H.D. WAS NOW in her first year at Bryn Mawr College, and no happier than Pound had been in his freshman year, though for rather different reasons. Like Pound, H.D. had found Philadelphian education blighting to the spirit, but had come to it later than Pound, and through a very different route. If for Pound starting school was when the serpent entered, for H.D. her family’s move to Philadelphia was the crucial break in her childhood years. Bethlehem was only about fifty miles from Philadelphia, and in the same state, but for the young H.D. the two places were in different universes. They were certainly in different time frames; Bethlehem might have massive steel works in the new town to the east, on the other side of the Lehigh River, but the old town, built on a bluff high above the new development, remained part of an earlier world. Life for H.D. in Bethlehem was enmeshed in family – aunts, uncles, cousins, her much-loved grandparents, known as ‘Papalie’ and ‘Mamalie’ – and in the charm and beauty of Moravian ritual. The parents and grandparents lived in the same street, two houses, but one garden; the children at one stage even believed they had ‘two fathers and two mothers, for we thought that Papalie and Mamalie (our mother’s parents) were our own “other” father and mother, which, in fact, they were’.75 The world that H.D. described in her memoir of her early years, The Gift, is not one entirely free of anxiety and unhappiness. There was her sadness that her brother meant more to her mother than she did, and she was always conscious, she says, of the dead children in the cemetery, and that for some reason it was ‘always a girl who had died’.76 There was Fanny, who was her mother’s elder sister, Alice, the child of her father’s first wife, ‘the Lady’, also dead, and Edith, her own elder sister. There was a little girl who had been at school with her mother whose crinoline had caught fire from a Christmas tree and who was burnt to death at the Young Ladies’ Seminary in Bethlehem, where H.D.’s grandfather, a minister and a writer of botanical treatises, had been headmaster.
Yet for an imaginative child Bethlehem was a world of great richness, one of the sources, H.D. came to feel, of her creativity as a poet. In The Gift, which she wrote during the London Blitz in 1941, recalling the childhood that she had buried until her sessions with Freud, she evokes that Bethlehem world as the child experienced it, letting ‘the story tell itself or the child tell it’.77 There was Papalie, who knew everything about tarantulas, algae and other exotica, and had a microscope and an alligator which was the survivor of twins called Castor and Pollux, no one knew which. There were the Grimm fairy tales, read again and again by the indulgent family servant Ida; there were nursery rhymes; there were the Arabian Nights. There was the schoolteacher Miss Helen, with her brown paper map of Africa which the children covered with pictures of camels and palm trees cut out from magazine advertisements, and who, on Friday afternoons, would read them Tanglewood Tales (Hawthorne’s retelling of Greek myths for children), ‘if [they] were good, instead of lessons’.78 ‘Those stories,’ she told Freud in 1933, ‘are my foundation or background, Pandora, Midas, the Gorgon-head … Perseus and the guardian, Athené.’79 The Greek settings and images of her later poetry had their roots in the young child’s entrancement by these stories. There was the Moravian Christmas, with its Christmas trees and glass balls and gilt pine cones and its crib and its music, and Papalie, as the minister, saying.
I am the light of the world, when the doors opened at the far end of the Church and the trays of lighted beeswax candles were brought into the church by the Sisters in their caps and aprons, while Uncle Fred in the gallery at the organ, was playing very softly, Holy Night.80
Christmas, that celebration of a birth ‘in a town that had the same name as ours’, had especial significance in the children’s year, not only for its magic and colour but because they all helped to ‘make’ Christmas. It was H.D.’s first introduction to the delight of creation:
We were ‘making’ a field under the tree, for the sheep. We were ‘making’ a forest for the elk, out of small sprays of a broken pine-branch. We ourselves were ‘making’ the Christmas-cakes. As we pressed the tin mould of the lion or the lady into the soft dough, we were like God in the first picture in the Doré Bible who, out of chaos, created Leo or Virgo to shine forever in the heavens. ‘We’ were like that, though we did not know it. Our perception recognised it, though our minds did not define it.81
Then there were visiting players, like those who came in a procession to perform Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘shoddy strolling players’ through whom the children discovered ‘art, or many of the arts’:
O well, I know it was only Little Eva in a jerry-built, gold chariot, and yet it was the very dawn of art, it was the sun, the drama, the theatre, it was poetry, why, it was music, it was folklore and folk-song, it was history … [and] the three children … who stood watching were all the children of all the world; in Rome, in Athens, in Palestine, in Egypt, they had watched the golden-chariots, they had seen black-men chained together and cruel overseers brandishing whips. It was Alexandria, it was a Roman Triumph, it was a Medieval miracle-play procession with a Devil who was Simon Legree, and the poor dark shades of Purgatory, who were negroes chained together, and it was Pallas Athené in her chariot with the winged Victory poised with the olive-crown, who was coming to save us all.82
This sense of a unity of meaning beneath diversity, the belief that the Greek, the Christian and all the other myths were one, was to be central to the adult H.D.’s philosophy, a belief which she would share with Pound and Yeats and other modernists, though the mythic pattern they discerned might vary. As a child she accepted, as children do, all the different systems she met, Christian and pagan, science and fantasy, as equally true. Moravian tolerance perhaps made it easy to hold on to this catholicism of belief. She did not have to struggle with the less flexible world of mainstream Protestantism, as Pound did. One story H.D. was told when she was very small was of the Indians who said that the Christmas Eve music from the Moravian church was the voice of the Great Spirit: ‘so,’ the small H.D. concluded, ‘the Great Spirit who was the Indian’s God, was part of our God too’.83 In the chapter in The Gift entitled ‘The Secret’ she tells a story, evidently her invention, but characteristic of what she felt about the Moravians, of an early eighteenth-century pact between a breakaway group of Moravians and the chief medicine men of the friendly tribes, who jointly pledged to share their secrets, making a new and deeper truth. H.D. here goes rather further than the Moravians; although it was true they preferred converting Indians to killing them, and although they respected the Indians’ religious spirit and their freedom from acquisitiveness, it was no part of their plan that the Indians should, even partially, convert them.
When H.D. was nine, her father moved from Lehigh University in south Bethlehem to a much more prestigious position at the University of Pennsylvania, and life changed. The note was struck for the young H.D. when, after reaching the new house, she found her mother had not brought her Grimm, but given it away to some needy child. H.D. was broken-hearted.
I could see the first picture, the bright princess with the ball and the frog in the corner to the left and then the large dancing-bear and the girl going up the glass-mountain with spikes she stuck in the ice-sides of the mountain.
I was part of the ice of the mountain.84
Grimm remained the symbol of the childhood she had lost. The family moved just after Christmas, a strange last Christmas in Bethlehem because ‘Papalie was dead, there was a new baby’. Papalie was ‘the first “dead person” [she] had ever known’, and his death deepened her sense of the irrevocable fissure between the old world and the new.85 The new baby, also a boy, brought yet a further loss of her mother’s attention. H.D. missed the fluid extended family of Bethlehem, where nearly everyone was ‘a relative or friend’, where ‘in a sense every one is related for there is the church and we all belong together in some very special way, because of our candle service on Christmas Eve’.86 No longer were all her mother’s women friends known as ‘Sister’ in Moravian fashion: they were now the ‘University ladies’ or ‘faculty ladies’ who whispered and gossiped and were later to do such damage to the young Pound’s Philadelphian reputation. The children went to a new and ‘horrible’ school, which H.D. and her younger brother Harold did not like, although the older Gilbert was happy there. It was too far to come home to lunch, and the school day felt very long. Of course, had H.D. stayed in Bethlehem her feelings might have been different. For a teenager Bethlehem might have felt narrow and cloying. But for H.D., leaving when she did, in her memories Bethlehem, though such a tight community, was never oppressive and suffocating as she felt the provincial, genteel society of the Philadelphian bourgeoisie to be.
During the nineteenth century, thousands, probably millions, in America and Europe had experienced a move from a rural childhood to an urban adulthood, from a small, intimate community to the anonymity and often anomie of city life, from a pre-industrial world to the stresses of modernity. In the nineteenth century anthropologists claimed that the crucial step into civilisation was the evolution from societies based on blood-relations to those organised instead on property and status, an assertion which perhaps had as much to do with their own changing society as it did with any putative history of the race. H.D.’s move was one variant of this sudden change in lifestyle, though an unusual one, for it was a move from a town to a house two miles from the city edge, surrounded by farms. Yet Bethlehem had, more than most places, preserved a culture in which, as in the premodern world, relations were based on kinship, including the kinship of the extended religious family: they were the Moravian Brethren, the Unitas Fratrum. Although they no longer held their possessions in common as they had done in the eighteenth century, the ethos of sharing and exchange remained. In Upper Darby and West Philadelphia H.D. found a modern society of individual property owners, who associated with those of their own class and status: her family met and exchanged visits only with the university families and a few other professional and comfortably placed families in the neighbourhood. H.D. had to endure something worse perhaps for a teenager than the anonymity of the city. She met, not an urban life of nameless strangers, but a suburban life of acquaintances, who might not fully understand their neighbours but who would not hesitate to judge them. At the turn of the century, the respectable East Coast bourgeoisie felt itself under threat, from a newly rich and, they claimed, vulgar Middle West, from a tide of working-class, ethnically suspect immigrants, from the New Woman, from labour unrest. Conformity was the price of acceptance in the suburbs, particularly for women.
As a small child, H.D. had pondered what it meant to be a girl, and life in Upper Darby highlighted even more how strangely different were the worlds in which her mother and father lived. The Moravian religion in principle gave women a more equal role than other sects; when H.D. told Freud about the Christmas services with the beeswax candles, he commented:
There is no more significant symbol than a lighted candle. You say you remember your grandfather’s Christmas Eve service? The girls as well as the boys had candles? … If every child had a lighted candle given, as you say they were given at your grandfather’s Christmas Eve service, by the grace of God, we would have no more problems … That is the true heart of all religion.87
But Freud was too sanguine. H.D. was still left with problems. The Bethlehem Moravians of her youth, like the majority of their contemporaries, believed that a woman’s role was to care for a man, and indeed their ideals of loving service made that all the more an obligation. H.D.’s mother was always harassed, shopping, organising meals, the household, everyone’s clothes, caring for the children but above all making sure they did not disturb their father or his academic visitors. Life in the Doolittle household revolved around the Professor, even though for so much of the time he was absent from it, in the ‘transit house’, watching the stars. In Upper Darby the young H.D. tried to think it out:
What it was, was, Mama had Uncle Fred and Uncle Hartley and Aunt Laura and Aunt Aggie and Mamalie and the old school and Cousin Edd and everybody in the old-town really. She had Gilbert and the new baby upstairs. She had Harold.
Ida and Annie [they now had a second maid] belonged to the house and the kitchen and the baby.
What Papa had was the Transit House now and his classes at the University and people who came to see him about the new instruments and reporters from the papers. What Papa had was outside, the old Observatory on the hill, the walk across the bridge at night, ‘like a thief or an astronomer’ as he would say. What he had was the high walled-in book-shelves here and in the old study … What he was, was a pathfinder, an explorer … What it was, was that he was separate, he was not really part of this table with the glass-balls, with the tinsel paper, with the work-basket, with the paste-pot, with the old gilt fir-cones that Mama said we could paint over with some new gilt that she would get when she went in to shop in Philadelphia.88
Her father’s life seemed heroic, but always lonely. As a non-believer, he was not part of the Moravian church family: he was left out of the Moravian love feasts, their central and unique ritual. Everything she knew about his early life was bleaker than her mother’s. As a boy, he had had no Christmas tree and was miserable on Sundays; when he came back from the Civil War, his mother cried because he and not his brother Alvin had survived.
Freud said to H.D. that her father sounded a cold man, and whilst she could not accept that, it was true that to the young H.D. he was remote and awe-inspiring, and his gestures of affection, when he took her hand and called her ‘Töchterlein’, frightened rather than reassured her. Yet it is surely significant that while she mentions the other children, Hilda herself does not figure in either her mother’s or her father’s world. H.D. never felt as close to her mother as she wanted:
It is she who matters for she is laughing, not so much at us as with or over us and around us … About her there is no question. The trouble is, she knows so many people and they come and interrupt. And besides that, she likes my brother better. If I stay with my brother, become part almost of my brother, perhaps I can get nearer to her.
But one can never get near enough.
Later H.D. came to feel that it was from her ‘musician-artist mother, through her part-Celtic mother, through the grandfather of English and middle-European extraction’, that she had inherited her ‘imaginative faculties’, though she was also to be a ‘pathfinder, an explorer’ like her father, and like him, dedicated, indeed devoted, to her work.89 By the time she came to write The Gift, or perhaps indeed by writing The Gift, H.D. was able to accept her inheritance from both her parents, much as Virginia Woolf, writing of her not dissimilar parents, came to do through writing To the Lighthouse. But that was not for many decades after the move from Bethlehem. In her Philadelphian years, she was torn apart by conflicting models, expectations and desires. Her parents represented two worlds, each essential yet impossible for her.