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Paint It Today
This novel, a never before published Roman a clef by the famous imagist writer, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), that explores H.D.'s love for women, is a lyrical recreation of the love and loss of her friend and first love, Frances Gregg, and of her later meeting with Bryher who was to become H.D.'s lifelong companion. Spanning the years from H.D.'s childhood in Pennsylvania to the birth of her daughter, Perdita, in 1919, this turbulent love story is set against the backdrop of World War I, H.D.'s involvement in early 20th century London literary circles, her brief engagement to American poet, Ezra Pound, and her shattered marriage to British novelist Richard Aldington. Paint it Today is H.D.'s most lesbian novel, a modern, homoerotic tale of passage which focuses almost entirely on the young heroine's search for the sister love which would empower her spiritually, creatively, and sexually. Cassandra Laity's introduction places H.D.'s love for the sexually magnetic, betraying Gregg and for the more nurturing and loyal Bryher in the context of the lesbian romanticism of early modern fiction. her annotations of all Greek references and literary quotations,m as well as, biographical facts represented in the text, provide nuance and detail to this engrossing work.
140 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1992
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About the author
H.D.
123 books335 followersAn 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.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 27, 2020
En mi top 5 personal de la obra de H.D., esta novela me parece una belleza absoluta. Breve pero llena de referentes, en ella descubrimos a muchos de los poetas que influyeron a Hilda Doolittle y no deja de ser una ventanita más para las que somos lectoras cotillas y queremos dejarnos manchar de su apasionante vida. Cuando me preguntan por obras de ficción que hayan bordeado las relaciones abiertas o el poliamor, ahora pienso en 'Píntalo hoy'
February 10, 2023
My favorite kind of HD’s writing, a meandering but not overdone poetic prose.
April 11, 2008
If you like Sappho and women's lit., you've gotta read H.D. She was sort of the soul-sister of Sappho and even used some of her ideas. I think it was she who reapeted "For me niether honey nor the bee," which was a famous Sappho quote. Okay, so I love Sappho. Did you know one of her famous fragments was just "You hurt me." She was the first woman to say that, but boy do many of us know what she meant.
Anyway, give H.D. a try. She is an imagist.
Anyway, give H.D. a try. She is an imagist.
February 3, 2009
I was not expecting a foreword by Karla Jay! Nonetheless, also read in the laundromat, hate that it ends unfinished, I think this is my favorite of H.D.'s prose, probably because quite painterly.
April 20, 2021
5/5
Will buy the paperback to have such masterpiece for good(((:
Will buy the paperback to have such masterpiece for good(((:
November 22, 2020
In her time, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) stood at the forefront of modernism, considered the prime exemplar of a movement in English-language poetry known as Imagism, which abandoned all 19th-century indulgence in strict rhyme and strident meters in favor of what they called "vers libre" or free verse, hearkening instead to the example of the Greek lyrical poetry for its precision and keen attention to a more natural, but no less sophisticated, poetry. The first Imagist anthology, "Des Imagiste" (1914), included not only H.D., but her future husband, Richard Aldington (whose WWI trauma made him the likely model for D.H. Lawrence's Sir Clifford Chatterly—H.D. Lady Chatterly and Lawrence himself the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors), the lesbian poet Amy Lowell (Robert Lowell's aunt), and such unknowns as the Americans William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, and an Irishman, James Joyce. The second, "The Imagist Poets" (1915) added D.H. Lawrence. Imagism suggested that the image itself contain an entire universe, muscular not only in the physical realm, but also in the emotional, intellectual and spiritual.
After her death in 1961, H.D. faded into obscurity, largely due to her classical Greek, Roman, Hermetic and Egyptian influences. Humanity had embarked on The Space Age and seemed determined to leave antiquity behind, at long last. An heroic future lay before us. But it didn't take long for H.D. to be reexamined, regarded through a persistent 1970s' enlightened feminism. H.D., it turned out, had never been engaging in the mere sentimentality of looking back naïvely to some supposed Golden Age; in fact, as had always been clear to her admirers, she shook up the very foundations of Western Civilization's patriarchalism, not by rejecting or ignoring the classical myths that had always so engaged her, but by retelling or re-viewing them, through the eyes of a woman, reflecting on a more balanced time when women, not only men, were divinely represented.
"Paint It Today" is usually described as a short novel, a novella, but I would describe it rather as an 89-page long, prose poem. Her poetic instincts—more precise and concentrated than anyone's— can make her fictions as boggling and difficult to digest as Joyce's of 1918 and '39. She succeeds best in her shortest novels, "Paint It Today" and "Hedylus," where her crystalline sculpting of language is most endurable, though I've enjoyed with even more effort two longer works, "HERmione" and "Bid Me to Live." I don't mind such effort, likening it to a runner's second wind. I am as daunted, though, by the triple-layered "Palimpsest" as I am by "Finnegan's Wake." "Palimpsest" is thought of as the third book of an autobiographical modernist trilogy, beginning with "Asphodel" and "Paint It Today," though "Paint It Today" is the earliest composition. All three addressed her erotic longings for other women, which were not always physically consummated. H.D. is not an Anaïs Nin. She was more bold, perhaps, than open—one would not masturbate to H.D. as one might to Anaïs. But H.D. was no less erotic: I know of no writer more intimate, nor less casual.
In "Paint It Today" the reader lives in the mind of Midget, a tall woman, H.D. herself, whose adolescent crush on Josepha (Frances Gregg), was returned at least in spirit, as the two sought, as "Wee Witches" to corrupt one another, but always in the cause and for the sake of beauty. This is never explicitly stated—H.D. was nothing if never explicit! Eventually, both girls marry husbands, having awakened but never indulged the white-hot and particularly dangerous passion they held for one another.
Midget in time meets her second equal, Althea (Winifred Bryher). They delight in insulting one another, often with aristocratic airs, but also in getting muddy, rowing in storms, and parading around in their underwear. Althea, born into wealth, had never experienced an autumn day getting dirty in the weeds; Midget was but a little, American barbarian.
This is a novel without plot, as some of the very best novels can be, though still highly structured, divided by the "tidal wave" of London's World War One: Josepha before the War, Althea after. One participates, not in a story, but in a life, enjoying both the mud and those sensual classical sculptures, marble-made-flesh, that Midget and Althea, and Midget and Josepha before them, so completely enjoyed themselves. Every touch is electric, every breath the beginning edge of an orgasm.
"Do you remember the very first hyacinths were out that day your train left? Your arms were full of them and your eyes hated me above them and you seemed to say, 'You see there are other people, you see there are other hyacinths than the ones you bring me.' Yes, you tell lies, Josepha. There were never other hyacinths."
After her death in 1961, H.D. faded into obscurity, largely due to her classical Greek, Roman, Hermetic and Egyptian influences. Humanity had embarked on The Space Age and seemed determined to leave antiquity behind, at long last. An heroic future lay before us. But it didn't take long for H.D. to be reexamined, regarded through a persistent 1970s' enlightened feminism. H.D., it turned out, had never been engaging in the mere sentimentality of looking back naïvely to some supposed Golden Age; in fact, as had always been clear to her admirers, she shook up the very foundations of Western Civilization's patriarchalism, not by rejecting or ignoring the classical myths that had always so engaged her, but by retelling or re-viewing them, through the eyes of a woman, reflecting on a more balanced time when women, not only men, were divinely represented.
"Paint It Today" is usually described as a short novel, a novella, but I would describe it rather as an 89-page long, prose poem. Her poetic instincts—more precise and concentrated than anyone's— can make her fictions as boggling and difficult to digest as Joyce's of 1918 and '39. She succeeds best in her shortest novels, "Paint It Today" and "Hedylus," where her crystalline sculpting of language is most endurable, though I've enjoyed with even more effort two longer works, "HERmione" and "Bid Me to Live." I don't mind such effort, likening it to a runner's second wind. I am as daunted, though, by the triple-layered "Palimpsest" as I am by "Finnegan's Wake." "Palimpsest" is thought of as the third book of an autobiographical modernist trilogy, beginning with "Asphodel" and "Paint It Today," though "Paint It Today" is the earliest composition. All three addressed her erotic longings for other women, which were not always physically consummated. H.D. is not an Anaïs Nin. She was more bold, perhaps, than open—one would not masturbate to H.D. as one might to Anaïs. But H.D. was no less erotic: I know of no writer more intimate, nor less casual.
In "Paint It Today" the reader lives in the mind of Midget, a tall woman, H.D. herself, whose adolescent crush on Josepha (Frances Gregg), was returned at least in spirit, as the two sought, as "Wee Witches" to corrupt one another, but always in the cause and for the sake of beauty. This is never explicitly stated—H.D. was nothing if never explicit! Eventually, both girls marry husbands, having awakened but never indulged the white-hot and particularly dangerous passion they held for one another.
Midget in time meets her second equal, Althea (Winifred Bryher). They delight in insulting one another, often with aristocratic airs, but also in getting muddy, rowing in storms, and parading around in their underwear. Althea, born into wealth, had never experienced an autumn day getting dirty in the weeds; Midget was but a little, American barbarian.
This is a novel without plot, as some of the very best novels can be, though still highly structured, divided by the "tidal wave" of London's World War One: Josepha before the War, Althea after. One participates, not in a story, but in a life, enjoying both the mud and those sensual classical sculptures, marble-made-flesh, that Midget and Althea, and Midget and Josepha before them, so completely enjoyed themselves. Every touch is electric, every breath the beginning edge of an orgasm.
"Do you remember the very first hyacinths were out that day your train left? Your arms were full of them and your eyes hated me above them and you seemed to say, 'You see there are other people, you see there are other hyacinths than the ones you bring me.' Yes, you tell lies, Josepha. There were never other hyacinths."
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews