Palimpsest

by H.D. (Pseudonym)

A novel in three very loosely connected parts -or a collection of three stories-:

1. Hipparchia: War Rome (circa 75 B. C.)
2. Murex: War and Postwar London (circa A. D. 1916-1926)
3. Secret Name: Excavator ´s Egypt (circa A. D. 1925)

The force and beauty of H. D.´s prose brings the stories in Palimpsest brightly to life, particularly in her sense of place: Rome about 75 B.C., post-World War I London and Egypt at the time of the Tutankhamon tomb excavations. The use of the palimpsest motif gives the reader the impression that one story has been superimposed on the other ad that the protagonist is always the same woman -in essence H. D. herself.

This edition includes the following appendices:

- Forewarned as regards H.D.´s prose (Robert McAlmon)
-A note on the text (Mathew J. Bruccoli)

Library of Congress Catalog Number 68-25566

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a difficult book to review. H. D. experiments on several different planes with her three-layered mixed genre palimpsest-novel. A palimpsest is a parchment from which writing has been imperfectly erased to make room for fresh writing, but since the erasures are imperfect, the previous writing still remains partially visible. Due to the cost of parchment, many antique manuscripts, particularly during medieval times, suffered such recycling.

H. D.´s first layer can be read as a historical novel set in ancient Rome circa 75 B.C. It follows an interesting but rather baffling relationship between Marius Decius an officer in the Imperial Roman Army and Hipparchia a cultured slave girl, a heitara from Corinth who is an accomplished poet. Of the three stories in the novel this is the one in which the narrative framework moves most, the book opens with Marius´ stream of consciousness after six months of Circean intimacy with Hipparchia, when he begins to wonder what it is that draws him to her:

He seemed inconsequently to himself to be penned in some pig-sty of illusion [...] Did Hipparchia´s chamber some scented death-root? Some fine-ground powder sprinkled as these new Asiatics taught in most vicious circles, drug to bring vision, to spell self-destruction [...] Hipparchia. Witchcraft. Illusion. Poetry.

We follow his mind as he talks to her, rides out on patrol, talks to the straightforward Olivia a Roman patrician friend whom he winds up abandoning Hipparchia for. The story then moves to Hipparchia´s stream of consciousness, after Marius has abandoned her and she is taken up by the rich and idle Verrus at his carefully designed and manicured gardens at Villa Capua. This first story is the one with the most interesting and intricate psychology as the two main characters struggle to understand the nature of their shifting, uneasy relationship which reflect a deeper clash between the nature of ancient Roman and Greek cultures. Marius believes that Roman civilization is erasing its Greek predecessor:

The best of the [Greek cities] are overbuilt by the new invading strength of the Roman populace, who on the very levelled ruins build new foundations for a mightier empire.

It is clear to H. D. that the ensuring palimpsest only manages to project ancient Greek civilization all the more keenly. The same thing happens to the relationship between Marius and Hipparchia, as both strike out to other partners, Olivia in the case of Marius and Verrus in the case of Hipparchia, their original relationship grows in importance, but in hindsight. The stream of consciousness shifts several times more as Marius leaves for an expedition into the deserts of Persia and Hipparchia leaves Verrus and his villa and returns to Rome where she falls ill.The story includes fragments of poetry which Hipparchia obsessively works and reworks trying to draw them or recover them into some sort of whole:

Her work is a correlation of gods, temples, flowers, poets [..] Her book was a fervid compilation of poetry, religion and ethics [...] Hipparchia worked with flaming mind to recapture some half-obliterated fragment

The prose in this story is hughly enthused with poetry.

The second layer of this palimsest-novel takes us to a story set in post-World War I London, a grey, misty ghostlike city, London as a pays lontaine, an alien city in a way which Rome or Capua were not, a place of dead gods:

London was the place for absolute obliteration, for this drift of the senses that was a sort of oriental state of god-in-nothingness

This second story includes the most extensive stream of consciousness flow in this book. The whole story is in fact the detailed description of the middle-aged Raymonde Ransome´s stream of consciousness as she recieves a lady visitor who ostensibly comes for advice on whether to take a trip to Florence or not. Raymonde Ransome is a war widow and a poet enamoured of, unsurprisingly for H. D., ancient Greece. The inner monologue covers a lot of ground. Sometimes it sounds uncannily close to Virginia Woolf, although H.D. acknowledges a debt to James Joyce as she manages to make Ransome explicitly and briefly drag him into her reflections. Between her reminiscenses of her husband Freddie, a blighty officer in the British Army, her envy of her friend´s Mavis style and apparent effort-filled agelessness, her nervous breakdown, Ransome is also, as was Hipparchia, engaged in painstaking writing poetry up from fragments of verses:

Inspiration, they said was a high and vibrant rush of wings. It was not. It was a small painful grub that sank deep and gnawed into one´s forehead and burrowed painfully deeper. It must be prodded out like some festering splinter. Inspiration was more like a festering splinter than a rush of words.

I found about the second quarter of this story becoming tedious and far too repetitive, but it manages to bounce back after a while. What is surprising about the novel is how, even though this second part of the story has very few direct quotes to the first story, the first story is never erased from the reader´s palimpsest-like consciousness. This may be due to some subtle similarities between Hipparchia´s awkard drifting through Roman social life and Raymonde´s self-conscious and somewhat clumsy drifting through hers; it may be due to the shared preference for classic Greek verse and compositional styles, or it may be due to apparently shallow similarities between Marius the Roman Officer and Freddy the British officer. The similarities are far from perfect -this is no novel of reincarnations- but they are enough to set off reverberations, like that of sympathetic strings on a lute or a sitar.

The third story is, in my opinion, the least successful one. Ostensibly set in Egypt in the time Howard Carter and George Herbert were still excavating the tomb of Tutankhamon, there is actually very little about the excavation. This time the story takes place in two days and its intervening night, again a British army officer appears opposite the main character, again a modern woman but the coolest and most self-possessed woman of the three protagonists. Hypparchia appears to have died young; Raymonde survives her husband physically - in the story there is no question of her dying- and she appears to draw strength from her mixed bag of memories concerning her husband, who cheated on her with one of her friends; in the third story Captain Raftan is very definitely kept at arm´s length by Mrs. Fairwood the psychologically most independent, mature and self-reliant of the three protagonists, but, paradoxically, a mediocre versifier who barely manages to make up a ditty. Egypt is, in itself a multi-layered palimpsest, and we see find out that:

The laughter in her throat was Greek, was Egyptian.

The exasperated Rafton complains that

You´re always talking about the Greeks.

and tries to set her right, according to his lights:

The Greeks came to Egypt to learn.

Mrs. Fairwood admits that:

I always loved the Greeks so much I was afraid to come to Egypt. Lest is somehow spoil or taint Greece. But that´s not possible. For Egypt is, don´t you feel it, simply another planet? That we are, by some trick, sifted over onto another planet, revolving in the same curve as out earth curve but near, much nearer to the sun and stars.

In short, this book is a somewhat flawed and overly long experiment which has some lovely and very interesting effects, some fascinating but occasional insights and an innovative structure which does not quite fulfill the promise of its first story. It can be found and borrowed electronically from https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21493...

[Sarah Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly profuse and dense but enrapturing prose. H.D. captures the power of eternal love and collectivity through space and time more so than any of her other work.

[Padma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few poets exert such a spell on me as the early modernist, H.D. Her fiction resembles her poetry in that it has qualities that are crystalline, chiseled from marble, of import both spiritual and psychological. Her novels often read like sub-liminal dreams, etched just below the surface of consciousness, and in that regard they are difficult, which is not to suggest that they are either unsatisfying or unworthy; instead, the reader is granted an unfamiliar intimacy that is easy to recoil from, to look away from, making the challenge of reading her an awakening to the awareness of one's own inner monologues/dialogues, of which we normally catch snippets of only when we are silent, and a voice breaks forth, a fragment spoken in a tongue we neither recognize nor hear as foreign, for it is both distant and familiar, breaking into our hearing from other worlds than the one we see, yet worlds we have always known, for we dream ....

It is said that H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) is the only analysand of Sigmund Freud who actually wrote of her experiences. In this, we are given a treat, an insight into one of the greatest minds of the last century that is intimate, rather than academic, personal rather than political. To H.D., Freud is the wise man, her mythological Theseus; and yet in other works like her essays in "Notes on Thought and Vision," she seems more Jungian in her arguments with Freud, resistant to Freud's degrading of the feminine, more in tune with Jung's awareness of archetypal energies that can be tapped into as wellsprings of awareness. It is, perhaps, her love and respect for Freud, that dictate we never hear her speak of Jung, Freud's disciple-turned-rival, directly. She recognized Freud's significance in opening the floodgates of the unconscious for examination.

"Palimpsest" is dreamy, through and through. It takes great patience to enter the minds of three different women who are superimposed upon each other, each though unaware of the others' presences. H.D.'s novels are not plot-driven, so one can not fall back on extrapolations of narrative when discussing her. I've never taken opium—but reading this work, I suspect that this is what opium feels like, dreamlike and beautiful, unnerving. Best just to stop thinking and let it happen to you.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does one categorize this book? Part poetry, part prose, narrative that is nearly entirely internal monologue yet somehow impersonal, in the first two sections "plot," if we can even use that term, happens almost entirely off the page, but the scenes never drag. The tremendous learning of H.D.'s mind is entirely present here, and it practically took my head off.

[Kay Baird · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to read. The story progresses through description largely in stream-of-consciousness: repetitive phrases and images that evoke association rather than logical, straightforward thinking and language. "An escape from binary and hierarchical thinking associated with patriarchy" says The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, quoted on American Poems.

I kept putting the book down in frustration, wanting that old familiar expository style I was trained in, I feel comfortable with, I feel skilled in. Feeling lost in this swamp of suggestion and intimation. And then picking it up again, because after all I think it is actually about the struggle for expression outside of those norms.

What if I could learn from it a freer style; could I speak my deep mind?

Eventually, however, I stopped banging my head against it.