II

WHEN POUND LEFT for Europe in the March of 1908, H.D. had remained at home, wretched and confused, her engagement, as she said, ‘shattered like a Venetian glass goblet, flung on the floor’.³⁵ As she describes it in her quasi-autobiographical novel Paint it Today, she was ‘drifting, unsatisfied, hurt and baffled out of a relationship with a hectic, adolescent, blundering, untried, mischievous, and irreverent male youth’. She was wounded by Pound’s casual and callous – as it seemed to her – philandering. For her, their love had been a passion; for him, it appeared in retrospect, a pastime. She felt betrayed, as if what to her had been sacred he had desecrated, and she had ‘gained nothing from him but a feeling that someone had tampered with an oracle’.³⁶ By the time she came to write End to Torment she could acknowledge what she had gained as well as suffered, but perhaps the fiction reflects something of her feeling of desolation and despoliation at the time.

H.D. wrote repeated accounts of her life up to the end of the First World War, sometimes as memoirs and sometimes as romans à clef. Memoirs are always in themselves only partially reliable reworkings of the past, but fictional accounts, though often illuminating, have to be drawn on with particular caution. The novels that deal most explicitly with this period are the two I have already mentioned, Her and Paint it Today, and two more, Asphodel and Bid Me to Live. Paint it Today is quite short, written in 1921 or 1922, after H.D.’s return visit to America with her companion Bryher. It covers, in fleeting fragments, her life from her childhood to the end of the First World War. The first draft of Asphodel was also written about then, but the surviving version is from a revision made in 1926 or 1927, written at much the same time as Her, the H.D. figure in both being Hermione or Her Gart. Her is specifically about the years between Bryn Mawr and her departure for England, her Philadelphian life, her early love affairs, and her struggle to find some autonomy. Asphodel takes the story on from her arrival in Europe to the immediate post-war years, and her discovery of herself as a writer. All give significant insights into H.D.’s psychological and artistic journey in the early years, but her plots do not necessarily follow the precise historical sequence. Though Her, for example, encompasses many of the central events of H.D.’s life between 1905 and 1911, the order has been shifted, and the novel weaves them together not as a factual or exact account but as an attempt to understand, as the text puts it, Her’s ‘yet unformulated consciousness and her consciousness of America’, her gradual growth, if not fully to self-understanding, to a sense of necessary direction.³⁷ All of these novels are Künstlerroman, that is, stories about her development as an artist, not as systematic as say Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but equally concerned with the evolution of an aesthetic path, and her allusions to particular poems or writers always carry rich resonances. When H.D. came to write the novel Bid Me to Live, set in the First World War, and the only one of these four to be published in her lifetime, she records that Freud advised her to tell her story as directly as she could, and not to re-pattern events as she does in these earlier versions. Yet even in the other three, many details can be corroborated outside the text, and H.D. certainly had a wonderful ear for dialogue. The Pound character sounds unmistakably like him, and in Asphodel, which covers her years in England from 1911 to 1919, Aldington is mimicked, or perhaps even quoted, brilliantly. H.D. was later to refer to the four novels as her Madrigal cycle, recording with different rhythms and emphases these years, which included both trauma and great happiness. In each case she paints it as she sees it at the moment of writing, as the title of Paint it Today indicates. None of them is a definitive account, but all can help interpret H.D.’s attitudes to her work and her complex emotional life.³⁸

One incontrovertible result of H.D.’s abortive love affair with Pound was that it seared for ever her relationship with her parents. She was dismayed and angry at their apparent lack of sympathy for what she cared for in Pound, his passion for poetry, for beauty, for life, irritated that they were so easily prey to what she saw as the blinkered judgements of Philadelphia. In their opposition to her feelings for Pound – perhaps all the more because they had been partly justified – they had, she felt, rejected what was most important in her. Yet though her relationship with Pound was a turning-point, one that would eventually set her on the path to her life as a poet in Europe, she was for now still the dutiful daughter at home. The H.D./Midget character in Paint it Today had never, she wrote, ‘said to her mother, “I can’t,” or to her father, “I won’t” … it was a subterranean sort of struggle. It was a question of atmosphere and pressure and tyranny of affections, but Midget had never faced a direct issue with absolute defiance.’³⁹ Both H.D.’s mother and father were figures of authority, as Williams noted on his visits there. Her mother ruled the house, though as he observed, not ‘obtrusively’, and saw to it that Professor Doolittle, with his ‘flowing beard’, was treated as the revered patriarch of his tribe: ‘At a meal, usually supper, with every place taken by the children and others, if the alert Mrs Doolittle detected in the general din that the doctor wanted to say something, she would quickly announce: Your father is about to speak! – Silence immediately ensued. Then in a slow and deep voice, and with his eyes fixed on nothing, as Ezra Pound said … nearer than the moon, he said what he had to say. It was a disheartening process.’⁴⁰ But, and perhaps Williams did not quite see this, if they were authoritative they were never authoritarian, and they loved H.D. dearly and she them. Had it not been the case, her escape might have been much easier.

As it was, her attempts at finding a substitute for a Bryn Mawr education did not go well. In one of Pound’s letters to his mother while still at Wabash, he had mentioned that H.D. was studying music at the conservatoire, but that apparently did not last long. Many years later, she told the composer Eric White, who set some of her poems to music in the 1930s, that she had been discouraged because her musical uncle Frederick Wolle, the one who had founded the Bethlehem Bach Choir, had disapproved of her liking for Beethoven, whom he considered a much inferior, and far too modern, composer. She registered for a teacher training course at the University of Pennsylvania, but didn’t pursue it, though she said in Tribute to Freud that she would have liked to be a teacher, and that one of the things that later drew her to Lawrence was that he had been a schoolmaster. H.D.’s ‘provocative indifference to rule and order’, which Williams had earlier admired, appears to have been temporarily crushed, but neither had she any faith in her ability to follow any systematic path. As she put it in Paint it Today, ‘She had not the strength nor courage to snap fresh and vivid from the surroundings of her childhood. She had no sap or vivid living power left in her. She felt instinctively that she was a failure by all the conventional and scholarly standards. She had failed in her college career, she had failed as a social asset with her family and the indiscriminate mob of relatives and relays of communal friends that surrounded it. She had burned her candle of rebellion at both ends and she was left unequipped for the simplest dealings with the world.’⁴¹

That could, one imagines, have been the end of the story of H.D’s poetic career. A few scribbled poems, a few dreams, put away, like Williams’ mother’s oil-paints, in the attic of some respectable Philadelphian academic or lawyer whom she had married after a year or two of helping her mother with the household tasks and the giving and attending of tea parties. But, for all her sense of defeat, incompetence and hopelessness, her survival instincts came to her rescue. As she wrote in End to Torment: ‘the two-edged humiliation, from the friends and family, from Ezra, was carefully camouflaged, covered with the weeds and bracken of daily duties and necessities, and a bridge finally crossed the chasm … a forceful effort toward artistic achievement’.⁴² She went on writing; she went on reading. Pound had given her a volume of Renaissance Latin poets – easy Latin, she said – and she translated some of them.⁴³ She translated some German poetry, German being her grandparents’ language, for which she had a special affection. She wrote charming, gently subversive, children’s stories, which Homer Pound helped her to publish in the Presbyterian Press. She filed papers and articles for her father, and when schoolchildren poured in to visit the Observatory in 1910 as excitement rose over Halley’s Comet, she told them (again somewhat subversively) Greek myths about the origins of the stars rather than scientific data. She began to read works by the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, who had written a book about such myths, as well as one about mysterious psychic forces in the universe, and who was considered ‘unreliable and sensational’ by her father.⁴⁴ And it was also in 1910, ‘the comet-year’, she says in Tribute to Freud, that she found another rebel outsider with whom she could bond, another irritant to her family to save her from reabsorption into the blight of Philadelphian ‘blandness’ and ‘immeasurable bourgeois blankness’, to quote Henry James once more.⁴⁵ The fresh irritant, the new outsider, was Frances Gregg, who, as H.D. recalls in End to Torment, ‘filled [her Philadephian life] like a blue flame’ after Pound had gone.⁴⁶ It was her first lesbian love affair, and as significant and unforgettable as her first heterosexual affair with Pound.

H.D. met Frances through an acquaintance (according to Barbara Guest, Nan Hoyt), who appears as Mary, a ‘relic of the tepid school’, in Paint it Today, and as Nellie Thorpe, a Bryn Mawr acquaintance, in Her.⁴⁷ Frances, who was one or two years older than H.D., had had a scholarship to the ‘tepid’ school, but had had to leave early, probably before H.D. had moved there. She was later a student at the Philadelphia Academy of Art, to which William Brooke Smith had hoped to go if he had lived. Frances was poor, compared to most of H.D.’s circle, who were ‘the daughters of lawyers, doctors, professors, and oversuccessful wholesale merchants’.⁴⁸ She lived with her mother, Julia, presumably widowed, certainly husbandless – Frances’ father, an Englishman called Oliver Gregg, was said to have gone prospecting out West, never to return. Julia was told he had died of exposure. In H.D.’s fictional accounts of her relationship with Frances, Fayne Rabb, the Frances figure, wonders if her mother had ever been married at all. Frances and her mother shared a small flat in an unfashionable area of West Philadelphia, though when Frances was younger they had lived in a poorer district still, on the edge of a slum, where, according to her son, Frances had ‘heard negro jazz, saw negro dancing, and a lynching’.⁴⁹ Frances had, like Pound, been born out West, probably at Fort Worth, but moved with her mother and grandmother back East when still very young. Mrs Gregg came from one of the old Dutch families who preceded the British in the New York area; she liked to be known as Mrs Van Ness Gregg, and was proud of being related to the Roosevelts, but in Philadelphia status depended first and foremost on money.⁵⁰ Ancestry might count, but not in shabby surroundings.⁵¹ The very fact that Frances was not part of Philadelphia’s snobbish, tribal upper middle class appealed in itself to H.D., but H.D. was only the first of several, including most notably John Cowper Powys, to be entranced, and frequently made wretched, by Frances Gregg.

Frances Gregg was different from, as well as indifferent to, the well-bred young ladies of Philadelphia. In her own short story, ‘Male and Female’, based on the events of this period and only published posthumously, Frances says of her fictional self: ‘There was about her … a touch of something both neurotic, and exotic, that made her women friends regard her with envy, suspicion and a deep-rooted, if blind, jealousy. Somehow they knew she was not “good”, in their sense of being suppressed, nice women, but they also recognised something bold and clean and fierce that commanded their respect but, oddly enough, made them hate her all the more’.⁵² In H.D.’s fiction the Frances figure always arouses considerable disapproval, but both in fiction and real life she is described as bewitchingly lovely, something borne out by the extant photographs. In Paint it Today, like Frances’ other admirers, H.D. stresses her eyes, ‘an unholy splendor’, whose colour fluctuated mysteriously from blue to slate or ‘rain gray’.⁵³ Richard Perceval Graves, in his memoir of the Powys brothers (whose complex relationship with Frances will emerge later in this story), describes her, more conventionally, as ‘very beautiful’ with ‘the large appealing eyes of a star of the silent screen’.⁵⁴ The Ezra Pound figure in Asphodel calls her a ‘Burne Jones fury’, which captures better the dangerously compelling intensity of her eyes.⁵⁵ She was shy and vulnerable looking, but also clever, witty, quick and often cruel. She worked as a teacher – the usual fate of the unmarried and less than affluent middle-class American woman, but perhaps it was she who made H.D. admire the calling – following in the footsteps of her mother, who had founded a school for Italian immigrants, and, Graves claims, ‘made their home a centre for outcasts of all kinds, in particular ill-treated children and animals’.⁵⁶ If this were true – and Frances’ son repeats the story – Mrs Gregg was a rather nicer character than most accounts of her have credited. Frances’ grandmother, who had lived with her daughter and granddaughter till her death, was a powerful and resilient woman, much admired by Frances. Her husband had died in the Civil War, leaving her with five children, four of them boys, to bring up single-handed. She worked, like her daughter after her, as a teacher, and was also, according to Frances’s son, ‘a formidable lecturer on temperance, venereal disease and women’s rights’.⁵⁷ There was something of her zeal and resolution in Frances, though she would devote those qualities to rather different causes. Frances’ mother Julia was more conventional. She was, Graves says, ‘a devout Evangelical Christian’ (Frances spent hours of her youth in revivalist camp meetings) but ‘Frances herself had no time for the Church, though she very much admired the way in which, as she saw it, Christ had courageously launched a movement which challenged the established order of the entire universe. She thoroughly disliked the social and intellectual establishment on earth; she had a particular loathing for the police.’⁵⁸ No wonder she appealed to H.D.

H.D. wrote in Paint it Today that since she was about ten she had longed for a sister, a twin sister, even a baby sister. Frances filled that role, although, as H.D. was to discover, sisterly emotions come in many forms. In the satirical novel that Frances helped her husband to write some years later, The Buffoon, which is in many ways very cruel about H.D., and very comic about Pound, the heroine is a curious fusion of Frances and H.D., and there were likenesses between them, in their sense of isolation, in their interests and even in their looks. When Llewelyn Powys later described Frances as he first saw her, it sounds remarkably like H.D. He even calls Frances a dryad, as Pound did H.D.:

The first impression she produces is of one walking in a trance, her head full of dreams … The next is of an extraordinary timidity and shyness – more than shyness, a certain reluctance to step into the world at all – precisely like the look of a Hamadryad standing waiting at the entrance of her hollow tree till the steps of some passing faun have died into silence … She is tall and dark and very supple and slender … yet moulded with quite girlish and almost Tess-like contours.⁵⁹

H.D.’s contours were never described as Tess-like, but the tall, slender shyness and the sense of unease in the world would apply equally well to her. When they later travelled together they were often taken to be sisters.⁶⁰ But in spite of their shared social diffidence they were both strong characters, though Frances’ strength was a more active force. She was a much more overt rebel than H.D. ever was. H.D. was always attracted by rebels; she needed them to help, or make, her escape. Pound, Frances and Aldington were all stirrers, out to disturb the bourgeois peace of mind. H.D., frustrated as she might be by conventional expectations, was much more inclined to remember that the bourgeois were after all human beings. She was polite; she was tactful; she hated hurting people’s feelings. She was consumed by guilt when she realised that she had done so. H.D.’s own strength lay in her largely silent, sometimes stoic powers of endurance. Many of her early poems are about endurance – ‘Sea Rose’, for example, where the traditional feminine emblem of the rose loses its beauty and sensuousness, but equally it becomes, instead of an image of fragile mortality, a survivor:

Rose, harsh rose,

marred and with stint of petals,

meagre flower, thin,

sparse of leaf …

Stunted, with small leaf,

you are flung on the sand,

you are lifted in the crisp sand

that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose

drip such acrid fragrance

hardened in a leaf?⁶¹

H.D. wrote that poem in England during the First World War, but already she often felt marred, meagre, sparse and stunted. Frances, like Pound, brought her fierce joy and great pain.

Frances had an intense, almost suffocating relationship with her mother, who was deeply possessive of her, something Frances both depended on and hated. Julia, Frances’ son says, was ‘the bane and spur of her life’. She and her mother had constant, bickering rows, though ‘when the battles were over … [they] would … begin to laugh’.⁶² That seems to have been the model for most of her relationships; she would bind people to her, alternatively slashing them pitilessly and enchanting them with her vitality and spirit. John Cowper Powys said later of her cruelty to him: ‘She is really wicked – beyond anything it is possible to imagine’.⁶³ In Her and Paint it Today she is compared to the beautiful, sadistic Roman Empress Faustine in Swinburne’s poem of that name, to whom the slaughter of the gladiatorial contests was an addiction; she ‘loved the games men played with death,/Where death must win;/As though the slain man’s blood and breath/Revived Faustine’. Frances Gregg wrote later in another short story. ‘I could never let anything alone. My instinct was to draw a thing to me, then strip it of every defence, every self-illusion, every self-deception … Certainly there was a fury in me, a bitter hatred of people, and a vindictive malice toward life, – but there was too, a love, and a pity that broke my heart. I am queer. I am solitary.’⁶⁴ Yet just as H.D. recognised that Pound was ‘torn and lonely’ under the bravado and gaucherie, so too perhaps she recognised Frances’ love beneath her destruction of it, the pity beneath her cruelty. And Frances cared about books, cared about poetry, cared about ideas. She too wanted to write. She was intellectually and artistically H.D.’s salvation.

Frances’s extra two years, the toughness of her life, and her time at the Academy of Art had all combined to make her a more sophisticated and knowing young woman than H.D. In retrospect, it has been easy for commentators (like, for example, Barbara Guest) to think of H.D., the famous poet, in this friendship/love affair with someone who never made a name, as being the more dominant of the two. But Frances believed passionately in her superiority to the world at large and in the moral rightness of her own unorthodox convictions; perhaps, in the face of Philadelphian condescension, such passionate self-belief was necessary. She would castigate H.D. for her bourgeois softness and compromises well into the 1920s and 1930s, and H.D. both admired and feared her fierceness of principle. Frances was, according to her son, appalled by the suffering of the world; if there were ‘fury’ and ‘bitter hatred of people’ in her, it came out of her terrifyingly bleak view of the human condition and her conviction of the constant inhumanity of man to man. Unlike H.D. and Pound, she had lived close to the most exploited groups in American society, the blacks and the immigrant poor, and she knew the brutality of the law-keepers and the respectable. She was heir to the New England tradition of hell-fire preaching – she had heard plenty of it in her youth – and, like the famous Jonathan Edwards, she was ready to terrorise people for what she thought was their good. Her letters to Powys could be savage: she saw them as necessary tools of reformation. In Her, when Fayne Rabb talks about George Lowndes, she describes a similar technique: ‘George is lie upon lie upon lie. George interests me because I try out on George the thing that is in me … Truth, pure truth, that atomic center of me, draws George to me, separates George from George like some deep distilling acid. The thing in me, pure upon pure truth, disintegrates George and I watch the disintegration, matching element to element, saying this is George, this was George. The George that is to be.’⁶⁵ It has to be said, if this is based on Frances’ treatment of Pound, the reformation did not succeed.

Cassandra Laity points out that the Fayne Rabb figure is depicted by H.D. as a femme fatale, which is certainly the case, but one wonders whether it was not Frances who first modelled herself on the beautiful, forceful and exciting femmes fatales of the late nineteenth century. Her sinister stories rather suggest that she did. Her writing has a dark, disturbing Gothic quality – she published some stories appropriately entitled ‘Contes Macabres’ in the New Freewoman – and her imagination was powerful and perturbing. Like other rebellious women at the time, as Rita Felski has suggested, she may well have found the femme fatale a much more attractive role model than the ‘nice’, ‘good’ woman. In addition, Frances had a strong interest in the occult, and was, she claimed, a medium, another role through which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women could claim a position of psychic power generally socially unavailable to them.⁶⁶ H.D. depicts Frances on occasion as a kind of vampire, like Swinburne’s Faustine, feeding on others’ souls; ‘she is psychic klepto-maniac’, she told Bryher in 1930: ‘She must get and break’.⁶⁷ In the autobiographical novels Fayne Rabb is never depicted saying a kind or tender thing. One can understand why Bryher later described Frances as ‘very dangerous’, but she gave H.D. an alternative and fascinating model of what a woman could be.⁶⁸