Sacred Belonging: Writing, Religion and Community in H.D.'s Second World War Novels

Abstract

Abstract: This article considers two works from H.D.'s Second World War writing: The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. situates herself in the context of diverse intimate communities: her spiritualist circle, her partnership with Bryher, her family and previous generations of Moravians. These communities ground her personal vision of writing as a spiritual exercise that will bring healing to both the individual psyche and the wider society ravaged by war. The significance of community is such that when she becomes isolated, desolation and breakdown follow. The restoration of communication and community through vision and writing leads to healing and a particular understanding of religious modernism as a unity of spiritual and material, transcendent and ordinary.

Keywords:

• H.D.
• religion
• spiritualism
• writing
• modernism

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the AHRC.

Notes

¹H.D., The Gift by H.D.: The Complete Text, ed. Jane Augustine, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998, p. 215. Subsequent references are to this edition and cited in parentheses in the text. H.D.'s tension can be seen in her wartime correspondence. She wrote to Bryher of listening to the news: ‘I listen-in the usual 4 times daily. It takes all my energy and time and inbetween [sic], I try simply to keep myself together’. H.D. to Bryher, 18 June 1940, Bryher Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

²In her letters to Bryher in 1946, H.D. swings between intense anxiety and calmer reflections on her past and present surroundings. One letter reads: ‘You may think that I am mad, but I am pretty certain that this apartment is wired throughout … you must not come here. They may trap us both’. However, a few weeks later she writes: ‘Do not worry about Voices, Fido dear. That is all over now’. H.D. to Bryher, 23 September 1946 and 6 October 1946, Bryher Papers.

³H.D., ‘H.D. by Delia Alton’, Iowa Review 16:3, 1986, (pp. 180–221).

⁴Rachel Connor, H.D. and the Image, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 45.

⁵Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 4.

⁶Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 16, xii.

⁷Donna Krolik Hollenberg (ed.), Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. & Norman Holmes Pearson, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997, pp. 94, 104–5; Caroline Zilboorg (ed.), Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters 1918–61, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 269–70, 280, 295.

⁸For a discussion of trauma and H.D.'s First World War writing, see Suzette Henke, ‘H.D.: Psychoanalytic Self-Imaging’, in Suzette Henke (ed.), Shattered Subjects, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 25–53.

⁹Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 10.

¹⁰Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 6.

¹¹Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 4.

¹²Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 14–15.

¹³Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 3.

¹⁴Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, (1917) trans. from the German by Shaun Whiteside, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, London: Penguin, 2005, pp. 201–218.

¹⁵Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 35.

¹⁶Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–3.

¹⁷Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 157.

¹⁸Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, p. 123.

¹⁹Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, p. 254.

²⁰H.D., The Sword Went out to Sea: (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007, p. 67. Subsequent references are to this edition and cited in parentheses in the text.

²¹This is a clear example of the fictionalization of H.D.'s life in The Sword. H.D.'s husband, Richard Aldington, was not killed in the First World War, although they did separate at that time.

²²Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, p. 165.

²³Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth-Century England, London: Virago, 1989, pp. 6–10.

²⁴For an analysis of coding, decoding and hieroglyphics in H.D.'s poetry, see Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, pp. 118–21.

²⁵The history of encounters between European Moravians and Native Americans (mainly Lenape, Mahican, Shawnee and other Algonquian groups) is more complex and compromising than The Gift suggests, although the text does not entirely elide the history of conflict. H.D. included a detailed description of massacres of Native American and European Moravians at the hands of hostile tribes and European colonists. See H.D., The Gift, p. 273.

²⁶Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, p. 124.

²⁷Adalaide Morris, How to Live/What to Do: H.D.'s Cultural Poetics, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 135.

²⁸H.D., Tribute to Freud, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975, p. 47.

²⁹See Luke 6.38.

³⁰H.D.'s communities are intimate, but not exclusive, as she writes in Trilogy: ‘that way of inspiration / is always open, / and open to everyone’. H.D., ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’, in Trilogy, New York: New Directions, 1998, pp. 1–60 (p. 29).

³¹One may wonder why H.D. did not join one of the circles operating at the Institute for Psychic Research, seeking public legitimization, as many mediums did. H.D., however, was generally somewhat secretive and defensive about her occult interests and seems to have been concerned about her reputation among friends and colleagues. Majic Ring explores her connection to Manisi/Bhaduri more thoroughly; it was his reference to her own past visionary experiences that led H.D. to trust him and to desire his presence in her circle.

³²Wunden Eiland was an island in the middle of a river near the Moravian settlement dedicated to the wounds of Jesus, and, in The Gift, the meeting place of the Hidden Church.

³³Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere, ‘Introduction’, in The Sword Went out to Sea: (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007, pp. (p. xv–liii).

³⁴Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 12. For further discussion of the representation of trauma in history writing, see Dominick LaCopra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Some studies, such as Detloff's The Persistence of Modernism, attempt to bridge the discourse on traumas that are public and communal versus those that are private and isolating. See Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism, p. 13.

³⁵Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, p. 19. MacKay makes a similar point, although she cautions against a too simplistic identification of formal experimentation and anti-conservative politics. See MacKay, Modernism, pp. 7–9.

³⁶Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, p. 213.

³⁷I use the word ‘madness’ here deliberately, partly because H.D. uses it herself in the course of The Sword, but also in order to avoid an anachronistic use of clinical language.

³⁸Jane Augustine, ‘Preliminary Comments on the Meaning of H.D.'s The Sword Went out to Sea’, Sagetrieb 15:1–2, 1996, pp. 121–32 (p. 130).

³⁹Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28:1, 2001, pp. 1–22 (pp. 4–5).

⁴⁰See I Corinthians 13.12.