A Helen from Bethlehem

...examined the artifacts and pictures Freud had placed round the room before she dared look at the Master...

...The shock of Pound's betrayal drove Hilda to writing poetry...

...She lacks Pound's prickly observations, or William Carlos Williams'quirky exuberance...

...For years H.D...

...This was not, however, a scene to faze Ezra...

...The struggle between her love for Pound and a desire to be her own person reverberated throughout her life...

...He rationalized this behavior by claiming a precedent in the "troubadour" tradition of courtly love...

...There is a remote inhumanity to her poetry that gives many passages a marmoreal clamminess...

...Our heroine was born Hilda Doolittle on September 10, 1880, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, then a mostly Moravian town...

...Nevertheless, he persuaded her to follow him to England in 1911, where he was already a leading member of the new generation of American expatriate writers...

...Imagiste at the bottom of the page...

...Subsequently, Bryher made a marriage of convenience with Robert McAl-mon, and they founded Contact Publishing House, which brought out H. D.' s books (along with some by Bryher, Pound and Lawrence...

...She did love him, though...

...His vanity offended, he scolded her," I see you are going to be very difficult____"Later he said accusingly, "The trouble is—I am an old man—you do not think it worth your while to love me...

...Her sessions with him freed her to go on to her strongest works: the three poems of Trilogy (1944-1946), and the epic, Helen in Egypt (1961), with its beautifully sculptured coda, "Winter Love," where she assessed her relations with Pound and Lawrence and her own struggles, as a poet, to survive the vicissitudes of love...

...Cut this out, shorten this line...

...In desperation, she developed a passionate friendship with D.H...

...She was also, as Robinson tells us, gifted with "extraordinary beauty, [and] it was this quality that was a determining factor in the course of her life, and in the direction of her work____There was often a faraway look in her eyes, and she tended to be pensive...

...Overcome by shyness, H.D...

...Now, through painstaking excavations, Robinson has reconstructed a more substantial figure—a woman who was an icon of her age's artistic life...

...The fierce little dog, normally snappish with strangers, took to H.D...

...Many years later, she described his reaction: "'But Dryad, this is poetry.' he slashed with a pencil...

...He called her "Dryad," and soon started neglecting his pal, William Carlos Williams, to read poetry to her and to cast an emotional spell over her that she never quite outgrew...

...She loved Hilda, nursed her through the birth, paid her bills, and adopted the daughter...

...She called him "Professor" and, in memory of her own scholarly father, "Papa...

...Most significantly, Bryher paid for H.D.'s analysis with Sigmund Freud in 1933-34...

...She seems more human in describing others than in explaining herself...

...On the personal front, Aldington soon turned from her to other women, and Pound continued to try and manage her life and work...

...poems in the popular taste...

...typified Freudian sublimation almost too completely...

...Exactly what happened between Lawrence and H.D...

...Despite Robinson's conjectures (largely based on biographical reconstruction from Lady Chatterly and The Man Who Died), another lover of H.D.'s is usually credited with being the father...

...While her husband was on the battle-front during World War I, she was meeting Lawrence for woodland trysts on a "whortleberry" colored blanket that was later to figure prominently in Lady Chatterly's Lover...

...On Poetry A HELEN FROM BETHLEHEM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THERE ARE SO many vignettes of symbolic significance in Janice S. Robinson's enlightening H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet (Houghton Mifflin, 490 pp., $17.95) that the book frequently seems an allegory of 20th-century poetry, not a mere biography...

...slough off the fantasy, accept the tangible, go out, go out, go forth, renounce the cult of dream for stark reality, the ashes, the dark scarf the veils of widowhood...

...Lawrence...

...There she discovered him about to cement a poetic dynasty with Yeats by marrying the daughter of one of the Irish poet's mistresses, whose surname was Shakespear...

...At 15, she and the teenage Ezra Pound fell in love, appropriately enough at a Halloween party...

...The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins...

...Unfortunately for her, Pound had developed a habit of in vol ving himself with several women simultaneously...

...Within a short time, her verse was the talk of the hour, she was married to Richard Aldington (an affected minor British writer), and she was living across the hall from Pound and his Shakespearian bride...

...Given Hilda's monogamous Moravian upbringing, to her this looked like fickleness...

...In the tea room of the British museum she showed her mercurial fiance "Hermes of the Ways" and "Orchard," two impressionistic, emotional satires of his woman-chasing, in Attic settings...

...In any event, Aldington refused to support mother or child, yet he would not divorce...

...Pound thus created the famous movement and gave Hilda the name she would use throughout the rest of her long life (she died in 1961...

...That is not to suggest H.D.'s biographer is wrong to deem her an important 20th-century poet...

...Have you a copy...

...Near the end of her life, in "Winter Love," she vividly recalled "the first unsatisfied desire?the first time, that first kiss,/the rough stones of a wall,/the fragrance of honey-flowers, the bees,/and how I would have fallen but for a voice/calling through the brambles/and tangle of bay-berry/and rough broom,/ Helen, Helen, come home;/there was a Helen before there was a War,/but who remembers her...

...Not surprisingly, the situation turned less than idyllic...

...Within a few years, Amy Lowell's triter version of Imagism (Ezra scornfully called it" Amygism") had replaced the classical sparenessof H.D.'s...

...has been a misty figure, remembered vaguely, if at all, by verse readers as the first" Imagist," and by scholars of psychoanalysis as the author of the perceptive Tribute to Freud...

...At its best her verse was classical in its simplicity and contemporary in its emotions: Rise from your apathy, your dream, the die was cast and Helen lost...

...The litanies of classical names, the constant weaving together of chance conjunctions into a Poundian web of allusions, the pallid pensiveness page after interminable page—all these qualities combine to make a little of H.D.'s verse go a long way...

...HILDA DESCRIBED her first encounter in Vienna with the father of psychoanalysis in a detailed letter to Bryher...

...leave lovers to their happiness and grope your way, ignoble and defenseless in the dark...

...She apparently was happy with the identification...

...When she spoke, her voice was rhythmic and musical...

...Ultimately, H.D...

...Freud, being fond of chows, kept one in his consulting room...

...Robinson's feminist defense of H.D.'s behavior notwithstanding, one can sympathize a little with the exasperation of the men in her life at the " Dryad" in her?a self-absorption that made her withdraw emotionally...

...Will this do?' and he scrawled H.D...

...Through her perceptive eyes, we see the great creative thinker of our century tunneling into the unconscious, fluidly developing his theories in response to his patients...

...at once: "I think that if the chow hadn't liked me, I would haveleft, 1 was so scared by Oedipus...

...yours was the guilt...

...Lawrence obviously stirred H.D.'s emotions deeply, but this affair also ended badly when she discovered she was pregnant: "He never wrote to me again, after I told him I was expecting this child...

...down, down, down the path of glory, the Sun goes into the dark, the Gods decree that Helen is deserted utterly...

...Lawrence began Lady Chatterly's Lover with the somber warning: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically...

...In fact, Robinson makes an excellent case for H.D.'s being the model for Connie Chatterly—rather than the usually cited Lady Cynthia Asquith, with whom Lawrence had no involvement...

...He did further injury by eradicating evidence of their affair and deliberately misleading early biographers: For example, Aldington is responsible for the story that Lawrence was impotent...

...was rescued from her traumatic predicament by a rich Englishwoman, Winifred Ellerman, who sometimes dressed as a man, liked to be referred to as "he" and called herself "Bryher...

...tried to shore fragments of the past against those ruins, and in doing so, this Helen from Bethlehem embodied her "tragic age...

...The only surviving girl among three boys, with a science professor for a father and an artistically inclined mother, she grew up intellectual...

...Andwefindout what it was like to lie on the famous couch: "A sphinx faces the bed...

...This ethereal glamor made her a kind of Helen of Troy, bound to attract the wrong man...

...remains less than clear...

...Hilda and Pound became engaged in spite of her parents' disapproval...

...Then we can send this, or I'll type it when we get back...

...I'll send it to Harriet Monroe of Poetry...

...Like Pound, Freud saw her as a Helen of Troy from Bethlehem...

...Her Tribute, dedicated to "Sigmund Freud—blameless physician," portrays him as a modern Asklepios, stoic in his loneliness, relentless in his quest for truth...

...Perhaps excessively happy...

...I did not want to go to bed, the white 'napkin for the head' was the only professional touch, there were dim lights like an opium dive...

...Her long slender neck supported a head of classical proportion and features—when lost in thought she had something of the look of a Greek statue—and she sometimes had a startled look, as if suddenly awakened...