Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. And Norman Holmes Pearson

4. "Are You and Erich Perhaps the Dioscuri?" 1955-1956

CHAPTER FOUR "Are YouandErichPerhapsthe Dioscuri ?" 1955-1956 In this interval H.D. documented her relationship with Erich Heydt, who had become linked with Pound and Pearson in her imagination. In the journal "Compassionate Friendship" (1955), she describes him as the inheritor of seven earlier male "initiators," beginning with Pound. 1 To the extent that Heydt reminded her of Pound, his attentiveness and interest in her work, along with problematic aspects of his background, revived the psychological tensions that were the source of her inspiration. For besides being infatuated with Heydt, H.D. was suspicious of his political affiliation during the war. She knew that he had grown up in Germany and wondered if he had been able to escape Nazi conditioning. 2 In her journal she conveyed the atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that pervaded the postwar milieu in the sanatorium by recording conflicting gossip about Heydt's alleged half-Jewishbackground. 3 Further, in H.D.'s imagination, Heydt, like Pearson, was a type of chevalier. She associated him with the "rosenkavalier" of Richard Strauss'sopera.4 In "Magic Mirror" (1956), the unpublished novel derived from this journal, in which Heydt is fictionalized as Dr. Erich Heller, another facet of his function is revealed. Heller enables the heroine to relive in memory the loss of her first child; that is, she remembers "the deepest depth of desolation" at the core of the illumination she achieved in her occult historical romances. In fact, the letters, the journal, and the novel all reveal that H.D. had paired Heydt with Pearson during the composition of Helen in Egypt.As she put it, "I think the Helenhas two god-fathers"; 5 Heydt enabled her to recover previously inaccessible parts of her inner life, and Pearson linked her to her homeland, to the outside world, and to the literary tradition. To complicate matters further, H.D.'s infatuation with Heydt coincided with a period of mild rivalry between H.D. and Bryher for Pearson'sattention. (It is noteworthy that H.D. regarded her friendship with E. M. Butler, whose work had been a major influence on Helen in Egypt,as a supplement to Bryher 's at this time.) 6 For although Pearson had been unsuccessful in arranging the publication of H.D.'s fiction, he had helped Bryher to publish several historical novels,7and he wrote to her and saw her more frequently than he did H.D. Although H.D. was pleased with Bryher's literary success and did not admit any jealousy to Pearson, his awareness ofH.D.'s disappointments contributed to his determination to bring about the publication of her Selected Poems (1956). It may also have given impetus to the exhibition of her work that he arranged at Yalein 1956 in honor of her seventieth birthday. Certainly Heydt became more entrenched in H.D.'s circle of intimates after Pearson'svisit at the end of 1954. At the beginning of 1955, he became Pearson's ally in encouraging H.D. to record part of Helen in Egypt.H.D.'s pleasure at these recording sessions resulted in her decision to write introductory prose captions to the poems' lyrics, a choice that Pearson supported. On 11 January 1955,he described the effectas "bardic, rather Greek in an odd way,as though some court-bard were telling the myths." In the following exchange, he and H.D. discuss both the recording sessions and the prose captions. ---- 90. TS Feb. 3 [1955] Dear Norman, Thank you for your letter and the beautiful carnation card. I am so happy about the disk-work [sic],went in yesterday by car and E[rich] came along "Are You and Erich Perhaps the Dioscuri?"1955-1956 and helped me. I did just 21 minutes this time, some of the first section with captions. It came up quite well- the first set, ofJan. 26, sent surface, is really the second disk, in time. The first one I did is more lyrical and has sections from Eidolon; this one of Feb. 2 has Egypt and some Leuke; one side of disk is Achilles, the other, Paris. It is difficult editing the sections but it has given me the idea of making some captions or short descriptive paragraphs, as introductions to cantos, not to all of them, but from time to time; they should be printed not as notes at end or beginning, but along with the poem...