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Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory,Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 81-108 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f r z nDOI: 10.1353/arq.2007.0005

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A Public History of the Dividing Line: H. D., the Bomb, and the

Roots of the Postmodern

I want to begin by acknowledging the problem of revis-iting the bomb and its literary after-effects. In returning us to one of

the past century’s many ground-zeros, the subject requires us again to look at an act of atrocity whose complicated history has been actively obscured. Perhaps this return might seem an all too easy escape from the atrocities of the present, just as the conventions of literary criticism seem to take us away from the scene of so many crimes. But, as Freud writes, “Everything new must have its roots in what was before” (Moses and Monotheism 35). And as H. D.’s work often suggests, our peripheral vision is capable of revealing more about our situation than we might initially expect, as we turn our attention to the sleight of hand that is not quite occluded by the “cover” story.

My interest in the topic stems in part from an ongoing fascination with literary-historical turning points, what we might think of as water-shed moments. But to think in terms of the ecology of the watershed is to miss the ways such moments are, literally, turning points, with all the complicity that term might imply, when a culture incrementally turns its attention, its hands, and its means of production away from one set of concerns and toward another. My underlying question is: what is being turned from, and what is being turned toward; what scene can we no longer bear and what have we constructed to replace or occlude it? What narratives (or even “poetics”) do we create in order to “go on,” as H. D. repeatedly puts it in Tribute to Freud?

Arizona Quarterly Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 2007Copyright © 2007 by Arizona Board of Regents

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Bridging the movement from Victorianism to modernism to post-modernism, with its fitful shifts in production between the handmade, the mass-produced, and the electronic, H. D.’s poetry often engages the most crucial issues these shifts bring up; namely, the relation between technology and poetic form, the role of memory in cultural survival and progress; the pressure of political reality on individual voice; and the problematics of pursuing a unified system by which science, reli-gion, politics, and aesthetics might all cohere—a pursuit that promises utopian equilibrium on one hand but threatens a coercive, even fas-cistic, social order on the other. Because H. D.’s work spans these two important transitions, and because so much of it is focused on memory and war, her work reveals a great deal about these issues as they took shape during the inter-war and post-World War II periods. While much has been written about the pressure of World War II on H. D.’s Tril-ogy, an essentially optimistic and redemptive work composed during the London blitz, I want to focus on the ways these unwieldy issues are played out more extensively in the major works that immediately fol-lowed: her Tribute to Freud and her recasting of Homeric epic, Helen in Egypt.

According to Barbara Guest’s biography, Herself Defined, H. D. thought of World War I as having silenced her, cutting short what she thought of as her literary youth (253). World War II was, on the other hand, marked by a poetic renaissance for her personally and for London generally, with sales of poetry books increasing tenfold. H. D. even par-ticipated in a war-time poetry reading organized by the Sitwells and attended by the royal family (Hollenberg 61 n.21). This war coincided with her most prolific—and in many ways her finest—period of literary production, a private dividing line between her early and mature work. After having all but disappeared from public life between the wars, H. D. suddenly swept through the production of several ambitious interven-tions into the canon, taking on, almost simultaneously, Shakespeare, Freud, Homer, and the Bible.1 She would emerge from London’s post-war ruins having shed one identity—that of a Pound-sculpted and Amy Lowell-authorized American imagiste—and forged quite another as a prolific, almost maximalist, international poet of intense intellectual ambition and historical scope. As the Trojan War made legible a histor-ical Helen, World War II had created a new H. D. who would actively shift the poetics of the period toward postmodern aesthetics and post-

H.D., the Bomb, & Roots of the Postmodern 83

colonial consciousness while maintaining a profoundly somatic relation to language and sound as constitutive of identity. “There was a Helen before there was a war,” she would write in a later poem, “but who remembers her?” (Hermetic Definition 110)

Having inherited World War II as the public dividing line between modernism and postmodernism, we enter this discussion with the facts, drama, and technologies of war defining the parameters of both early and late twentieth-century writing. After the devastating bombing on both sides of the English channel, the atom bomb cast a new kind of shadow on the optimism of modern industrial innovation. Developed to compete with German science but deployed in Japan, the Bomb was a foreign-policy sleight-of-hand and a raw performance of power made possible by the kind of unprecedented collaboration between govern-ment and academe that characterized, to other ends, the coordinated efforts of Nazi Germany (Figure 1). Previous wars had their vast rotting fields and the horrors of chemical warfare, machine guns, and air weap-onry, but the Bomb had taken on the very grammar of the sun. Official descriptions of the Bomb’s deployment, including Truman’s announce-ment of Hiroshima’s devastation, waxed mystical in their celebration of America’s “harnessing” of the sun’s secrets. Witnesses described the Bomb’s detonation as a noiseless, photographic flash; it vaporized those nearest the blast or turned them into charcoal, imprinting their shad-ows on stairways and walls, bodies horrifically reduced to “writing on the walls.”2

With the secrets of its production guarded even from the British for the benefit of the U. S. postwar economy, the Bomb was a triumph both of technology and of marketing, the ultimate manifestation of the drive toward faster, bigger, better products. “The secret,” “my secret,” or “the gadget,” as it was called in government memos, was not only an ultra-efficient killing machine but a destruction of previously understood units of measure. New York Times journalist and government-employed spin-doctor William Laurence considered Trinity potentially the most significant event in human history; and Truman suggested that with the deployment in Hiroshima the U. S. had emerged as the “most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history” (qtd. in Lifton and Mitchell 28). The Bomb was the ultimate signature for what would become known as the American century, a term coined in 1941 by Henry Luce, founder of

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Time magazine and Yale classmate and friend of the architects of Ameri-can postwar foreign policy who came to be known as the “wise men.”

As a physical demonstration of America’s new strong-armed inter-national identity, the Bomb had created a new territory somewhere above international law and, as far as lay understanding was concerned,

Figure 1: Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives.


above Newtonian physics, in the uncharted world of relativity, chance, and the specialized vision afforded by unapproachably expensive tele-scopes and microscopes. It was secret, and it was beyond seeing. Clearly it marked the waging of a new level of military war, but it also “covered” the waging of economic, intellectual, and cultural wars. The American consideration of possible targets for the bomb is telling in its bizarre logic. A summary of a May 1945 meeting of the Target Committee listed Kyoto as its first choice on the basis of the city’s cultural and intellectual content: “From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget”(Serber 80–83; Stoff 100). Though it was understood as early as 1940 that the detonation of the bomb would not only wipe out entire cities but would continue to kill civilians downwind of the bomb site, it took the last-minute urging of Truman’s advisor Henry Stimson to convince the Target Committee that it would be more effective in the long run not to eliminate precisely those who could most “appreci-ate the significance” of their own destruction.3 Still, the focus remained on producing a high number of civilian casualties in the alternate sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a policy that had already been displayed in the firebombing of other Japanese and German cities.

Complicating the situation for American writers, this shift in U. S. global identity from savior to enemy of culture occurred at a time when our national literature was shedding the last vestiges of its own colo-nial identity and gaining acceptance and critical attention as a body of work distinct from that of British literature.4 How could American poetry answer or even engage the terms of this pivotal moment, with its post-colonial literary emergence counterbalanced by a foreign policy that had just altered the international rules of engagement: free speech colliding with public relations, rescue colliding with genocide?

we were drifting

Coming to Freud in 1933 to confront the trauma of one world war and the lingering effects of what she called her “war-shock” (TTF 93), H. D. would write the account of her analysis in the context of the next one, the impossible war after “the war to end all wars.” Perhaps it is this merging of one trauma with another that leads her to confront

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the problem of endings and beginnings in both her writing and her psy-choanalysis. Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes H. D.’s work as an attempt to write beyond the conventional endings of romantic fulfillment and domestication, but I would argue it is also broadly engaged in the prob-lem of writing beyond what would appear to be the end of history and of narrative possibility. The public relations industry around the Man-hattan Project, like that employed to convince the American public of the need to enter World War I, was based in a rhetoric that presented itself as pacifist in its goals; in both cases it was argued that engaging in war would ultimately bring about the end of all war.5 In insisting on continuities, palimpsests, and paths of influence and transmission, H. D.’s rejection of conventional narrative teleology extends beyond the literary into a rethinking of political history. She writes to Norman Holmes Pearson in 1949, anticipating his reaction to her memoir of the years preceding and during World War I, Bid Me To Live: “You may find it superficial, but it isn’t. . . . The War I and War II, overlap in some curious way, one of those pleats in time” (Hollenberg 87).

In fact, much of H. D.’s opus is based in this overlapping and “pleated,” non-linear temporality, devoted to reincarnated, relived, or rewritten versions of the literary and historical past. And this temporal fluidity is accompanied, particularly in her late work, with an inter-discursive fluidity that critics have found alternately exhilarating and maddening. To follow a single thread of discourse through her work is, it seems, to lose track of the most essential quality of its ambition, its drive not so much to resolve as to hold in tension multiple reali-ties and multiple readings of reality. Her autobiographical writings are compounded by her personal identification with historical figures. Her sessions with Freud often focused on her experiences within the vision-ary realm—especially the hieroglyphic writing-on-the-wall she had wit-nessed in Corfu in 1920—but the sense of personal crisis that brought H. D. to Freud was inseparable from her larger concerns about interna-tional history and her overwhelming sense of the interconnectedness of aesthetic and political life.6 Her analysis ostensibly began as a way of coming to terms with her personal trauma during and after World War I. When her brother was killed in battle, her father (himself a Civil War survivor) reportedly died of grief. At the same time, H. D. was involved in a series of fraught romantic relationships; she had a miscarriage she believed was caused by the news of the Lusitania; she gave birth to her


daughter Perdita after surviving the 1919 flu epidemic; she embarked on what would be a life-long relationship with Bryher, shifting both her sexual and geographical alliances; and she established herself firmly as an expatriate in Europe. (TTF 13, 31) As she describes her attraction to psychoanalysis, the line between individual, national, and interna-tional patterns is explicitly blurred:

There was something that was beating in my brain; I do not say my heart—my brain. I wanted it to be let out. I wanted to free myself of repetitive thoughts and experiences—my own and those of many of my contemporaries. I did not specifically realize just what it was I wanted, but I knew that I, like most of the people I knew, in England, America, and on the Continent of Europe, was drifting. We were drifting. (TTF 13)

Drifting between “I” and “we,” between America, England, and the European continent, H. D. looks for release from cyclical patterns and compulsive repetitions, a release of something “beating” in her brain, not her heart, and thus a sound or movement rather than a feeling or heartbeat. As it unfolds in analysis, this “drifting” is a problem of intentionality and culpability, of desire and of design, inclusive of the spiritual, political, and aesthetic senses of the word.

In Tribute to Freud—particularly the section entitled “Writing on the Wall”—H. D. folds her visionary experience of hieroglyphic “pro-jections” into a deeper historical context, noting that “there had been writing-on-walls before, in Biblical, in classic literature” and that “all through time, there had been a tradition of warnings or messages from another world or another state of being” (TTF 50). In fact, the classic example of “writing on the wall” in the Book of Daniel is the story of a dream interpreter whose survival and that of his nation depend entirely on a fearless reading of dream symbolism; it is only through his skill as a reader of projected signs that Daniel survives the political upheaval and punishments of three successive political regimes. It is clear from H. D.’s papers that she considered her own visionary experience to be potentially of comparable significance, with Freud playing the role of prophetic interpreter. That is, her focus was at least ostensibly less on personal symbolism than on the possible significance of her visions to others. Freud recognized in her dreams an identification with Moses and

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“a desire to be the founder of a new religion,” and H. D. hypothesized a “picture writing” that would potentially “save mankind” (TTF 51, 71).

Writing, as described by H. D., was salvation on one hand and almost akin to grave robbing on the other. At one point, Tribute to Freud is interrupted by the sudden interjection, “Stop thief!” though it is unclear whether we are to hear the voice as hers or Freud’s (TTF 85). Her account of Freudian analysis oscillates repeatedly between the lan-guage of salvage and that of invasion:

Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analyzed, shelved, or resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes skillfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and iridescent glass bowls and vases that gleamed in the dusk from the shelves of the cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped up in the room in Berggasse 19, Wien IX. The dead were living in so far as they lived in memory or were recalled in dream. (TTF 14)

The link is explicit between shattered jar and shattered mind, between patched-together artifact and propped-up analysand, both survivors and containers of “the dead” and of the past more generally, though the intentionality behind this containment remains indeterminate. As H. D. continues, the line between subject and object blurs more explic-itly: “I wish to recall the impressions, or rather I wish the impressions to recall me” (TTF 14).

In response to the often overwhelming demands of psychoanaly-sis to find the story within and behind the surviving fragments of the story, the story beyond and historically before her own experience, H. D. developed a synaesthetic, interdiscursive, transhistorical sense of language as having a fragrance, a weight, a force, a shape; magnified, it could catch fire. It could be stolen, buried, broken and yet keep its incantatory magic (TTF 21–23). Because of the immateriality and resil-ience of memory and because of the mind’s tendency to repress what it cannot fully understand, sound became for H. D. a crucial carrier of relation, a way of asserting the past within the present. Even the “zzr-hiss” of bombs during the London blitz brought the past with it, “liter-


ally blasted into consciousness,” pieces of a phonemically dismembered Osiris returned from ancient Egypt to inhabit the world’s latest ruins (TTF vii). Detached from syntactical structures, sound was capable of showing abstractly the relation between past and present, which would then be followed by the piecing together of meaning, a process akin to the reception of mediumistic messages that, properly read, might be capable of guiding the present.

H. D.’s attention to sound patterns reached a crux during World War II when civilian London experienced the war, at least initially, as non-semantic sound: air raid sirens, the whir of the bombs, the silence before the shudder of impact, followed by the all-clear (TTF 102–3). The bombs H. D. heard were mostly unmanned airplane bombs—con-ceptually the ancestor of the Predator, called alternately V-bombs, flying bombs, buzz bombs, and “doodlebugs.” They had their own combustion engines and in flight made a “duv-duv-duv” sound followed by a silence just before impact. Between June 13, 1944 and March 29, 1945, approx-imately 4,000 of these bombs struck the greater London area. Trilogy was written during the “little blitz” of 1944, including the months of heaviest bombing referred to at the time as “doodlebug summer” (Guest 253–79). The period marks a shift in H. D.’s work to an even greater attention to sound as the structuring device of her poems. Like radio waves or telepathic transmissions, the sounds of the war could be read independently of attendant images, as manifestations of an invisible world. Witnessed from subways, shelters, and darkened apartments, the civilian experience of the bombing was largely auditory; one didn’t see the bombs but the human scene they threatened, with all its quotidian detail on the verge of being converted into “timeless” ruin. It is through the piecing together of sound fragments in Trilogy that H. D. defini-tively moves away from imagism and engages in what she understands as the poem’s “spiritual realism” (48). Freed from directly referential images, sound re-contextualized and gave meaning to her duress, not as personal trauma but as universal pattern and historical continuity. Read transhistorically the repetitive “duv” sound of German bombs was perversely akin to both the lyric aspect of poetry H. D. describes as a “wing beat” and the symptomatic “beating in [her] brain” (TTF 13) that prompted her to seek analysis.

Beyond the material and sonic blasts of war, the entire period was, of course, permeated by discussions of secrecy and hermeticism. In the

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summer of 1941 the National Defense Research Committee’s report on contract funds included over $50,000.00 for cryptography, a sum that in the Chairman’s budget was second only to the cost of uranium (Figure 2). In London, operations devoted to cracking the German code over-lapped with civilian communities devoted to cracking open the invis-ible world in order to bring the grieving into contact with their dead. With its sense that poetry could carry an ancient message that might save the present world—“a world ruined . . . almost past redemption,” H.D’s “Writing on the Wall” is torn between hysteria and inspiration, prophecy and spy talk. Her vision is potentially a “dangerous symptom”; she appears on Freud’s doorstep when the city is shut down by the mili-tary; and she is aware of potentially compromising the safety of a hotel clerk simply by speaking with him (TTF 85, 51, 59).

Figure 2: Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives.


In a vocabulary that anticipates the turbulence of Tribute to Freud, H. D. writes in Paint it Today, a few years after World War I: “The worlds had broken down, all the worlds, at least all the reasonable and reason-ing worlds filled with all the people of reason” (10). If poetry could offer an answer at all, it would be an answer outside reason, emerging from fragmented and even non-verbal elements into language. In the same work, H. D. describes the force driving this emergence as a beating pres-ence behind the words: “the beat and drop of poetry, the swerve up and the swallow wing beating back. . . . Poetry and the beat and the swal-low wings.” Such was the domain of lyric poetry as distinct from epic: “Large, epic pictures bored her, though she struggled through them. She wanted the songs that cut like a swallow wing the high, untainted ether, not the tragic legions of set lines that fell like black armies with terrific force and mechanical set action, paralyzing, or broke like a black sea to baffle and to crush” (10–11).

While epic arguably reified a nationalist—and even imperialist—agenda, lyric was a “beating in the brain” that set the mind out into uncharted territory, prompting a rethinking of history and of racial and political identity. Tellingly, the passage above develops into a question about the relationship between the living and the dead and repeatedly invokes a time and place where they can coexist: “neither past nor future” but “past and future together.” In this unmapped zone, she “felt somehow that she was speaking the wrong language. She was speaking English” (12). Bringing this H. D.-identified, fugitive Helen-figure to an Egypt on the brink of postcolonial independence from Britain some thirty years later was one way of rescuing her from the violence—and even boredom—of “large, epic pictures” in English. In fact, Helen in Egypt offers very little in the way of pictures at all—whether epic or imagist—suggesting its action instead through the sonic arrangement of quotation and dialogue.

Witnessing the postcolonial world in formation, H. D. anticipates what Édouard Glissant would eventually call a poetics of relation, with its attention to drift, to exile, to interrelated, rhizomatic networks of meaning. Such networks are larger than national and cultural boundar-ies and more intricate than can be immediately seen; they are open, unresolved, and shifting, and thus demand repeated study and re-inter-pretation. Placing herself between archaeologist and vessel, between native and exile, H. D. locates her attention to cultural history and to

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her own psyche at the point of relation itself: “There were things under things, as well as things inside things” (TTF 21).

talking greek

It is impossible, of course, to know how directly H. D.’s continuing interest in Egypt related to her work with Freud. But Egyptian culture, religion, and history are clearly integral to their conversations, which, after all, occur during his research for Moses and Monotheism, where he argues, largely on the basis of linguistics, that Moses was an Egyptian and that Judaism derived from an earlier form of monotheism in Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty. Freud’s wonder-cabinet of Egyptian and Greek antiquities often triangulated their discussions, providing a meeting place where the roles of analyst and patient would be at their most fluid, establishing an international cross-disciplinary community in miniature. In reading the objects before them, Freud and H. D. also read each other and collaborated in the production of meaning from cultural fragments that seemed to take them temporarily beyond the bounds of nation, history, gender, and ethnicity. In a letter to Bryher after her first analysis session, H. D. writes of Freud’s wounded pride when she paid more attention to his cabinet of antiquities than to him. “I said he was not a person but a voice, and that in looking at antiquity, I was looking at him. . . . He was not there at all, is simply a ghost . . .” (Friedman 34) —which is precisely the way she describes the figures who arrive to sort out their historical place on the beaches of Helen in Egypt.

After Freud shows her his favorite piece from the cabinet, a bronze Pallas Athene who, as he points out, has lost her spear, H. D. relocates Freud’s cultural position in significant ways:

He might have been talking Greek. The beautiful tone of his voice had a way of taking an English phrase or sentence out of its context (out of the associated context, you might say, of the whole language) so that, although he was speaking English without a perceptible trace of accent, yet he was speaking a for-eign language. The tone of his voice, the singing quality that so subtly permeated the texture of the spoken word, made that spoken word live in another dimension, or take on another color as if he had dipped the grey web of conventionally woven thought and with it, conventionally spoken thought, into a vat


of his own brewing—or held a strip of that thought, ripped from the monotonous faded and outworn texture of the lan-guage itself, into the bubbling cauldron of his own mind in order to draw it forth dyed blue or scarlet, a new color to the old grey mesh, a scrap of thought, even a cast-off rag, that would become hereafter a pennant, a standard, a sign again, to indicate a direction or, fluttering aloft on a pole, to lead an army. (TTF 69)

The passage is telling in many respects. First, H. D. shows a regard for Freud as a kind of poet whose words have an auditory pleasure beyond cognition—beyond even the discernible limits of language itself—an English beyond English, not language at all but sound, a “kind of sing-ing quality” or graphic symbol, a flag. Further, this universalized com-munication is associated with a double displacement. If Freud “might have been talking Greek,” he is “talking” rather than “speaking” with an American informality—and so is linked to H. D.’s own geographical displacement as an American in Europe—but as an American whose family not only came originally from Europe but from the same area of Moravia in which Freud’s family had lived. Together they are talk-ing about extracting the meaning of an artifact appropriated from the ancient world. And yet, in a manner of speaking, he “might have been talking Greek”; that is, H. D. could not understand his intended mean-ing, and so the premise of their shared understanding is placed at a point of jeopardy and slippage. In “talking Greek” he seems to own an innate connection to the material, which is, after all, a Greek figure. Holding in his hand a god that cannot speak for itself, he speaks for it, as H. D. will come to speak for Helen.

The experience H. D. describes is akin to synaesthesia, with the music or “color” of his words emerging to become a “mesh,” a “scrap,” or salvaged “rag” that (with the help of H. D.) becomes “a pennant, a standard, a sign again, to indicate a direction or, fluttering aloft on a pole, to lead an army.” If Freud sees in H. D. a mosaic counterpart and “founder of a new religion,” H. D. sees in Freud, if only for a moment, a disarmed deity or new Jeanne d’Arc, carrying a tattered “rag” as his flag into battle. What H. D. seems to regard as mutual transference is profound in its relation to the work of both writers and their wartime status. Freud, a Jew among the Nazis, was researching and proposing a

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radical revision of Judaeo-Christian and secular history with his argu-ment in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyp-tian—an argument that could, if it were accepted as science rather than mere literature, work against the theory and practice of Nazi ideology at a time when it was encroaching in very real ways on the lives of European Jews.

H. D. takes pains to place common ground between them, con-necting the dots between Freud’s Jewish Moravian childhood and her own Moravian American childhood and between their various recon-siderations of Goethe’s Mignon, of the biblical Miriam, and of Moses in Egypt, but her record of their discussion of the bronze Athene retreats into an essentialist reading of ethnicity and cultural inheritance. Two paragraphs after she recalls Freud as a kind of beautiful singer, she hears him speaking “as an ardent lover of art and an art-collector,” then as a racial stereotype, and ultimately as a god-like arbiter of her own value:

He was speaking in a double sense, it is true, but he was speak-ing of value, the actual intrinsic value of the piece; like a Jew, he was assessing its worth; the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ran in his veins. He knew his material pound, his pound of flesh, if you will, but this pound of flesh was a pound of spirit between us, something tangible, to be weighed and measured, to be weighed in the balance and—pray God—not to be found wanting! (TTF 70)

Beyond its allusion to the Merchant of Venice and to the writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel, the passage again merges both figures’ personal and political histories.7 The word “pound” appears four times in a single sentence, seeming to place the spirit of Pound rather than a “pound of spirit” between them as a specter of international intellectual idealism gone awry. In spite of the fact that her reading of Freud participates in the kind of anti-Semitic stereotyping that characterized Pound’s fascist broadcasts, here Pound’s once-godlike presence is reduced to a common noun, with “pound” standing in sonically for measurement and money and her increasing rejection of Poundian modernism’s celebration of the material image in favor of a more loosely associative and figural poetics.8 Further, the conflict occurs in the context of reading a classical Greek figure from precisely the canon that H. D.’s friend E. M. Butler argued was complicit in the shoring up of German nationalism in the


1930s.9 This scene also has its parallel in Helen in Egypt, where Helen is weighed as a feather against the weight of a feather, an act of assessment that is inseparable from the frustrated attempt to read the “riddle” of the “writing on the walls” (30). Further, Helen herself stands in as a word “translated or transposed” from Greek epic into Egyptian lyric. Arriving in a zone that is an out-of-time reflection of past and future, she passes through a “pleat in time” where the Holocaust of the recent war cor-responds with the “holocaust of the Greeks” and where the writing on the ancient walls finds a parallel not only in H. D.’s hieroglyphic vision in Corfu but in the swastikas chalked onto the Viennese pavement and the graphemic horrors of the atom bomb (Helen 5, TTF 59).

Like H. D. in Tribute to Freud, Helen in Helen in Egypt is caught in what she calls “the depth of her racial inheritance,” and while Helen in Egypt can be read as reflecting a stereotypical model of both race and gender, the instability of the text resists and overturns this reading, sug-gesting that it is instead a troubled working-through of the stereotypes it inherits (Helen 13). The dominant register of the text is interrogative rather than declarative, and the questions it asks often go to the root of identity: “where are we? . . . who am I? . . . where was I? . . . who are you?” (Helen 16, 55, 88). Building on this destabilized ground, likeness and difference are calibrated less by nationality, race, religion, or gender (though all these components are in play) than by the biological and literary status of its characters: are they alive or dead, shades or shad-ows, fugitive characters or posthumous authors? Even on the level of narrative, there is an almost absolute obliteration of expectation. Virtu-ally nothing happens; instead we explore repeatedly and at length the interstices and effects of actions conducted elsewhere. Readers, char-acters, and author are outside—or downwind—of the primary action, experiencing its echoes and after-effects.

As other critics have noted, much of the anxiety underlying racial and sexual identity in H. D.’s work is played out more explicitly in her work with Freud,10 where there is a constant tension between decla-rations of sameness and difference. Conducted in a Viennese Jewish household in the context of book burnings, riots, and the impending Anschluss, H. D.’s conversations with Freud turned repeatedly to race and to war. Even from the beginning of their sessions in March 1933, she seems to suggest a link between her role as a poet and Freud’s role as a Jew, “the only member of antiquity that still lived in the world”

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(Friedman 35).11 Like her, Freud spoke “in fragments” and as they spent their time “sitting and talking over the Egyptian,” she shies from an articulation of difference between them: “I wish he would not refer to me as a ‘poet’” (Friedman 115). While he may have fulfilled for H. D. the figure of the “blameless physician,” he was also the recipient of the Goethe prize for literature; above all, he was a writer, one of her kind. Like her poetry, his work relied heavily on metaphorical language and on interdisciplinary flexibility; surely her notion of literary palimpsest, which has shaped so much of the critical discussion of her work, was indebted to his 1925 essay on the “Mystic Writing-Pad.” Like H. D., Freud was, as Douwe Draaisma points out, a master of imagery, and beyond his obvious gestures toward literature and mythology in con-structions like the Oedipus complex, he too relied on metaphors from physical and military science. As Draaisma notes:

Freud compared unconscious material which finds its way into the ego through a dream and there acts independently to an army of occupation which refuses to adapt to the laws of the land that it has invaded and promulgates new laws of its own. Sometimes the ego has to endure a siege by the id or psycho-analytic treatment is represented as a foreign intervention in a civil war. (8–9)

Such a theater of internal warfare was familiar to H. D. who had already merged political and personal trauma to a great extent and whose sense of poetic form was equally driven by its perceived connection to politi-cal realities. Reading the signs of Nazi aggression while walking toward her sessions at Freud’s house, she realizes she is both literally and meta-phorically in the midst of a “civil war” though no one will call it that, and the appearance of Austrian soldiers recalls images from the Ameri-can civil war, in which her father fought (TTF 59). In a similar pattern of temporal folds, the walls that “do not fall” in Trilogy’s 1942 London reappear in Egypt a decade later, with a fugitive Helen of Sparta relo-cated outside the western canon in a post-nuclear landscape of redrawn global alliances and a newly emergent post-colonial North Africa.

H. D. had lived through the London blitz to see World War II cul-minate in a kind of Freudian wish fulfillment: in a reversal of a famous passage in Interpretation of Dreams, the American soldier boy had come


to save his European father from the flames. And yet America’s subse-quent dropping of the atom bombs had set the drift in motion again. All the terms and figures of Trilogy’s poetic economy had been in a single stroke fulfilled and compromised. The promise of what appears in Trilogy as new-testament salvation had been superseded by old-testa-ment vengeance; the “wise men” who bowed to the infant-god were, at least in name, becoming the architects of America’s emerging cold war policy. The desk and William Morris table that connected H. D. with Pre-Raphaelite sources and through which she received medium-istic transmissions had been dispensed with by the nascent information age and new “gadgets” like the Memex desk, a sophisticated microfilm-reader and prototype of the personal computer that promised a new era of public and private memory, making it possible for individuals to scan the contents of the world’s libraries with “rapid selection” technology.

To compound the web of relation further, the Memex was devel-oped by one Vannevar Bush, an MIT professor-cum-G-man, early in the 1930s, but it was strategically presented to the public in a July 1945 piece of wag-the-dog public relations. Extolling the wonders of scientific research, Bush’s article on the Memex appeared in the Atlantic Monthly only a few weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a project he oversaw concurrently through the federal Office for Scien-tific Research. In short, H. D.’s anxiety about the poet’s prophetic call-ing had been fulfilled in the worst way. During a séance in fall 1945, she believed she received warnings of an impending third world war from dead R.A.F. pilots, but her peers had rejected these messages as mad-ness; now it seemed furniture could indeed speak for the future but that its listeners would accept only the ventriloquized messages of public officials. She had read the writing on the wall but her reading had been superseded by a vastly more organized will to power.

why egypt?

The question underlying Helen in Egypt is, then, how to resist that will to power without being subsumed in its terms, how to fight the war in one’s poems. Not the war that had just been won but the war that continued, the historical through-line of domination and decep-tion from Troy to Hiroshima and beyond. Where could one go after Trilogy’s promise of resurrection in December 1944 had been compro-

98 Elizabeth Willis

mised by the willful elimination of civilian populations in the nuclear detonations of the following summer, the “gift” that had been traded on for military and economic gain, the power of the sun that had been harnessed in the service of destruction? After “haven” is reached in the pages of her war-torn Trilogy, why undo that poem’s promise of redemp-tion with a new set of risky and indeterminate patterns? Why re-open the phonemic rupture of bombing after it had been resolved, however tenuously, in Trilogy’s final evocation of a peaceful regeneration, where we find the East’s wise men “over-come” by the “overwhelming Grace” of divine presence? Why disrupt the narrative of American salvation from tyranny—Victory in Europe and the liberation of the concentra-tion camps—with reminders of American aggression—the blinding light of nuclear detonation—in Helen in Egypt?

Further, why does Egypt play such a profound role in the develop-ment of H. D.’s mature poetics? The inscription that opens Trilogy’s first long poem, The Walls Do Not Fall—“for Karnak 1923 / from London 1942”—makes explicit the link between British and Egyptian ruins and suggests an intimate and complex subjectivity of place. It is a tribute of sympathy and, in part, an acknowledgment that London’s wartime devastation bears a relation to the earlier British excavations at Karnak as well as to earlier conquests of Egypt. H. D.’s visit to Karnak with her mother, Helen, and with Bryher in 1923 coincided with some of Brit-ain’s most invasive excavations of ancient sites, including Tutankha-men’s tomb. Egypt was, for H. D., a site of sympathetic magic, but it also carried the darker undertones of imperialism and conquest.

The answer would seem to come in the very terms of H. D.’s own struggle, the relation between intentionality and “drift,” an important word for the twentieth century’s understanding of the world. Early in the century, Alfred Wegener had created a public uproar by using the term to describe the geological dynamism of entire continents from an originary Pangaea.12 And Édouard Glissant used it at the other end of the century to articulate the interconnectedness of global migrations and diaspora, as the routes of the slave trade shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural dynamics. “Drift” was also the operant word in British accounts of Egypt; Sir Valentine Chirol’s The Egyptian Problem devotes an entire chapter to the “Barren Period of Drift,” and the word was central to the thinking of Evelyn Baring, earl of Cromer, former British consul at Corfu, whose 1908 history of modern Egypt justifies


Britain’s takeover of Egypt in 1882 as an accidental—even natural—event, another example of “the government and people of England drifting by accident into doing what was not only right, but was also most in accordance with British interests” (330).13 In fact, the repeated modern conquests of Egypt were directly related to western recognition of its highly sophisticated cultural past, stemming primarily from the reports of archaeologists who accompanied the Napoleonic invasion of 1798. Naturally, conquerors “drifted” toward their own “interests,” par-ticularly when those interests helped narrate the rightfulness of military over cultural power.

After the British took political control of the country in 1882, Egypt remained a British protectorate through World War I; protected, that is, largely from itself: the Egyptian nationalist movement was quickly considered an enemy of the state. Independence was officially granted in 1922, but the British maintained control of key government insti-tutions as well as the Suez, and they sent archaeologists to continue their exploration of the pyramids. H. D.’s visit to Egypt with her mother, Helen, and with Bryher, coincided with this period of extensive excava-tion. When World War II broke out, Egypt was aligned with the Allies, and the decisive battle of the North African campaign was fought out-side Alexandria. But the British continued to occupy the country until 1952, the year H. D. began Helen in Egypt, a text riddled with aban-doned ramparts, ruined walls, and displaced trans-national subjects.14

Following on the “spiritual realism” of H. D.’s war trilogy, Helen in Egypt is presented as a “re-creation in her own terms of the Helen-Achilles myth” that builds on lyric fragments from the ancient Greek version by Stesichorus of Sicily; it is a post-Homeric version indebted to pre-Homeric sources (Helen vii). Yet in its choice of terms, the poem declares itself a profoundly contemporary post-war text. Its fragmented narrative unfolds in a wasted landscape where the “War is over” (99) but its “holocaust” (5) continues to be felt and the “game of prophecy” continues to be played (61). The “Sun” is “hidden behind the sun of our visible day” (29) and the poem’s characters live in the terror between anticipated and remembered violence, where they “would have been burnt out in a flash” and are struck by the “flash in the heaven at noon / that blinds the sun” (100) from which they move “through time into another dimension” (107). Beyond the official history of nuclear destruction, of definitive victories and defeats, fragments emerge from

100 Elizabeth Willis

the hidden realm of risk, uncertainty, and collateral damage. In this extreme landscape, Helen—herself an embodiment of untold stories of women in wartime—is placed at a margin. Achilles thinks he sees her on the ramparts and is struck down by the image. Her image is literally on the wall, a place of equivocation or of surveillance, a position of apparent safety, but also of display and of entrapment.

However impacted the text’s potential meanings, in locating her apocryphal Helen in North Africa, H. D. is, like Freud in Moses and Monotheism, fighting one reductive narrative of “racial inheritance” by means of a broader engagement with the terms of cultural otherness and with the kinds of displacement brought about by imperial and techno-logical dominance. Freud notes that Egypt had become a world empire by the end of the eighteenth dynasty and that “the new Imperialism was reflected in the development of certain religious ideas,” namely, the conception of a universal God, Aton, who was “no longer restricted to one people and one country.” Based on the worship of the sun god at Heliopolis, the worship of Aton was declared not only the earliest “and perhaps the purest” occurrence of monotheism but “an astonish-ing premonition of later scientific knowledge” with its location of God-like power within the energy of solar radiation (Moses and Monotheism 95–96).

While H. D. was unable to escape the essentialism that character-ized the discourse of the period, her work participates in a crucial re-historicizing of western culture and a re-politicizing of classical form within American poetics. Egypt was H. D.’s postwar “waste land”—a nuclear-age desert in which the classical order, with its war epics, had effectively been negated by its own processes. In it, the Bomb-like “flash in the heaven at noon that blinds the sun” negates not only the Egyptian sun-god Aton—the source, according to Freud, of the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition—but in a phonemic slippage seems to cancel all of monotheism with the destructive power of the manipulated Atom. As if in a delayed sequence extending from the dropping of the scarf at one of the thresholds in Trilogy, we are admitted into a realm in which “there is no veil”—where religious hermeticism has been replaced by secret alliances and science has been corrupted by its ravaging quest for knowledge and its relation to global power. The sun has been inked-in (Helen 2). In this sonically and figurally disturbed post-war zone, a displaced Helen “wore no zone.” Removed from the territory of mili-


tary action, she still occupies—or is occupied by—its rearranged sonic resonance. Unveiled, Helen’s body appears as an unwritten text that, taking charcoal in her hand, she tries to black out and re-veil (16). Now “she herself is the writing,” an assertion repeated several times as Helen literally becomes the action-writing of Helen in Egypt, a “living hiero-glyph” (5) that survives the unthinkable “flash in the heaven at noon that blinds the sun” (100). In the wake of a Holocaust based in the obsessive delineation of cultural, racial, physical, and sexual otherness, the most basic relation between subject and object, writer and writing, medium and message, has been dissolved. As Helen becomes language, she moves beyond the economy of war and desire that initially gave her visibility, to risk at once her own disappearance and her immortality as “sign” (13).

H. D.’s increasing engagement with Egypt marks a shift toward a more fluid sense of subjectivity and a recognition of the constitutive function of language in the phenomenal world, in effect shifting the attention of poetic discourse toward an acknowledgment of post-colo-nialism at a point when American poetry was becoming more fully articulated as autonomous from the British literary tradition; that is, as America was claiming, culturally, its own post-coloniality. Part of the trauma of the process underlying H. D.’s work is the recognition of how quickly this movement of cultural exportation translated into America’s own quest for global power through economic and military imperialism—and how ineffectual the recognition of this process was in altering its course. H. D. started writing Helen in Egypt in September 1952, the month Life magazine published, for the first time, photographs taken of civilians in Hiroshima on the day of the bomb. Her ambitious fracturing of the epic was begun the year Britain withdrew from Egypt, and it was completed while U. S. troops arrived to support and replace French colonial forces in Viet Nam.

writing beyond the war

In spite of the fact that H. D. continues to be read in terms of her “thralldom” to powerful modernist males, in a contemporary context her work seems less obviously influenced by Freud or Pound than, like theirs, in dialogue with the major socio-political concerns of the time. If much of Freud’s—and for that matter, Pound’s—work is built on the


premise of an oedipal structure whereby even literary heroes must kill their fathers, H. D.’s post-war work, especially Helen in Egypt, suggests alternatively that identity is shaped by the processes of revival and revivification, achieved through the flexible repetitions and mutations of the lyric. Viewed from the standpoint of literary critical history, she anticipates the kind of site-specific, shifting—or drifting—nature of identity addressed by late twentieth-century literary theory, at the same time resisting the end-time narratives built on Christian teleology. In fact, in the process of rereading her, it becomes clear that one of the most progressive strategies for poetry and politics alike may be a rec-ognition of cyclical patterns and an investigation of the ways personal histories converge with policy decisions.

One of the primary achievements of H. D.’s mature work is its ability to enact the interconnectedness of various discourses without forcing them into a superficial coherence. In its use of reworked and recycled materials her work is driven by lacunae and repetition in ways that anticipate the postmodern attention to liminality and margins, to the interlocking tensions of assertion and hesitation, to apocrypha and canon, and to cultural migrations and identity formations beyond the inherited constructs of self and nation. More than anything, H. D.’s war experience solidified the importance of the transhistorical aspects of her work, with an emphasis on poetry’s capacity for “spiritual realism” in the context of political history. Helen in Egypt is filled with open-ended questions and with phrases that are introduced, repeated and quoted so that meaning is compounded gradually and it is difficult to point to the exact moment when something appears or disappears, when it becomes conscious or is forgotten. As Glissant would assert, a destabilized poetic ground reflects the emergent identities in postcolonial and diasporic sites. Far from co-opting the stance of either canonical center or mar-ginalized other, the poetics of Helen in Egypt presupposes a much more comprehensive view of power and otherness by seeing the struggle for identity and voice as not merely a problem of twentieth-century poet-ics—or poetics generally—but as a problematic throughout human and even “post-human” history.

In an open letter to Einstein on the brink of World War II, Freud writes: “One thing we can say: whatever fosters the growth of culture works at the same time against war” (“Why War?” 286–87). Following Freud’s comment, what H. D.’s work reminds us is not so much that


culture can prevent war but that it can shore up strength against it, and that, of equal importance, it can assert its pressure on the historical record. The process may begin with the assertion of alternatives to con-quest narratives, including the rehearsal of survival narratives that are more realist than utopian, more revisionary than “new.” While H. D.’s poetry is not overtly political in conventional ways, it offers a construc-tive model for what we might call a progressive poetics by enlisting our attention to the question that lies behind the question of how to “go on”: what will we do with the past we have inherited—and what are we to make of those accounts that have not yet been heard?

Building on the mythology of Isis and Osiris—with its emphasis on collecting and adding up—and expanding this mythology through Freudian analytical discourse, H. D. presents in Helen in Egypt a cast of characters who are constantly sliding out of their predestined roles in the family romance. Just as H. D. both identifies with Freud and insists on her own specialness, Achilles blurs with Paris and with Theseus; Helen is and is not a version of her wounded Achilles. Throughout the text characters wrestle with their own identities, identities shaped by the pressures of context and relation that are never entirely known but are always in the process of being discovered. Rather than simply offering an alternative, apocryphal reading of a Helen escaped to Egypt or a biography of H. D.’s romantic attachments superimposed on the characters of the Iliad—as so many critics have described it—Helen in Egypt undoes the nationalism inherent in both the Homeric history of Troy and the American account of Hiroshima—and rewrites identity as fluid and shifting. Each of the characters is caught up in a theatre of war fought at a distance, and thus they are less connected with their national agenda than with each other in their shared relation as col-lateral damage.

When we expect Helen in Egypt to resolve itself into a clarifying thesis, it insists that its patterns of substitution and slippage deliver nei-ther the national identity promised by the epic nor the self-knowledge promised by psychoanalysis. Though Helen calls at times on her “racial inheritance” (243–45) the often maddening fluidity of figures effectively does away with any semblance of a stable identity distinct from the constitutive pressures of sociopolitical context. Repeatedly countering question with question, Helen in Egypt refuses easy resolutions, coming


instead to the conclusion that in the face of imperial deal-making, individual histories amount, more or less, to nothing. We arrive at a threshold where the whole city has become “an idol, a doll” (244) and “so it was nothing, nothing at all” (255). It is unclear whether Helen is a slave or a queen (233). Even the writing becomes nought (282). And the shield—presumably Achilles’ shield—that once dazzled with its workmanship is now a mirror where the history of war is blindingly reflected and refocused (294). The rewards of aggression are only “the pitiful heap of little things, the mountain of monstrous gear” (301) that vanish, leaving “nothing at all, a single arrow,” “a pause” (302, 304).

Having been driven by questions—do I love war? is this ironical? how will the story end? his war? my war? how did you get here? how does the message reach me? do you remember? can I take her place? will he ever find her?—and rhetorical reversals (“teach me to remember . . . teach me not to remember”; “I remember . . . what do I remember?” [207, 223]), Helen in Egypt builds a postmodern poetics of emergence. Its characters meet not in Egypt but in Helen in Egypt (190). Their timelessness is not abstract space; on the contrary, it is the physical manifestation of a war that can no longer be read as rupture and must be acknowledged as a continuum. But poetry, H. D. suggests, is also a continuum, here less focused on the heroics of individual performance in the service of nation than on the interconnectedness of narratives of resistance.

Halfway through Helen in Egypt, the story appears to be over: a veil caught on a piece of ruin “marks the end of the drama,” and the action stalls. At this “isolated moment in time” Achilles watches Helen “limp and turn / at the stair-head and half turn back.” Then Achilles swerves, and the story continues its inexorable loop: “I lived / on my slice of Wall / while the Towers fell” (127–28). Here, figural histories, collective and individual memories, overlap and inform each other. In the context of what H. D. proposes as “pleats” in time, Helen is a version of H. D., and H. D. is a version of Moses, and Moses in Freud’s book was an Egyptian, and Helen was H. D.’s mother with whom she visited Egypt, and H. D. was also the figure of Helen, standing beside herself, the displaced Egyp-tian of her own text, or a Spartan Helen in a lost, apocryphal version of a familiar war story, a Christian for whom Egypt represented both slavery and asylum, a Moravian spiritualist constructing a slippery code-shifting future with blasted and cast off pieces of deep and recent his-


tory, born in Bethlehem, in the swing-state of Pennsylvania. If H. D.’s own trajectory is a model of anything it is its ability to write beyond both apocalyptic endings and the promise of technological beginnings, the resilence to outlive, as H. D.’s Helen does, the historical destiny she has inherited and to envision a past durable enough to survive the “writing on the walls” of its projected future.

Wesleyan University

notes

1. It should also be noted that some of these interventions are linked directly with the world of H. D.’s spiritualist practice, a vestige of Victorianism that was somewhat legitimated in the modern period by the scientific and philosophical authority of the Society for Psychical Research. Shakespeare was a common extra-terrestrial contact at the height of London spiritualism, and H. D. herself claimed to receive messages from Freud after his death. For further discussion of modern “ghostwriting,” see Sword.

2. For descriptions of the Bomb’s aftermath, see for example: Hersey, Lifton and Mitchell, and Hogan. For literary aftereffects apart from H. D.’s Helen in Egypt, see Jack Spicer’s description of bodies reduced to “graphemics” (62), and Morris’s comparison of the poetics of H. D. and Spicer (204–27). Hersey’s descriptions of the graphic residue of the atomic disappeared include that of a painter on a ladder, brush in hand, in the act of painting a wall (96). Benedict attributes the power of Hersey’s work to the way it, too, functions as a warning in the form of yet another “handwriting on the wall” (656).

3. Vehement nuclearists like General Leslie R. Groves foresaw the possibility of a reaction against the bombing among American intellectuals and writers, to whom he referred as “the miscellany of crackpots, columnists, commentators, polit-ical aspirants, would-be authors and world savers” (qtd. in Lifton and Mitchell 12); he provided against the backlash by carefully controlling the release of information, prohibiting journalists from visiting the bomb sites, and employing the Pulitzer-prize winning William Laurence to write official press releases as well as what would have appeared to be independent articles on the glories of the Bomb. Though the Manhattan Project had depended entirely on the collaboration of university sci-entists and laboratories, many of the project’s advisors showed public contempt for non-nuclearists, focusing their disdain particularly on the “so-called intellectuals” who taught on college campuses (94).

4. Norman Holmes Pearson writes to Bryher in December 1938 that “the pres-ent is America’s greatest period” precisely because American writers were effectively entering and increasingly defining the international literary scene (Hollenberg 11, n.6).


5. Described almost universally as either a new “genesis” or the end of the world, the dropping of the Bomb was celebrated in an MGM film (a project that was initially intended to show the resistance of many Manhattan Project scientists to the dropping of the Bomb but was hijacked by official channels) that was tellingly called The Beginning or the End.

6. While in Corfu with Bryher in April of 1920, H. D. saw what she described as visionary projections akin to hieroglyphics on the wall of her hotel room (Tribute to Freud 51–55; hereafter TTF). It may be worth noting that Corfu was, like Egypt, a recently relinquished British colony, overseen by the same British authority, the earl of Cromer. While Cromer was pro-independence at Corfu, he was increasingly anti-independence in Egypt.

7. In its King James version, the passage in Daniel translates in part: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting” (5.27).

8. Freud and Pound collide only occasionally in Tribute to Freud, mostly in conjunction with H. D.’s account of her adolescence in Bethelehem, Pennsylvania. After recounting to Freud a dream that seemed “to have some association with Ezra,” H. D. comments, “The Professor knew the name, Ezra Pound. He said he had seen an article, but could not pretend to follow it” (TTF 181).

9. See Butler.

10. See, for example, Edmunds, Morris, and Friedman.

11. It should also be noted that Bryher, who financed H. D.’s analysis, believed her own roots were Jewish and had been covered up by her parents. See Guest 112, Friedman 163. During the 1930s she was actively involved in helping refugees leave Germany and Austria, often using her family home in Switzerland as a stopping off point (Friedman 236–61 passim).

12. His Origin of Continents and Oceans appeared in English translation in 1922. The original 1915 German edition was based on research presented at a Geo-logical Society conference in Frankfurt in 1912, though it wasn’t until the 1950s that the theory of continental drift was widely accepted.

13. For Cromer, British intervention in Egypt had been the “only possible solution of the difficulties which existed in 1882” (1:329), namely that through the machinations of Disraeli, Britain had gone from condemning the Suez Canal as an unachievable blunder to becoming its largest shareholder—and that the British empire clearly intended to exert political control commensurate with its growing economic interests in the area—a pattern that should be familiar to even the most casual students of twentieth-century American foreign policy. Cromer’s account was written largely to counter Blunt’s exposé of the statecraft behind Britain’s occu-pation of Egypt, written in 1895.

14. See Guest for more on the literary influences on Helen in Egypt, including Goethe and E. M. Butler’s study of Goethe, The Fortunes of Faust.


works cited

Benedict, Ruth. Rev. of Hiroshima, by John Hersey. Nation 7 December 1946: 656–58.

Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen. Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. London: Methuen, 1907.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. Endless Horizons. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1946: 16–38.

Butler, E.M. The Tyranny Of Greece Over Germany; A Study Of The Influence Exer-cised By Greek Art And Poetry Over The Great German Writers Of The Eigh-teenth, Nineteenth, And Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935. New York: Macmillan, 1935 .

Chirol, Sir Valentine. The Egyptian Problem. London: Macmillan, 1920.Cromer, first earl of [Evelyn Baring]. Modern Egypt. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan,

1908.Draaisma, Douwe. Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind. Trans.

Paul Vincent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, 1985.Edmunds, Susan. Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis & Montage in H. D.’s Long

Poems. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. London: Hogarth Press, 1939.———. “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad.’” Complete Psychological Works.

Vol. 19. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. ———.“Why War?” Collected Papers. Vol. 5. Ed. James Strachey. New York: Basic

Books, 1959. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H. D., Bryher, and their

Circle. New York: New Directions, 2002.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1997.Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: the Poet H. D. and her World. Garden City: Double-

day, 1984. H. D., Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions, 1961.———. Hermetic Definition. New York: New Directions, 1972.———. Paint It Today. Ed. and intro. Cassandra Laity. New York: New York Uni-

versity Press, 1992.———. Tribute to Freud. Boston: Godine, 1974.———. Trilogy. New York: New Directions, 1973.Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Knopf, 1946.Hogan, Michael J., ed. Hiroshima in History and Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996.Hollenberg, Donna Kralik, ed. Between History and Poetry: the Letters of H. D. and

Norman Holmes Pearson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.


Lifton, Robert Jay and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: Putnam, 1995.

Morris, Adelaide. How to Live / What to Do: H. D.’s Cultural Poetics. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Report of the National Defense Research Committee—6/27/40–6/28/41. Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

Serber, Robert. The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb. Ed. Richard Rhodes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Spicer, Jack. Language. San Francisco: White Rabbit Press, 1965.Stoff, Michael B., et al, eds. The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to

the Atomic Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Documents

Hellen Doolittle