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

Introduction: "A Whole Deracinated Epoch"

INTRODUCTION "AWhole Deracinated Epoch" Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) met Norman Holmes Pearson in 1937when she visited New York City, during one of the few trips to America she made after going abroad in 1911.Then fifty-one, H.D. was a glamorous expatriate, who divided her life largely between a home in Vevey,Switzerland, built by Bryher,1 her close woman friend, and a rented flat in Lowndes Square, London. An established writer, she had published five volumes of poetry, including Collected Poems(1925),a verse drama, and severalworks of prose fiction. Pearson, a Yale graduate student, twenty-three years younger, was sent to interview her about the sources of her poetry, by William Rose Benet,2 a childhood acquaintance of hers who had become influential in American literary circles. H.D.'sbeauty and cosmopolitan allure in the mid-thirties are captured by the poet Horace Gregory:3 I remember her most clearly,standing in the lobby of a Shaftesbury Avenue theater, waving me a greeting, with a cigarette in her hand. She was, so I thought, an American Aphrodite, taller and less sensuous than her Greek ancestress, but with the same powers to attract and charm: she moved with an ease and brilliance that outshone all those who surrounded our small company.... In contrast to her, how middle-class, how drab other people looked - how cumbersome and ill at ease they seemed in evening dress: how hopelessly English. H.D.'s talk was like her verse, angular and swift, with small rushes of words. Her accent, like Ezra Pound's, was BritishAmerican -on-the- Riviera.4 Pearson was interested in the sources of H.D.'s poetry in connection with the Oxford Anthology of American Literature, which he was coediting with Benet. It was to be a pioneering anthology, one that showcased the work of contemporary American writers as "a second great period of literary creation " 5 for an academic community thus far unenlightened. 6 Perhaps because she was absent from the American scene, H.D. was eager for more contact with American writing, in which she felt a "drive and push" that was missing in Britain.7 She was pleased to be included. Clearly she was also charmed by Pearson, whose family's roots in colonial New England she shared on her father 's side.8 Her letters show that they discussed these roots at their first meeting , as well as Pearson'spoetry and his interest in Cotton Mather 9 and American cultural history.1°Certainly she appreciated his offer to sort out problems she was having with the publication of her books,11 for she invited him to return to Kenneth Macpherson's 12 apartment, where she and Bryher were staying, to chat further. H.D. and Pearson were drawn together by more than their common ancestry , however. They shared the experience of having lived in central Europe in the early thirties. After graduating from Yalein 1932, Pearson had studied at Oxford, England, and in Berlin in 1933,13 the same year that H.D. began·her analysis with Freud in Vienna. Indeed, both recognized the growing threat of Nazism and anticipated a second world war. Pearson had actually heard Hitler speak at a rally. Later, in a letter to William Carlos Williams,14 he connected his desire to do counterespionage work with that experience: I had the satisfaction of seeing tangible results to the work that I did; that I had the chance to do something about a situation that I had hated almost from the first time I heard Hitler speak or sawhim smugly at a Wagnerian opera. It was on all counts something that I had to do, and therefore I was lucky to be able to do it.15 Similarly, H.D. later described "shadows ... lengthening" and swastikas painted in chalk on the sidewalks, conveying the sense of foreboding that im2 Introduction: "AWhole Deracinated Epoch" pinged upon her psychoanalytic sessions. "No one brushed these swastikas out," she wrote. "It is not so easy to scrub death-head chalk-marks from a pavement." 16 In a letter to Pearson in 1938,she worried about friends in Vienna, commenting, "Things are much worse than people realise, on the whole." 17 During World War II, Pearson was based in London with the Office of Strategic Services(OSS), and he and H.D. endured the Blitztogether. Astheir friendship grew, Pearson came to represent "home" to...