Within the Walls and What Do I Love?

by H.D., Annette Debo (Editor)

“These two hard-to-come-by texts reveal that the H.D. we know—the poet of exquisite, erudite, allusive imagist or modernist poems—chose to live through the experience of WWII London and to share with her fellow Londoners the hardships and anxieties of a city under attack.”—Demetres Tryphonopoulos, editor of Majic Ring
 
“Fascinating reading. Debo’s introduction and precise scholarly edition are not simply useful but will also change our minds about some of the other post-war works now available.”—Cynthia Hogue, coeditor of The Sword Went Out to Sea
 
This volume presents two rare works by the modernist writer Within the Walls , a collection of fourteen short stories, and What Do I Love? , a set of three long poems. Written during World War II in London, where H.D. chose to stay despite offers of refuge in the United States, the stories and poems recount her experiences during the Blitz. These texts capture the essence of war-torn London from the perspective of a woman with her boots on the ground.
           
Annette Debo’s nuanced introduction sets the cultural scene for these works. She positions the literature in three H.D.’s personal life, the story of women civilians at war, and the international history of World War II. Debo helps us comprehend a time and place that transformed “H.D. Imagiste” into the bold war writer evinced in this volume and opens our eyes to the impact of these war experiences on H.D.’s better known works.
 

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2014

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

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

there is a lot to dislike about this book. by "a lot" i mean proportionally -- this book is only 187 pages and 104 of them are wasted on one of the worst introductions i've ever had the displeasure of reading, and the poem isn’t really my thing. but it has one redeeming feature: this is the only place you can read "within the walls," h.d.'s collection of fourteen short stories.

for me, it took only one story, seven pages, about a mom waiting for her daughter to come home. it's called "before the war." i read it and i cried so hard i couldn't see straight, had to facetime my mom to tell her that i miss her, that i wish i had stayed home for the whole weekend instead of just friday and saturday, that i wish i had taken the big ass bag of liquid iv she wanted me to have, and that i wish, i wish, i wish i had known before i left what i know now about mothers and daughters and the warm, quiet longing they keep between them in a world so full of grief and coldness.

my mom laughed when she answered the phone. i told her about this short story i had to read for class, blowing my nose and wiping the tears away from under my glasses as i read aloud for her a passage that made me think especially of her. she was smiling, and told me i should just come home next weekend then. i don't know how to tell her that i'm not sure i can, so i just tell her i will. what i don't tell her is how saying it feels like h.d.'s written an eighth page to the story and how it breaks my heart in two.

[Mills College Library]

818.54 H1111w 2014