Seaward: H.D.'s 'Helen in Egypt' as a response to Pound's 'Cantos.' - woman author Hilda Doolittle; long poems

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

Despite the firm nook in the modernist pantheon that H.D. has acquired over the past quarter century, she remains an oddly isolated figure within the larger matrix of poetic modernism. Recent scholarship has correctly shifted attention to her late long poems, but there has been little consideration of how these ambitious works relate to other long poems by her contemporaries.(1) Over the last two decades of her life, H.D. composed nine long sequences (if we consider the Trilogy as discrete poems), which at the very least are clearly distinctive from the comparable works by Pound, Eliot, Crane, Williams, Stevens, and others that are commonly taken to be at the center of American poetic modernism. Undoubtedly, the ethereal mode of her work, which tends to filter out the messiness and vulgarities of present history, goes against the grain of contemporary developments. Yet, despite their apparent difference in manner and perspective, H.D.'s long sequences were written within the context of these other works and the larger cultural project in which they are engaged. In this essay, I will focus on the most obvious point of contact: H.D.'s relationship with Pound, and specifically Helen in Egypt as a response to Pound's Cantos. Few readers will be surprised at the suggestion of a significant relationship between these two works, yet the question has received little attention.(2)

From the time she was composing Helen in Egypt (1952-55), H.D. frequently mentioned Pound and his Cantos in her correspondence with Norman Holmes Pearson, and evidently approved, was even flattered by, Pearson's reference to Helen in Egypt as her "cantos" (Friedman 216).(3) More important, if more difficult to pinpoint, is that for H.D. and many others Pound defined the ambitiousness of the modernist poet. In the cases of H.D. and Williams, there appears little in the work of their early decades that would indicate an inevitable evolution toward the composition of long poems, yet both, late in their careers, felt compelled to produce deliberately planned, epic-scale works. In End to Torment, H.D. remarks that "Thinking of Ezra's work, I recall my long Helen sequence. Perhaps, there was always a challenge in his creative power. Perhaps, even, [. . .] there was unconscious - really unconscious - rivalry" (41). For H.D. personally, Pound represented her simultaneous initiation into both love and poetry, which remained inextricable and mutually motivating throughout her work. But most important, in the Cantos, as well as in his advocacy of other modernists, Pound promoted a conception of the "serious artist" responding comprehensively to the sense of cultural crisis during the period of world wars. For the older generation of American modernists, who for all their rebelliousness inherited a strong streak of Victorian earnestness, the social and spiritual catastrophe that manifested itself in the First World War and its aftermath obligated an attempt to identify the causes of cultural dysfunction and to offer positive answers for renewal. In this sense, Helen in Egypt, despite its very different mode of procedure, is of a piece with these other modernist epics.

H.D.'s ambitious late work, though, was not conceived as simply another rival modernist project alongside those of Pound and others, but as complementary work. This is evident in her unique memoirs - Tribute to Freud and End to Torment, and I would also include Bid Me to Live - which examine her relationships with other major modernists. While commentators have emphasized H.D.'s critiques of Freud, Pound, and Lawrence, this has sometimes obscured the memoirs' deeper intent to dialectically define her companionship with their work. This requires recognizing what distracts from the authentic impulse of their work, including prominently their masculinism, in order to reveal where H.D. joins them in a common effort. Throughout her late work, H.D. repeatedly refers to her participation in a heretical band of artists and cultural workers - "bearers of the secret wisdom" as she rather immodestly puts it in The Walla Do Not Fall (CP 517) - who whatever their superficial differences and disagreements are ultimately united in a common purpose, a conspiracy for world peace (see By Avon, esp. 83-85). In Helen in Egypt, after Helen and Achilles's fateful encounter on the beach and the latter's rebirth as the "new Mortal," each goes separately about their work: "both occupied with the thought of reconstruction, he 'to re-claim the coast with the Pharos, the light-house,' she to establish or re-establish the ancient Mysteries" in the Temple of Amen (63; see also 89).(4) In the mutual project of world peace, there appears to be a division of labor whereby Achilles attends to the more pragmatic and public sphere, while Helen attends to the sacred and psychological forms of salvation and reconstruction.

Although H.D. had moved away from classical Greek materials after the 1930s, her decision to work with broadly Homeric materials in Helen in Egypt was no doubt in part a response to those megaworks of Anglo-American modernism, Joyce's Ulysses and Pound's Cantos. The story that Helen was not at Troy but had been divinely whisked off to Egypt during the war represents a well-established, if minority, alternative to the orthodoxy of the Homeric version, and so problematizes the classic narrative drawn on by Joyce and Pound.(5) Actually, Helen in Egypt does not so much reject the Homeric narrative for a preferable alternative as it sets the two in dialogue and so complicates both. It is notable, however, that H.D. addresses the matter of the Iliad rather than that of the Odyssey. Well before Pound and Joyce, Odysseus had been taken as a type of the modern man. Curious for experience as an end in itself and pragmatically responding to each new circumstance, he and his story naturally have had more resonance with the modern sensibility than with the inflexible warrior ethos. For Pound, it is important that Odysseus's tale begins after the war and recounts a return home to reestablish the peacetime kingdom. For all its deviations into various hells, the Cantos begins with Odysseus seeking prophetic advice about how to get back home, and the poem was intended to help instigate a cultural revitalization to ensure that war was left behind for good, which is why the poem ground to a halt during World War II and its trajectory drastically altered when Pound returned to it at Pisa. In choosing to work with the Iliad materials, H.D. insists it is necessary to go not away from but back into the war. Since hers is a psychological, even a psychoanalytic epic rather than a historical one, it is necessary to reveal the psychic causes that for her lie beneath all social manifestations. By examining Achilles rather than Odysseus, she implies that the former is not an outdated type but remains an accurate model of the psychological economy of patriarchal power.