H. D.’s Visionary War & Peace

Previously accessible only as one of a trove of typescripts preserved at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, H.D.’s complex visionary novel, The Sword Went Out to Sea, has been published as she would surely have wished it to be. Composed during 1946–1947, H.D.’s vision—in our present age of cultural upheavals, flaming eruptions of war, fear of Arctic meltdown—appears at times startlingly prescient. The editors, Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandevere, have achieved a definitive edition with scrupulous attention to accurate chronology of her drafts. They have done painstaking research into H.D.’s biographical circumstances of the time as well as her references to various works of literature and mythological personae. Their introduction offers valuable information and understanding of the book’s unusual structure. Thanks to the creative dedication of these editors and other H.D. scholars working on posthumous publication of H.D.’s prose works, the breadth and depth of her oeuvre afford new insights into the transitional developments of literary modernism. Recent titles include The Gift, edited by Jane Augustine; Asphodel, edited by Robert Spoo; Paint It Today, edited by Cassandra Laity; additional titles are in progress. The current title’s “by Delia Alton” acknowledges H.D.’s original wish to publish the book under that pseudonym.

The catalyst for The Sword Went Out to Sea was the war against civilians H.D. endured with the “buzz-bombings” of London during World War II, a trauma that reverberated with her experience under the bombings of London during World War I. Not surprisingly in England, thousands of military and civilian deaths promoted attendance at seances for survivors seeking contact with lost loved ones. The operation of occult phenomena in literary modernism has been increasingly noted in contemporary critical studies such as Timothy Materer’s Modernist Alchemy and Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism (see ELT, 46.1 [2003], 95–99). H.D. wrote to Lord Hugh Dowding, a leader in spiritualist circles and popular lecturer on psychic research. He had been Chief Air Marshal in 1940 of the Royal Air Force (RAF), credited with a plan that helped to win the Battle of Britain. Lord Dowding was to become one of the male figures in H.D.’s life upon whom she projected connection with an heros fatal, mythologized into betrayal; he appears as a central varying persona in the novel.

H.D. and Bryher formed a small circle working with a medium, Arthur Bhaduri, and his mother. At sessions conducted in H.D. and Bryher’s flat on Lowndes Square, they began to receive “tappings” via a round tripod table that had belonged to designer/poet William Morris. (In the novel, H.D. associates the tripod with the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi; at another point, she associates the round table with the time of King Arthur.) When Bhaduri left for India, H.D. began to work alone with the round table, convinced that her own psychic gifts were making her a conduit for important messages from five RAF pilots who had died in the war. Her autobiographical work, The Gift, written in 1943–1944, edited by Jane Augustine (see ELT, 42.3 [1999], 344–48), returns to a childhood scene where she listens to her grandmother relating memories of past lives, a gift of “seeing” that has passed on to the granddaughter. Excited by the messages received through the tripod table, H.D. invited Lord Dowding to examine her notes, expecting his collaboration. Instead, she was shocked by his attitude of disdainful rejection of her intensive psychic work, a shock that contributed to a severe hallucinatory breakdown. After her six-month recovery at a clinic in Kusnacht, Switzerland, H.D.’s novel evolved as a powerful act of “exploratory prose” through which she framed a remarkable theory of “pleats of time”—basic to the structure of her conception.

As in much of H.D...