Now, almost two decades later, that fear appeared to be realised. H. D. talked at length with Freud about Lawrence; she gradually became convinced that the Mecklenburgh Square years held the key to the unresolved problem which was curbing her ability to write. Above all, her sessions with Freud stirred up the memories of an artistic disagreement. Given confidence by Freud’s encouragement, it was this argument with Lawrence which became the crux of the novel she now began to redraft, a markedly different version of the story she had written over and over again.
In all H. D.’s novels except for Bid Me to Live – mostly written in the early 1920s, and not intended for publication – the story ends with the H. D. character finding affirmation and freedom through partnership with another woman. In many ways, H. D.’s first attempts at writing about the Mecklenburgh Square period stand as a tribute to the new sort of family she, Perdita and Bryher formed: a matriarchal clan focused on freedom and creativity, connected to one another not by law but by choice. In Paint It Today (a version composed around 1921, and the most explicitly lesbian of the novels), the Aldington character – married to appease and simultaneously escape overbearing parents – hardly figures, and the protagonist’s marriage is presented as a brief interlude between two main affairs with female characters, based on Frances Gregg and Bryher. In Palimpsest (1926), a brutal version of the story set in a Roman army camp, which transposes the Aldingtons’ marriage into a forced union between a lascivious soldier and a Greek slave, the Bryher character helps the protagonist return to writing poetry, reanimating the ‘sheer intoxicating intellect’ which her marriage had suffocated. At the end of Asphodel (1921–22, and revised around 1926), pregnancy and childbirth – portrayed elsewhere in the novel as a source of violence done to women by men, and associated with war – become a form of creative expression. This version focuses on the happiness Hermione eventually finds with Beryl (Bryher), with whom she brings up her daughter, finally breaking the cycle of unsuitable relationships. No longer is Hermione terrified of pregnancy: having renounced heterosexuality, she is confident in her instinct for survival, able both to give birth and to write again.
Bid Me to Live is the only one of H. D.’s novels to focus entirely on heterosexual relationships: Gregg, Bryher and her second pregnancy do not appear, and the novel’s ending centres on Rico, a character absent from all the other manuscripts. Yet in 1949, H. D. wrote that this last novel was the first she was happy with: ‘I think I pay tribute in it, to that England, to that particularly Bloomsbury scene and those people … I never wrote anything of Lawrence, though I was asked to. I do think I have a very authentic Frederico, and that pleases me as I did not want to let all that go, without a sort of hail and farewell.’ This novel, unlike the earlier versions H. D. composed, is not about finding happiness in a new relationship or in motherhood. At its centre is a different sort of self-assertion, one no less vital: H. D.’s assertion of herself as a writer.
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Aside from the letter to Cournos, Lawrence is hardly mentioned in H. D.’s extant correspondence from the Mecklenburgh Square years: there’s little evidence to suggest that they were especially important to each other personally, still less that they had any sort of romantic relationship. It was, therefore, a surprise to all when Bid Me to Live appeared to suggest a longstanding passion. In the novel, it’s the support of Frederico (the character based on Lawrence) that sparks the very beginning of Julia’s writing: H. D. attributes to Rico the words of Pound which famously launched her career, as if editing her own origin story.
‘Don’t you know, don’t you realise that this is poetry?’ said Frederico, edging her away toward the far end of the room. He held the pages that she had brought Mary Dowell for her anthology. ‘Don’t you realise that this is poetry?’
In the novel, Julia’s attraction to Rico begins to obsess her; she imagines herself and Rico projected into another dimension, outside of the room, the city, the war. The centrepiece of the novel takes place in the large sitting room, where Julia and Rico sit alone, at work, while the others are out shopping. For Julia, this moment has been deliberately engineered: ‘it was understood … she and Rico were to work something out between them.’ Rico opens a notebook and spreads it on his knee, looking to Julia like ‘the true artist working with no apparent self-consciousness’. She moves to the window and gazes out on to the square, ‘where the plane-trees were swaying in the wind, their branches etched against the near sky’. With a start she glances back into the room, and finds his eyes locked on her, his gaze marking a track through the air between them, filled with some peculiar magnetism. She gets up and edges her chair towards him; gently she touches his sleeve – and he winces sharply, recoiling from her touch with a shiver like a ‘hurt jaguar’. Stunned, Julia retreats. Not a word is spoken between them before they hear voices at the door, and in sweep Elsa and Bella, laughing and teasing Rico about the landlady, who had enquired flirtatiously about him on the stairs. As the room is caught up in a call for teatime, Bella shoving things about proprietorially, Elsa flinging her bags on the floor, Julia notices that Rico has already started writing again.
When John Cournos and Arabella Yorke read Bid Me to Live on its publication in 1960, they were outraged at the depiction of the frisson between H. D. and Lawrence, which seemed to them a travesty. Both dismissed the idea that Lawrence could possibly have had romantic designs on H. D., and suggested that H. D. must have been duped by Lawrence into thinking his feelings were deeper than they were. But their interpretations of this scene – like that of the biographer who suggested that Lawrence was Perdita’s father and H. D. the model for his Lady Chatterley – were too literal. Rico’s importance, in the book, lies not in his status as love interest, but in the challenge he poses to Julia’s sense of self, and to her writing. When H. D. wrote about Lawrence in Mecklenburgh Square, it was not to reveal a romantic attachment, but to dissect the power his image had come to represent, and which she had spent her life trying to overcome. The exploration of sexual politics in Bid Me to Live is a response to H. D.’s wider, ongoing search for a way she could live ‘in two dimensions’, as a writer and as a woman. The years of feeling stifled by men – a pain which went right back to her childhood, through her engagement to Pound and the breakdown of her marriage – now came to a head, as she connected her present inability to write with the control these men had always exerted over her. As she returned to the Mecklenburgh Square episode, the personal turmoil of those years manifested anew as an artistic crisis.
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Lawrence himself had always remained reticent on the subject of H. D., though he wrote to Arabella’s mother, Selina Yorke, in December 1918 (having learned of H. D.’s pregnancy): ‘Feeling sorry for her, one almost melts. But I don’t trust her – other people’s lives, indeed!’ In 1926, writing to another friend, he expressed exasperation at H. D. (‘a cat’) for not divorcing Aldington and allowing him happiness with Arabella, ‘though she herself went off with Gray’. Lawrence’s most extensive discussion of the group is a brief section of his novel Aaron’s Rod, begun in Mecklenburgh Square in November 1917 and published in 1922. It offers an account of H. D.’s behaviour more nuanced but no less damning than John Cournos’s. On his travels, the protagonist, Aaron Sisson, encounters a strange bohemian ménage engaged in a reckless display of domestic anarchy: bored of playing conventional parlour games, they are trying to fix candles and fireworks to trees in the forest outside. At their centre is Julia (it is striking that, forty years later, H. D. chose the same name for her self-portrait), whose discomfort within the group is highlighted from the start. She is ‘a tall stag of a thing, but she sat hunched up like a witch’; she is wild-eyed, with long, twitchy fingers, prone to bouts of nervous high-pitched laughter. Lawrence has reversed the chronology of the two affairs, placing H. D.’s before Aldington’s – a galling distortion, given that the characters and situation would have been instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the group. When we meet Julia, she is
attempting – with increasingly overt coquettishness – to encourage her husband, Robert, ‘a fresh, stoutish young Englishman in khaki’, to start an affair with a woman called Josephine: it soon transpires that she is longing to leave Robert for Cyril Scott, with whom she has established ‘a nervous kind of amour … based on soul sympathy and emotional excitement’. Robert tells the others that he doesn’t object to her affair at all, and Aaron deduces that Julia is trying to dramatise her dilemma in order to gain attention: that she really wants Robert to beg her to stay. The group’s attitudes to Julia range from disgust to amusement to pity; for Aaron, she is manipulative and corrupt, her behaviour confirming his fear that women are out to possess men, and to destroy men’s freedom by asserting their own.
H. D., when she read the novel, found the characters ‘unrecognisable, as the characters of that war-time charade; least of all did I know myself, Julia … No doubt, I did not want to recognise her.’ She sounds resigned, but it must have been dispiriting beyond belief to see her suffering caricatured so cruelly – to see both Lawrence and Cournos condemn her from the safety of fiction, revealing the hypocrisy of their avowed commitment to individual freedom. The novel’s central theme – that heterosexual love is ‘a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul’ – occupied Lawrence throughout his career, and also pervaded his own relationships. Friends, including Gray and Aldington, later wrote of Lawrence’s possessiveness, the way he demanded total subservience and obedience from his friends, a sacrifice, wrote Gray, ‘which no one with any personality at all could make’. This attitude was particularly entrenched in Lawrence’s relationships with women. Gray later wrote that he grew ‘weary and sceptical’ of Lawrence’s attitude to the many women who admired him, and whose adoration he seemed to cultivate. And it’s clear that even while he was in Mecklenburgh Square, Lawrence was alert to the power he held over H. D. Writing to Lawrence at 44 Mecklenburgh Square on 7 November 1917, Gray accused him of encouraging women to worship him as ‘a Jesus Christ to a regiment of Mary Magdalenes’. In his reply – more amused than angry – Lawrence assured Gray that any woman who fell in love with him was seeking not physical gratification but a spiritual awakening, which he was well placed to offer. He loftily argued that these women – ‘Hilda Aldington’ included – represented to him ‘the threshold of a new world, or underworld, of knowledge and being’; a realm whose secrets he intended to reveal in his own writing. His letter is mysterious and allusive, but one part of its meaning is clear: women, to Lawrence, were not equals but muses; not artists in their own right, but simply material.
Almost forty years later, H. D. recalled Frieda warning her against her husband, in a rare private moment: ‘Lawrence does not really care for women. He only cares for men. Hilda, you have no idea of what he is like.’ Thinking back to that time, H. D. puzzled over something Lawrence had said in Mecklenburgh Square, as they sat around on the landlady’s gilt-edged chairs: that ‘Frieda was there forever on his right hand, I was there forever – on his left’. She was amused to think of Lawrence presenting himself as Jesus, with Frieda as John, the loyal disciple, and H. D. as Judas, the rival and potential betrayer. But the image was disquieting – whether good or bad, both women were no more than helpmeets to the prophetic male. She concluded that, like Aldington, he saw women only as either a body or a mind: while Frieda provided his emotional support, Hilda was there for intellectual stimulation, and neither was permitted to transgress into the other’s territory. In Bid Me to Live, Julia begins to sense that Rico’s winning exterior is a mask: he suddenly appears the epitome of aggression, his red beard like a volcano, his teeth as he laughs ready ‘to tear, to devour’. She suddenly realises why Elsa, Rico’s wife, has seemed to condone the potential affair: free of her husband, she will be able to pursue her own interests, while Julia will take over her role in offering support and inspiration for the great artist. Belatedly, Julia sees that in providing the conditions for Rico’s freedom, she will be sacrificing her own: ‘She was to be used, a little heap of firewood, brushwood, to feed the flame of Rico.’
One particular incident comes to represent Julia’s fears. At a crucial moment in the book, Rico responds angrily to a poem Julia has sent him, an exploration of the doomed love of Orpheus and Eurydice. ‘I don’t like the second half of the Orpheus sequence as well as the first,’ he tells her. ‘Stick to the woman speaking. How can you know what Orpheus feels? It’s your part to be woman, the woman vibration, Eurydice should be enough. You can’t deal with both.’ Rico’s criticism disturbs Julia, with its damning implication that she should curb her ambitions and write only from personal experience, not try to say anything universal. Julia voices H. D.’s frustration at these double standards (made all the more egregious by the fact that in Mecklenburgh Square, Lawrence had been correcting the proofs of his novel Women in Love, which explores the inner lives of the Brangwen sisters): ‘This man-, this woman-theory of Rico’s was false, it creaked in the joints … If he could enter, so diabolically, into the feelings of women, why should not she enter into the feelings of men?’
H. D. did not allow Lawrence to silence her. Rather, she took up and transformed his command to write ‘only’ as a woman, by placing women’s voices and experiences at the centre of her work. Her poem ‘Eurydice’, which Lawrence had critiqued, was printed in the Egoist in May 1917. In the published version, Orpheus doesn’t speak; if, as the novel suggests, there was once a second section where he did, she evidently took Lawrence’s advice and cut the verses. But the poem is a striking riposte to the usual story in which Eurydice, condemned to eternal silence by the carelessness of her poet husband, is pitied and swiftly forgotten. Instead, H. D.’s Eurydice is powerful, independent and dangerous. She reproaches Orpheus for sending her back to hell; finally, she claims the underworld as her own domain, a place where she can find peace within herself at last, no longer drowned out by her husband’s stultifying song. H. D.’s time in Mecklenburgh Square was painful for her personally, but it was a crucial juncture in her work: this groundbreaking poetic monologue, longer than her previous works and far more personal, marked her emergence out of the Imagist aesthetic towards a new voice that was distinctly her own. And its publication sparked a new, lifelong project for H. D. Over the next four decades, her poetry moved away from the timeless, impersonal beauty of Sea Garden to a more narrative style, centred around female figures drawn from mythology – Cassandra, Calypso, Demeter. Her work explored the inner lives of ancient heroines forging their own narratives, their own identities, outside of traditional legends where they were passive, ignored or vilified; the project mirrored her concern, through her autobiographical writings, to interrogate her own past and renounce the ‘initiators’ whom she had allowed to direct her. As she wrote these women out of the myths they had been trapped in for centuries, H. D. began to write herself out of the situation that had overwhelmed her in Mecklenburgh Square.
Richard Aldington (front row, far right) in 1918
Her major poetic sequence Helen in Egypt was published in 1961, the year after Bid Me to Live, and composed in tandem with it. In this work, H. D. counters the familiar myth in which Helen’s infidelity is responsible for the Trojan War, favouring instead an alternative story, borrowed from Euripides’ subversive drama Helen. H. D.’s Helen is not a capricious beauty indifferent to the slaughter unleashed in her name, but an innocent and bewildered woman, trapped in Egypt while a phantom double, created by the gods, wreaks havoc at Troy. For H. D., Helen is a mirror of Iphigenia, whose figure resonated for her during the First World War: both were sacrificed – in body or in reputation – to men’s aggressive instincts, left voiceless while the tales of the men’s martial exploits live on like Orpheus’s songs. In Helen in Egypt, H. D.’s Helen embarks on a quest towards self-discovery, repairing her fractured psyche and stepping out of the fictional identities imposed on her (a famous beauty, a passive object, a contemptible adulteress) through a process of psychoanalysis
, encounters with characters from her past, and beginning herself to write. Across her work, H. D. was seeking new ways to understand a simple fact: that women have always been shaped by expectations of how they should behave, and thus have been denied the freedom to discover and know themselves as they might want to be. H. D.’s triumph is to create a character who emerges as a complex whole, after whose discovery the passive, objectified Helen of tradition can never be read in the same way again.
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The final chapter of Bid Me to Live takes the form of a letter from Julia to Rico. She answers back to his criticism of her poetry, to his insistence that women cannot write convincingly about men, that they should stick to subjects they know and not try to be ‘both’. The letter is a firm retort to all those who, throughout her life, attempted to shape H. D. according to their chosen labels, and stands also as a wider statement about women’s subordinate position in society. In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, the artist Lily Briscoe seeks a form of creative expression that doesn’t entail motherhood and domestic duty, ignoring the needling voices of men who insist, mockingly, that ‘women can’t paint, women can’t write’. At the end of the book, her completed painting stands as a triumphant rejoinder to these taunts. In the same way, Julia’s letter to Rico – also coming at the end of a poetic and complex novel – rejects the suggestion that being a woman is incompatible with being an artist. Her words affirm her desire to be a writer, not a muse; a person ready to transcend the confines of contemporary womanhood through her radical art.
Square Haunting Page 9
