Modern Morals and the Human Heart

...an American girl named Bella Carter, whose aspirations other than desire for sexual union are vague...

...Despite his arrogance and his need to be served by women, he will always, Julia knows, comprehend and distinguish what she feels as a woman in love, as a mother and as an artist...

...It was not until the turn of the century that the hero as artist, particularly as novelist or poet, became a significant figure within a work of art...

...and, of prime importance, a great and intense novelist called Frederick, who has a red beard, a German wife, a house in Cornwall and a philosophy whose fundamental tenet is that man-is-man and woman-is-woman...

...As for the language of the story, it indicates that H. D.'s poetic talent is still a significant one...

...The larger human meaning in Julia's discovery is refreshingly radical and romantic...

...Her words, though never inaccurate, are always clear, bright and simple...

...Once there, however, he quickly achieved a dominant position and has remained, ever since, a central figure in our literature, although his preeminance has been challenged lately by the scientist-administrator and the rich-man-in-search-of-himself...

...It is Frederick who insists that marriage can be a matter of love and art both, after it has ceased, for Julia and Rafe, to be either...

...And the cultural implications of her insight and achievement are exciting: They suggest that the survival of community of any sort depends on the presence of imagination in individuals...

...But Carlyle was referring to actual artists, to the heroic power and influence of their work...

...The book stands as tangible proof that strong and evocative novels based upon romantic assumptions about the human condition can still be written...

...and rediscovers and clarifies her love for Frederick...

...I would like to serve your genius...

...A truth has been revealed to Julia and it is this: The very qualities that make a man an artist—a genius —make him the proper lover for a woman who is also an artist...

...She says, addressing him (in absence) in one of the ode-like passages that are interspersed among the more plainly lyrical parts of this novel, "You said I was a living spirit, but I wasn't living until you wrote to me, 'We will go away together!' We have gone away together, I realize your genius, in this place...

...Clearly...

...her declaration occurs near the end of the novel and we never see her and Fredreick together again...

...She has abolished the cliche which insists that the man of talent is likely to be more selfish than other men...

...If her manner of serving his genius is not clear, the source of her love for him is: It is her sense of his tenderness, of his almost feminine capacity for understanding what she feels...

...Technically and stylistically, Bid Me to Live is a fine work...

...It is Frederick who sends her letters that are a "living fire" and that inspire her most intense poetry...

...The author takes pleasure in the subtle gradations of meaning among words and at the same time registers her sense of the concrete...

...Eva is a goddess-mother who feeds Frederick's creativity and who presumably encourages him to sleep with other women so that he may complete his sexual experience...

...yet curiously they are never uninteresting, because they are never beyond the range of easy reception by the recording sensibility that transmits them to us...

...Anyhow, I need a great-mother as much as you do...

...her husband, Rafe—himself a poet, though at the moment a soldier...

...Surely, however, she would not serve it as Eva, his German wife, does...

...Julia Ashton is the woman, and the person who steadies her, as she gropes her way toward recognition and control of the links between her artist-self and her other selves, is Frederick, the novelist-genius...

...The war, enforcing its atmosphere of transciency and provisional commitment upon the human heart, which longs for the permanent and enduring, is a poignant and well-realized presence...

...By denying her, Frederick turns her toward the composer Vane, since she can no longer remain the wife of Rafe, who, with childlike cruelty, has used his marriage bed for his affair with Bella Carter...

...In effect...

...Julia, by contrast, had said earlier, again to the absent Frederick, "I could not be your mother...

...The story, set in England during World War I, concerns a poetess...

...Bid Me to Live, through its portrait of Frederick, is a contribution to the literature about D. H. Lawrence...

...He accomplishes this by involuntarily withdrawing from her touch at just the moment Julia believes that their love and friendship is about to be consummated in love and sex...

...H. D.'s new novel, Bid Me to Live, like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, belongs to what must now be called the "traditional" genre of the serious novel: to the type in which the protagonists are indeed artists...

...It is he who writes to Julia, "We must go away where angels come down to earth," and who, as a consequence, unintentionally forces her to isolate, purify, define and firmly take hold of her being as an artist...

...Her characters, except for Julia and Frederick, tend to be flat and toneless...

...Julia Ashton...

...It is Frederick, not her husband Rafe, who understands what Julia feels when she loses her baby...

...How, precisely, she would serve it is not made clear...

...But Vane takes Julia to Cornwall, which was, until recently, Frederick's home...

...The various human relationships are delicately but firmly developed and the ruptures that occur between people are occasions for the release of life, not for its destruction or sterilization...

...discovers the meaning of "gloire"—that ineluctable quality which existence has for romantic artists like Frederick and herself...

...Instructor of English, CCNY More than 100 years ago Carlyle called our attention to the hero as poet and as man of letters—as artist...

...It is also, in a related but larger sense, a story of the Blooms-bury group and of how its members experienced the war...

...Julia has seen that creative sensibility is the last best hope for making a human relationship succeed...

...a composer named Vane, who is a man of decency and intelligence...

...But above all, H. D. makes vivid and credible the pain-ecstasy that is the substance of both art and love...

...It is, too, a study of the effects of modern manners and morals upon the human heart, an exploration of the multiple connections between a certain woman's role as artist and her other roles, which happen to be those of wife, housekeeper, mother-of-a-child-dead-at-birth, wartime citizen and mistress...

...And in Cornwall Julia discovers that she does not love Vane...