I

H.D. REACHED THE French port of Le Havre in early August 1911. When Pound left New York in February, the Doolittles had no plans for H.D. to go to Europe that summer, and she only gained their agreement shortly before she left. In her fictional version of events, H.D. reproaches herself for the sadness her departure brought her mother, yet it may not have been as distressing as it might have been earlier. Shortly after her return from New York, H.D.’s niece Helen was born, the first child of her brother Gilbert, her mother’s favourite. The baby was the cause of great family excitement, and whilst H.D. was herself very taken with little Helen, she was also, no doubt, grateful to her for giving her mother a new interest that softened the pain of letting her only daughter leave the country. On 23 July, five months after Pound had left the States, H.D. sailed from New York along with Frances Gregg and her mother, her parents having agreed to let her join them for a four-month sightseeing visit to Europe.

William Carlos Williams came to the quayside to see her off. Her father was there, but not her mother. ‘The picture of Professor Doolittle at the pier on the departure of his daughter for England!’ Williams recalled later, ‘to meet Ezra Pound (as he well knew) impressed me deeply. He was alone with her, aside from myself. He was sitting on a trunk, completely silent. No word to me or to anyone.’¹ Perhaps Williams is right, and Professor Doolittle was worried about the equivocal engagement, even though officially the visit was only temporary. Perhaps he had a premonition that his favourite child would not return to America in his lifetime. He and H.D. were very alike, and he may well have realised that H.D. was following a quest to which she would be as dedicated as he to his stars. Whatever its cause, her father’s silent, reproachful misery must have been acutely painful for the affectionate and easily guilt-ridden H.D. But if she was going to meet Ezra Pound, she was still entranced by the mercurial Frances, and if she was conscience-stricken by her parents’ distress, she was enormously excited about her visit to Europe. Many years later, answering a questionnaire in the Little Review, she said that the happiest moment of her life had been when she had first left for Europe along with someone she loved. But what about Frances? She said later of that moment, ‘If, out of the long dead years, I could choose one episode to relive, it would be, I think, that embarkation’.² But what did she hope for? Her feelings may have been equally divided. She had after all originally planned to go without H.D. Perhaps she too was going in search of Pound.

Given their poverty, it may seem surprising that the Greggs managed to afford a European trip, but Americans could visit Europe very cheaply in those days. H.D. was paying her own way, that is to say, her parents were paying, and as she was given rather more spending money than the Greggs were likely to have, in the event she may have partially subsidised their visit. According to Barbara Guest, she and Frances spent the early days of the voyage hiding from Mrs Gregg, kissing in a lifeboat under the tarpaulin.³ Then the weather worsened and the rest of the voyage was grim; they finally reached Le Havre a week late. But, having put the miseries of the crossing behind her – it makes one feel, hearing these accounts, that jet-lag is a small price to pay – H.D. was delighted with France. She sent a series of excited postcards to her mother – she was writing letters too, but those her parents did not save. ‘Dearest,’ she wrote on one card, ‘Often think of you here – the crowds of real French – and the green hills would so delight you … My life is so exuberantly full, I know you rejoice with me.’ They stopped in Rouen on their way to Paris, the route recommended by Baedeker. H.D. sent her mother a postcard of the famous cathedral door, ‘Where I sat and wrote your last – overhead the open sky – and red geraniums in the stone niches at the gate entrance. We are so happy here that even Paris seems anti-climactic – markets with plums, pears, etc. in the open – Attended pageant service in the Cathedral to-day – Tuesday – annunciation of the Virgin – I am still intoxicated with it all.’ But when they reached Paris it was far from an anticlimax. ‘Am enjoying all things,’ she told her mother. ‘I grow happier and freer and more exuberant every day’.⁴

Once in Paris (‘very hot,’ H.D recalled), they threw themselves into sightseeing. H.D. loved the art galleries.⁵ To their disappointment the Louvre was shut when they first arrived; the Mona Lisa had been stolen, an event that H.D. would recount later as if it had symbolic import for her. Although she was at one level ecstatic in her liberation, she was also apprehensive about where this bold step out from the family home would lead; the capture of the Mona Lisa is one of several images in her writing about this period that suggest the violation that women risk when they venture into the public sphere. (H.D. was not alone in seeing her as an archetypal woman: in Blast Lewis would comment that Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa eloped from the Louvre like any woman. She is back again now, smiling with complacent reticence, as before her escapade; no one can say when she will be off once more, she possesses so much vitality.’)⁶ When the Louvre reopened, H.D. spent many hours there, writing to her mother that ‘I am still just beginning to get into the Louvre. A life-time would be short in which to really study it – We are so very happy!’ Aldington was later to write of H.D. that ‘To look at beautiful things with H.D. is a remarkable experience … She responds so swiftly, understands so perfectly, re-lives the artist’s mood so intensely, that the work of art seems transformed.’⁷ The art that H.D. sought out on this visit were the established greats: Greek statues and Renaissance paintings, works whose praise she would have read in Pater. There are no references to her seeing any avant-garde or recent painting or sculpture on this first visit. She would never, in any case, lose her passion for Greek statuary.

H.D. was also carrying on a busy social life. Pound had written to his mother the previous May, ‘I’m not sure but Paris is the easiest place to see “London”’: H. D. might well have said the same about seeing ‘Philadelphia’.⁸ Paris was full of Americans. Margaret Snively and her father were there for some of the time; so was H.D.’s cousin Francis Wolle, who took her to Versailles and to Gounod’s Faust. She met up again with Walter Rummel, now back from London, who invited her and the Greggs out to his studio in the rue Raynouard, in Passy, ‘a lovely suburb where Maeterlinck lived’. They went several times to see him: ‘Such music!’ she told her mother. In Asphodel, where Rummel appears as Walter Dowel, it is said that people collected underneath his window while he played.

H.D. was as enchanted as she had been in Swarthmore; she was always acutely responsive to music. In End to Torment she tells a story of going by herself to the Philadelphia Academy to hear Paderewski. At the end ‘too shattered to move’, she ‘found [herself] alone in the vast empty circles of balcony benches’. Below her, she saw ‘a furtive handful of dark figures’. They were not part of ‘the fastidious, fashionable audience that had just surged out … We [were] of a secret order.’ Paderewski returned, and played for them for another hour.⁹ She sat entranced. She appears to have been equally moved by Walter’s playing, which had been admired, of course, by Paderewski himself. Over forty years later, when she heard of Rummel’s death, she still remembered how magical she had found that music. In her fictional account in Asphodel (in which Hermione is for a while dazzled by the combination of his music, ‘Byronic face’, courtesy and sophistication)¹⁰ she writes:

It was winter when Walter played. Cold and chill and the sound of the notes was the last drop of an icicle that started to melt in the spring, melting, it must melt but it decided not to melt and broke off a little crystal bead and fell down, down, down and broke, with an infinitude of sound, the lightest sharp cold ice note at the top of the piano, making the whole world vibrate.¹¹

‘That is Walter,’ she says a little later: ‘Fire frozen.’¹² This imagery recalls the fiery kisses given by Ezra, that ‘do not so much warm, they magnetize’ – ‘rigor mortis. I am frozen in this moment,’ as she puts it.¹³ H.D. often describes ecstasy as others might describe agony, the singer with ‘a voice that made you crouch low in your chair and pray to be dead’, the moment of epiphany as a moment of death.¹⁴ Yet in the case of both Pound and Rummel the fiery coldness is also perhaps a comment on their ultimately ruthless dedication to their art. Walter in her account emerges as in the end somewhat detached from humanity, as if, for all his charm, his immersion in his music and occult pursuits held him apart from the warmth of human interaction.

In spite of this, H.D. was attracted and intrigued by Walter. In the fictional account, Walter spends time with Hermione, discussing music and telling her of his efforts to reinvoke the ancient music that the Egyptians had played: ‘He believes he can hear things … He thinks it’s all written if one could only get it.’ He tells her she is ‘all wrong’ to prefer the Greeks to the Egyptians, and because of that ‘she couldn’t be expected to understand – the real things’.¹⁵ Egyptian art was to become a source of inspiration to many modernist visual artists, including the London Vorticists, and, by the time she wrote Asphodel, to H.D. herself. Rummel may well, in 1911, have felt H.D. was rather old-fashioned in clinging to nineteenth-century Hellenism. Rummel himself did not venture as far as Debussy, whose work was profoundly influenced by Javanese and Cambodian music, which he had discovered through the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. These great international exhibitions of the turn of the century years were celebrations of colonialism, structured to exhibit the superiority of the coloniser to the exotic but backward colonised, but what Debussy took from this music was symptomatic of the new readiness among artists to value non-Western art: if we forget our European prejudices, he wrote, we can see that ‘Javanese music is characterized by an art of counterpoint compared to which that of a Palestrina is mere child’s play.’¹⁶ Rummel felt that the Egyptian past took him in a very similar way beyond the limitations of European prejudices. Through him, H.D. was meeting for the first time the modernist critique of traditional European forms, the search for alternatives already intuitively part of her own artistic practice. Even if she had not yet met Parisian avant-garde painting, through Rummel she was introduced to what was then the avant-garde in music.

Meanwhile, H.D.’s relationship with the Greggs continued to be volatile. Frances was, as H.D. put it, ‘uneven as always’; Mrs Gregg saw H.D. as a rival for Frances’ affections, and resented her. In addition, judging from H.D.’s own postcard-recorded schedule, Frances and her mother could well have felt indignant about how much time she spent away from them, and it may have been H.D.’s passion for Paris that prevented the visit to the Loire region that Pound had thought they would make. In Asphodel Hermione’s earlier desire to see Chartres vanishes when she discovers Paris; if the Greggs’ plans were altered to suit her, they may well have been irritated by her change of mind. They stayed a while, H.D. recalled in her ‘Autobiographical Notes’, ‘in a dreadful little place, on the outskirts of Paris’. (‘Siamese cats,’ she adds darkly.)¹⁷ Yet none of this appears to have stopped her enjoyment. Towards the end of September they left Paris for a few days on the Pas de Calais coast at Paris Plage, near Etaples, south of Boulogne, before moving on to England. H.D. wrote to her mother: ‘We enjoy the people here so very much & the living in more or less aristocratic surroundings. The sea is, as always, wine in my veins.’¹⁸ According to Paint it Today, Hermione and Fayne tried to take photographs of each other in the nude in an old boat on the shore, but ‘Julia [Fayne’s mother] shouted there was a man (and a French man) coming and we must get dressed at once … even our shoes must go on.’¹⁹ H.D. in England would discover the delights of swimming naked, much advocated by the younger generation of writers and artists. Rupert Brooke and his friends, christened by Virginia Woolf the Neo-Pagans, were particular devotees of this, and his young girlfriend, Noel Oliver, had already caused a scandal at her supposedly progressive co-educational boarding-school, Bedales, by diving nude into the school swimming pool.²⁰ What would a Philadelphian evangelical like Mrs Gregg say to that? H.D. and Frances undoubtedly, like Hermione and Fayne in Paint it Today, for now ‘bathed in clothes’.

In Paint it Today, H.D. also recalls that French shoreline – and shorelines were to remain a central locus for her poems – as the place where she became conscious of the intense difference of Europe from America: ‘The wind against an old hulk on the sands below Etaples, was not yet wind, not wind that is when contrasted with that rush of swords that cut the sand stretches into snow and ice patterns and blared through the Maine pines and tore in midsummer, tornadowise, walnut and tough oak branches from the walnut and great oak trees … Yet what they had lost in the sting and dash of spray, in the rains and wind, they gained elsewhere.’ What on the shore ‘inflamed their imaginations’ were the half-obliterated letters on the bow of ‘the old hulk, blown windward, half filled with heavy, earthlike sand … The letters, cut with a slightly Gothic twist, might have stood for an Andros, or Arcadia or Helenis stranded there from southern waters’.²¹ The twisted letters evoke both a medieval and a classical past. Europe was the continent of history, of myth, of a past whose fragmentary remains surrounded the living, offering depth, entrancement, poetry, secrets to be teased out. But it was a peopled continent. Even though ‘the sun was not a sun … these people trailing up from the sand were people, authentic people … Here in France, at Etaples, the people were a reality. In America, it was the white sand that lived, the wind, the stainless rout of stars.’²² This might seem a strange view of America coming from someone who grew up on the edge of a great city of the East in the early twentieth century, even for someone with a father whose life was largely spent with ‘the stainless rout of stars’. But that sense of the dwarfing of humanity by the immensity, in size, in power, in danger, of the natural world of the American continent (something akin to what Hulme had felt on the Canadian prairies, or Fletcher in the Arizona desert) never left H.D. Weather in her poems is always that American weather of extremes (‘you are unsheltered,/ cut with the weight of wind – you shudder when it strikes’; ‘O wind, rend open the heat,/ cut apart the heat/ rend it to tatters.’)²³ It would be her discovery of Sappho, when she reached London and started to use the British Museum Reading Room, that showed her how to use that imagery as a way of understanding her life. Images of wind and heat, along with the lashing of the waves, are central to her poetry of those early years; their physical lacerations give a language to her psychic turmoil.

H.D. retained all her life this intensity of response to the natural world, but she is not a poet who ‘describes’ the natural world. Rather, and this is perhaps what is distinctively modernist about her, she wants to capture the subjective response to ‘the sting and the spray’, or to the scent of a flower. ‘She, Midget,’ she writes in Paint it Today,

did not wish to be an eastern flower painter. She did not wish to be an exact and over-précieuse western, a scientific describer of detail of vein and leaf of flowers, dead or living, nor did she wish to press flowers and fern fronds and threads of pink and purple seaweed between the pages of her book. Yet she wanted to combine all those qualities in writing and to add still another quality to these three. She wished to embody, as this other quality, the fragrance of the flowers.

You cannot paint a fragrance, you cannot be a sculptor of fragrance, you cannot play fragrance on a violin. Yet you can, with a pencil, at least attempt to express something in definite terms, before which the violin, the chisel, and the brush are powerless.²⁴

In Asphodel H.D. tells the story of her first response to France rather differently; there her coming to Europe makes her grasp for the first time that she could and should be a writer. The H.D. character, Hermione, arrives with a plethora of fictional images of French life derived from her reading, images that in America had seemed dreamlike and fairy tale but which in Europe tumble into actuality. She is taken aback by how like Maupassant and Pierre Loti the French appear to be; what had seemed totally fictional is suddenly there in front of her: ‘that was France, de Maupassant was true. Literature was true. If de Maupassant was true then life and letters met, were not sub-divided, hermetically shut apart. Helen thy beauty is to me was still hermetically sealed and a star, but de Maupassant in one terrible instant became real, a reality. Terrible and strong … Writing. How marvellous. Writing. She must write.’²⁵ In America she had only understood writing as a dream world, a visionary alternative to a society in which she felt ill at ease. Now she saw that writing would be her way forward in understanding the confused reality of her life. H.D. was to say many times that she could not have become a writer if she had not come to Europe. Whether she literally had one such moment of revelation as here, or whether it was a more gradual realisation, by the time she had reached England she knew she ‘must write’. By the end of the next year she would have achieved her first recognition as a poet.

H.D. and the Greggs crossed the Channel on 29 September 1911, either with or at much the same time as Rummel.²⁶ By early October they had all arrived in London.