H.D.'s Hippolytus Temporizes

BOOK REVIEWS H.D.'s Hippolytus Temporizes Melvin E. Lyon. H.D. 's Hippolytus Temporizes: Text and Context. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Studies: New Series No. 70,1991. 116 pp. Paper $6.95 MELVINE. LYON in this monograph offers a reading of H.D.'s play Hippolytus Temporizes, first published in 1927. At the center of the essay is a careful delineation of the discernible plot of the play, along with a discussion of other versions in H.D.'s lyric writing of the mythic material treated in the play—H.D.'s translations from the Hippolytus of Euripides (published in 1919) and poems of the 1920s that relate to the figures of the play (Phaedra, Hippolyta and Hippolytus, Artemis and Hehos). In the opening chapter Lyon establishes an essentiaUy biographical context for his interpretation. Following a dominant orientation in H.D. criticism, Lyon sees the play as another fictional reiteration of the traumatic events surrounding H.D.'s failed marriage with Richard Aldington in the years 1916-1919, and he finds parallels especially in the version ofthat story told in H.D.'s novel Bid Me To Live (finally published in 1960, but begun much earlier). In Lyon's reading, the biographical equivalences are fairly fixed, though he does admit to some ambiguity. H.D. is to be identified with Artemis (a goddess of "frozen passion" and wild isolated landscapes), Aldington with Hippolytus (a man torn between a pure spiritual love and an impure sexual one), and the sensual Phaedra with Dorothy Yorke, the "other" woman with whom Aldington had an affair that speeded the disintegration of the marriage. Lyon situates this reading within the larger framework of H.D.'s lifelong preoccupations with myth: the exploration of the figure of the "goddess" (her gradual move from sororal to maternal models, and from disparate and irreconcüable Greek goddesses to the syncretic Isis), and what H.D. called the search for the "Eternal Lover." In regard to the latter, Lyon sees H.D.'s marriage with Aldington as a continual imaginative preoccupation, which eventuaUy issues in her symbolic remarriage to him in the soldier-figure of Hugh Dowding, projected by H.D. as Achules in Helen in Egypt (written in 1952-1955). Lyon's study makes a welcome contribution to current criticism of H.D. for two reasons. First, very little has been said about Hippolytus Temporizes, despite the intense critical activity surrounding H.D. in the last decade or so. This study represents the third essay-length consideration of the play—John Walsh's reading in the "Afterword" to the 379 ELT 36:3 1993 Black Swan edition (1985) counts as the first, my essay (Contemporary Literature, 1990) being the second—and Lyon's monograph is likely to remain one of the most serious attempts to decipher the play for many years to come. Moreover, Lyon accomplishes a task here of simple and fundamental importance: the mundane work of establishing the obvious facts of the chronology of publication, commenting on the relation between different versions of the Euripidean material in previous poems and translations, and untangling the literal level" of the action of the play. This kind of "ordinary work" is a fairly rare occurrence in criticism of H.D., in part because the serious study of her writing is very recent; and because H.D., ignored by the New Criticism with its methodological explications, has instead been recovered (since about 1975) in the context of overriding theoretical issues (feminism, psychoanalysis, semiology and deconstruction, lesbian studies). Sophisticated readings of H.D.'s poetry and prose often eschew the dated orientation toward "sense," or the distinction between literal and metaphorical levels. Lyon's contribution to the criticism of H.D. is strongest in establishing a certain very useful groundwork for reading the play. The task of determining the "plot" of Hippolytus Temporizes is an arduous one—as any reader wül agree—requiring a great deal of sympathy and patience. This essay wül be of help in making the play more accessible than it has seemed and in allowing it to be understood in light of H.D.'s longstanding preoccupation with the story of Hippolytus. The emphases...