Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world 2 | 2010 Voicing Conflict : Women and 20th Century Warfare H.D. and the Angelus Militans Suzanne Hobson Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1328 DOI: 10.4000/miranda.1328 ISSN: 2108-6559 Publisher Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès Electronic reference Suzanne Hobson, “H.D. and the Angelus Militans”, Miranda [Online], 2 | 2010, Online since 03 July 2010, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1328 ; DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4000/miranda.1328 This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. H.D. and the Angelus Militans 1 H.D. and the Angelus Militans Suzanne Hobson 1 Modernist writers were not slow to recognize that there was an easy analogy to be made between literary and visual representations of the war in heaven and the aerial warfare that was to distinguish 20th-century conflict from all terrestrial precedents (Alldritt 114). The military angel was a ready-made figure for the kinds of strategies and technologies of warfare that were experienced for the first time in World War I and more widely and to more devastating effect in World War II. D.H. Lawrence, for example, recognized the resemblance between Zeppelins and warring angels as early as 1915. He writes to Ottoline Morell that “[i]t was like Milton—there was war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up” (Boulton 1981, 390). Wyndham Lewis offers his own version of Milton’s “war-in- heaven” in The Human Age (1955) and describes this war as the reverberations in the celestial sphere of the Blitz that was occurring on earth (Lewis 1955, 67). H.D., an American-born poet resident in London during the Blitz, remembers how rumours of “bombs on wings” (H.D. to Bryher, 16 June [1944]) heralded the arrival of the first V2s and compares the sound of bombs to that of angels’ wings in her WWII epic, Trilogy: “whirr and roar”; “zrr hiss” (H.D. 1997, 19, 58). Of course, these writers were neither the first nor the last to connect warfare with angels. As Lawrence and Lewis indicate, Milton provides the most well-known version of this image in Paradise Lost while Thomas Pynchon explores the same V2-angel connection as H.D. in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). But this analogy does gain a particular force in writing by and about first-wave modernists because of their association with radical and utopian dreams and, by the early 1940s, with what was often perceived as the cutting off or, worse, perverse fulfilment of these dreams in the hail and fire of WWII (Perloff 3). In the 1910s and 20s the angel had featured in texts by D.H. Lawrence, Allen Upward and W.B. Yeats as an emblem of the desire for a flight from what Yeats calls the “steel trap” of the machine into the rarefied and ultimately unified universe represented by Balzac’s hermaphrodite angel, Séraphita.1 Post-WWII, H.D. and Lewis focus on an angel equivalent to the failure of this same project: a military angel that threatens to bind the imagination more tightly to the machine-world from which its predecessor in Balzac had offered release. Miranda, 2 | 2010 H.D. and the Angelus Militans 2 2 The background to this change in iconography was the change in the way in which modernism itself had come to be perceived. By 1950, modernism’s utopian imagination had begun to look at best embarrassing and at worst as though it had concealed a diabolical purpose all along. While not decisive, WWII was instrumental in this change of mood. As Marina MacKay points out, in the war modernism seemed to find both its realization and its dissolution; it was vindicated in its vision of an England that is “post- imperial, anti-heroic and unwanted”, but this was less of a triumph than a “winding up”: “either you had no purpose / or the purpose is beyond the end you figured” (Eliot quoted in MacKay 1). To its detractors and would-be replacements, modernism seemed to have been overtaken by the very forces that it had sought to unmask. J.F. Hendry, for example, opens the New Apocalyptic anthology for 1940 by referring his readers to those among his predecessors who had foreseen the terrible outcome of “machine- made” logic but whose reaction was alternatively bizarre, escapist or defeatist: D.H. Lawrence withdrew into sex and the subconscious, Auden into politics and Wyndham Lewis into paranoia (Hendry 12-13). Curiously, Milton himself plays a cameo role in this story of modernism’s wartime decline. As critics turned in increasing numbers to Paradise Lost to find what Wilson G. Knight calls a “prefiguration” of “our own gigantic, and itself archetypal, world-conflict” (Knight 83), they also turned away from Eliot who had argued influentially in 1936 that Milton’s style was wholly artificial and his poetry a wrong-turning in the history of English literature.2 To the minds of some of Eliot’s critics, the war tipped the balance decisively in favour of Milton and away from modernism as the poetry most appropriate to the times: “The rejection of Milton as our great master of the 'artificial style' can now be seen as the inevitable achievement of the first half of the 20th century, and it has died with the poetic movement that caused it” (Gardner 3). 3 Detloff, Perloff and Mellor have argued persuasively that literary modernism persists beyond the endings once regularly imagined for it. Nonetheless these endings are imagined and give rise to a strand in post-war writing in which modernism’s utopian aspirations survive at the cost of a certain embarrassment, self-consciousness or embattled sense of going against the tide. The angelus militans, I argue, is one of the emblems of the arrière-garde through which writers such as H.D. and Lewis articulate their continued attachment to a vision of a transfigured world while also expressing their difficulties with the “poetic movement” with which this vision and their own writing had become inextricably linked. These difficulties include modernism’s obsession with the machine, its sense of a divine mission or superhuman destiny and, in the case of H.D., its masculine bias. Space will not permit an investigation of both of these writers though Lewis also uses the military angel as a vehicle to explore the various sex-obsessions of his contemporaries. In what follows, therefore, I focus on H.D. and her attempts to recover a remarkably unpromising image—the military angel—for a pacifist critique of war and, closer to home, an attack on the modernist “machine- made” logic that had contributed to a climate in which military and masculine passions could flourish. 1. Angelic military orders 4 H.D.’s interest in angels is recorded in the acknowledgements to Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels (1967), which pay lavish tribute to his friend and correspondent Miranda, 2 | 2010 H.D. and the Angelus Militans 3 —“an avid reader in esoterica; also a devout believer in angels, whom she invoked by name and apostrophized in song” (Davidson xxviii-iv). It seems unlikely, however, that Davidson was H.D.’s source for her pacifist reworking of images of angels of war. Under this heading Davidson records only three names: Michael, Gabriel and Gadriel (Davidson 46). Cross-referencing this entry with those on the individual angels it becomes clear that what Davidson has in mind is the kind of heroic and majestic warrior exemplified by Milton’s prince of “celestial armies” (Milton 314). Milton is a named source in two out of three of these entries along with Origen and the recently discovered dead-sea scrolls which identify Michael as the Prince of Light leading the armies of light against the powers of darkness. Other writers known personally or at least read by H.D. had something of a Miltonic bias too; in the case of Henry Adams this appears as an all-out preference for what he calls the “masculine and military passions” of Milton’s Archangel as opposed to the feminine values encoded in the figures of nineteenth and early 20th-century art (Adams 30-1). 5 Adams describes these priorities in his curious art-history book, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. First published privately in 1904, this book was rescued from obscurity in 1913 as a response, claims its editor, to the need to provide new ideals and standards for artistic attainment in a declining modern era. In an age, he says, that has created only the industrial horrors of the Black Country in England and Iron City in America, it is necessary, to imagine that there might be another 13th century yet to come, that the architectural achievements of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres might one day be repeated (Adams viii). This idea, common to literature from the late nineteenth and early 20th-century periods, is based on two related presuppositions: first, a view of the modern world as corrupt (a corruption often revealed in the lamentable condition of the arts) and second a romanticized vision of medieval society as a mysterious centre of creative life and spiritual renewal. For Adams, the angel which once stood at the summit of the tower on Mont Saint-Michel is a symbol of what has been lost: The Archangel stands for Church and State, and both militant.