HD'S MYTHOMYSTICAL POETICS by Adriana Cheta Hetram A thesis s

379 Pages·2011·2.39 MB·English

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“THE BLACK IMPRINT OF SANDALS IN WHITE MOSAIC FLOORS”: H.D.’S
MYTHOMYSTICAL POETICS

by

Adriana Cheta Hetram

A thesis submitted to the Department of English

in conformity with the requirements for

the degree off Doctor of Philosophy

Queen’s University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

August, 2011

Copyright © Adriana Cheta Hetram, 2011
Abstract

My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous
with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961).
Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle occultism and a collective psyche
troubled by the eschatological distress that, as Susan Acheson writes, “was widespread
amongst modernist writers grappling with …world events and with the implications of
Nietzsche’s inaugural annunciation of modernity in terms of the death of God” (187), her
later oeuvre is dedicated to the same work of soul undertaken by the “secret cult of Night” in
Vale Ave. Here, her thematic scope faces two ways: backward to ancient Greek mystery
cults and their palingenesic rites and forward to depth psychologists searching for the Soul of
the World. Vale Ave plays a pronounced role in my study as symbolic guide; in its seventy-
four sequences the layering of time in the “trilogy” of past, present, and future that H.D. had
explored during the years of the Second World War in order to get behind the fallen walls of
cause and effect collapses into two distinct phases of human origin—“meeting” (evolution)
and “parting” (involution)—and the poem invites Lilith and Lucifer to be its archetypal
guides. My method for the study is imaginal, entering such disciplines as history, philosophy,
and theology and bringing psychological understanding to them.
John Walsh’s introduction to Vale Ave notes H.D.’s theme “that the human psyche
exists in a dimension outside of time and space as well as within them. In Vale Ave, H.D.
presents the extremity of this dual-dimensionality: metempsychosis” (vii). However, the
concept that H.D. investigates is more than a literary processus of characters who adopt
different masks and appear at various junctures in a chronological unwinding of history. To
capture the fluidity of the term “reincarnation” and retain the Greek nuance, I label this genre
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“Metempsychography”—the Luciferian act of writing the soul to bring light to its depths—
and explore these works as part of a Modernist tradition of writing “books of the dead”
designed not to guide the soul after death, but to draw the gaze upon “a nearer thing,” as H.D.
writes in Erige Cor Tuum Ad Me In Caelum, the wisdom intrinsic in the spirit of life itself.

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Acknowledgements

“A man’s soul is like a lagoon connected with the sea by a submerged channel;
although to all outward seeming it is land-locked, nevertheless its water-level
rises and falls with the tides of the sea because there is a hidden connection. So it
is with human consciousness, there is a subconscious connection between each
individual soul and the World-soul deep hidden in the most primitive depths of
subconsciousness, and in consequence we share in the rise and fall of the cosmic
tides”
—Dion Fortune, Mystical Qabbalah

I love this quotation from Mystical Qabbalah, which Fortune culls from a poem by
John Donne. It never ceases to remind me of the incredible channels of support that have
constantly flowed my way during the writing of this dissertation. At times during the writing
I did feel as if I were marooned on a lagoon, but I never ever forgot the overwhelming
encouragement from those who believed in me at every step of the way with no other agenda
than to see me succeed and finish a project that has taught me so much about the value of
literature and intricacies of life itself. My parents, first and foremost, who never questioned
that I would finish, only when. My father has been a tremendous support to me and has
somehow managed to make me bear lightly the immense debt I owe him. My mother’s
unconditional love and kindness can never be repaid in full measure, only immeasurably
appreciated. From both I have inherited my love for reading and learning and my powers of
analysis and there are not enough lifetimes, reams of paper, or words in any language to
express and record what my parents mean to me.

To Andrew, my dear if somewhat exasperating brother, who I hope will never, ever again ask
me what chapter I’m on. (And who, accordingly, will never again have to hear, for the fourth
year in a row, “One”).

To Dreeni, for amazing pep talks, lots of cousinly love, and “saving me” from attending
Teacher’s College.

I also would like to thank my stepfather, Ric Wilson, for his support over the years and for
his belief in me.

My “extended family,” Tony, Roula, and Evan Vekios also mean so much to me and
believed in me every step of the way, as well as providing me with a wonderful place to live
and do my work on H.D.

To the greatest teachers one might ever wish for, not only of the craft of writing and
literature, but also of the craft of life. First, Gabrielle McIntyre and Asha Varadharajan who
believed in the project when I didn’t, offered invaluable contributions, and were kind even
when they should not have been, especially when I was not always considerate of their
schedules. Gabrielle and Asha—I consider you my mentors and the finest examples of what
professors should be. I would also like to mention Sylvia Söderlind, whom I also cherish as
my teacher and friend. The genius of these women astounds and humbles me, and yet
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underscores to me how lucky I have been to work with them over the years. Second, I
dedicate this work to Lesley Higgins, my mentor and favourite professor at York U and the
reason I even started a PhD, and last but definitely not least, to Nancy Fenn, my own Hermes
Psychopompus and metaphysician extraordinaire who gave me courage to finish.

I would like to thank—with all the effusiveness of gratitude and the humility of a junior
scholar —Julia Vandivere and Cynthia Hogue and Demetres Tryphonopoulous for publishing
editions of The Sword Went Out to Sea (2007) and Majic Ring (2009). Up until the
publications of these texts I had experienced the well-known inconvenience and—especially
in the case of Sword —utter frustration of working from microfilms.

My PhD Defense Committee made my defense one of the best experiences of my academic
career. Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Asha Varadharajan, Gabrielle McIntire, James Miller,
and Sylvia Söderlind—thank you all for your presence and participation in this work and for
your guidance.

My gratitude and love to all my teachers—some mentioned above but there are many, many
more whom I cherish—exceed any expression I make here. May this effort be the beginning
of the contributions I make, academically and otherwise, to their legacy.

To my 2008 ENGL 201, The Bible and English Literature, for bright and inspired comments
about the Bible’s “fraught background” and the general pleasure of allowing me to be part of
your learning experience.

Much love and gratitude to a very dear “majic ring” of friends: Yashoda Raganathan, Sandy
Bugeja, Cheryl Cundell, Hugh Ryan, Eugene Johnston, Deanna Mason, Brandon Alakas. To
Tanya, a beautifully spirited PhD candidate in Boston, who has proved to me that Leonard
Cohen’s profound words —“there is a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in”—
holds true even in the darkest times when the walls are seemingly made of iron. IJ,
semblable. If semblables truly hold the power of life and death over each other, then I am
glad that you are mine.

Last, but not least, to H.D.

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Table of Contents

Abstract i

Acknowledgements iii

Table of Contents iv

List of Figures and Illustrations v

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: H.D. As Mystical Midrashist 21

Chapter 3: The Erotics of Continuity and the Psychomachia of Discontinuity in 92
The Sword Went Out to Sea, Helen in Egypt, and Vale Ave

Chapter 4: “Once Upon a Time”: An Imaginal History for Vale Ave 190

Chapter 5: Hidden in the Attic of the Mind: The Sequences of Vale Ave and the 224
Patronage of Lucifer

Chapter 6: The Kingdom Within: H.D. and the Tree of Life 285

Chapter 7: Conclusion: Parting, Again 347

Works Cited and Consulted 353

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List of Figures

Figure1 “Villa Verena,” Dr. Rudolph Brunner’s Privat Nervenklinik 99

Figure 2 H.D.’s “Delphian Harlequin” 209

Figure 3 The Painted Lady, “Vanesse des Chardons or La Belle Dame in French,” 276
imaginally-rendered, with Goldwings

Figure 4 The Tree of Life and the Cycles of Life 333

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Chapter One
Introduction

We followed the Z or the bee-line in its zig-zag track or path across time. Time was
conveniently pleated and the pleats lay flat under the chart or map that took us from London
to Lausanne, to Lugano, to Knossos, to Athens, to Delphi . . .back to London, to Venice . . .
There are to-and-fro journeys and return flights, but this briefly is our path or our zig-zag in
space. Time is another matter. But this bee-line or Z-line has this advantage over time, time
is neatly folded; the pleats are disproportionate, it is true, but under the Z-map, no-one will
notice. It is very easy to understand this, if you like fairy-tales or Märchen. . . Once upon a
time . . .
—The Sword Went Out to Sea

My hermeneutical forays into the late oeuvre of the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)
resemble the zigzagging flight of the bee and painted lady butterfly or the spiralling map of
encounter amongst figures of soul (semblables) throughout the rise and fall of cities in The
Sword Went Out to Sea. I envisage my trajectory as one with H.D.’s rather than as an
alienating penetration of the significance of her writings. Sword is an evocative pastiche of
poetic, erudite, autobiographical, and spiritual meditation masquerading as a novel, just as
my study is a midrashic tribute to H.D.’s later works masquerading as a dissertation. Often I
have landed far from the conventional analytical rigours that define the genre of thesis
writing, but sometimes I have managed to stay within them. What is important to me,
however, is the task of representing the essence or spirit of what I call H.D.’s
metempsychography—the recording of soul—in the later works. “Soul” is rarely definable in
any convincing sense; it can, however, be mythologized into a more visible figure. Many are
its legends, but the parable of soul that best expresses its journey and that governs the
archetypal direction of my readings features Eros, the originary god of creation, and Psyche,
the princess who evolves from an innocent maiden into a wise woman blessed by the Stygian
beauty of Persephone, the keeper of secrets, and Hecate, the guardian of the wisdom of age.
The myth of Psyche and Eros offers, among other things, a kind of Bildungsroman-in-
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minature of Psyche’s coming of age in archetypal circumstance, and as such we might align
it with the soul’s descent into the human world where “soul” is that mystery of being that
was born through and grew up in the myths, spent its adolescence demurring to and restricted
by religious discourse, enjoyed an early adulthood in the Enlightenment in which it all but
disappeared leaving only a few rebellious traces of the status it once held, and now comes
back into an honoured old age as H.D. writes sacred texts of her own to highlight the soul’s
autonomous aspects.
By “late oeuvre” I mean those works that were written or redacted mostly after 1946
and bear within them the terrible beauty and weight of age and its sense of spiralling
accretion, ambiguity, and excess that cannot possible be contained in the lovely but fragile
systems of youth, like those of health, certainty, dogmatism, and conviction, to name a few. I
must admit that I am not near in age to the H.D. who was beginning the earliest of these late
texts in 1943 when she was 57; thus, my readings of her work are empathetic but not
identifications with or visceral understandings of advancing age. However, the crisis of faith
and consciousness that turned her away from a role on the stage of life in post-war England
to pen her own mythical histories of soul and being is only too familiar to me and has drawn
me to work on these incredibly sophisticated poems and novels in which the traces of soul
and its patterns in the experiences of life demand that they be considered as sacred texts.
I seek to understand H.D.’s process of writing a sacred work, but the impulse behind
my writing is poetic and meditative as exposition is betrayed by and dragged into the primary
literature. That I choose, or more accurately was compelled to write this dissertation within
her own imaginal coordinates—it takes its being-in-the-world from them—instead of solely
within the boundaries of conventional literary analysis, is a tribute to the “ongoingness”
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(Morris, How to Live 1) of her art of re-living. My study contributes to existing scholarship
by providing the first full-length reading of Vale Ave with significant reflection on other
major works in H.D.’s post-WWII poetry and prose that have received only modest amounts
of scholarly interest. This post-war corpus evokes the richness of the poet’s experiences in
London and her travels abroad between the two world wars. Temple ruins in Greece,
decadent Gothic Cathedrals in Paris, Vienna, and Provence, and the “blitzed” landmarks of
England’s antiquity all inform a poetic repertoire that suspends time and borders and
searches for God in the wake of Its loss.
As the Second World War progressed, H.D. began to immerse herself in hermetic and
kabbalistic writings, which would provide new lexica of images for her later, mature work. In
Hermetic Definition, for instance, written in Switzerland between 1957 and 1961, H.D. uses
Robert Ambelain’s Dans L’Ombre des Cathédrales as baedeker to Notre Dame Cathedral’s
secret architecture. Centuries of “secret spoken” alchemical and kabbalistic knowledge,
Ambelain explains in his book, buttress the very structure of the cathedral and conjure a
shadow side to the Church’s logos (Christ)-centred history. It is this archaeology of the
“shadow sides” of God(cid:1)to borrow a phrase from Carl Jung(cid:1)that underlies the work in my
project. My aim is to accentuate the supplements that emerge between the conventionally
structured binaries of Western thought “set[ting] aflame” all of the “stone-stories” (VA VII)
in H.D.’s texts. My mode of inquiry, formed at the interstices of depth psychology, theology,
and poetic discourse, explores theological, phenomenological, midrashic, kabbalistic, and
gnostic obsessions with mystery, language, knowledge, and desire—all of the languages of
soul.
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