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

3. "Our Mystery," 1952-1954

CHAPTER THREE ccOur Mystery" 1952-1954 The main creative event in this interval was the composition of H.D.'s long poem Helen in Egypt after a five-yearhiatus during which she wrote no poetry. H.D. began the poem in the autumn of 1952, having been inspired in part by Pearson's importunement as well as by her reading.1 Both H.D. and Pearson marveled at the mystery of its beginning. H.D. wrote that she was in a state of "eternal present" before she began to write, and Pearson repeatedly used the phrase "our mystery," alluding not only to H.D.'s unpublished novel "The Mystery" (which he had suggested) but also to her fulfillment of his wish for more poetry. For example, he remarked on the empathy between them, "that I should havewished for new poems, and find that you havebegun them already, as though I read ectoplasmic wavesfrom your vitality" (17September 1953). In addition, Pearson's allusions to "our mystery" refer more broadly to a mythopoeic view of history that the two shared. Both H.D. and Pearson regarded ancient myth as a repository of sacred revelation and substituted a metahistorical, spiritual definition of truth for an empirical one. Indeed, they practiced a method of interpretation related to this viewpoint: the tendency to see affinities and parallels in historical evidence, which then become the basis for claims of a formal identity that is interpreted to reflect universality. (This hermeneutic was standard practice in mythography and psychoanalysis,fields of inquiry that interested them both.) 2 Also, they shared an epistemological bias that favored intuition and emotion over empiricism and reason.3 Evidence of this mythopoeic view of history is found not only in H.D.'s repeated admonition in the letters that she was telling the same story in each of her romances despite their different historical contexts, but also in her notes H.D. byDeliaAlton, where she describes her attempts to synchronize historical time with "dream time" or "the gloire." 4 Pearson's appreciation of this view is evident in his role in the writing of "The Mystery" as well as in his urging her to write more "Delia Altons," in order to continue to convey the relationship of historical people and events to her mythical quest and legend. Further, this tendency to transmute history into a drama of the soul was familiar to Pearson from his study of American literature, the history of which he conceptualized as being strongly marked by "the Puritan instinct of introspection ," which had been vigorously revived in the nineteenth-century "New England Renaissance," particularly in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 5 In fact, Pearson singlesout the ability to extract the "innate spiritual significance" from the "outmoded historical data" of the past as Hawthorne's legacy. 6 It is significant that Pearson continued to send copies of his essays on American literature and editions of American writers to H.D., who read them and commented on her own relation to the writers in question. She also read widelyin his (and W. H. Auden's) five-volume anthology, Poetsof theEnglishLanguage (1950), throughout the poem's composition. Indeed, if Pearson's phrase "our mystery" exaggerated the intellectual and emotional affinity that set the poem in motion, H.D. did not correct him. Rather, she commented that it was his prodding that was responsible for "her embarcation on the good ship Helena for Egypt," and she adopted a strategy of sending him sections of the first part of the poem ("Pallinode") as they were completed in order to free herself to compose more (30 September 1952). She continued part 2 of the poem ("Leuke") in the summer of 1952,after being 120 "Our Mystery," 1952-1954 operated on for an intestinal occlusion, relying again on Pearson's responses for validation,7 and she wrote part 3 ("Eidolon") during the first six months of 1954.As she had during the composition of Trilogy, H.D. asked Pearson for advice about the direction of part 3.This time, however, she did not followhis advice as fully as she had earlier, apparently because it implied a degree of emotional resolution that she could not achieve. After the success of her recording sessions and further consultation with Pearson, she added the prose captions in 1955. Responding to H.D.'s excitement during its composition, Pearson regarded Helen in Egypt as the culmination of her career...