GLR November-December 2023

H.D.: Everything All at Once

I NNOVATIVE, bursting with creative energy, and accomplished in multiple genres, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886– 1961) is a pivotal, if still under-appre ciated, figure in literary modernism. Having christened herself “H.D., Imagiste” early in her career, she and her literary friends Ezra Pound (to whom she was briefly engaged),

At various points in her life, with various people, in various contexts, you will find a different H.D. She is tomboyish, assertive, confident, reclusive, shy and fearful. She is mercurial. She is detached and aloof, a loner. She is painfully vulnerable, always hiding from view. She is glamorous and charming, inviting attention. She shies away from so cial settings, stooping to minimize her pres

H ILARY H OLLADAY

H.D. (Hilda Dooli tt le) by LaraVe tt er Reak ti on Books. 208 pages, $22.

Richard Aldington (whom she married), and William Carlos Williams created Imagism, an early 20th-century movement popularizing brief, gemlike verses that dispensed with abstrac tions and conventional rhyme and meter. Over a period of fifty years, H.D. published poetry, short stories, novels, plays, essays, memoirs, and translations, edited film and literary journals, and both made and appeared in avant-garde films. Turning to her re lationships, Freud called her “the perfect bi-,” and her lovers of both sexes justified his seemingly laudatory assessment. In Lara Vetter’s engaging and well-paced H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) , part of Reaktion Books’ series of concise biogra phies, the author admits early on that her subject presented some challenges:

ence and extravagant height. ... She is always serious. She is funny, “saltily American, humorous, informal.” She had a laugh “like a waterfall, or a tinkling cascade of bells.” Elsewhere, Vetter offers this pleasing juxtaposition: “She was extraordinarily well read—her library vast—but in stressful times, she binged on lesbian romances and police procedurals. For a time, she raised pet monkeys.” Such was the eclectic life of H.D., Imagiste. Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Charles Doolittle, a math and astronomy professor at Lehigh Uni versity, and Helen Wolle Doolittle, a painter and musician. Charles Doolittle was a widower who brought two sons into the house hold. In addition to these half-siblings, Hilda had three brothers. She enjoyed a happy childhood and loved the natural beauty of her hometown, which was then a small rural Moravian community. When Hilda was eight, the family moved to Upper Darby, PA, so her father could teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Her life continued smoothly as she excelled in high school, studying Latin and the ancient Greeks, and got into Bryn Mawr College. Adventurous and eager to launch her career as a writer, she left Bryn Mawr in the middle of her second year. After falling for a beautiful art student, Frances Gregg, and trying to make a life for herself in New York City, H.D. sailed for Europe in July of 1911 with Gregg and Gregg’s mother. The young lovers rel ished their adventures in France, which, Vetter writes, was “everything they had hoped for. The two snuck off to take nude photographs of one another on the beach, went to museums, and heatedly debated art and aesthetics, touring France with guide books firmly in hand.” Later on, in London, H.D. became part of a starry literary milieu, thanks to Pound’s introductions. In the ensuing decades, in both London and Paris, she would get to know T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Mar ianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Tok las, among many others. H.D. stayed on in London when Gregg returned to the U.S. After Gregg returned with a husband in tow, H.D. began a rela tionship with Richard Aldington, an English poet and critic who shared her intellectual and poetic interests, and married him in 1913. Vetter writes that for H.D. the marriage “would ultimately prove liberatory, shielding her sexual relationships with women and men in the decades to come.” The couple weathered a dif ficult spell when H.D. bore a stillborn daughter. While Alding Hilary Holladay is the author of The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography.

TheG & LR

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