H.D. (1)Recensioni

32. Asphodel by H.D.
publication: written 1921-22, modified 1926-1929, 1st published 1992 (Edited by Robert Spoo)
format: 230-page paperback
acquired: April 2023 read: May 3-23 time reading: 13:48, 3.6 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: Classic autofiction theme: TBR
locations: Paris and England 1912-1919
about the author: H.D. is Hilda Doolittle (1886 –1961), an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist. She was born in Bethlehem, PA, attended Bryn Mawr college in Philadelphia for a year, dating Ezra Pound, and moved to England permanently about 1912.

A gem, but one that requires some reader commitment. japaul22's 2022 review got me interested. (Thanks!)

H.D. was an American poet from Pennsylvania who moved permanently to England where she made her name as a writer associated with Ezra Pound. This 1920's novel is from a single manuscript marked "Destroy" by H.D. and found after her death in 1961. It was a known but unpublished text for some 30 years, a ghost text cited by writers and scholars both for its style and its insight into the literary world of its in London, until it was published here in 1992.

It's all stream of consciousness, with a lot of repetition with individual "paragraphs", seeming to emphasize the writer's constant own bewilderment. It's a roman à clef or, a kind of autobiography but with fictional names, of her years around and during WWI, when she first arrived in Europe and went through several relationships, a marriage, and had a child from an extramarital affair. A lot happened to this poet and literary-world presence. She was engaged and then not to a young Ezra Pound, who she met in Philadelphia at age 15. She came to Europe with a women lover, the author Frances Josepha Gregg, and Gregg's mom, settling in London. Then Gregg got married. Then H.D. got married and then WWI happened. Her husband enlisted and openly had affairs, saying he wanted to keep multiple relationships. While her husband was in France, she moved in with her own lover, and got pregnant. Then broke off this relationship. Her husband came home and there was some confusion before her daughter was born and she and her husband eventually separated. A young admirer of her poetry, the author Annie Winifred "Bryher" Ellerman, became her next lesbian lover and helped her with her pregnancy and baby. (After the book, this relationship got rocky too).

This is an interesting work. Wonderfully playful here, deeply pained there. In the broken stream of conscious, it seems Hermione Gart, fictional H.D., is always searching and never settling. Tormented by bedbugs, swept away by the Louve (I can kind of imagine), deeply attracted to her men (it's strange seeing Ezra Pound described in such sexually attractive lights). She is deeply selfish without ever meaning to be, blind to obvious, but captures her own pains of the moment. The reader must latch on or put the book away. You have to engage in the text emotionally, go into your reader trance and be there with her, sometimes in a rush. Otherwise it's torture. The book becomes an experience, demands it of your brain.

I enjoyed this weird thing, this relic, this messy meaningful word soup by this poet whose poetry I haven't read. I can't recommend it, as you won't like it unless you already want to read it. But it rewards some commitment.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8544967

NOPE.

Re-reading this book was magical, and one can see H. D.'s growth as a female writer among mostly male counterparts—her characterization of George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) is particularly scathing in a lovingly oppressive way only H. D. can mange to convey; one can also see her emerging into a voice entirely her own, one more grounded in nature and indebted to Greek sources.

The real treasure in reading HERmione is that those who try to nicely pigeonhole H. D. into the category of "Imagist poet" will find this overturned, not only because her prose is so beautiful and bewitching, but because she is one of the most overlooked writers in literary modernism when it comes to prose.

Sadly, her prose is often overlooked in favor of her fine poetry, but HERmione is one of the best modernist novels of the mid-1920s and rightfully deserves to be on lists of major novels from this period alongside other giants like Woolf and Joyce.

I bought a used copy of this book a couple of years ago when the 1920s author kept popping up in book related discussion. H.D. was an American author, mainly of poetry, who is often spoken of with Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Dorthoy Richardson. H.D. also wrote a couple novels, [Asphodel] being one of them. It is a stream of consciousness work that I was a bit apprehensive of reading because I thought it might be hard to read and comprehend. Actually, though, I really loved this book and I'm glad I made time for it.

In [Asphodel], H.D. writes a flowing, colorful, autobiographical novel about her experience before, during, and just after WWI. Her love life is central to the book and frames the action. Pre-WWI, her love is her female friend Fayne Rabb; during the war it's Jerrol Darrington, who she has a stillborn baby with; and then Cyril Vane, who is less a love and more a diversion, but who she does have a child with.

The book doesn't necessarily have much forward motion, it sort of swirls around the plot, but I liked that. I was happy to dwell in the descriptions of the main character's experiences, feelings, and observations. You can tell that H.D. wrote a lot of poetry when you read this novel. She has a beautiful way of using color in her writing.

I highly recommend this for readers interested in the 1920s era of British and American writing. I think this book deserves to be more widely read!

A note also that the edition I could get my hands on, edited by Robert Spoo, has an incredibly helpful appendix that gives background info on the real people that the fictional characters are based on. It really helped me understand what was going on.½

Depth of the sub-conscious spews forth
too many incongruent monsters

The day is quadrant of agonizing beauty. Damage was inflicted last night. Self care was errant. But the day has bounded with joy. So strange then to immerse in the gilded pain of H.D. While I was out walking I considered easily disparate natures of this triptych and how "incongruent monsters " found a harmony in my aching head.

I think I will wait on her Helen. The cicadas are a sufficient charm at present. I can reach for her fear but it remains imprinted, folded.

Why must you recall
the white fire of unnumbered stars,
rather than that single taper
burning in an onyx jar?

This is a tale of veils and ramparts, the gaze of the author and perhaps a refracted mirror of personal/mental matters drifting awry. Helen in Egypt is a palimpsest, a blotted scribbling--a flight from Troy to the darkened cults of Osiris. I kept heeding Doolittle's advice and pleaded incessantly aloud to learn how not to remember. Time adds folds and our persistent treading leaves torn sandals and a dimming vigor. There is an ancient rhythm on display. There is a little and crest. Heroes fall and odes warble across the centuries. I finished this meditation on our porch on a September morning, one whose beauty was almost indecent.

In this early and slim volume, you can see what will come in HD's later imagist writing. Here too often the diction of "high poetry" of the 19th Century appears. And too many poems are apostrophes to flowers and objects. But the irregular verse is free, the imagery true, and the language moving towards the modern.

I do like H.D., but not this collection. The writing is derivative of Keats and the Romantics at their gushingest. The classical references and dramatic monologues of mythical figures do nothing new. And every poet should be allowed only one "ah" and one "O" in their careers. H.D. uses up a century's worth here.

Trilogy is a compilation of three of H.D.'s major works: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rood.

The Walls Do Not Fall reflects on H.D's experience of witnessing the bombings of London during WWII and surviving those bombings. Through this poem, H.D. is trying to connect the bombings in London with her history--her personal history as a woman as well as her personal history as a poet in addition to connecting it to History as well. As with much of H.D.'s poetry, this poem is tinged with her search for her voice in, particularly at the time she was writing, a male dominated world.

Tribute to the Angels connects to The Walls Do Not Fall in that it is an exploration of his-story in ancient and Biblical times. The poem is H.D.'s search for herself, her voice, and her salvation.

The Flowering of the Rood is both a creation story, a crucifixion story, and a resurrection story, but it focuses principle on Mary Magdalene and her "salvation" and "resurrection"--a resurrection of the self.

H.D.'s work is always a fascinating exploration of language and words, especially the multiple meanings of language. Potential readers of this text will fine it much more approachable if they, themselves, are fairly knowledgeable in the areas of mythology, ancient history, and biblical history.

Trilogy is a compilation of three of H.D.'s major works: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rood.

The Walls Do Not Fall reflects on H.D's experience of witnessing the bombings of London during WWII and surviving those bombings. Through this poem, H.D. is trying to connect the bombings in London with her history--her personal history as a woman as well as her personal history as a poet in addition to connecting it to History as well. As with much of H.D.'s poetry, this poem is tinged with her search for her voice in, particularly at the time she was writing, a male dominated world.

Tribute to the Angels connects to The Walls Do Not Fall in that it is an exploration of his-story in ancient and Biblical times. The poem is H.D.'s search for herself, her voice, and her salvation.

The Flowering of the Rood is both a creation story, a crucifixion story, and a resurrection story, but it focuses principle on Mary Magdalene and her "salvation" and "resurrection"--a resurrection of the self.

H.D.'s work is always a fascinating exploration of language and words, especially the multiple meanings of language. Potential readers of this text will fine it much more approachable if they, themselves, are fairly knowledgeable in the areas of mythology, ancient history, and biblical history.

Reading this book felt like walking through a dream. The style is stream-of-consciousness, which honestly usually annoys me to no end. Here, though... it's compelling and beautiful and readable and it drew me in. Flowers and Greek mythology abound in this book. And the colors- so many colors!

This is an autobiographical story by HD of her time living in Europe before, during and after WWI. She was contemporaries with artists and writers of the time and some of them feature in her story. I was very conscious of reading a true story, because, despite the dream-like feeling of the writing, it feels very real. The substance of the story may fade with time, but feeling of it will stick with me.

HD talks about the creative process in refreshingly direct, yet appropriately ungraspable language.

For me, it was the birth of my child that the jelly-fish conciousness seemed to come definitely into the field or realm of the intellect or brain.

In a later essay, she talks about Sappho. It's good, but the language is a bit more dense and hard to parse, and I really don't care about Sappho as much.

Takes a while to 'hear' what she's up to, but when you get the hang of the fact that she uses time in very long blocks ('cosmic' time rather than single-human time) things start to chime.

I read this without knowing anything about H.D. or the Imagists but simply fell in love.

Somehow "cities" especially struck me, this bit:
"he had crowded the city so full
that men could not grasp beauty,
beauty was over them,
through them, about them
no crevice unpacked with the honey,
rare, measureless"

is incredible. I want to read everything by H.D. now. I read Sea Garden as an ebook but this is one of the few books I really want in person. I loved it so much I just want to have it near me, physically. I'm going to read the rest of her work and some of the other Imagists' now, and I hope it's just as amazing!

H.D was Hilda Doolittle an American imagist poet. She published this novel in 1960 a year before her death. It is a deeply autobiographical novel the characters thinly veiled recreations of her friends and lovers.
Set in London and Cornwall in 1917 – Julia Ashton is married to Rafe (representations of H D and husband Richard Aldington) who returns on leave from the trenches, leaves writes letters to his wife and returns again. Among their friends are Frederick and Elsa (DH and Frieda Lawrence) Bella (Dorothy Yorke) and Vane (Cecil Gray).

Julia is still mourning the loss of her baby, as she tries to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity. The world of the people surrounding her is a peculiar one – one of a dreamlike unreality – like actors on a stage they play out their relationships to a background of war. When Frederick arrives on the scene he persuades Julia to go to Cornwall, and it is here that she is finally able to make sense of what has happened, and start to face the future.

The novel has a rather claustrophobic and dreamlike quality; the writing is very beautiful, the prose having a very poetic feel to it – which is not surprising given that the author was best known as a poet. There are some very poignant moments – the scenes between Julia and Rafe as their marriage is ending were brilliantly portrayed and quite obviously hugely personal to the writer.

Interestingly in the afterword to this edition H.D’s daughter Perdita Schaffer describes how she came to meet her natural father Cecil Gray in 1947 – she was the result of the brief liaison between H.D and Cecil Gray after H.D’s marriage to fellow poet Richard Aldington came to an end. This is part of the story, of the people who are behind the characters in the novel.

A peculiar, yet compeling work of historical fiction by H. D., the poet most know for her imagist works. The ins and outs of the personalities and Roman court at Jerusealum can get confusing at first, but still I found the book highly engaging and provactive. Don't want to say too much since there is a major "what ho!!" in the latter half½

HD talks about the creative process in refreshingly direct, yet appropriately ungraspable language.

"For me, it was the birth of my child that the jelly-fish conciousness seemed to come definitely into the field or realm of the intellect or brain."

In a later essay, she talks about Sappho. It's good, but the language is a bit more dense and hard to parse, and I really don't care about Sappho as much.½

This is the best document from the Imagist movement I've ever read.

The BiblioLife facsimile print-on-demand (2009) is what a reprint should be, showing (as much as budget allows) respect to the typographic original with its slightly larger copy. OTOH the Kessinger Publishing reprint is a complete hack job, devoid of attention to proper layout, type, or even proofreading. It looks copied-and-pasted from a public-access Web source.

I enjoy her earlier poetry, but the latter hurts my brain.

This bored the heck out of me, and I loved her earlier poetry.

Of all of H.D.'s work, next to Notes on Thought and Vision (which proves a good key or legend to understanding Trilogy) this is my favorite and I suspect her most important epic poem (though I am fond of Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definitiontoo).Trilogy consists of three books: These Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; and The Flowering of the Rod. Each of these divisions is made up of 43 parts or poems, the poems divided only by the number they bear, the 43 adding up to the mystical number 7. Mystical numbers and allusions abound here, just like the three books of Trilogy allude to the Trinity. The three books were written during World War II and the London blitz which seems to have triggered a psychic breakdown or trauma that enabled H.D.'s intense and intricate vision captured here, a vision that speaks to a new world H.D. envisioned as inevitable after the mass destruction and horror of the war.These Walls Do Not Fall is the earliest of the three books, written during the air raids and battles over London in 1942. H.D. lived in London at this time, the stress and destruction of the bombings present in the poetry. Poem 1 opens with “An incident here and there, / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square” (1:1-3). The incidents refer to the air battles over London, transportation impossible as the rails have been torn up to make guns, while the repetition of here and there, or there and here in the poems, “there, as here, ruin opens / the tomb, the temple; enter, / there as here, there are no doors:” (1:10-12) relates London to the ancient city of Karnak as H.D.’s epigraph reveals: "for Karnak 1923 from / London 1942." H.D. visited Karnak in 1923, and likens the ruins she saw to the ruins of the London she lives in. This conflation of space opens, in a way that’s akin to invoking a muse, a creative space of imaginative and mythic potential: the shrine lies open to the sky, the rain falls, here, there sand drifts; eternity endures: (1:13-15)Stranded in London, the old town squares gone, inaccessible, these modern day ruins become a shrine, like the ruined temple at Karnak, its roof, and thus boundaries, gone. In London, rain falls through the opened roof space, while in Egypt sand drifts through a similar space. H.D. follows this comparison with the phrase “eternity endures,” showing how ruins persist: as in Karnak so in London. Also, since the phrase is followed by a colon, the next stanza seems to be an example of enduring eternity: ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof leaves the sealed room open to the air, so through our desolation, thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us through gloom: (1:16-21)As the ruins lie open to the sky, so do H.D.’s thoughts, the ruins inspiring her to ascend through the opened space, to reach new imaginative heights.Poem 1 not only sets the historic scene and impetus for H.D.’s project, but also serves as an introduction to the book itself. H.D. marvels at how “the bone-frame was made for / no such shock knit within terror, / yet the skeleton stood up to it:” (1:43-45) referring to the incessant bombing of the Germans on a literal, physical level locating the trauma within her body and yet how it endures. She moves to the metaphor in the next stanza: “the flesh? it was melted away, / the heart burnt out, dead ember, / tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,” (1:46-48) painting a graphic picture of the body consumed and destroyed, which metaphorically speaks to a necessary death, a burning away of the layers to get back at the skeleton, at the framework: “yet the frame held: / we passed the flame: we wonder / what saved us? what for?” (1:49-51). This first poem ends with these important questions, questions that allow the creation of the poems that are to follow, poems that will demand answers through their very process of being written. H.D. will find whatever “Presence” or “Spirit” saved her, and in finding the benefactor, learn why she was saved, for what purpose she was spared. These questions also keep the reader reading, to find out what spirit or being spared H.D. and her companions as they hid out in shelters. It also poses the “what for?” question, which would speak to the skeletal frame that remains. H.D.’s project is to create a new religion, one stripped of its recent history and baggage. She seeks to return to the beginning of all myths, and marry them by finding or forcing connections between their stories.For instance, H.D. has a tendency to conflate mythologies and god figures, such as the Egyptian Amen and the Christian Christ. In poem 18 she writes: “The Christos-image / is most difficult to disentangle // from its art-craft junk-shop / paint-and-plaster medieval jumble // of pain-worship and death-symbol,” (18:1-5) referring obviously to the Christian, or more appropriately Roman Catholic cult of pain and death that surrounds Christ. The “art-craft junk-shop” refers to the iconography and religious art that has arisen through the ages, especially frescoes, the “paint-and-plaster medieval jumble.” She disentangles this Christ image to conflate him with Amen, the Egyptian Sun God: “for now it appears obvious / that Amen is our Christos” (18:11-12). H.D. writes, in language reminiscent of the Bible, “let us light a new fire / and in the fragrance // of burnt salt and sea-incense / chant new paeans to the new Sun” (17:11-14) the “sun” a pun on both Sun and Son. The new Sun is “of regeneration;” the territory of the Egyptian God Amen: “we have always worshipped Him, / we have always said, / forever and ever, Amen” (17:16-18). H.D. takes the Christian ending to a prayer “amen” and raises it to the level of a God’s name from another culture, Amen. The endnotes by Barnstone remind us how “Amen is a variation in name of Amon or Ammon. Amon’s most important shrine was the Temple of Amon at Luxor in ancient Thebes” (Reader’s Notes 179). The temple-city of Luxor is at Karnak, housing the Temple of Amon or Amen. Amen is also associated with Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, who is Apollo in the Greek pantheon, patron of poets and art. The move on H.D.’s part is to create a God of the Arts, the “mage” as she calls him, who later reveals himself as Kaspar in The Flowering of the Rod, and as Christ and Venus in Tribute to the Angels.The key word to understand this conflation project is “palimpsest”, a word she uses throughout These Walls Do Not Fall which signifies an ancient manuscript of parchment or papyrus which was written over more than once, the earlier writing still legible beneath the new writing. H.D. writes in section 31, “jottings on a margin, / indecipherable palimpsest scribbled over” (31:3-4) which perfectly describes how her new words incorporate the words of ancient texts. Yet she also uses this word in an imagined accusation against her project: “how can you scratch out // indelible ink of the palimpsest / of past misadventure?” (2:26-28). The accusation seems to come from within her as she doubts her project, though textually it comes in the form of the “they” that haunts these poems as the audience of her project. Since the ink is indelible or unable to be erased, the question is, how in good faith can she scratch out as a form of erasure? And what words on the palimpsest is she scratching out? The words written over the original by those who have misinterpreted the original meaning, the interpretations of “past misadventure”? Or the original words themselves? In would seem the former, the misinterpretations, though her project is in the same interpretative vein as she writes new words over the originals, her additions seeking to also add new meaning.I always have more to say about H.D. and this book (in particular where Notes on Thought and Vision intersects with this project), but on a personal note I've always found the book in many ways a Christmas poem, especially the last section The Flowering of the Rod, as it was written during December 18-31 in 1944. This section uses the language of the Nativity and of the Three Magi, or wise men, especially Kaspar, in its vision of poetry’s power for the future (the poet as secret initiate, the chosen prophet to destroy the old gods and make way for the new god of art, of poetry, the Mage, Amen). It is the most “Christian” of the three books, with Tribute to the Angels coming in second as a Spring poem, and thus heavily involved with rebirth as it was composed in the last days of May (17-31) in 1944. Tribute to the Angels is shorter in length, though still made up of the requisite 43 poems, and is probably the most difficult of the three books to decipher in its use of the book of Revelation to speak of seven angelic figures as they conflate with gods and goddesses from other cultures.But the reason I call it a Christmas poem stems from a strong affinity that I can only explain as the shared rooted-ness of also having been born and raised in Bethlehem, PA. I must confess I have read Trilogy every year on Christmas Eve for the past five years now when I am at home visiting my parents in the Christmas City.