet, I have not materialized masks in staging this play, though it would certainly be possible. There may also be room to include some choral elements, either through soundtrack or by integrating live choral speaking during the course of the performance.