H.D., the life and work of an American poet

by Janice S. Robinson

Extensive documentation of notes, bibliography and index in this biography of Hilda Doolittle, an important modern writer.

490 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[e]

Robinson admirably takes up the tack of reclaiming H.D. as the first of firsts in Imagism & psychoanalytically informed art, & really seems to want to underscore her agency completely independent of (emotionally tone deaf? deliberately manipulative?) male poets in her life like Pound, Aldington, et al, & her brief exegesis on Moravianism, the importance of the Yule putz & other iconography, their lifelong recurrence in H.D.'s work—all this was what every critical biography ought to be: a resituating from the actual upheaval of extant materials as well as new light cast on the knowledge brought to the table by the reader themselves.

But as soon as Robinson starts talking about D.H. Lawrence, all hope is lost. Maybe some in the academy still read Lawrence, but I've never met anyone able to finish one of his novels, & his poetry notates in prostrate at the feet of a footnote. So when Robinson tries to support her theory of Lawrence's influence on H.D. (& vice versa) through close reads of their contemporaneous work, it seems plausible for a few pages or so, until it becomes gossipy theorizing about which character is H.D. or Lawrence in their respective novels, alleging that for H.D., in the rest of her work to come, Lawrence will always be Achilles in her personal mythopoetics, & the immediate effect is one of a sort of dull pique; except Robinson continues on this course for 150 uninterrupted pages, roughly a third of the book's total length, & the broader effect created undercuts Robinson's seeming entire project of reclamation, of restoration. By the time Bryher shows up, it feels like too little, too late, & Robinson seems weirdly dedicated to desexualizing her & H.D.'s relationship, casting her more in the role of emotional caretaker or something. Pointless commentary on Aldington's rumour-spreading of Lawrence's perceived or alleged homosexuality abound as well.

This biography... it's just not very good. Some of the analysis of the early, Imagist work, as well as the work done to reframe Pound's presence in her life into something more overtly narcissistic/imperious, is unlike much else I've read in H.D.ana, & I think hugely important to the development of that field—this is, after all, close to 40 years old now. But the shoddy parallelizing of H.D.'s dramatis personae is at best novel & worth thinking about for a couple minutes at a time & at worst merely gossip, dreadfully boring, & frankly, pretty much useless. This is not work informed by long reads of Freud. This is not written by someone who's read the texts H.D. embeds into her palimpsestry. It's 450 pages of trying to get a new generation of readers to enter into H.D.'s world, except the note posted on the door has "LAWRENCE" written over & over again on it in thick permanent marker, as if that were enough to entice, as if H.D. required anything more than to let her work speak for itself.

[Alexandra]

Delightful so far, though the author is leaving out or skipping over large parts of H.D.'s life, such as her time in Greenwich Village in 1910 and the affair with Cecil Gray ?!?

I'll keep reading but I'm suspecting the author is also sympathetic to psychoanalytic theory... :/...penis envy? I doubt it...

H.D.'s poetry is amazing and I love getting insight into the biographical events and relationships that provide the impetus for her poetry. Such beautiful work and a beautiful honest creative soul. I'm loving H.D. if not this biography.

Next up: HERmione by H.D.

[Dawn]

I don't know much about HD but I know this book is very flawed. While deeply researched, its man-obsessed lens obscures as much as it uncovers about a truly sensational poet and woman. The only reason I kept reading is to find things between the cracks in Robinson's heavy-handed thesis (that HD and DH are soulmates). Had this book not dropped out of the sky and landed in a random used book store, I wouldn't have bothered with it's 400ish pages.