The American H.D.

Preface

preface Upon repatriating, Hilda Doolittle, known by her initials “H.D.,” wrote that she was “charmed—enchanted & happy to be re-newed, returned” to the United States.1 Her repatriation took place at age seventy-two, when she filed the papers and took the oath of allegiance to recover her American citizenship, revoked by a 1907 naturalization policy that ordained that any American woman who married an “alien” would forfeit her citizenship. As a result, when H.D. married Richard Aldington in 1913, she simultaneously became a wife and a British subject. Despite this change in her legal citizenship, H.D. always considered herself American , an identity that significantly impacted her writing, and a feeling she verbalized in an interview given in her seventies: “But I am very much an American. . . . Anyway, I feel one. Sometimes by living away one grows closer” (Stix). Through her repatriation, H.D. emphasizes her feeling of being American by legally becoming one again, merging her psychological state with the material requirements of the nation. The renewal she experiences is one of being officially reunited with the country in which she lived until age twenty-five and with her enduring feelings of Americanness, which Bryher, H.D.’s intimate companion for over forty years, identifies as growing stronger throughout her life, despite her physical separation from the U.S. In her memoir about H.D., The Heart to Artemis, Bryher wrote, “to me she has always been the most American of poets” (273). This book considers the significance of the concept of nation in modernist writer H.D.’s artistic vision and life. H.D. serves as an important subject for study because of her versatile career that stretched from 1909 to 1961: she was a major American writer who lived her adult life abroad; x Preface a poet who also wrote experimental novels, short and long stories, essays , reviews, one children’s book, and translations; a white writer with ties to the Harlem Renaissance; an intellectual who collaborated on avant-garde films and film criticism; and an upper-middle-class woman who refused to follow gender conventions. H.D.’s wide-ranging career enables a study centering on a single figure to become an expansive narrative about modernism’s relationship with the United States and the nuances of the American nation, from the Gilded Age through the Cold War. In emphasizing the role of nation in H.D.’s life and writing, I follow in the footsteps of H.D.’s close friend and literary executor, Yale University professor Norman Holmes Pearson. A proponent of the American literary canon, Pearson rarely missed an opportunity to emphasize that H.D. was an American—that she felt like an American before repatriating and that she was legally an American afterward. He facilitated the publication of H.D.’s texts from World War II onward, and he was responsible for the treasure trove of H.D. materials at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Intent on shifting critical attention away from a limited imagist portrayal of H.D., Pearson focused on the publication of her later, more mature work. He was instrumental in publishing The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), The Flowering of the Rod (1946), By Avon River (1949), Tribute to Freud (1956), Selected Poems (1957), Bid Me to Live (1960), Helen in Egypt (1961), Hermetic Definition (1972), and Trilogy (1973), and he left many other manuscripts in H.D.’s archive ripe for publication. He forged relationships with publishers, recruited reviewers, and patrolled reviews that appeared—once, for instance , reassuring an editor at Carcanet Press about a less than glowing review on Hermetic Definition: “Hugh Kenner did a rather lazy review in the New York Times. Now that he has written the review I hope that he will have time to read the book.”2 In Contemporary Literature’s 1969 special issue on H.D., edited by L. S. Dembo, Pearson gave an essential interview about H.D. Besides demystifying her biography, Pearson directed scholars toward H.D.’s Tribute to Freud and her later poetry, emphasizing its significance by comparing Trilogy and Helen in Egypt to Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, and Yeats’s poetry (Pearson and Dembo 438). He Preface xi sought to reposition H.D. within the modernist canon, agreeing with the interviewer L. S. Dembo that “you’re quite correct in putting H.D. in the very center of the modern poetic...