FOR H.D., HOWEVER, in spite of her sadness at leaving Bethlehem, the first few years in Philadelphia brought compensations. She had, perhaps for the first time, girl friends. Like her mother, she had a gift for friendship. What she inherited or learnt from her mother’s blend of good manners and Moravian loving-kindness was considerable charm and sensitivity in her relationships. Soon after her arrival in Upper Darby, she made friends with two girls her own age, Margaret Snively, whose family were their closest neighbours, and Martha Wells, who lived only a little further away. Dr Snively was the Episcopalian minister of their nearest church, and warden of an orphanage for clergy daughters. The family lived in a wing of the orphanage building, and it was there that H.D. first met Pound at the Hallowe’en party, one of many parties and dances held there. It was Margaret’s brother DeForrest who originally introduced her to Pound; later some of H.D.’s illicit meetings with Pound took place at the orphanage with Margaret’s connivance. But that was in the future. As adolescents H.D., Margaret and Martha would explore what William Carlos Williams later nostalgically described as ‘the really lyrical Upper Darby country of those days’, rich in wild flowers.90 Together they would escape some of the humid sultry heaviness and constraints of the Philadelphian summer, when the three girls would go with Margaret’s family on holiday to the New Jersey coast, or with Martha’s to the Casco Bay islands off the coast of Maine. The sea coasts so often evoked in H.D.’s poetry owed much, she said, to those early holidays.
Talking of her girlhood friends, H.D. told Freud that early adolescence was a return to happy childhood. But that seems to have been out of school, or at any rate out of the classroom. The change from happy to most unhappy schooldays came, she said, with the advent of long division, which probably coincided with the move to Upper Darby. School now became a diminishment, no longer the opening of enchanting vistas. In her first autobiographical novel, Paint it Today, the narrator describes the character representing H.D. changing from the eager child ‘on the trail of the Pennsylvania foothills breaking her first bunches of the wax-pink mountain laurel’, to one ‘blurred in the process of civilizing, of schooling, of devitalizing’.91 H.D. never said much about her school years, but she did recall being
publicly reproved at Miss Gordon’s school in West Philadelphia, when I was fifteen, because I firmly stated that Edgar Allan Poe was my favourite among American writers. I was told by Miss Pitcher who had otherwise encouraged me, even at that age, in my literary aspirations, that Poe was not a good influence, he was ‘unwholesome, morbid.’92
Poe, the aesthetician, the explorer of the dark places of the psyche, had been rejected by the respectable American middle classes, as well as by the Bostonian men of letters who decreed what constituted critical and moral correctness in nineteenth-century America. Britain was equally unreceptive. Where his work had been enthusiastically received, of course, was in France, especially by Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal could be said to be the finest tribute to Poe’s perturbing art. Poe’s heritage, by and large, only re-entered the English language tradition through the impact of Baudelaire and the French symbolistes, first on the nineties poets, and then on the modernists. But on H.D. the influence was direct; she defiantly continued to love Poe’s poetry all her life, especially his poem about Helen of Troy:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Helen was her mother’s name. The Gift is dedicated ‘to Helen, who has brought me home’; she quotes the poem many times in her prose writings, including Tribute to Freud, in which she records that Freud suggests that her fascination with Greece (Hellas) was linked with her search for her mother (Helen). But this admiration for Poe is also a sign that H.D. was one of a generation, to whom Pound also belonged, who were beginning to question the definitions of morality and ‘wholesomeness’, duty and earnestness that had dominated American culture, perhaps even more powerfully than in Britain, since its inception. To love Poe’s poetry was to opt for pleasure rather than duty, beauty rather than moral endeavour. This shift in literary sensibility was just one aspect of a wider cultural change through which H.D. was living, a change particularly significant for young women, who, like the generation Virginia Woolf described on the other side of the Atlantic, ‘could sport with infidel ideas … of a life different from [their mother’s]; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other’.93
At the time, however, the accusation of having ‘unwholesome, morbid’ tastes went deep. She asked to change schools because she was unhappy – exactly why isn’t clear, but Miss Pitcher’s comments cannot have helped. The Quaker Friends’ Central School to which she moved was not a great improvement. The atmosphere, she suggests in one of her novels, was ‘tepid’ and the girls snobbish.94 It was in fact a co-educational school – her brother Gilbert was there – but strictly segregated, points being deducted from the end of term grades if boys or girls were seen speaking to each other in school time. Yet although she was not particularly happy at school, she was much liked. She was praised in the 1905 yearbook for her ‘charming affability’, and voted the class member ‘with the best disposition’.95 One of her classmates described her memories of H.D. shortly after her death, ‘the tall, loveable girl who became the famous H.D. of poetry … so friendly to all, so ready to help … So modest … She had no desire for the leadership she could have had and lived in a beautiful world. I sat near her during our senior year and remember her gazing out of the high windows watching the horse-chestnut leaves unfurl in the spring. Yet she never kept herself aloof and was always one of us in our group activities.’96 The young H.D. loved social get-togethers, but faced with academic pressure she would withdraw from competition and the classroom into her inner world. Her problem was that the other world, of achievement and grades, kept dragging her back. And whilst she was liked, there were also jokes in the yearbook about her height and her name, subjects about which she was deeply sensitive. She never suffered anything like Pound’s ostracism; quite the reverse. All the same, she found searing enough her share of the common, casual callousness of schoolchildren.
The Friends’ Central School had a high academic reputation, and its pupils, including the girls, were expected to gain entrance to the best colleges and universities. Most of them did, the girls going on to famous women’s colleges in New England and Pennsylvania, such as Smith, Vassar, Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. By this date, most of the more recently opened colleges and universities in the American West were co-educational, but in the older established colleges of the East single sex education remained the norm. A higher percentage of women went into higher education in the States than in Britain – indeed those western colleges were co-educational largely because they could not have made up their numbers without women students. The relationship between education and gender had complexities in the States not experienced in England. On the one hand, as in England, there were colleagues of Dr Mitchell who took an even more extreme view than he did of the harmfulness to women of intellectual activity, prophesying neurasthenia, infertility, hysteria and general debility in the wake of too much mental activity in adolescence. Yet traditionally, for many sections of American society, education and bookishness in general were regarded as a womanly indulgence; real men went into business or politics or some kind of active life. The zealous reforms in the university system that Pound disliked so much, the emphasis on the scientific and the vocational, the fact-crunching, philological bent of the humanities, was in part a response to this perception of the feminine taint of education. But whilst many middle-class women might go to college, there were still few whose families considered any profession apart from teaching acceptable for them. H.D.’s mother had pursued a very common pattern: a good education, teaching until married, dedication after that to husband and family. William Carlos Williams’ mother was very similar; in his autobiography Williams describes how, as a small boy, he had found his mother’s discarded oil-paints, and was amazed to learn of this earlier life of which he had known and suspected nothing; she was simply his mother, and his father’s wife. Pound’s mother had not been to college, though she too was well educated and reasonably well read, even if Pound were to be exasperated in later life when he could not persuade her to prefer Stendhal to Marie Corelli. But there was no question of her taking paid employment. Isabel Pound would walk to meet her husband at the station every evening; when she was older and could not manage the steep hill, she would stand on her front porch to await Homer’s return home up the hill. That was her place. Of course, this state of affairs did not apply to the working classes; as in England, working-class women worked out of necessity. H.D. later wondered why, in the Philadelphian years after she left college under a cloud and felt chained to the house, she had never thought of working as a shop girl, or becoming a hat- or dressmaker, just to gain independence. But at the time it was inconceivable.
H.D.’s father, unusually, had ambitions for her, but not ambitions that made her happy. It was he who wanted her to go to Bryn Mawr, the women’s college with the highest entrance requirements in the States, the equivalent of Harvard for young men, and rare among women’s colleges in offering postgraduate and doctoral work. ‘He wanted,’ she wrote, ‘eventually (he even said so) to make a mathematician of me, a research worker or scientist like (he even said so) Madame Curie. He did make a research worker of me but in another dimension.’97 It was he who insisted on her ‘preparing for college’, which meant not just the usual high school curriculum and leaving certificate, but intensive coaching and extra study for the very demanding Bryn Mawr entrance examination. H.D. took the examinations twice, firstly in June 1904. Her September birthday meant that she would either be one of the youngest or one of the oldest in her academic year. If she had been successful, she would have been not quite eighteen when she enrolled. She failed, discouragingly, but in 1905, on the second attempt, she passed.98 She entered the same year as Marianne Moore, who was fourteen months younger. Intriguingly, on H.D.’s Bryn Mawr record, her date of birth is wrongly given as 1887 – presumably a clerical error that may have owed its origin to the fact that most of her year were younger than she was. Another reason, perhaps, for feeling ill at ease.
In spite of her eventual success in the entrance examination, H.D. at this period felt increasingly out of place in the Philadelphian world. She chafed under her parents’ requirements. She was turning out neither sufficiently feminine for her mother, nor sufficiently scholastic for her father. She was totally undomesticated; she liked to rush round the countryside, her clothes thrown on anyhow, her hair wild. She never fitted in with the ideals of Moravian womanhood, which in the environs of Pennsylvania mapped seamlessly on to conventional middle-class morality. Everyone who met her commented on her beauty, but she felt ugly. She was awkward, ashamed of her height and unsure of herself. (In Paint it Today, the character representing H.D., ironically named Midget, has ‘stiff legs and arms and short hair and no grace and beauty of girlhood’, and ‘seems of an inferior race’ compared to her girl friends.)99 At school and college she felt equally inferior. Her father wanted all his children to be academically successful; they all were, except H.D. Describing herself at that time, H.D wrote: ‘I was clothed with confusion. I had been forced into the wrong groove. Is every groove wrong? I resented the years preparing for college that might have been spent with music, drawing.’100 H.D., as a schoolgirl, had had, she said, ‘a craving, a hunger for music’, which sometimes she was able to assuage by visits to concerts at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, but she never had enough.101 Years later Freud said to her that her unconscious childhood wish had been for a house with a piano and no boys. Her mother had given up her own music, and though H.D. learnt to play, she never had much confidence in her talent. In Asphodel Hermione, or Her as she is generally called, asks herself ‘why didn’t they really let me sing’ and thinks of a singer she had heard as a girl with ‘a voice that would make you crouch in your chair and wish you were dead’. The singer, much sought after by Philadelphian parents who ‘begged her, prayed and implored but she wouldn’t take their daughters’, says to Her: ‘You have a quality in your voice. I would make you a good singer but only of chamber music, you understand. I will take you for nothing. Who are you?’ And she replies nervously: ‘My – father – is a – a – professor of – of theorems and things. I don’t think I care for … music.’102 This story may not be literally true, but the sense of loss and inhibition was. In an equivalent English school at the time, as a young lady she would have learnt music and drawing, for which she also had quite a talent, though she would certainly not have been expected to make a career out of either of them – yet when she reached London, she would meet young women who had defiantly done just that. But at the Friends’ Central School and Bryn Mawr, such frivolities had no part. Only scholastic subjects were studied, and those with an eye on examination success. Professor Doolittle, during H.D.’s time at Bryn Mawr, rather generously offered to give the students some lectures on astronomy. The president turned his offer down, on the grounds that astronomy was not part of their academic programme, and therefore there was no point in the students knowing about it.
H.D. started her first year at Bryn Mawr, apprehensive and uneasy. Bryn Mawr College was only a few miles from her home, built in one of the fashionable suburbs along the ‘Main Line’, the railway that ran from the centre to the most prestigious suburban areas west of the city. Most students were resident, but H.D., living locally, travelled daily. The reason was undoubtedly her parents’ desire to keep her under their protective eye at home. They were well off, and could easily have afforded to pay the residential fees. H.D. might have been happier if she had had the chance to take more part in college social life. She did not, for example, get to know Marianne Moore, although they took two courses together, and they remembered each other by sight. At the Friends’ Central School, H.D. had been in the Classical Section, the ‘academically elite’ stream, where she learnt Latin, French, German, English Literature and Ancient History, as well as Mathematics, Physics and some Botany. She was one of four students chosen to read an essay at the graduation ceremony, hers being on ‘The Poet’s Influence’, a title which suggests that the ‘literary aspirations’ that Miss Pitcher had encouraged, at any rate until her unfortunate comment on Poe, were undiminished. At Bryn Mawr she took three courses, Latin, English and Chemistry, a science component being compulsory. Although she had far fewer courses than Pound, each had very demanding requirements. She coped, but that seems about all. In English the students were given an enormously strenuous programme of private reading, which included, during the first year, five histories of England, Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, Andrew Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion, E.B. Tylor’s Anthropology, the Icelandic Eddas, all the main Anglo-Saxon works, Matthew Arnold’s poems and criticism, the Chanson de Roland, Aucassin and Nicolette, Le Morte d’Arthur, Dante’s La vita nuova and his poems in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translations, Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, ballads and other early poetry. And that was only part of the course. H.D. certainly enjoyed the literature; what she felt about the history and anthropology she doesn’t say, but later she was to take a keen interest in anthropologists like Sir James Frazer and Jane Harrison, so perhaps that earlier introduction bore fruit. Bryn Mawr turned its students out well-read – at least in the literature of the past. Even if H.D. had not left early she would not have been asked to read a literary text more recent than Keats – apart, that is, from Matthew Arnold (Rossetti was only there as a translator). The inclusion of Arnold’s criticism in that first year course might suggest that some in the Bryn Mawr English department believed the study of literature should bring sweetness and light rather than philological competence, but H.D., much as she loved literature, found the teaching dry.
H.D. was also pursuing her own interests, perhaps to the neglect of her prescribed work. She did some translations from the lyric Latin poets that year, but not from the writers on her course, Horace, Livy and Cicero, none of which she ever seems to have liked. Even before she began Bryn Mawr, H.D. had started to teach herself Greek – not a subject generally offered to schoolgirls.103 Her childhood fascination with Greek myth had been rekindled when at sixteen she went to a performance of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. It was a student production, put on by the University of Pennsylvania. Pound had been in the chorus, dressed, according to Williams, in ‘a togalike ensemble topped by a great blond wig at which he tore as he waved his arms about and heaved his massive breasts in ecstasies of emotion’.104 But the Messenger, whom even the cynical Williams agreed was ‘superb’, ‘awakened’ H.D. to the riches of Greek drama: she felt, she recalled fifty years later, that she ‘had heard Greek at last’.105 And among the Greek dramatists, Euripides, anti-war, a defender of women, was to remain the most central for her. She drew on his work all her life, working in her London years on translations from Iphigenia in Tauris, Hippolytus and Ion, producing poems based on his plays throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and in her late poem Helen in Egypt, published the year before her death, drawing on his play about Helen. Ironically, although Pound was in the production that inspired her so much, Greek was the shakiest of his languages (none of them were very steady) and one is tempted to think that one motive, perhaps an unconscious one, for H.D.’s ongoing pursuit of Greek was that it was not under Pound’s mastery. H.D. herself always read Greek with some difficulty, liable to condescension from male scholars. Greek was still a club that only gentlemen were expected to join. Yet she persevered. Williams, to whom Pound had introduced her, had learnt no Greek as a medical student in the USA and only rudimentary Latin. He was envious of those who had, and was impressed by H.D.’s study of Greek, but his own timetable was too pressured to emulate her. H.D., who always felt in danger of having her efforts shattered by the explosive egos of the male poets around her, had already by the age of nineteen identified the poetic field that she would make her own.