Abortion, identity formation, and the expatriate woman writer: H.D. and Kay Boyle in the twenties

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1994 by Donna Hollenberg

Issues of nationality, race, and gender appear to intersect more benignly in "Two Americans," a story based on an informal gathering that may have taken place during the Robesons' visit with H.D. and her friends. A close reading, however, reveals a level of unintegrated anxiety beneath its surface detachment that appears related to H.D.'s abortion. Here H.D. explores the psychological ground between two expatriates - a white American woman poet Raymonde Ransome (based on herself) and a celebrated black American male singer, Saul Howard (Paul Robeson) - who are brought together by Daniel Kinoull (Kenneth Macpherson), the British director in whose film they are working. The story's impetus is Raymonde's troubled response to Saul's easy friendship with Daniel as a fellow artist, despite his racial difference, a camaraderie she cannot share. Though, like Saul, Raymonde admires Daniel's work, her earlier sexual intimacy with the film director has given her feelings of personal defeat that she cannot account for satisfactorily. Her relationship with Daniel has become a burden: he is like a "steel pin," or a "silver thorn" in her side, which she must rid herself of in order to write more freely ("Two" 95). Saul appears to have successfully used his role as artist to overcome the psychological setbacks of being a black American, so she uses his example to bring the dimensions of her own difference "home" to her.

Henry Louis Gates's point that race is the "ultimate trope of difference," because it is so arbitrarily applied in a racist, sexist society clarifies the meaning of this identification. Because the polarity between black and white persists in culture independent of any significant biological reality (unlike that between masculinity and femininity), the use of racial metaphors in this text allows H.D. to perceive truths about gender that ultimately explode the parallel with race. Again she describes Paul Robeson's presence in mythic terms which float upon the same pool of racial fantasies that are evident in Borderline. Again, these fantasies place her protagonist in a double bind. For though her artist-heroine's identification with the celebrated African-American singer is partially self-affirming, in that it confirms her own artistry, her womanhood is still subject to an inimical cultural ideal.

For despite the fact that they are both marginal Americans, Raymonde sees Saul's self-acceptance in terms which ally him with a pagan tradition more conducive to free artistic expression and sexuality than her own Puritan one. He is a dark fertility god, able to inspire the whole company with his talent: "He was no black Christ. He was an earlier, less complicated symbol. He was Dionysus as Nietzsche so valiantly struggled to define him" (94). Unlike her own "crippled song-wing," which was too "shrill," his song "flowed toward all the world, effortless, full of benign power, without intellectual gap or cross-purpose of hyper-critical consciousness to blight it" (94). She would like to be the Apollonian counterpart to his Dionysus, but despite her efforts she can't make this self-representation stick because of guilt connected with her being a woman.