"H.D.’s American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of Place”

South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Atlantic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

H.D.'s American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of Place Author(s): Annette Debo Source: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 69, No. 3/4 (Fall, 2004), pp. 1-22Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064607Accessed: 05-06-2015 15:50 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 198.86.8.4 on Fri, 05 Jun 2015 15:50:47 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samla

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064607

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



H.D.'s American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of

Place

Annette Debo

In Paint It Today/Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D., wrote,

She, Midget, did not wish to be an eastern flower

painter. She did not wish to be an exact and

over-pr??euse western, a scientific describer of

detail of vein and leaf of flowers, dead or living, nor did she wish to press flowers and fern fronds

and threads of pink and purple seaweed between the pages of her book. Yet she wanted to com

bine all these qualities in her writing and to add still another quality to these three. She wished to

embody, as this other quality, the fragrance of

the flowers. (17)

Into this passage is inscribed Midget's hope to become a

writer able to capture the essence of a place, a goal which

H.D. herself achieved. Although she did not become the sci entist her father had planned, H.D. inherited his scientific

modes of observation, and while he practiced the art of

astronomy, she incorporates into her art her careful and intri

cate observations of the American land. The seascapes of

Maine come to life with their scraggly pines and hardy flow

ers; likewise, Pennsylvania's pastures and woods are careful

ly ensconced in her texts?a much more permanent method

of capturing landscapes than "press[ing] flowers and fern



2 Annette Debo

fronds and threads of pink and purple seaweed/'

The ecocritical lens, through which H.D. has not yet been read, offers new ways to address H.D.'s focus on place.

Orchestrating a concert of voices in The Ecocriticism Reader,

Cheryll Glotfelty asks, in her catalog of questions posed by ecocritics, "in addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category?" (xix). If place is indeed a

valid aspect of identity, then it becomes integral to the theo

rizing of the modernist self. For H.D., her American past haunted her, and throughout her life, as she repeatedly

sought self knowledge through outlets as varied as psycho analysis and the occult, she reflected back upon her child

hood to formulate the relationship between her adult identi

ty and that American childhood. In part, that preoccupation relies on a belief in the formative power of place. For exam

ple, H.D.'s narrator in Paint It Today stipulates that "language and tradition do not make a people, but the heat that presses on them, the cold that baffles them, the alternating lengths of

night and day," underscoring the power of place?just like

race, class, and gender ?to construct identity (20).

Furthermore, although ecocriticism became codified as a dis

crete critical school only in the mid-1990s, its roots stretch to

H.D.'s time and beyond. H.D.'s contemporary Mary Austin

made the claim that "Art, considered as the expression of any

people as a whole, is the response they make in various medi

ums to the impact that the totality of their experience makes

upon them, and there is no sort of experience that works so

constantly and subtly upon man as his regional environ

ment" (97). I contend that H.D. shared Austen's belief in the

power of place and that H.D.'s connection to American places was a pivotal part of her artistic vision.*

My first objective then in interpreting the influence of

the American land in H.D.'s work is identifying its physical presence. Because H.D. uses mythical settings in many

poems, readers often do not realize that her poetic images are

based on the American landscape of her youth, which I will



South Atlantic Review 3

demonstrate by tracing her images to their origins. There is

also H.D.'s own testimony to consider. In 1937, when looking back on her writing to explain the sources of her poetic

images to Norman Holmes Pearson, her close friend and lit

erary executor, H.D. wrote,

"Leda" was done at the same time as "Lethe".

Lotus-land, all this. It is nostalgia for a lost land.

I call it Hellas. I might, psychologically just as

well, have listed the Casco Bay islands off the coast of Maine but I called my islands Rhodes, Samos and Cos.

They are symbols. And symbolically the first

island of memory was dredged away or lost, like a miniature Atlantis. It was a thickly wooded

island in the Lehigh river [in Pennsylvania] and

believe it or not, was named actually, Calypso's island. (Collecott 72)2

In this somewhat elusive explanation, H.D. illustrates how

she grafts the Grecian names of Rhodes, Samos, and Cos onto

the physical bodies of the Casco Bay islands and an island in the Lehigh River, places she has lost through time (the world of childhood) and distance (the U.S.). The "first island of

memory" is in the Lehigh River, which runs through Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the town in which H.D. was born

and lived until she was nine. This island, deliberately chosen

because of its Greek name, becomes the physical basis of the later imagery in the poems "Leda" and "Lethe." According to Diana Collecott, Calypso's Island was also the "scene of

Doolittle family holidays, before 1911," a perfect melding of American places and memories with Greek allusions.

Significantly, the presence of Maine and Pennsylvania here is not an isolated incident. On the contrary, this layer is an

ubiquitous component of H.D.'s palimpsest-like writing. Shards of her past are ever present, the American landscape

undergirding the Greek myths and allusions she superim



4 Annette Debo

posed upon it. For the purposes of this article, I will use Sea

Garden, H.D/s earliest and justly acclaimed volume of poetry, to illustrate this point.

Once having established the presence and importance of American places for H.D. in Sea Garden, I will turn to how

place functions in two of her novels. In H.D.'s fiction in gen

eral, place becomes an active spirit that constructs identity and shapes her as a writer. In HERmione, the land infiltrates the house, spreading its aura of wildness throughout, and it

molds Hermione's character and influences her development as a writer. Similarly, in Paint It Today, when the main char

acter, Midget, moves to Europe, she remains permanently

separated even from the other artists there because both her

character and her art were formed by the American environ

ment of her youth.

I

H.D.'s use of the American landscape has received

scant critical attention to date even though in 1916 John Gould Fletcher noticed the resemblance of H.D.'s coasts to the

Northeastern coast of the U.S., commenting that "the scenery and the feeling are not Greek. In fact, as someone has point ed out, the whole poem might have been called 'The Coast of

New Jersey'" (34). The only H.D. critic to build on his com

ments is Susan Stanford Friedman who has noted that "the

landscape of Sea Garden originated in America," a conclusion

she likely based on Pearson's statement that H.D. "often told me that her nature imagery

. . . was never really Greek but

came from her childhood reminiscences of Watch Hill and the

coasts of Rhode Island and Maine, which she used to visit

with her friends as a child" (Friedman 99; Dembo 437). Friedman's claim gestures toward the role the U.S. plays in

H.D.'s work, but even her work provides a limited analysis of

this aspect of H.D.'s writings In developing this critical

thread, I maintain that the American landscape is




omnipresent in H.D.'s writing because of its connection to

nationality. Despite her expatriate life, H.D. always felt her

self an American, even repatriating at age seventy-two, and

for nationalism, the land is pivotal. Historian Robert H.

Wiebe writes that "Nationalism is the desire among people who

believe they share a common ancestry and a common destiny to live

under their own government on land sacred to their history/' a def

inition highlighting the land as "sacred" (5). As an expatriate, H.D. left behind her community and her citizenship, but in

the imaginative space of her poetry, she could retain, and

even revere, the sacred land of her childhood in the U.S. In

Sea Garden, as in much of H.D.'s writing, the Greek qualities for which H.D. is better known are superimposed onto

American places, which become the bedrock for all her land

scape imagery. Always alert for opportunities to mingle the

ancient and the contemporary as well as her American past and her European present, H.D. uses the American land, in

scientific detail, in her imagery. Certainly, H.D. infused the landscape of Sea Garden

with her penchant for Greek allusions, and, following closely upon her 1912 visit to Capri, the volume is also inflected by H.D.'s travel to that island (Guest 53). However, while the

allusions may be Greek, the landscape is American, accurate

ly rendered by a woman who grew up in a family of scien

tists. From her father, a prominent astronomer, and her

grandfather, an influential botanist, H.D. inherited scientific

habits of method and precision which influence her poetic technique, as Adalaide Morris and Charlotte Mandel have

demonstrated. Morris sees H.D. "reproduce" her grandfa ther's "delicate language, his transfixed, interrogating gaze, and his push for taxonomic precision" (199). Mandel writes,

Hilda Doolittle was born at the full of the

Victorian-style quest for scientific knowledge by diligent personal observation, collection, nota

tion and classification.... From birth, she was



6 Annette Debo

influenced by these devotions to exactitude at

reading the universe, interpreting meaning that

would be evoked by avid study of detail and its accurate rendition into drawing and written

symbol. She absorbed the discipline of their con

centrated search, and its mystery, for the myriad

specific tiny plants and orbiting sky-presences were invisible to the naked eye. (301)

This discipline and eye for detail give to Sea Garden a botani

cal accuracy and a proclivity "to model the ancient Greek cat

alogue form almost into a naming of species" as in "Sea

Gods" with its myriad forms of violets: wood violets, stream

violets, blue violets, river-violets, yellow violets, bird-foot

violets, and so on (Mandel 307). Her "catalog" replicates the

many variations of a species, much as a nature illustrator

might create a book of northeastern flora or a nature writer

might record her explorations. Not only do the poems read like botanical catalogs at

times, but their imagery of the landscape and vegetation is as

authentically drawn as the algae her grandfather painstaking

ly hand drew and colored for his two internationally recog

nized studies. The sources for H.D.'s imagery are found in

her experiences in the U.S., akin to the local research in ponds and streams upon which her grandfather relied. Her cousin

Francis Wolle testifies to her training in the local flora and

fauna in their summer romps as children: "Chiefly under

Eric's [H.D.'s brother, a scientist] guidance we got to know

the birds, plants, and wild flowers" (33). H.D. began Sea

Garden only a year after leaving Pennsylvania for Europe, and

the Northeastern coast as well as the Pennsylvanian country

side clearly emerge in Sea Garden's imagery.

Moreover, Sea Garden's patterns of imagery locate the

freedom for which the speaker longs in that landscape. Many critics have addressed how the American land and the fron

tier affected the development of an American identity in the




Europeans who settled in the U.S. A dominant strain of

thought pertaining specifically to women is that women were

complicit in domesticating the land, in transforming vast

forests into orderly orchards and gardens, as persuasively

argued by Annette Kolodny. Similarly, Vera Norwood has

shown how middle-class white women developed an interest

in nature but managed to keep it within their gender role: "an

enclosed flower garden filled with beautiful women at their ease remains a classic image of woman's proper role in

nature" (xviii). These women found acceptable outlets in

becoming landscape and garden designers, writing about the

nature near to hand, creating scientific illustrations, and

painting and photographing the environment. On the other

hand, Stacy Alaimo claims an opposing view, that "many women have, in fact, invoked nature in order to critique cul

tural roles, norms, and assumptions and to escape from the

confines of the domestic" (15). She continues,

These women looked outward toward a natural

realm precisely because this space was not

already designated as "truly and unequivocally theirs" and thus was not replete with the domes

tic values that many women wished to escape.

Nature, then, is undomesticated both in the sense

that it figures as a space apart from the domestic

and in the sense that it is untamed and thus serves as a model for female insurgency. (17)

It is into this tradition that H.D. falls.^ Sea Garden is about freedom of the spirit, and

"absolute freedom and wildness," to use Henry David

Thoreau's phrase, is found in uncontaminated nature (161)5 While H.D. preferred living with European people, she con

sidered the American land more alive and vibrant, and her valuation of the landscape, like the

relationship she senses

with the land, echoes Transcendental beliefs.^ The most



8 Annette Debo

favored landscape is the coast; its wildness is alluring and

promises escape and adventure. More than half a century

earlier, Thoreau looked to the West for wildness: "The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preser vation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and

barks which brace mankind" (185). Thoreau locates the wild ness for which he longs in the West because of the mythos of

the frontier as a vast, unsettled wilderness, a mythology which ignores the earlier inhabitants of the Americas, consid

ering only the land conquests of the European settlers. By 1890 this frontier had been officially closed, ending the fiction

of endless, empty land. Therefore, H.D., writing in 1916, uses

the sea as her imaginative space for locating wildness because

it cannot be settled or domesticated by any people. Its yearly storms shift miles of sand, wreck boats, and tear down hous

es, and in its violent nature lies its value as an untamable

space, a place of absolute freedom.

Thus, Sea Garden's most prominent and revered land

scape is the Atlantic coast, which H.D. visited many times

and cherished. In fact, in a letter to her childhood friend

Mary Herr, H.D. names Maine "a place of mine," emphasiz

ing the significant role it continued to play for her/ While

growing up, H.D., her best friend Margaret Snively, and

another neighbor Matilda Wells would spend several sum

mer weeks on Bailey Island in Casco Bay, Maine with

Matilda's family. H.D. also went to the Snively cottage in

Watch Hill, New Jersey with Margaret (Guest 17-18). In her

correspondence with H.D. in the 1950s, Margaret fondly rem

inisces about those summers:

Do you remember the day when "Hilda, Matilda, and Me" went up the creek and went in bathing in

the altogether and had only just got dressed again




when a rowboat of boys came round the bend?

And the other time when we were stormbound

up the creek and a boy named Allen rescued us and

Father made me go up to his house with him to

express our thanks? I did feel an awful fool and I

guess Allen did, too. That was a fine free life we led

there.8

These trips were special, a far distance to travel at the time, as

H.D.'s cousin Francis Wolle testifies that "to the rest of us

who had never been further than the Jersey Coast for a vaca

tion this seemed a tremendous trip and a great honor" (34). This Atlantic coast is the same landscape constructed

in Sea Garden where H.D. is not so much planting a sea gar den as she is faithfully recording into her poetry the flowers

which naturally adorn the seashore. For the flower poems?

"Sea Poppies," "Sea Lily," "Sea Violet," "Sea Rose," and "Sea

Iris"?H.D. chooses plants that can survive on the edge between land and sea, in the danger this exposed position promises them, as many critics have noted. However, what

has not yet been acknowledged is that these flowers are actu

ally wildflowers native to New England. The sea poppy of the poem is "treasure" "caught root / among wet pebbles"

with a more potent fragrance than the more cultivated pop

pies growing in meadows. The persona values the flower,

which becomes "fruit on the sand," in the space between the

pines, the boulders, and the sea (H.D., Collected 21). In actu

ality a wildflower of southern New England, the golden sea

poppies grow on gravelly beaches and in waste places (Newcomb 142), places where life is perilous and where gar

den plants, accustomed to the luxury of cultivated beds, could not grow. Similarly, growing on the sea's edge, the sea

lily is anchored to the land underwater. A sea lily is really an

invertebrate marine animal whose body resembles a land lily, and the lily of the poem has the privilege of having its great head "drift upon temple-steps" but it is also "shattered / in



10 Annette Debo

the wind," since it has to accept the violence of the ocean in

which it lives. The sand cuts the flower and "yet though the

whole wind / slash at your bark, / you are lifted up" ?the

lily triumphs over the power of the sea (H.D., Collected 14). Likewise, the true sea violet, a coastal flower with a violet

color and a white throat, grows in sandy soil along the south

ern coast of Maine (Newcomb 34). H.D. values it beyond the

scented white violet and "greater blue violets" which "flutter

on the hill." The poem's sea violet is paradoxically "fragile as

agate," hardy enough to withstand the wind and shells of the

"sand-bank." This violet has a "frail" grasp on the sand but

survives. In fact, it not only survives but becomes a star

edged with fire, a powerful symbol for how the outwardly "frail" can persevere in the harshest elements (H.D., Collected

25-26). Not only the flowers, but the seashore itself in Sea

Garden is New England imagery?a beach of gravel or sand,

or craggy rocks meeting the sea directly?also based on

places H.D. personally knew. "The splendour of your ragged coast" in "The Shrine" and the "gulls and sea-birds that cry

discords" in "The Wind Sleepers" recall Casco Bay in south

ern Maine, near Portland (H.D., Collected 10,15). The Maine

coast provides images for H.D.'s "safe crescent" beaches, her

cliffs and shoals, her beautiful graves which lure the boats

into a place with no shelter. The coast provides allure to

boats on the open sea?"honey is not more sweet / than the

salt stretch of your beach"?but the boats are beaten by the

sea, finding no safe landing place on the rocky coast (H.D., Collected 7, 8). The steep cliffs, the craggy coasts, the rocks

meeting the sea evoke the southern side of Casco Bay, Cape

Elizabeth with its "endless line of rock coasts, with here and

there a fine bluff . . . combinations of cove and cliff of distin

guished beauty" (Nutting 52). Here, the rocks abruptly clash

with the ocean, providing a panorama for H.D.'s many strug

gles with the sea or the borderline between elements.




II

In HERmione, the land becomes an active spirit which

exerts power. Instead of staying peacefully outside the civi

lized home, the land invades the home, blurring the lines

between the exhilarating woods and the stultifying domestic

sphere. Hermione, in fact, invites it in to help her escape the

rigidity of her gender role. Even more importantly, the land

becomes an integral part of Hermione's character; its influ

ence helps shape the woman she is becoming. Additionally, the land plays a central role in her choice to become a writer;

within this novel's parameters, she must be able to represent the land accurately in her work to qualify as a writer.

As in Sea Garden, H.D. continues her scientific render

ing of the American landscape in HERmione, and she models the novel's setting on the Doolittle house in Upper Darby

where the family moved in 1896 when H.D.'s father became the Director of the Flower Observatory at the University of

Pennsylvania (Guest 16). The Director's residence was on

seven acres, along with the Observatory buildings. H.D.'s

father describes it:

The Observatory is located in an agricultural

region away from the distur bances due to the

heavy traffic and electric illumination of the city; the elevation is high and altogether thelocation

quite as favorable as can belooked for in the

immediate vicinity of a large city, at the same

time it is easily accessible. By the recently con

structed Newtown Square electric railway it may be reached from the University buildings, West

Philadelphia, in thirty minutes or less. (Doolittle

123)

This then is the landscape of HERmione: a house surrounded

by working dairy farms, orchards, open fields, and woods?



12 Annette Debo

"Gawd's own god-damn country," as George Lowndes,

Hermione's sometime fianc? (a character based on Ezra

Pound), calls it (84)?but one that is also bordered by the West Chester Pike and is only a short trolley ride from down

town Philadelphia. In HERmione, instead of the land representing the

spirit as in Sea Garden, the land becomes an active force to

which the house and its occupants belong. In fact, this house is submerged in its environment; the outdoors invades the

home. In contrast to pioneer women who were domesticat

ing the wilderness (Kolodny 12), H.D. rejects domesticity, which she can afford to do because she is not facing the actu

al frontier like the pioneers and because her class standing provides her with the luxury of servants who do many of the

everyday household tasks. For her, "progress" means return

ing domestic spaces like the home and the kitchen to a wild state because the wilderness is liberating, precisely because it can only now be fantasized. This house is filled with lilies

and wild azalea boughs, and intimately grounded in its land. Screen doors slain, honeysuckle overruns the porch, and the

dog Jock invades the kitchen. Like the wild invasion encroaching on the home's

domesticity, Hermione is more often in the woods than in the

house where her mother Eugenia and all her expectations for

Hermione reside. Significantly, H.D. inflates the bucolic

nature of her setting, rendering it as primeval, a space engen

dering "female insurgency," to use Alaimo's words, rather

than an outlying city suburb. At times, the surrounding woods and river become "torrents of white water running

through deep forests," using the myths of a rustic, wild

America (H.D., HERmione 6). This land, primeval and pow erful, does not remain a benign backdrop for the action but

becomes an integral part of Hermione's character.

Significantly, at several points Hermione is figured as a tree?

an indigenous being, with long stabilizing roots in

Pennsylvania?demonstrating the way the place of her birth




inextricably shapes her. She thinks,

Pennsylvania. Names are in people, people are

in names. Sylvania. I was born here. People

ought to think before they call a place Sylvania.

Pennsylvania. I am part of Sylvania. Trees. Trees. Trees. Dogwood, liriodendron

with its green-yellow tulip blossoms. Trees are

in people. People are in trees. Pennsylvania.

(H.D., HERmione 5)

The immediacy of this relationship articulates the extent to

which Hermione has been shaped by the forests themselves.

However, the forest contains, as well as shapes, Hermione who is often walking in a maze-like forest of lirio

dendron, oak, dogwood, larch, and tulip trees (H.D.,

HERmione 3-5). The maze atmosphere and tall, blowing trees

also serve to represent her confusion as she reels from failing at mathematics in college and tries to determine what she will

do, since, in her opinion, she is grown too large (in age and a

pun on H.D.'s 5'11" frame) for the house and has not "ever

done anything" (109). The woods shelter, yet as in "Pursuit,"

they also confuse with their immensity and sameness, leaving little trace of individuality: "Trees, no matter how elusive, in

the end, walled one in. Trees were suffocation" (7-8). These

trees, actually open woods around cultivated farmland and

no longer part of a frontier, become, in their symbolism, thick

and close like the ancient American forests. They muffle

sound and action, even giving Hermione the impression of

being underwater, drowning as well as suffocating. Either

way, the trees stifle her ability to breathe and live. For

Hermione, the way out of this maze is to head for the coast.

Escape, as in Sea Garden, lies at the seashore, which is the way

she understands freedom. From her family's suffocation,

Hermione envisions a solitary escape, albeit an impossible

one, to their beach cottage at Point Pleasant, New Jersey: "The



14 Annette Debo

circles of the trees were tree-green; she wanted the inner lin

ing of an Atlantic breaker_Pennsylvania could be routed

only by another: New Jersey with its flatlands and the reed

grass and the salt creeks where a canoe brushed Indian paint brush" (H.D., HERmione 7). The seashore pulls at Hermione

with its flatlands, rather than crowding trees, and its promise of danger and adventure.

In essence, then, inland Pennsylvania and the coast

seem irreconcilable and represent a fundamental opposition in Hermione, bequeathed by her father and mother.

According to the novel's logic, Hermione's feelings for place are genetically directed; an attachment to place is embedded

in a literal, biological way:

In Pennsylvania, Carl Gart had found a sort of

peace and a submergence of the thing that drove

him, that had driven his people to New England and then West to trek back East. In Eugenia Gart, the fibres were rooted and mossed over and not

to be disrupted. If Eugenia Gart pulled up her

mossgrown fibres, Pennsylvania itself would

ache like a jaw from which has been extracted a

somewhat cumbrous molar .... In Hermione

Gart, the two never fused and blended, she was

both moss-grown, inbedded and at the same

time staring with her inner vision on forever

tumbled breakers. If she went away, her spirit would break; if she stayed, she would be suffo

cated. (H.D., HERmione 9)

Because she inherited from both parents, Hermione contends

with both desires?to stay and to leave?and both have a

price, a breaking of spirit or the threat of suffocation.

Eventually, Hermione plans to leave, to be directed by "her

inner vision on forever-tumbled breakers," but part of her is

moss-grown already, embedded into the American subsoil




that she carries with her forever.

As well as controlling her character's development, the land is pivotal in shaping Hermione's sense of what it

means to be a writer. Although Eugenia comments that

Hermione ought to go on writing her "'dear little stories,'"

mediocre magazine writing no longer satisfies Hermione; she

wants to become an artist (H.D., HERmione 80). And in this

novel, being an artist is tied to the ability to write in a way that is evocative of place. Hermione laments that she did not

continue with her music and that she cannot paint; she needs

artistic skills to capture the "'composition' of elements" that

make up a place:

Music might have caught the trail of the grass as

she ran on across the meadow and the deep note

made by a fabulous bee that sprung into vision,

blotting out the edge of the stables, almost blotting out the sun itself with its magnified magnificent underbelly and the roar of its sort of booming. The boom of the bee in her ear, his presence like an

eclipse across the sun brought visual image of the sort of thing she sought f or ... it had not occurred

to Her to try and put the thing in writing. (13)

As the novel progresses, however, Hermione increasingly sees writing as a way to capture "the thing"?the trail of

grass, the bee and his eclipse, Pennsylvania?and to redeem

her failure at college: "Writing was an achievement like play

ing the violin or singing like Tetrazzini" (71). As her writing develops, Hermione finds that her

emphasis on Pennsylvanian materials positions her as a

specifically American writer, as opposed to the European tra

dition which carries more cach? with her worldly friend

George. Unlike Hermione, George tries to reject ties to

American literature and art, which, to him, lack the sophisti cation and development of their European counterparts, and



16 Annette Debo

so she rejects his view and satirizes his youthful pomposity. While walking in Hermione's woods, George parodies the

opening lines from Longfellow's poem Evangeline: ""This is the

forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,' (George intoned dramatically; she knew why she didn't love him) 'bearded with moss and with garments green, indistinct in the twi

light'" (H.D., HERmione 65). Stubbornly resisting George's preference for European art, Hermione thinks, "why couldn't

George ever let me alone to see things in my own way, to

enjoy things even if they are provincial?" (133) George

laughs at her parties and makes the museum offerings seem

dowdy: "'Don't look at those things' [he says] and if this is

what Europe does to people, Hermione thought, I don't want

Europe" (135).

Ill

In Paint It Today, as in Hermione, the land wields

power, shaping the central character, Midget, much the way it shaped Hermione. However, in this novel, that power

operates at a much deeper level: formative environments cre

ate an essential difference between Americans and the

English, thereby inextricably separating Midget from her

European peers. Even though Midget has moved from the

U.S. to Europe, she remains rooted in the American land of

her youth. In describing how Midget's character is formed, H.D. writes, "I know that the important things in the temper

ing of a soul are perhaps the rough, the commonplace, that

seem to youth and early maturity unimportant, stifling, even

inhibiting surroundings or conditions .... I am trying ... to

give a picture of that being, that spider, that small, hatched

bird, that flawless shell that once contained an unborn being" (H.D., Paint 6). The "small, hatched bird" is Midget, and her "flawless shell" is the Pennsylvania in which Midget grew up, where the novel opens. The shell, or the place, is what

"tempers" the soul and creates the person.




When describing Midget at the beginning of the

novel, H.D. literally describes her as her environment, again

emphasizing the land's ability to shape identity: "Her por trait? Find her on the trail of the Pennsylvania foot-hills

breaking her first bunches of the wax-pink mountain laurel; find her with a screwed-up knot of precious wild arbutus, or

the first wandlike bough of dogwood" (5). The mountain lau

rel, arbutus, and dogwood, all native plants to the

Pennsylvania woods, become synonymous with Midget; she

becomes a native part of her surroundings, as indigenous as

the plants.

However, where HERmione ends with the central

character located in the American landscape, Paint It Today transports that character to Europe and yet retains the

ingrained sense of American identity. As for many expatri ates, for H.D. the U.S. becomes more easily definable in con

trast to Europe and more easily appropriated for the imagina tion after she herself left. The American landscape remains

the dominant influence in Midget's perceptions, and she con

tinually compares what she is seeing in her travels to what

she had experienced in the U.S. While she grows to prefer liv

ing in Europe, the U.S. landscape remains more alive for her,

and we see that Midget remains an American artist despite her decision to live in Europe: "Here in France, at Etaples, the

people were a reality. In America, it was the white sand that

lived, the wind, the stainless rout of stars" (H.D., Paint 16). All aspects of environment in Europe pale against the U.S. as

when watching a sunset Midget thinks, "this was not the sun,

this flameless, low-swinging, mid-European substitute" (15). Even the wind in Europe "was not yet wind, not wind that is when contrasted with that rush of swords that cut the sand stretches into snow and ice patterns and blared through the

Maine pines and tore in mid-summer, tornadowise, walnut

and tough oak branches from the walnut and great oak trees"

(14). This rough wind is the same one cutting sand across

flower petals in Sea Garden and ripping through the dense



18 Annette Debo

forests in HERmione.

Having established a basic difference between Europe and the U.S., and having endowed the American landscape

with a certain power continental society lacks, H.D. develops that difference as one which creates a permanent, essential

ized separation between peoples according to the environ

ment of their youth. In London, Midget can fit in, appear to

be English, "tall to the breaking-in-the-middle point, with

fluttering hat brim and tenuous ankles, as of their own

world" (H.D., Paint 18), and the literary people she meets are

always surprised when she reveals that she is American, an

alien in their country. Her American identity separates her

from these English acquaintances, "in time, in space, a thou

sand, thousand years" apart (19). And what separates her is

her sensual experience of the American land, of specifically

grapevines in one case. Midget is at a party, "patter[ing] rub

bish with the best" when she hears a woman describing French vineyards second hand, as her friend in France has

described them to her: "'He says he will have a house party and invite me especially next spring. It is indescribable, he

says'" (17), and as the woman describes the "indescribable"

event she hasn't seen, Midget reflects on the grapevines she

has seen. Over her back porch in Bethlehem, H.D.'s house

had a grape arbor, a favorite place for her and her cousins to

play. The memory of touching, seeing, smelling those blos

soms just as they open is a fragrance H.D. inscribes into her

writing and her construction of American identity. The fra

grance is "cold," "identified with the tiny green feather

bunches curling out from the very young, very small under

furred, red-tipped leaves of the grapevine. This was the fra

grance of the grape flowers, if flowers these young spikes,

resembling the unripe lilac blossoms, could be called" (19). The fragrance of Midget's American past is essential to her

identity and delineates the line between herself and the

English people she is meeting. Midget is different because of

what she has experienced in her youth through her senses




and her connection to the land.

Positing environment?the fragile eggshell, the senso

ry experience, the influence of seasons?as the crucial compo

nent constructing identity, rather than the literary and social

culture one is born of and into, positions H.D. as an environ

mental determinist. H.D. clinches her emphasis on environ

ment with the bald announcement, quoted in my introduc

tion, that "language and tradition do not make a people, but

the heat that presses on them, the cold that baffles them, the

alternating lengths of night and day" (H.D., Paint 20). The

physicality of place?the summer heat, the cold, the length of

daylight in each season?forms people, as Midget is formed

by the U.S. In some ways, this position is isolating because

Midget remains an outsider in Europe, an exotic waiting to be

caught. Alternatively, Midget's position gives her an out

sider's insights, and her essentialized American identity can

travel with her wherever she goes. Midget has earned that

identity by living in the American environment, breathing the

air, living through the seasons, and experiencing grape blos

soms.

Reading H.D. as a writer who so emphasizes place alters our critical view of her work. Much of her current crit

ical reputation rests on her reliance on experimental strate

gies, quite evident in the three texts interrogated here as well

as throughout her career. But extensive exploration of that

dimension of her work, and the corresponding critical asser

tion that her content is disconnected from the U.S., easily obscures H.D.'s equally strong reliance on physical place as a

shaping factor in her work. She is too often imagined as exist

ing in an imaginary Greek world; past critical discussions even interrogate the authenticity of the Greece she creates. In

contrast, here I have shown that in H.D.'s landscapes while

the Greek layer may be the top layer of H.D.'s palimpsest, it



20 Annette Debo

is overlaid upon a very real portrayal of the northeastern U.S.

H.D.'s images, at their roots, are American, but even more

significantly, these places exert the power to shape her char

acters' identities and ultimately H.D.'s own art, firmly align

ing her texts with her own geographic roots.

Western Carolina University

Notes

1 This article is a revision of the second chapter of my dissertation. 2 This letter is also used by Eileen Gregory to support her exploration of

H.D.'s involvement in hellenism. Gregory argues that the passage I have

quoted here is often used as a means of collapsing H.D.'s hellenism into

biographical and psychological matter?as though her early hellenic orien tation were only a mask or shield for personal problems later cogently

unraveled by Freud. Such a biographical interpretation misses the com

plexity of the hellenic fiction itself, reducible neither to biographical or

Freudian allegory nor to literary conventioi?s. (Hellenism 33) My argument in this article avoids the pitfalls that Gregory critiques, but I

clearly have interpreted H.D.'s letter in a far different way than her. I find

Gregory's objectives in H.D. and Hellenism compelling, but I do believe that if critics restrict H.D. to a hellenic sphere, we have done her a disservice.

Therefore, my work complements Gregory's, opening new spaces in H.D.

studies. *

Friedman was countering the claim that in Sea Garden "the landscape . .. is never anchored in human geography because... the 'country' is imag

inary and symbolic" made by Barbara Guest (qtd in Friedman 98). In addi

tion, Gregory sees in Sea Garden a consistent landscape, but she does not

identify that landscape with a specific place ("Rose" 139). 4 The scope of this article prevents me from developing a full analysis of

gender here. However, chapter three of my dissertation addresses the intersection of gender and nationality.

5 Many H.D. critics have read the symbolism of Sea Garden's flowers as

resistant to domestication and in favor of danger and wilderness. I am

working in the same vein but claiming a broader reading of nature and

spirit. 6 Friedman was the first to connect H.D. to transcendentalism. She writes

that H.D.'s "use of nature as objective correlative for spirit attested to her American literary heritage?the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau" (99).

7 H.D. to Mary Herr. 1944. Hilda Doolittle Collection, Special Collections




Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. I would like to thank H.D.'s

Estate for permission to quote from H.D.'s unpublished letters and pub lished texts. Copyright 1925 by Hilda Doolittle. Copyright ? by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Copyright ? 2004 by The Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

8 Pratt to H.D. 9 July 1956. The Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Austin, Mary. "Regionalism in American Fiction." English Journal 21 (Feb 1932): 97-107.

Collecott, Diana. "Memory and Desire: H.D.'s 'A Note on Poetry.'" Agenda

25.3-4 (Autumn/Winter 1987-88): 65-76.

Debo, Annette. America in H.D/s Palimpsest: Place, Race, and Gender in her

Early Poetry and Prose. Dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park, 1998. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1998. 9836388.

Dembo, L.S. "Norman Holmes Pearson on H.D.: An Interview."

Contemporary Literature 10.4 (Autumn 1969): 435-446.

Doolittle, C.L. "The Flower Observatory?University of Pennsylvania." Popular Astronomy 5 (1897-98): 122-25.

Fletcher, John Gould. "Three Imagist Poets." The Little Review June/July 1916: 32-41.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Exile in the American Grain: H.D.'s Diaspora." Women's Writing in Exile. Eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1989. 87-112.

Glotfelty, Cheryll. Introduction. Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xv-xxxvii.

Gregory, Eileen. "Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.'s Sea Garden."

Signets. Eds. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. 129-154.

_. H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and her World. London:

Collins, 1984. H.D. Collected Poems 1912-1944. Ed. Louis L. Martz. New York: New

Directions, 1986. _. H.D. papers. The Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare

Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. New Haven, Connecticut.

_. Hermione. New York: New Directions, 1981. _. Paint It Today. New York: New York University Press, 1992.

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her. Chapel Hill: University of North



22 Annette Debo

Carolina Press, 1984.

Mandel, Charlotte. "Magical Lenses: Poet's Vision Beyond the Naked

Eye." H.D. Woman and Poet. Ed. Michael King. Orono, Maine: National

Poetry Foundation, 1986. 301-318.

Morris, Adalaide. "Science and the Mythopoeic Mind: The Case of H.D." Chaos and Order. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1991. 195-220.

Newcomb, Lawrence. Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

Norwood, Vera. Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Nutting, Wallace. Maine Beautiful. New York: Garden City, 1924.

Thoreau, Henry David. Excursions. 1863. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter

Smith, 1975.

Wiebe, Robert H. Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Wolle, Francis. A Moravian Heritage. Boulder: Empire, 1972.



"H.D.’s American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of Place”

Documents

Transcript of "H.D.’s American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of Place”