Books and Plays

What Will She Do with Seven
Fat Years?

By CLINCH CALKINS

What will she do with seven fat years
Now that her seven lean years are over
Whose throat is baked with the parching tears
She would not shed for a faithless lover?

She is used to a broken pitcher,
She is used to an arid well.
She knows a terrible tale of drought
Which her tongue cannot tell.

To one who has filled, when the fields were failing,
Her empty sacks at an empty grange,
And sought waste grain in an ancient flailing
Enough will be strange.

First Glance

It is the business of a novelist, as it is the business of any artist who employs the imagination, to show us a world we never saw before and shall never see again. Out of the level chaos of nature he lifts for a moment the peak of his own consciousness; though we shall see other peaks later, we shall not see precisely this one. Even the so-called realist is doing nothing else—at least for me—than I have said, for surely there is no world here and now that all of us perceive alike; the realist gives us a new earth even if he only proves the importance of what we have been looking at all the while.

"H. D.'s" who might have been expected always to con-
fine herself to the unique idiom of her astounding poetry,
has written a novel. But its idiom is not very different
from that of her poetry, thanks to three predecessors in
prose, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce; and
its world is identically the same—though effort is required
to perceive the identity. The world of "Palimpsest"
(Houghton Mifflin: $3.50) is a wider one than its author
has employed before; there are more persons in it, more
events that can be given common names. The three sepa-
rate parts of the narrative have separate scenes—ancient
Rome, modern London, and modern Egypt; and though they
have a single heroine, she has separate names and exists in
separate ages. She is one woman—and so, unmistakably,
is all this world one world. It is her world, too, and it is
"H. D.'s".

"So sure was that world, so distant, yet so clear, so
definite, so precise that no casual treachery could blight
it. It was so personal a world that Mavis with all her years
of tenuous probings had not even seen it. . . . Behind Lon-
don there was another London. It was just to keep that
other London that she had blinded them all, almost blinded
herself by her attitude, her panache, her not quite di-
minished glory." So speaks Raymonde in the second and
best of the three narratives which compose the book. So
in different words had spoken Hipparchia in the first, and
so speaks Mrs. Fairwood in the third. The three of them

are one in their struggle—described with the utmost
subtlety—to hold fast some inner world where, and where
only, life may go on without interruption in obedience to
the necessities of the soul. It is the desperation with which
the three women clutch this hidden place that makes
"Palimpsest" a peculiarly modern novel; when has it ever
been so needful, for those wishing to live, that they should
do so privately, guarding with the jealousy of the first
Stoics the little or large domain they have marked out for
themselves?

It is the form the action takes—if it may be called
action—that guarantees the world of “Palimpsest” to be
personal with “H. D.” I should not like this to be con-
strued too literally. But both Hipparchia and Raymonde
are poets. They have been called “cold,” the writers of
“cold” verses. And Hipparchia can reflect that when her
lovers complain of her unfeeling she is at “the very exalted
height of ecstacy”; while Raymonde, outwardly composed,
knows herself within to be “a sort of lightning-rod for all
the meters.” This may or may not be “H. D.’s” answer to
those who have called her own poems splinters of Greek ice.
Those who know them for the passionate things they are
will need no answer. They should read the book, however.
It is not only a most remarkable and beautiful book; it is
as well an explanation and an amplification of our most
reserved poet.

MARK VAN DOREN

The "Different" Negro

*The Negro in American Life.* By Jerome Dowd. The Century
Company. $5.

Mr. DOWD is not a newcomer in the field of the Negro. He
has been studying him for more than twenty years.
Though he is a Southerner he has no violent antipathy toward
the Negro, even while honestly believing him happiest "in his
place." He is affiliated with the Inter-Racial Movement, and he
is obviously deeply sincere in his desire to see as little friction
as possible between the two racial groups. With such a back-
ground, one would expect a pronouncement from his pen to
throw important light on the problem.

One realizes with regret, however, that Mr. Dowd's habits of
thought have not changed. Some years ago he attempted to
make a study of the cultures of Africa. Two volumes of that
work appeared, and no more. They are worthless. The sloven-
liness of intellectual habit shown in them was such as to make
them useless for serious reference. The arrangement of the
data was careless; Mr. Dowd's sources were most superficial;
what monographic material existed was ignored. We have the
same use of data in this book; it may be distinguished for its
omissions. Unfortunately these include the most recent and im-
portant work, mostly published in scholarly journals, and prac-
tically unavailable to the general reader. It is obvious that Mr.
Dowd does not know these papers. This is true not only in the
biological sciences, where such lack of knowledge might be ex-
cusable, but in his own field of the social sciences. Let us see
how serious these omissions are.

Mr. Dowd first gives a résumé of the historical background
of the American Negro. Naturally he refers us to his own work
for the African cultures, but not even to mention Phillips's
standard work on slavery is inexcusable. Next comes a consid-
eration of the Negro in the North since the Civil War. The
thesis is that the Negro does not fare any better here than in
the South, though most of the data presented come from sources
(with the principal exception of the Report of the Chicago Race
Commission) the scholarly character of which is at best doubt-
ful. Then comes a discussion of the Southern Negro. We learn

For

DURRANT'S PRESS CUTTINGS,

St. Andrew's House, 32 to 34 Holborn Viaduct,
and 3 St. Andrew Street, Holborn Circus, E.C.1.

TELEPHONE: CITY 4963.

Cutting from the

Dated September 25 1926

Address of Journal Dublin

Palimpsest. By H. D. (Contact Editions, 29 Quai d'Anjou, Ile Saint-Louis, Paris.)

H. D. is well known as a writer of delicate, Hellenic, very beautiful poems. Now, in a beautifully printed book, she appears as the author of three long-short stories. The method is faintly Joycean, the subjects Rome (75 B.C.), post-war London, "Excavator's Egypt." The writing is difficult, is of extraordinary beauty (quotation is almost impossible, only a great breadth, a very long paragraph could do it justice), but the trees cloud the wood and the reviewer found it impossible to finish two of the three stories. One writes "impossible," but perhaps "unnecessary" would be a more fitting word, for maybe this desire to see the wood is stupid, is old-fashioned, and, if one comes to think of it, there are no woods only trees beyond trees endlessly so that any five or any fifty pages of Palimpsest are equal to the whole of Copperfield. But if five pages are as complete as fifty, why write fifty? No good answer is to be found, and H. D.'s book of poems is pulled down from its shelf and re-read. So few lines in each poem but each so completely expressed. Could not H. D. have as perfectly expressed these stories in three poems each of but ten or twenty lines? An ungracious question to ask when the several hundred pages have given so much pleasure. Palimpsest has that rare, precious quality—distinction.

L. R.

36

482

Saturday Review of Books

From 75 B.C. to 1925 A.D.

PALIMPSEST. By H. D. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1926. $3.50.

Reviewed by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

THE first venture of any writer in the field of prose fiction, unless it is unusual in theme or treatment, is likely to pass with little notice. H. D.'s book is sufficiently unusual in treatment to warrant considerable attention being paid to it. The treatment, however, overburdens the theme, or rather the three themes, for in this book of three hundred and thirty pages, we are told first, the story of a young Greek girl beloved by a Roman captain after the fall of Corinth; second, the story of an American woman in war-time London, torn between faithfulness to a dying creed of patriotism and loyalty, and the exacting demands of her art, and enduring mental torture in the process; third, the story of an unnamed married woman traveling with a friend in Egypt and falling partially in love with a young English officer invalided out of the war.

These three stories are held together only by the fact that all are told from the standpoint of the principal feminine character in each who is supposed to experience them; thus Hipparchia, the Greek hetaira of the first section becomes Raymonde in the second and the unnamed married woman in the third, by the device of having each of these characters tell the story from the vantage-point of the first person. Moreover, the technique is the same throughout: liberal use is made of the device of rendering the characters' unconscious thoughts in the way first developed by James Joyce in "Ulysses." In fact Joyce is specially involved and commended in the second section for having said that "the infinitely small held infinite possibilities."

Enough has been said to show that this book will probably obtain but few readers who can dispose of sufficient time to read it through to the conclusion. The number of those who admire it will perhaps be even smaller. For H. D. as the prose writer is not the same as H. D. the poet. The hand that guides the stream of words and images may be that of H. D.; but the voice is the voice of James Joyce. And the poet is clear just where the prose-writer is thick, muddy, and unsubtle. Compare the following:

Now she may say
that I adore her face
O brave, O true,
for looking on that ruin of her grace,

I shall see mirrored back,
my sun, just you,
All grave and decorous
and very rare,

As one set with dull gold and amber
And with fair
Tyrian blue hyacinths
Against hyacinth hair.

Does not this lyric contain all the old magic of H. D. with an added touch—a patina—of the Elizabethans? But compare this with the following from the near context:

Feet, feet, feet, feet. No Freddie, no Freddie not metres. Not poems. Not that kind of feet. No trochaic iambic or whatever, not verse free or otherwise. I am listening to something. To feet, feet, feet, but not that kind, nor your kind Freddie. No, not iambic feet, not beat and throb of metre, no Freddie. I don't want to write it.

Is it really worth while writing out all this endless set of variations and repetitions which go on for two pages more, simply to show that the poet's mind frequently wanders about while it is actually composing? Is not the poem itself worth much more than all the analysis upon it? Is the method of Joyce strictly speaking applicable to this sort of material? These questions demand an answer. To answer them, or to satisfy yourself concerning them, you must read through H. D.'s novel. To me the stern economy, the tenuous grace, the almost noiseless flight of H. D.'s genius in lyric poetry is swamped and lost in this spate of words. The section where she proves herself best master of her new medium is the first which does give, somewhat overladen by detail, some very vivid pictures of the Greek spirit absorbed and ravished by Rome and yet conquering the force that has beaten it. H. D. is still at her best when she deals with antiquity. From 75 B. C. to 1925 A. D. is too daring a leap. This novel is a palimpsest in more senses than one.

164

THE OUTLOOK

August 14, 1926

A Poet in Prose

PALIMPSEST. By H. D. Contact Editions, Quai d'Anjou, Ile Saint Louis, Paris.

IN these three stories of some hundred pages each H. D. offers to the world her first book of prose. She has already acquired an extraordinarily wide and uniform fame as a poet, the kind of fame which is usually accorded a writer only by posterity. This present volume will baffle many of her settled admirers, those to whom her poetry has been explained as one explains a recipe for a pudding. She has here left her well-ordered, familiar garden, where all the shrubs and flowers have been neatly tagged by the critics, and has shut the gate, one might almost say banged the gate, behind her. And plunged into the world outside, into the storm, into that tempest of life which lures to try them, only the hardiest of the children of men. Frail garden-lady she can be regarded no more. The record is so grim with intellectual directness, so gossamer fine with sensuous and emotional perceptions, that it makes difficult reading. This terrible Odyssey can never, like her poetry, be reduced to formulas for the acquisition of the middle-class mind.

Perhaps the finest story of the three is the second, called "Murex," which crowds into a tea-hour all

the brutality and the ecstacy of war London, and more than that, a kind of aesthetically fine, moral revaluation of life. This story, bulky though it be, is made, shaped, moulded as consciously as the smallest of her poems. Its sheer, at times intangibly sheer, thought texture is framed in the "blurred obliterating" atmosphere of London, London "in which there was nothing to do but listen, nothing to do but wait. Listen to what? Wait for what? . . . There was a sound of feet. There were feet, feet, feet passing up Sloane Street on the way to Victoria." The vibrancy of feeling at times suggests a new-blown glass bulb which is too brittle because removed too soon from the fire. The substance of thinking, observation, and vision is woven so sensitively that only those whose sight has been sharpened by the new things in modern literature can see the pattern that emerges on the surface of the firmly bound warp and woof. The people in the story, the American who though living in London and loving it remains American because *that* she is, the English Jewess who for all her birth in Hampstead might have been a "just unearthed Egyptian," the siren who falls like a blight or a fire, destroying, but cleansing and making possible new growth; all these are alive, are real, prick into the consciousness as sharply as the honey-coloured stippled wall of the little room and the sound of the feet tramping by to Victoria. But no one of these three nor "the webbed and beautifully veiled composite picture" of the three, is the important thing in the story. The situation is commonplace, even cheap. A slightly passé hetaira has under her own roof seduced the fiancé of the young guest to whom she professes an especial devotion. The important thing is that the bright thrust of H. D.'s mind flashed upon it, reveals it as a significant facet of life itself. It is like an anaemic and misshapen hand held up against strong sunlight; the ugly thing is transfigured by the glow of blood. Or like a brackenish pool from which a blue heron rises; the foul surface is dazzled into clear colour by the mere reflection of its wings.

This book contradicts the idea, so bruited abroad lately, of the value of nationalism in literature. Here is an expatriate American writing of first-century B.C. Rome and of Great War London, when obviously by popular dictum she should be concerning herself with West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But writing where she happens to be in the world, of what she happens to have experienced from life, life above and beyond the purely casual limitations of geography, and being always just herself without striving or pretence, she has found a speech that is not aggressively American, like Carl Sandburg's, or self-consciously Anglicised, like Henry James's, but the speech of an individual human being who is also a creative artist. H. D. is interested in writing not as a method of national self-glorification, or as a social pose, or as a paying profession, or as a means to any end whatsoever outside itself. It is writers like H. D., who are above the vulgarities of affectation or the stupidities of propaganda, writers whose immediacy of thought and feeling burn to ashes all intervening falseness, that have always been the hope of life as well as of literature.

LOUISE MORGAN.