UNTIL 1912, PERHAPS beyond, it was always assumed (by Pound as well as others) that, of the two young women, Frances was to be the writer; in the event, she would publish, if not a great deal, enough to make clear that she had great promise. No one yet believed in H.D., except, very uncertainly, H.D. herself. Yet H.D. was writing poetry, still apparently largely translations. Now she wrote poetry for Frances, or about Frances. In Paint it Today she includes a translation from the German poet Heine, whom Pound, in spite of his inadequate German, would also attempt to translate, perhaps following H.D.’s example, in the Canzoni which were published a year after his return home. Heine, who has been rather neglected by Anglophone audiences in recent years, was widely read in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; an outsider, first as a Jew in Germany, and later, when he moved to Paris, as a German in France, for the incipient modernist, and perhaps especially H.D., he was an important early emblem of the poet as exile. Some of his poems, significantly enough, were in a form of vers libre, but H.D. was here apparently translating from his rhymed lyric love poetry:
I have come again away from the dead,
Drawn by strange powers to thee,
Quicken me now nor fear to give,
Too much of yourself to me.
‘She had translated it painstakingly from Heine,’ she explains, ‘and she knew that she had brought over a little the fragrance of the German. She worried about the “thee” and the “yourself” but “thyself” sounded stilted, unnatural.’69 This is not yet the vers libre that she is known for, but it has a simplicity and reticence that continue to be qualities of her verse. She writes in Paint it Today about trying to find the right sort of poetry for her. ‘Poetry and the beat and the swallow wings. Large, epic pictures bored her, though she struggled through them. She wanted the songs that cut like a swallow wing the high, untainted ether, not the tragic legions of set lines that fell like black armies with terrific force and mechanical set action, paralyzing, or broke like a black sea to baffle and crush.’70 Like the young poets that Pound was meeting in London at the Tour Eiffel, she knew that traditional verse forms no longer worked for her, and like them she had found it hard to discover forms in English on which she could model her poetry. Again like them, she looked elsewhere for her models.
One of the first models that H.D. drew on for verse ‘that cut like a swallow wing the high, untainted ether’ was the Greek poet Theocritus, the founder of the pastoral tradition. Pound had introduced her to Andrew Lang’s translations, which were published in a single volume along with his followers Moschus and Bion. Pound himself always admired Theocritus, referring to him repeatedly as one of the touchstones of poetry, but, unlike H.D., in practice he rarely drew on him. That collection appears to have been the one that first led H.D. to her love of the Greek lyric poets, with their combination of passion and economy, the defining qualities of her own poetry. In End to Torment she gives an example of the sort of Greek pastoral poem she wrote to Frances – in this case she says in ‘Bion and Moschus mood’, rather more melancholy, at any rate in Lang’s selection, than Theocritus himself – though this particular poem sounds more a parody of the sort of thing she would have written than a carefully preserved morsel of her early writing, as some critics take it to be. H.D. was a very witty writer, but her more earnest admirers sometimes miss her jokes:
O hyacinth of the swamp-lands,
Blue lily of the marshes,
How could I know,
Being but a foolish shepherd
That you would laugh at me?71
In Her, Fayne Rabb dismisses Hermione’s poetry out of hand, much as Pound had done H.D.’s: ‘“Your writing is nothing really. It is the pulsing of a willow, the faint note of some Sicillian shepherd. Your writing is the thin flute holding you to eternity. Take away your flute and you remain, lost in a world of unreality”. “It’s not – I mean – all.” “It is all – all unreal. You accept false, superimposed standards” … “But I’m trying to escape them.”’72 If that poem of the swamps and marshes is anything to go by, H.D.’s writing had some way to go, and perhaps she records this attack because she knew it had some truth. Fayne repeatedly berates Hermione for her conventionality: ‘You aren’t firm enough. You are transient like water seen through birch trees. You are like the sparkle of water over white stones. Something in you makes me hate you … You are yet repressed, unseeing, unseen … Really at the end you are just like other people.’73 Did Frances talk like this to H.D.? Or is H.D. putting her own self-criticisms in Fayne’s mouth? One way or another, Frances was needling her out of her safe conformity.
As in her love affair with Pound, books were a central focus of H.D.’s relationship with Gregg. In Her, she describes Fayne as ‘the girl with the wild eyes that were the only sane eyes (possibly except Bertrand’s) that Hermione had yet seen’; Bertrand (based on H.D.’s much-loved and brilliant elder stepbrother Eric) is significantly the first person in this novel to introduce her to books, including the story of that other solitary rebel, Jane Eyre.74 H.D. introduced Frances to the writers that she had met through Pound, while Frances told H.D. of other writers of whom she had never heard. In End to Torment, H.D. writes, ‘I read her some of the poems Ezra and I had loved together, chiefly Swinburne. “You read so beautifully,” said Frances’.75 In the version of their meeting that H.D. gives in Her, books are their first topic of conversation; this is of course a fictionalised account, but the books selected are probably representative. At the polite young ladies’ tea party at which they first encounter each other, Hermione finds it hard to express a view of her own. Everything is referred to the Pound character, George Lowndes. When Fayne asks about Meredith, she says ‘a friend of mine – a man I know – George (he is George too) Lowndes, have you heard of him? he writes; George Lowndes says Meredith shows in every other syllable that his father was a tailor.’ When asked what he means by this, she is unable to explain in any articulate way. Fayne says to her, ‘“Who is George?” … “Oh, he knows people who write. He writes.” … “What then is George like?” “Oh, I don’t know – rather like Aucassin and Nicolette [the anonymous medieval work translated by Andrew Lang, that H.D., Pound and Williams had all read]. I mean, he once said I was.” “Like –” “One or the other. Aucassin, you know, and Nicolette, you know.” “I don’t know.”’76 They discover they have Dante, Ibsen, Shaw and Maeterlinck in common, but when Fayne asks her if she likes Maeterlinck, all she can say is ‘The Bee – yes, George said it was nature faking.’ Fayne, in the midst of the conversation about George Meredith, had dropped the unexpected and unwelcome question: ‘What about Dostoevski?’ ‘Dostoevski rang no bell,’ the text goes on. ‘Dostoevski was a shaggy word, it did not suit them’; the conversation returned to Meredith.77
The ‘Dionysian’ Dostoevsky, as he is described here, perhaps stands for a dimension of psychological complexity and darkness that Pound’s version of the aesthetic programme, let alone polite Philadelphia’s cultural map, did not include. Frances’ short stories often have a tormented Dostoevskian feel. Dostoevsky, before Freud, had traced the divisions and contradictions of the mind, and perhaps helped H.D., who, unlike Pound, was an avid reader of fiction, to understand some of the battles that her unconscious waged with her conscious mind. His influence can certainly be seen in H.D.’s fiction, but even before she turned to novel-writing, reading Dostoevsky may have helped her comprehend the psychic conflicts that she was to suffer during the war years, recorded in her imagist poetry. In fact, that poetry, one might guess, though so often spoken through mythic Greek personae, owes much of its psychological intensity to her reading of fiction. According to Asphodel, by the time Hermione reached Europe in 1911 she had also read Flaubert, Maupassant and Pierre Loti, which if true of the real-life H.D., would have put her well ahead of Pound. She and Frances went together to what Frances described as ‘those maddening, exalting, incredible’ University Extension lectures on literature in Philadelphia (it was at one of these that Frances was to meet John Cowper Powys), and these no doubt extended the range of reading she had met up till then.78 H.D., like Pound, had her fundamental approach to writing formed by her first meeting with the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes, especially Swinburne and Pater, and that influence would remain, but her art would in addition be fed from many other sources.
It was undoubtedly significant that in Her, H.D. describes Hermione talking to Fayne about George long before she gets on to herself. In 1910 H.D. was still obsessed by Pound, and her stories of Pound, the evidence suggests, played a central part in her relationship with Frances, intriguing and irritating the latter, well before his return. By now Pound had made his name. Philadelphia was proud of its young poet who was able so to impress the English public. As Pound was caustically to point out, that was the only way to get oneself taken seriously in America in 1910, though even so, when he actually arrived, the praise became more tempered. Yet undoubtedly H.D. could not help but be proud of the reports of his success, which were to some extent a vindication of her fight with her parents. An exchange between Her and her mother goes: (her mother) ‘I thought you said he was getting on famously, that all London, Munich, Paris and Berlin were at his feet, that he was chanting his verses to crowded houses, at tea parties –’; (Hermione) ‘I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said that Yeats had praised him in a review, that Madox Ford wanted him to help in a new book he’s doing, that – …’79 All in fact wildly inaccurate, apart from chanting his verse to crowded houses and at tea parties, in the limited purlieus of London, but indicative of the vibrations of Pound’s small successes as they reached Upper Darby.
Yet if H.D. poured out to Frances the story of ‘her infatuation’ with Pound (as Fayne Rabb describes it in Her) she was also ‘infatuated’ (as H.D. put it to Freud many years later) with Frances herself. How H.D., in the bland Philadelphia of 1910, defined or understood her passion for Frances is hard to say. Writing about this period in the 1920s, H.D. avoids labels or categories. In Her she mocks the fashionable sub-Freudian jargon of the post-war years that would have defined and pigeonholed her feelings, her failures, her struggles to find herself. ‘Her Gart had no word for her dementia … She could not predict later common usage of uncommon syllogisms; “failure complex,” “compensation reflex,” and that conniving phrase “arrested development” had opened no door to her … Words that had not (in Philadelphia) been invented, beat about them: Oedipus complex, inferiority complex, claustrophobia.’80 Not that the text suggests doors would have been opened to her even if she had known such words, but perhaps she would have known that her confusion, her sense of failure, was not uncommon. But how she explained or understood her feelings for Fayne/Frances, ‘her sister love’, is never resolved, and no more precise formulation is ever offered in the novel. Her was not written to be published, so it was not fear of censorship. As with The Gift, which is written ‘as the child saw it’, H.D. is telling the story of Her as the young woman in 1910 would have understood things, so she would not put it in language only available to her a decade and a half later. But there are perhaps other reasons that H.D. does not introduce the vocabulary of the 1920s here. Though by then H.D. knew a great deal more about sexology than she could have done at twenty-three, for her the theories that were current were not very helpful. She did not feel, as her then companion Bryher did, that she was a boy trapped within a woman’s body. Gender inversion was the most common explanation of homosexuality at the period, and Bryher had the comfort of being assured by Havelock Ellis himself that in deciding she was inwardly a boy she had diagnosed her problem correctly. H.D. admired Havelock Ellis in many ways – he was a good friend, and possibly at one stage a lover, and it was she who had put Bryher in touch with him – but his theories were alien to her experience. In Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, which appeared in 1928, shortly after H.D. had finished Her, gender inversion is also the theory embodied by Stephen Gordon, who again sees herself as a boy unhappily trapped in a female body. Such a concept was not much use to a bisexual like H.D., who felt uncomfortable with contemporary definitions of both masculinity and femininity. As Her says to Fayne in Asphodel, ‘I don’t want to be (as they say crudely) a boy. Nor do I want you to so be. I don’t feel a girl. What is all this trash of Sappho? None of that seems real, to (in any way) matter. I see you. I feel you … My brain reaches some height of delirium. Do people say it’s indecent? Maybe it is. I can’t hear now, see any more, people. Some are kind, some aren’t. That’s all the division I can ever have between them.’81 By the time H.D. came to write Her and the extant version of Asphodel, she was in love with Kenneth Macpherson, though with no desire to break away from Bryher. Her complicated emotional life still refused easy definition.
Freud’s theories would later be more helpful to H.D., but when she was writing Her she was warily taking an interest in them for the first time. There are brief allusions to Freud in the novel, but Hermione is mistrustful of his theorising: ‘I mean abstractions are so frightening,’ she comments.82 That mention of the ‘conniving phrase “arrested development”’ suggests his theory that the homosexual has for some reason remained trapped in an immature stage, an idea H.D. was never to accept. Fayne is said to have an uncle doctor, ‘very advanced’, in North Philadelphia, who is translating some psychoanalysis: ‘it was mother and father and Oedipus complex’. Fayne, Her says, ‘read a lot of books, wanted to lend me some books, psychoanalysis, German books … German that ran on and on, and the translations read odd, didn’t mean the same thing.’ What she does discover from them is that ‘there were people who loved … differently’.83 This simple statement, not wrapped in scientific terminology or medical jargon, is all she wants to accept here.
H.D. insists several times in her letters that Pound was the first person to mention psychoanalysis to her, and that he did so in 1912; Frances also said she first learnt of Freud from Pound, presumably at the same period: Fayne’s uncle must be a fictional device so that she can introduce the references to her awakening interest in Freud. It is, as it happens, quite likely that some ‘advanced’ doctors in Philadelphia were reading Freud at the time; the lectures he gave on his famous tour to the States in 1909 were not only, as I mentioned earlier, reported in the press, but were published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1910, and any doctor with a serious interest in mental health could well have known about him and decided to find out more. The very considerable influence of Freud in America was certainly beginning. According to Gregg’s son, Oliver Wilkinson, Frances did not know before her marriage the sexual meaning of ‘lesbian’, nor did she realise that heterosexual relations involved penetration; if true, something hard to believe of a student of Freud.84 Even if psychoanalysis were already infiltrating corners of Philadelphia, the reference indicates not literal knowledge then, but simply how important culturally Freud had become by the time the fictions were written. Freud differed from sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who saw homosexuality as innate; for Freud both homosexuality and heterosexuality are acquired. To understand your sexuality, you had with your analyst’s help to revisit and retell the story of your life. When H.D. went to see Freud in 1933 she had already spent over a decade attempting to find a way to retell the story of her life in her fiction, though without the help of an analyst. So, although, as Diane Chisholm argues, H.D. very much ‘translated’ Freud’s scientific categories into her own poetic language, Freud’s method was ideal for her.85
At the time H.D. met Frances in 1909 or 1910, it is much more likely that her understanding of sexual desire and her knowledge of how people ‘loved … differently’ came, not from sexology or psychoanalysis, but from literature, and in particular Swinburne, whom Pound had read to her, and whom she read to Frances. As critics have pointed out, it is often through quotations from him that she expresses her complex passions in these autobiographical novels. Swinburne was at his best a superb lyricist as well as a shockingly iconoclastic writer, a combination of qualities which endeared him to poetic young rebels, and many of the modernist generation admired him fervently in their youth. Pound in these years saw Swinburne as an apostle of life dispelling pious Victorian gloom, ‘the lifter of the hearts of men’.86 Unlike H.D., he never refers either to Swinburne’s exploration of deviant sexuality nor to the dark melancholic strain in his poetry. Swinburne published his Poems and Ballads, First Series, the collection from which Pound and H.D. both quote, in 1866, just as the first works of sexology were beginning to appear in Germany, at the very start of the period when, Michel Foucault has argued, the idea of a homosexual was born; that is, the homosexual as a distinct type of human being who only desires those of his or her own gender, as opposed to human beings who might from time to time, or indeed frequently, commit homosexual acts. Swinburne’s poems in this collection are psychological studies of states of desire, deeply influenced by Baudelaire, exploring the complexity and diversity of human sexual passion. Jonathan Culler says Baudelaire saw ‘passion as a sought-for hell’, and the same could be said of Swinburne: he writes of lesbian, male homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, incestuous and masochistic desires, in all of which pain and pleasure, ecstasy and suffering, are inextricably mixed.87 Swinburne is a master of lyric beauty, even when his subject-matter is at its most disturbing. What he says of Baudelaire could apply equally to his own Poems and Ballads: ‘he has chosen to dwell mainly upon sad and strange things – the weariness of pain and the bitterness of pleasure – the perverse happiness and wayward sorrows of exceptional people. It has the languid, lurid beauty of close and threatening weather – a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hothouse scents in it; thick shadow of cloud about it, and fire of molten light … The style is sensuous and weighty; the sights seen are steeped most often in sad light and sullen colour.’88
Unlike Baudelaire’s, the settings of Swinburne’s love poems are generally mythic, or at least they are set in classical Greece or Renaissance Italy, not in his own day. That would have been too much for an English audience, though even so his publishers, the respectable firm of Moxon, withdrew the collection as soon as they had released it. Swinburne had to have it reissued by a firm of dubious reputation whose owner had a taste for erotica. The collection sold well, going into numerous editions, in spite, or possibly because, of the frequent attacks on it. The poem that caused most affront and was deemed ‘especially horrible’, according to the reply Swinburne published to his critics, was ‘Anactoria’, a version of a Sappho poem in which she expresses passionate love for a young woman of that name. During much of the nineteenth century, translations of Sappho quietly changed the gender of pronouns, or substituted ‘youth’ for ‘girl’, so her poetry became heterosexual.89 As Swinburne (who had been to Eton) pointed out, this was in spite of the fact that every schoolboy – every schoolboy, that is, who belonged to the classes who were taught Greek – was ‘compelled under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat … the imperishable and incomparable verses of that supreme poet’.90 It was women and the working class who were being ‘protected’ by these bowdlerised translations. The first English edition to break with that tradition was brought out by H.T. Wharton in 1885, the edition from which H.D. would later work. Swinburne in 1866 was in the vanguard. ‘Anactoria’ is still startling for the violent intensity of passion that Sappho pours out, the scandal of this poem being compounded by its blasphemous denunciation of God. Swinburne subverted every Victorian idol: patriarchy, family, religion, even the monarchy, for he was a republican into the bargain. To the questioning young, impatient with the status quo, he gave new breath.
H.D.’s writings echo the sense of the ambiguities and ambivalences of all forms of desire in Swinburne, whose gallery of passion is much closer to Freud than to the early scientific work of the marshalling and cataloguing sexologists. To Swinburne, as to Freud, all desire is more or less perverse; in some forms the inevitability of its pain, its frustration, its disruptive force are clearer than in others, but they are not essentially different in kind from the form society decrees ‘normal’. Like Freud, Swinburne sees human desire as insatiable, never to be totally fulfilled, always threatening to tear apart the fragile veil of social order; family relationships are often erotically charged, and frequently destructive. In the sexologists’ work, genders may become inverted, but most sexologists had a strong and generally conventional late nineteenth-century sense of what masculinity and femininity ought to be. In Swinburne’s poems, as to some extent in Freud, those certainties vanish. Like other Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic poets and artists, his work is full of disturbing femmes fatales, androgynous bodies, and suffering, vulnerable men. It was perhaps this move away from conventional gender binaries that H.D. particularly valued in his writing.
The Swinburne poem H.D. quotes most often to describe the intensity of love and pain in Her’s response to Fayne is one of Swinburne’s most poignant and delicate poems, ‘Itylus’, not explicitly concerned with sexual love at all, though the emotions as always in Swinburne are tinged with eroticism, and the backdrop to the poem, as contemporary readers would have recognised, is rape, mutilation and child murder. Its mixture of bitterness and sweetness, allure and rejection, violence and pity is, perhaps, what makes it so meaningful for her. Frances was never an easy person. In her ‘Autobiographical Notes’ for 1910 H.D. comments, ‘Frances is un-even as always’.91 Their relationship was, as Frances’ son later said, ‘deep’ but ‘bitter-sweet’.92 Yet, if her relationship with Frances was always difficult, H.D. does suggest in Her that the experience of falling in love with a woman was in itself an important step in accepting herself. All through her life and work, she was struggling against an upbringing and a culture that devalued her as a woman and that gave young men – at least middle-class young men – a sense of effortless superiority over her or any woman. The modernist avant-garde would create its own problems for the woman artist, as she would find. But, with Frances, a fellow-woman whom she loved and whose worth and power she felt, she could believe that she too, although a woman, could have value, and could create. Her love for Frances made possible her first blossoming as an artist, whereas, although she learnt so much from the young Pound, he had in many ways, in that first love affair between them, silenced her, with his chant of ‘You are a poem, though your poem’s naught’, or, as George puts it in Her, ‘your pomes were rotten’.93 Both Pound and Frances, she concluded later, were necessary to her development as a poet, but after Pound’s awakening, Frances, as she says in End to Torment, ‘completed or “complemented” the Dryad or Druid that Ezra had evoked so poignantly’.94 After Pound had left the first time, she writes,
A sort of rigor mortis drove me onward. No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano. Not rigor mortis. No, No! The vines grow more abundantly on those volcanic slopes … I was separated from my friends, my family, even from America, by Ezra. I did not analyse this. When Frances came into my life, I could talk about it – but even so, only superficially. But I read her some of the poems that Ezra and I had loved.95
It was at that point, she says, that she could begin to write again. As she puts it in Her, ‘Love is writing’.96 Writing is in H.D.’s eyes in itself an erotic – a bisexually erotic – activity.
H.D. never lost her affection for Swinburne’s poetry, but he cannot have been an entirely encouraging guide for youthful ardour. In Swinburne’s late nineteenth-century view of sexuality, all desire is ultimately doomed to pain and self-defeat; for all his atheism and claimed paganism, the pallor of evil still colours eroticism in his poems; his depiction of lesbianism depends on his readers’ knowledge that this is forbidden, shocking desire. In these poems, sexuality is central, as it was to be for the modernists, but for Swinburne it is an inevitable curse, not a hope. Like Baudelaire he believes that ‘the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil’.97 H.D. continued in her poetry to show desire as intense and violent, painful and ecstatic, just as Swinburne does, but, as she says in Asphodel, she wants to resist the labelling of her desires as ‘indecent’; the decadent delight in sin was not for her generation, or at any rate not for most of them: Eliot, who was perhaps an exception, at any rate in hanging on to the sense of sin, if not delighting in it, wrote, in 1927, the year in which he became an Anglican, that Baudelaire ‘was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, “life-giving”, cheery automatism of the modern world’.98 H.D. had no liking for ‘cheery automatism’ either, but neither did she desire the stigma of evil.
One thing that is striking about H.D. is the intensity of response she gave to her relationships. Pound, Frances, Aldington, Lawrence, Bryher, Kenneth Macpherson and others she felt about with a strength of passion, though of very different kinds, that absorbed her whole being for the time, and that she never forgot, revisiting and exploring each encounter in her poetry and fiction again and again, weaving them together in mythic patterns. Where others might be emotionally wary, H.D. gave herself unguardedly, frequently to be painfully hurt. And yet, that said, as with Pound, there was always one passion that was stronger: her need to write. Those with Pound and Frances were perhaps the two most intense relationships she had, but she would not have sacrificed her poetry to either of them. Already in 1910 she knew she wanted to be a poet; but she also knew she loved Frances; and she was soon to discover that she still loved Pound. Pound had shocked Philadelphia, but a woman loving a woman was more shocking still. She might feel her desires ought not to be labelled ‘indecent’, but she knew that, if uncovered, they would be. H.D. always went in fear of social ostracism. She was rebellious, but largely covertly; she knew that a woman who overstepped the mark could be psychically destroyed. When Pound returned to Philadelphia their relationship would begin again, but this time there was also Frances. How would that be resolved?