H.D. and “The Disease to Please”
by Gary Lehmann
For those readers who are able to posit the notion that Jane Fonda may actually be a multi-faceted modern woman, her new book, My Life So Far, opens up some interesting issues. Some people are still stuck in the 1960s and cannot see beyond the “Hanoi Jane” who stirred up so much trouble during the Viet Nam War by speaking out about the futility of that war. Her new book addresses a much more modern topic.
In this book, she explains that her relationships with men have haunted her throughout her life. She says she felt she was strangely controlled by her first husband, the French film director, Roger Vadim. In her big break-through film, Barbarella, she wanted to please him so much that she willingly subsumed her own desires to his. When she married political activist Tom Hayden she pursued his goals and his needs for years. The marriage to media mogul Ted Turner occurred when they were both older, but in all three cases, and any number of other relationships along the way, Jane felt that she has suffered from a “need to please” men -- which probably had its origin with her enigmatic relationship with her father, the actor Henry Fonda, and the suicide of her mother when Jane was still a girl.
“My relationships…cost me my own voice,” she now says. “I want people, especially women, to see how insidious such efforts to please others can be." Her problem is by no means unique.
The poet H.D. [born Hilda Doolittle] might be said to have suffered from the same “disease to please” quite a few years earlier. She was born in Bethlehem, PA to an academic family. Her father, Charles Doolittle, was a Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy. “Everything revolved around him,” Hilda wrote many years later. He was a stern patriarch, hard to impress. In this, her experience was much like Jane’s.
At Bryn Mawr College, Hilda met Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Under Pound’s tutelage, she began writing poetry. He gave her the moniker “H.D.,” and they became engaged. On an August day in a museum tearoom, Pound both gave her a pen name and determined that she should be a published poet. When she left school two years later under something of a cloud, it was Ezra Pound who introduced her to his literary circle, the Imagists, in London. There she met her future husband, Richard Aldinton, who she married after the Pound relationship wore off. Naturally, she wrote Imagist poetry, and submitted much of her work to the harsh review of her mentor, the patriarchal Mr. Pound. She later had a remarkable friendship with D. H. Lawrence and then Cecil Gray, the future father of her daughter. Before the First World War, she emerged as a young woman firmly under the wing of various men. They ultimately had the effect of both promoting and marginalizing her talents.
The war to end wars changed a great deal. In many ways, the pre-war Imagists were poets who reflected in words the aesthetic values of Impressionist painters. They created objectified poetry, based on images of life, both inanimate and human. After the war, the same group of poets [Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens] gradually came to be known as Modernists as they absorbed the harsh realities of the War.
In so far as H.D. was an Imagist, she pursued clarity through precise visual images. As she emerged a Modernist, she discovered the need to write about what Rafael Campos has called “human relationships contextualized in their starkly new and sometimes alienating surroundings.”
Here, H.D. found her voice in the experiences of classical females, like Helen. In Homer’s version of the Trojan Wars it is the male version of the story that is told. In H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, the silent heroine speaks for herself. In Helen, it is H.D. who finds a feminist voice with which to speak to the world.
Helen
by H. D.
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
As she gained an independent voice, she started to find other women who were fighting a similar fight. H. D.’s personal relationships with women varied a great deal. She was an early friend of Marianne Moore, who encouraged her. After so many disastrous relationships with men, she took up an openly lesbian relationship with the poet, novelist, and critic Annie Winifred Ellerman, who published under the name Bryher. Together they traveled around Europe through the twenties, writing poetry and generally acting out the lives of wild women of the flapper era.
In 1933-34, H.D. moved to Vienna and studied under Sigmund Freud. She became one of the few cases where he psychoanalyzed one of his own students, after which her poetry became even more openly feminist in tone. As she worked with Freud, she kept notes which were later published as Advent. Ten years later, she published a slightly fictionalized version of her psychoanalysis by Freud entitled Writing on the Wall. Today, the two manuscripts have been re-issued by New Directions under the title Tribute to Freud and a fascinating read it is. What H.D. seems to have discovered is what Jane Fonda discovered many years later. Dedicating your life to the service of others isn’t always the best way to serve the development of your own special talents.
Or as Jane Fonda put it in her book, “It was true, but not entirely true, that I was always on a path of self-discovery -- of different aspects of self-discovery when I would meet a remarkable man who would bring me further down that path, and so I was at least co-captain of my own ship."
H.D. wrote long before the general public was ready for the idea of genuine human equality between the sexes. So, her poetry was largely ignored. H.D. spent most of her life trying to free herself. Jane Fonda has had a long but somewhat thin career, and yet she has not always been a free woman. I think H.D. would read Jane Fonda’s book today with interest.
Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Gary Lehmann’s essays, poetry and short stories are widely published. Books include The Span I will Cross [Process Press, 2004] and Public Lives and Private Secrets [Foothills Publishing, 2005]. His most recent book is American Sponsored Torture [FootHills Publishing, 2007]. Visit his website at www.garylehmann.blogspot.com