R E V I E W S ......

C A R O L I N E Z I L B O O R G &......

Reading H.D.: Tradition and the Talented Individual

Jane Augustine (ed.), On the back jacket of The Gift, the American scholar Louis Martz The Gift by H.D.: declares that H.D. is `the most important female poet in America since Emily The Complete Text, Dickinson, and indeed the most important female poet writing in the English Gainesville: Univer- language in the twentieth century’. All four of the books reviewed here make sity Press of Florida, a vital contribution to our understanding of H.D., a writer whose poetry as 1998, $49.95. well as work in other genres (especially the novel, autobiography and essay) James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura deserves to be better known. Jane Augustine’s new edition of H.D.’s memoir, Marcus (eds), Close written in London during the Second World War and reflecting both on her Up, 1927±1933: early childhood in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and on her family background Cinema and and Moravian roots, offers the first accurate and scholarly version of this Modernism, London: multilayered text. Close Up, 1927±1933, an annotated anthology of work Cassell, 1998, £17.99. from the first journal devoted to the study of film as art, features material Eileen Gregory, (both written and pictorial) which shows the range of issues the magazine H.D. and Hellenism: explored while emphasizing the writing of two particular contributors, H.D. Classic Lines, and Dorothy Richardson. Donna Krolic Hollenberg’s edition of letters Cambridge: Cam- bridge University selected from the large correspondence between H.D. and Norman Press, 1998, £40. Holmes Pearson, the Yale professor who, beginning in the 1930s, began to Donna Krolic collect H.D.’s writing and to encourage her in numerous ways, offers us Hollenberg (ed.), fascinating insights into the friendship between these two people and into Between History and H.D.’s creative process; the volume also provides an additional angle on Poetry: The Letters of H.D.’s life during the period 1937±1961. Eileen Gregory’s study of H.D.’s H.D. and Norman classicism gives us a much-needed examination of the poet’s relation to the Holmes Pearson, past which most captured her imagination and which influenced her Iowa City: The specifically (for example, at the level of translation) as well as more generally University of Iowa Press, 1997, £33.95. through her understanding of nineteenth-century Hellenism and her own reading of particular ancient authors and history. Together, these very different books suggest the three main strands of recent scholarship on H.D. One involves the publication of work by H.D. still in archives. A second has focused on the publication of letters illumin- ating her life and her creativity, while a third strand has involved critical ...... Women: a cultural review Vol. 11. No. 1/2. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 146 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... readingsÐat once biographical, historical, textual and theoreticalÐwhich elucidate H.D.’s writing while arguing for her significance within the larger context of twentieth-century literature. Augustine’s edition of The Gift makes available for the first time the text as H.D. wrote it and as she intended it to be read, including her coda to the book, her `Notes’, never before published in their entirety. Because of its nature both as visionary memoir and as autobiographical record, The Gift reveals as much about H.D.’s cast of mind during the London Blitz when she wrote it as it does about her family heritage, especially on her maternal German side, and her own childhood in the United States in the 1890s. The memoir is thus simultaneously a celebration of her female inheritance and a complex modernist text which uses both an adult and a child voice, flashbacks, stream of consciousness, free-associative meditations on myth and a rich blend of personal and national history. Filtered through H.D.’s awareness of the German bombs falling around her as she wrote, The Gift is an important text for an understanding of the author’s war writings, such as Trilogy (1944±6), anchored in her experiences in England during the Second World War, or Bid Me To Live (1960), drawing on H.D.’s life during the Great War, or Helen in Egypt (1961), which explores the experience of a fictional woman caught in a historical, mythical war in another time and place. The Gift is also a key text for understanding the religious and gender concerns which pervade H.D.’s work. Augustine’s introduction and annotations, based in part on research in Moravian archives, additionally provide an illuminating biographical and historical context for this definitive edition. Between History and Poetry is as compelling in the aggregate as in its specific content. Hollenberg has edited the correspondence with meticulous care, and her extensive notes and short introductions to each chapter help to set the material in biographical context. In making a selection from more than a thousand extant letters from among H.D.’s and Pearson’s papers at Yale, Hollenberg focuses on correspondence concerning H.D.’s creative process and reading, and on those letters which chronicle her attention to publication. Thus this collection is especially useful to readers wishing to gloss particular works (there are, for example, twenty-three references to Tribute to Freud (1974) and thirteen to The Gift) or particular literary figures (there are forty-one references to Richard Aldington, H.D.’s fellow Imagist and husband, from whom she lived apart after 1919, and over a hundred each to Ezra Pound and to Bryher, H.D.’s close companion after 1918). The letters themselves are often concerned with apparent pleasantries, numerous references to friends, acquaintances and relatives, and endless `thank-you’s’ for books, manuscripts, cards and greetings duly sent and received. The reader slowly becomes oriented, however, to the significance of nearly all things for H.D., and what the correspondence may seem to lack in narrative power or reflective substance is compensated for by the richness REVIEWS . 147 ...... of allusion and the valuable insights it provides into H.D.’s complex and unusual mind. In response to a birthday present from Pearson in 1944, she wrote: `thank you for flower-fruit and fruit-flowers (ISBN almost ended by eating the purple-blue & blue-lavender & grape-hyacinth orchids last year.)’ On her historical novel `The White Rose and the Red’ (still unpublished today and among her papers at Yale), she commented: `William Morris was as bored and distressed by the Crimea as you are by the atom bomb.’ Making important distinctions in her `Vale Ave’ sequence of poems, H.D. points out cryptically and characteristically: Read for Germain[e] & Germaine, in last poems, GermainÐVIII & IX. Actually, the vibration goes on, as from gardenias, `the flowers he left,’ VIIÐalso note Germain for Germaine in VIIÐrather symbolical, this insistence on the f[eminine] gender. The Professor [Freud] said mine was `mother fixation,’ so prob[ably], I went on to f[eminine] gender Germaine transferenceÐsuch a lovely name. Norman Holmes Pearson’s more conventional letters, while balancing H.D.’s intensity, are often interesting in their own right, as when, for instance, he describes a visit to Pound during the latter’s incarceration at St Elizabeth’s: Now I was there; he re-opened a folding aluminum garden chair in which one lounges. He lounged, and I sat bolt-upright in another chair. He had the perfect ease, the soft voice, the gentle manners which belong to his Chinese role as opposed to the persona of the ill-spelling phonetic- minded writer of letters. One might have wishes for more illustrations (there is only a frontispiece showing H.D., Pearson and Bryher in New Haven in 1956), but Between History and Poetry is an important book for anyone interested in H.D. and her circle. Close Up, 1927±1933: Cinema and Modernism, while less substantial than its subtitle suggests, makes available interesting material previously access- ible only in archives. The journal Close Up, edited by H.D.’s lover Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher and H.D. herself, was a major attempt to assess, as the editors state in their preface, `the aesthetic possibilities opened up by cinema within, despite and against its commercial contexts’. The introductions to each of the book’s eight sections offer valuable insights into the material that follows. Laura Marcus discusses, for example, the `interplay between an aesthetics of formal restraint and one of emotional, spiritual or ``psychic’’ transcendence, between holding back and going beyond, [which] runs through H.D.’s film writings’. All of the eleven articles which H.D. wrote between 1927 and 1929 are reprinted here, as are responses of others to the experimental films, directed by Macpherson, in which she acted: Foothills, Wing Beat and Borderline. Stills from these films are also reproduced 148 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... throughout the book, while a still of H.D. in Foothills appears on the cover. The anthology additionally includes a number of Bryher’s essays, revealing the interest she and H.D. shared in the aesthetics and representation of the female body and character, as well as a generous selection of pieces from Dorothy Richardson’s regular column, `Continuous Performance’, which demonstrate her concern with both the practical and phenomenological conditions of cinema spectatorship. Marcus suggests that in the debate that arose with the introduction of sound during the years of Close Up, Richardson `began to gender silence as feminine, sound/speech as masculine and to portray women’s film spectatorship as a negotiation of the terms of speech and silence’. In turn, her articles finally celebrate the cinema as a woman’s sphere. Among other contributors to Close Up in this anthology are Macpherson, the British psychoanalyst Barbara Low, the London journalist Robert Herring, and Hanns Sachs, the Berlin-based psychoanalyst whose analysands included Low, Karen Horney, Gregory Zilboorg and Bryher herself. This anthology also contains in a useful appendix a list of the contents of each issue of the journal and biographical notes on its contributors, making the collection particularly valuable to the interested scholar. Gregory’s H.D. and Hellenism offers a sustained critical exploration of H.D.’s use of specific classical material (especially Sappho, Theocritus, the Greek Anthology, Homer and Euripides) and the influence of Hellenism more broadly understood on her work throughout her life. Elegantly written and eloquently argued, the book examines H.D.’s intertextuality in the context of classical fictions operative at the turn of the century: the literary debates about a new `classicism’ in reaction to Romanticism; the fictions of classical transmission and the problem of women within the classical line; romantic Hellenism, as represented specifically by Walter Pater; and the renewed interest in ancient religion brought about by anthropological studies. The appendix presents two extensive and extremely helpful lists. The first, keyed poem by poem to Louis Martz’s edition of H.D.’s Collected Poems, 1912±1944, indicates the classical and intermediary texts (for instance, the translations H.D. knew best) with which each poem engages. The second, a kind of index to the first, is an annotated list of classical authors; under each name Gregory indicates specific related poems by H.D. as well as the particular Greek or Latin texts on which she drew. Careful to distinguish direct from impressionistic influence, Gregory’s scrupulous research and compelling arguments offer new and important readings of H.D.’s Hellenism while establishing the groundwork for future scholars. From H.D.’s early work before 1925, which was strongly influenced by her intimacy with Richard Aldington, to her epic achievement at the end of her life in Helen in Egypt, Gregory demonstrates that H.D. was a knowledgeable and insightful reader, translator and interpreter who engaged REVIEWS . 149 ...... creatively with classical writers at the level of language, image and theme. While the first three books discussed in this review may appeal primarily to those readers already familiar with and strongly interested in H.D. and/or her circle, Gregory’s book particularly, in spite or perhaps even because of its sustained focus, addresses issues of far-reaching consequence for how we read not only H.D. but modernism itself and, more generally, the female writer who, like Shakespeare’s sister in any age, must inevitably tangle with tradition and her own place within it.

A I L S A H O L L A N D &......

Poetry, Sexuality and Two World Wars

H.D.’s fictionalized histories of her involvement in the Imagist circle . . . describe the break with Romanticism and the subsequent transition to a modernist poetic as a painful indoctrination into a predatory, patriarchal sexual politics H.D. associated by turns with World War I, the `modern aesthetic cult of brutality,’ and her own confining role as muse to Lawrence, Aldington and Pound (32).

Cassandra Laity, This book initially appears to be about aesthetics, as Laity demonstrates H.D. and the how in her early poetry H.D. adopted the personae of the male androgyne Victorian Fin de and the femme fatale from decadent literary and visual art to free herself from SieÁ cle: Gender, the anti-romantic, impersonal aesthetics of the `male’ modernism of her Modernism, Deca- contemporaries. However, this is represented by Laity as not merely an dence, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- artistic but also a political choice. The politics involved are in turn both versity Press, 1997, feminist (enabling H.D. to write as a woman) and liberal/pacifist (as H.D. £35.00 ($54.95). rejects poetry that she associates with the war). The intersection of aesthetics and politics is the most intriguing aspect of the book. Laity shows how Romanticism and its characters continued to have a larger significance for H.D.: `The advent of World War II, Pound’s Fascist sympathies, and other misdeeds of male modernism affirmed H.D.’s lifelong belief that the male modernist `swerve’ from Romanticism had been tragically misdirected’ (152). With this statement, Laity fails to address the important question of the