She Is Her. I Am Her.

In one of William Shakespeare’s most memorable scenes, Juliet asks “What’s in a name?” from her balcony as her “gentle Romeo” looks on. The young Capulet questions the relevance of denomination for “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In 1927, as if in answer to this timeless question, the modernist poet H.D. (née Hilda Doolittle) wrote an autobiographical novel, HERmione (published in 1981 and just reissued by New Directions), that offers a potential rejoinder to fair Juliet: “Names are in people—people are in names.”

From the beginning, names played a central role in H.D.’s creation myth. Most readers who know of her likely encountered the simple version of her origin story, in which Ezra Pound, her one-time fiancé, gave her the pen name H.D. at the tearoom in the British Museum. Privately, he continued to call her by his favorite pet name, Dryad. She shared a version of that famous scene in End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (1979):

“But Dryad,” (in the Museum tea room), “this is poetry.” He slashed with a pencil. “Cut this out, shorten this line. ‘Hermes of the Ways’ is a good title. I’ll send this to Harriet Monroe of Poetry. Have you a copy? Yes? Then we can send this, or I’ll type it when we get back. Will this do?” And he scrawled “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom of the page.

Pound’s signing of the poems on her behalf with this new nom de plume offers a tidy provenance for a poet and a literary movement—one that H.D. herself was clearly not opposed to retelling. But like all names, the sobriquet became both freeing and confining. It allowed her to escape certain gender expectations by giving her the potential to “pass”—at least on the page—as male. Though she spent the majority of her long career crafting elaborate epic poems and revisiting the important moments of her life in labyrinthine autobiographical novels and memoirs, H.D. remained forever encumbered by the Imagist epithet, even though she was a part of that movement for only a fragment of a decade.

Imagism focused on precise imagery and clear language. Pound’s description of H.D.’s early poems in his letter to Harriet Monroe says it all: “Objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!” According to T.S. Eliot, another Pound protégé, Imagism was “the point de repère, usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry.” But H.D. and most of the other Imagists moved on from the limits of brevity rather quickly. In later interviews, H.D. made clear that the Imagism label didn’t accurately describe her work after World War I. During the 1920s and in the decades that followed, her writing was characterized less by concise, exacting imagery, though her love of an evocative image remained, than by an epic quest for psychoanalytic self-examination and an intricate web of mythopoetic allusion. (It’s mythic talk, mythic as the Greek!) H.D. became a purveyor of the kind of “cosmic” poetry that the Imagist manifesto so vehemently opposed. She wrote of her later work: “This is not the ‘crystalline’ poetry that my early critics would insist on. It is no pillar of salt nor yet of hewn rock-crystal. It is the pillar of fire by night, the pillar of cloud by day.”

In some ways, HERmione can be seen as an author’s attempt to rewrite her own genesis, to make her development as a poet a more important story than a christening over tea at the British Museum. This dramatization of her earlier “becoming” involves not just Pound and herself but also a mysterious other, the poet Frances Gregg, who made up the third point in an eternal triangle. Gregg met Pound and H.D. in 1911 and began a volatile ménage à trois that contained the seeds of H.D.’s erotic awakening as well as her poetic one. Each awakening, of course, was inextricable from the other because—as H.D. claims in HERmione—“Love is writing.” For many artists, creative inspiration hitches a ride on the arrows of Eros.

HERmione is not a memoir, though, nor is it autofiction. It is a roman à clef in which H.D.’s father, Charles Doolittle, is Bertram Gart; her mother, Helen Doolittle (née Wolle), is Eugenia; Pound is George Lowndes; and Gregg is Fayne Rabb. Most important, H.D. christens herself Hermione Gart—a name overflowing with associative possibilities, which the author exploits. The main reference is to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in which the character Hermione has a daughter named Perdita, as the real-life H.D. did. Hermione makes this reference explicit: “I am out of the Temple Shakespeare. I am out of The Winter’s Tale. It was my grandfather’s idea to call me something out of Shakespeare.” Throughout the novel, she repeats the phrase “I am Hermione out of Shakespeare,” and the Bard’s recasting of the Pygmalion myth in The Winter’s Tale, with the statue-object come to life, becomes a central motif. The name Hermione also comes from Greek myth, in which she is the daughter of Helen of Troy, a subtle nod to the name of H.D.’s mother. 

Though names in HERmione can be allusive, overdetermined, and brimming with meaning, they can also be anonymous and abstract. When H.D. describes her family sitting at a table—“Gart and Gart sat facing Gart and Gart”—signification borders on farce. In another move to abstract and anonymize, H.D. most often refers to herself, the main character Hermione Gart, simply as “Her,” reduced to a third-person pronoun, a feminine object.

When readers are introduced to Her, she has a tenuous grip on reality:

Her Gart went round in circles. “I am Her,” she said to herself; she repeated, “Her, Her, Her.” Her Gart tried to hold on to something; drowning she grasped, she caught at a smooth surface, her fingers slipped, she cried in her dementia, “I am Her, Her, Her.” Her Gart had no word for her dementia, it was predictable by star, by star-sign, by year.

Her fragile mental state is partly due to her having just failed at Bryn Mawr. She feels like “a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place.” The failure cuts so deep because the degree was meant to free her from the bondage of Victorian domesticity and make her a modern woman. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the events depicted take place, there were few female models for Her to follow. Her mother was once a talented musician who gave it up to please her husband. Eugenia Gart explains, “Your father likes the light concentrated in a corner. He can work better if I’m sitting in the dark.” Hermione does not want to sit in the dark, and her failure at Bryn Mawr—“I failed in conic sections”—enmeshes her in that potential darkness:

Only now she knew that failing at the end meant fresh barriers, fresh chains, a mesh here. The degree almost gained would have been redemption, something she hardly realized, tutoring or something, teaching … something she had an inkling would bring her in, would have brought her in a “salary.”

Amid the whirl of her madness, the prose moves in fits and starts, always turning in on itself, offering repetition upon repetition, with only minor adjustments. The crystalline brevity of H.D.’s early Imagist poems is replaced with excess, redundancy, and a tempestuous drift. This emphasis on repetition aligns her with fellow modernist poet Gertrude Stein. However, Stein’s repetitions maintain the hypnotic ebb and flow of tides; H.D.’s have a more chaotic churn. Her reiterations break up smooth flow as often as they create it. They are less perfected, more haphazard—which may make them more representative of true consciousness.

In this sense, HERmione feels connected to another Modernist’s autobiographical novel: Conrad Aiken’s Ushant (1952). Aiken and H.D. shared a particular spiraling, liquid vision of autobiography and—perhaps this is where their books’ spiral shapes emerge from—a deep interest in psychoanalysis. Aiken has been called “the first American to recognize … the relevance of Freud to literature,” especially with regard to his poetry and novels throughout the 1920s. In fact, Freud is rumored to have kept a copy of Aiken’s novel Great Circle (1933) on his desk. If Aiken was, indeed, the first to recognize Freud’s literary utility, no doubt H.D. was the second.

Though HERmione was written before she began her daily sessions with “Papa” (as she called Freud) in 1933, it was clearly written with Freudian psychoanalysis in mind. H.D.’s lover, the British writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known by her pen name, Bryher, owned a library of psychoanalytic texts that furnished H.D. with much of the terminology that clutters the novel’s weaker moments, as when she therapizes her younger self. “Words that had not (in Philadelphia) been invented, beat about them: Oedipus complex, inferiority complex, claustrophobia.” But readers might forgive the few instances in which Freudian buzzwords overtake the text because the novel’s psychoanalytic underpinnings are deeply connected to its core themes.

One lesson of psychoanalysis is that associations often “work”—with or without conscious intent. In this way, naming, even when truly random, can allow a person to form connections that hint at unconscious desires and anxieties. Can it be anything other than coincidence that Hilda Doolittle shares her family name with the Cockney flower girl in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion? Even so, H.D.’s interest in the Pygmalion myth was strong enough to inspire her poem “Pygmalion,” which, like HERmione, explores the possibility of artistic self-creation. Shaw and Pygmalion are referenced in HERmione, even though the connection to the Doolittle name is shrouded by the character’s pseudonymous renaming: “‘Poor damn Shaw would be delighted’ and Hermione hated George with his affectation of familiarity with crowned (so to speak) heads and saw that Fayne Rabb was Pygmalion.”

Into the crucible of Her’s perceived failures and tenuous sanity appeared George Lowndes, freshly returned from Europe. Lowndes so closely resembled Pound that even the poet’s wild mane—“upstanding harlequin thick hair”—and famously polyglot conversation—“a harlequin sort of person with patchwork clothes with patchwork languages, bursting into Spanish or Italian or the sort of French that no one ever tried to think of speaking”—make cameos. His presence offers Hermione hope that he might “dynamite her world away for her.” He introduces Hermione to various poets and opens her mind to the possibilities of language, but the influence begins to overpower Her and make her feel “smudged out.”

Her’s various imprisonments—the name Hermione Gart, science, mathematics, conic sections, her failure at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the trees, Lowndes’s views of Her, his objectification, their engagement, etc.—can be named, but these names are a synecdoche for the larger imprisonment that they are all a part of: the imprisonment of identity, which is an imprisonment of language and naming.

By way of example, readers who follow the tree motif throughout the novel find an interesting swirl of opposing tidal currents in Her’s stream of consciousness. At times, trees oppress and ensnare her. “Trees, no matter how elusive, in the end, walled one in. Trees were suffocation.”  Elsewhere, she becomes a tree —“I am a tree. TREE is my new name out of the Revelations.” Or, at least, the word tree—“I am in the word TREE. I am TREE exactly.” Without knowledge of Pound’s early poetry dedicated to H.D., the motif becomes convoluted, contradictory, and unmoored. But recognizing HERmione as a response to Pound’s early poems, addressed to H.D. in Hilda’s Book (1905), makes the erratic tree symbolism cohere.

Allusions to tree nymphs abound in Hilda’s Book. “She hath some tree-born spirit of the wood / About her,” Pound wrote in “Rendez-vous.” Elsewhere, in “The Tree,” the only poem in Hilda’s Book in which Pound gives his addressee a voice, she becomes a tree as Daphne did to escape an assault by Apollo: “I stood still and was a tree amid the wood / Knowing the truth of things unseen before / Of Daphne and the laurel bow.” This image of Daphne’s escape from seduction is reimagined in HERmione: “George turned facing Her, rubbed cheek against a tree trunk. […] She now braced herself decisively against her own tree.”

Even the choice of H.D.’s pseudonym—Her—assumes additional weight when read in relation to Hilda’s Book. “I saw her yesterday,” Pound wrote in “Shadow” and further down repeated the line, this time capitalizing HER: “I saw HER yesterday.” HERmione is H.D.’s rebellion against being turned into a feminine object. Lowndes/Pound “wanted Her, but he wanted a her that he called decorative.”

Her’s transformation into a statue through the eyes of Lowndes is as constant in the novel as her tree metamorphoses—and even more thematically relevant with its associations to Pygmalion and The Winter’s Tale. At one point, “Kisses forced her into soft moss. Her head lay marble weight in cushion of forest moss.” Elsewhere, “Her hand was something apart, weighted […] a marble hand sunk into the pillow.” And later, when Her collapses, “George put two hands under the armpits of a statue that was falling.”

H.D. was ambivalent toward Pound. “The strange thing is that Ezra was so inexpressibly kind to anyone who he felt had the faintest spark of submerged talent,” she later wrote. She never denied her debt to him. But she also knew that if she had stayed with him or married him, “Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call ‘Air and Crystal’ of my poetry.” She wanted to be a poet’s equal, not a muse or a dryad, not a statue or a tree—not any object.

Though Lowndes’s influence is undeniable, the novel places greater emphasis on Rabb:

Valiantly I will keep Her under. I will incarcerate Her. Her won’t anymore be. A white butterfly that hesitates a moment finds frost to break the wavering tenuous antennae. I put, so to speak, antennae out too early. I felt letting Her so delicately protrude prenatal antennae from the husk of the thing called Her, frost nip the delicate fibre of the starfish edges of the thing I clung to. I, Her clung to the most tenuous of antennae. Mama, Eugenia that is, Carl Gart and Lillian were so many leaves wrapped around the unborn butterfly. Outside a force wakened, drew Her out of Her. Call the thing Fayne Rabb.

The butterfly imagery is revealing because it shows up elsewhere in H.D.’s work. In her 1944 poem “Tribute to the Angels,” the second section of her Trilogy, a goddess appears who “carries a book” that “is not / the tome of the ancient wisdom” but one of “blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new.” This deity “is Psyche, the butterfly, / out of the cocoon.” For H.D., the butterfly is a feminine, fertile symbol of birth—but, importantly, not one tied to procreative copulation. The butterfly represents rebirth, the emergence of self from self, the blank page inviting new words, the artist becoming.

Though Lowndes calls some of Hermione’s poetry “rotten,” Rabb takes her poetic aspirations more seriously. She understands the relationship between naming and becoming: “Your writing is the thin flute holding you to eternity,” she tells Her. “Take away your flute and you remain, lost in a world of unreality.” Lowndes makes a mockery of their intense homoerotic connection and accuses them of “witchcraft,” but the women, through their “concentric intimacy,” find in one another a model of feminine poetic self-possession. Unlike the “claustrophobia” that surrounds her relationship with Lowndes, the relationship with Rabb offers a seemingly infinite expansiveness. Rabb is described as a “thing that made the floor sink beneath her feet and the wall rise to infinity above her head,” and Hermione declares that “she would follow Fayne into the space beyond space.”

Interestingly this relationship, too, turns her into an object, into a statue. One woman says to the other, “And I—I’ll make you breathe, my breathless statue.” To which the other responds, “Statue? You—you are the statue.” The objectification here is different though. They are both the Pygmalion and the statue brought to life, subject and object to one another, equals. Ultimately, this relationship, like the one with Lowndes, overwhelms, as Her begins to lose herself in Rabb: “She is Her. I am Her. Her is Fayne. Fayne is Her.” When Rabb admits to a relationship with Lowndes, it destabilizes Her completely, whirling Her “into obliteration.”

However, these supposedly obliterative failures (at Bryn Mawr, with Lowndes, with Rabb, etc.) are ultimately not failures at all. They are different stages of the molting caterpillar, the disrobing of skins and selves. Only upon later reflection did H.D. see these failures as gates “slammed […] so that she should attain a wider vision,” understanding that these setbacks might constitute “some subtle form of courage.”

By the end of this Künstlerroman, Her is free and the world, her world, is ready to be written by Her. She leaves the Gart home, and the surrounding forest—whose heat and trees “were suffocation” months prior—is now blanketed in snow. She makes marks as she walks: “Her feet were pencils tracing a path through a forest. … Now the creator was Her’s feet, narrow black crayon across the winter whiteness.” HERmione depicts a transformation into subject-object; she is the observer observing herself (Her’s self).

Yet, even as the book charts Hermione’s movement toward a more self-possessed identity, the “self” remains elusive and unfixed. What may have initially seemed like a disagreement with Juliet (“Names are in people—people are in names”) actually places her in accordance with the Capulets’ thinking. Names pin, but only through naming (by calling a rose another name) can we escape the tyranny of the initial named identity. Language offers freedom. “Words were her plague and words were her redemption,” Hermione claims. And what are words but names?