H.D.

's American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of Place

Author(s): Annette Debo
Source: South Atlantic Review , Fall, 2004, Vol. 69, No. 3/4 (Fall, 2004), pp. 1-22
Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20064607

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 H.D.'s American Landscape:
The Power and Permanence of
Place
Annette Debo

In Paint It Today/Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D.,

wrote,

She, Midget, did not wish to be an eastern flower

painter. She did not wish to be an exact and
over-pr??euse western, a scientific describer of
detail of vein and leaf of flowers, dead or living,
nor did she wish to press flowers and fern fronds
and threads of pink and purple seaweed between
the pages of her book. Yet she wanted to com
bine all these qualities in her writing and to add
still another quality to these three. She wished to
embody, as this other quality, the fragrance of
the flowers. (17)

Into this passage is inscribed Midget's hope to become a

writer able to capture the essence of a place, a goal which
H.D. herself achieved. Although she did not become the sci
entist her father had planned, H.D. inherited his scientific
modes of observation, and while he practiced the art of
astronomy, she incorporates into her art her careful and intri
cate observations of the American land. The seascapes of
Maine come to life with their scraggly pines and hardy flow
ers; likewise, Pennsylvania's pastures and woods are careful
ly ensconced in her texts?a much more permanent method
of capturing landscapes than "press[ing] flowers and fern

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2 Annette Debo

fronds and threads of pink and purple seaweed/'

The ecocritical lens, through which H.D. has not yet
been read, offers new ways to address H.D.'s focus on place.
Orchestrating a concert of voices in The Ecocriticism Reader,
Cheryll Glotfelty asks, in her catalog of questions posed by
ecocritics, "in addition to race, class, and gender, should place
become a new critical category?" (xix). If place is indeed a
valid aspect of identity, then it becomes integral to the theo
rizing of the modernist self. For H.D., her American past
haunted her, and throughout her life, as she repeatedly
sought self knowledge through outlets as varied as psycho
analysis and the occult, she reflected back upon her child
hood to formulate the relationship between her adult identi
ty and that American childhood. In part, that preoccupation
relies on a belief in the formative power of place. For exam
ple, H.D.'s narrator in Paint It Today stipulates that "language
and tradition do not make a people, but the heat that presses
on them, the cold that baffles them, the alternating lengths of
night and day," underscoring the power of place?just like
race, class, and gender ?to construct identity (20).
Furthermore, although ecocriticism became codified as a dis
crete critical school only in the mid-1990s, its roots stretch to
H.D.'s time and beyond. H.D.'s contemporary Mary Austin
made the claim that "Art, considered as the expression of any
people as a whole, is the response they make in various medi
ums to the impact that the totality of their experience makes
upon them, and there is no sort of experience that works so
constantly and subtly upon man as his regional environ
ment" (97). I contend that H.D. shared Austen's belief in the
power of place and that H.D.'s connection to American places
was a pivotal part of her artistic vision.*
My first objective then in interpreting the influence of
the American land in H.D.'s work is identifying its physical
presence. Because H.D. uses mythical settings in many
poems, readers often do not realize that her poetic images are
based on the American landscape of her youth, which I will

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 South Atlantic Review 3

demonstrate by tracing her images to their origins. There is

also H.D.'s own testimony to consider. In 1937, when looking
back on her writing to explain the sources of her poetic
images to Norman Holmes Pearson, her close friend and lit
erary executor, H.D. wrote,

"Leda" was done at the same time as "Lethe".

Lotus-land, all this. It is nostalgia for a lost land.
I call it Hellas. I might, psychologically just as
well, have listed the Casco Bay islands off the
coast of Maine but I called my islands Rhodes,
Samos and Cos.
They are symbols. And symbolically the first
island of memory was dredged away or lost, like
a miniature Atlantis. It was a thickly wooded
island in the Lehigh river [in Pennsylvania] and
believe it or not, was named actually, Calypso's
island. (Collecott 72)2

In this somewhat elusive explanation, H.D. illustrates how

she grafts the Grecian names of Rhodes, Samos, and Cos onto
the physical bodies of the Casco Bay islands and an island in
the Lehigh River, places she has lost through time (the world
of childhood) and distance (the U.S.). The "first island of
memory" is in the Lehigh River, which runs through
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the town in which H.D. was born
and lived until she was nine. This island, deliberately chosen
because of its Greek name, becomes the physical basis of the
later imagery in the poems "Leda" and "Lethe." According
to Diana Collecott, Calypso's Island was also the "scene of
Doolittle family holidays, before 1911," a perfect melding of
American places and memories with Greek allusions.
Significantly, the presence of Maine and Pennsylvania here is
not an isolated incident. On the contrary, this layer is an
ubiquitous component of H.D.'s palimpsest-like writing.
Shards of her past are ever present, the American landscape
undergirding the Greek myths and allusions she superim

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4 Annette Debo

posed upon it. For the purposes of this article, I will use Sea
Garden, H.D/s earliest and justly acclaimed volume of poetry,
to illustrate this point.
Once having established the presence and importance
of American places for H.D. in Sea Garden, I will turn to how
place functions in two of her novels. In H.D.'s fiction in gen
eral, place becomes an active spirit that constructs identity
and shapes her as a writer. In HERmione, the land infiltrates
the house, spreading its aura of wildness throughout, and it
molds Hermione's character and influences her development
as a writer. Similarly, in Paint It Today, when the main char
acter, Midget, moves to Europe, she remains permanently
separated even from the other artists there because both her
character and her art were formed by the American environ
ment of her youth.

H.D.'s use of the American landscape has received

scant critical attention to date even though in 1916 John
Gould Fletcher noticed the resemblance of H.D.'s coasts to the
Northeastern coast of the U.S., commenting that "the scenery
and the feeling are not Greek. In fact, as someone has point
ed out, the whole poem might have been called 'The Coast of
New Jersey'" (34). The only H.D. critic to build on his com
ments is Susan Stanford Friedman who has noted that "the
landscape of Sea Garden originated in America," a conclusion
she likely based on Pearson's statement that H.D. "often told
me that her nature imagery . . . was never really Greek but
came from her childhood reminiscences of Watch Hill and the
coasts of Rhode Island and Maine, which she used to visit
with her friends as a child" (Friedman 99; Dembo 437).
Friedman's claim gestures toward the role the U.S. plays in
H.D.'s work, but even her work provides a limited analysis of
this aspect of H.D.'s writings In developing this critical
thread, I maintain that the American landscape is

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 South Atlantic Review 5

omnipresent in H.D.'s writing because of its connection to

nationality. Despite her expatriate life, H.D. always felt her
self an American, even repatriating at age seventy-two, and
for nationalism, the land is pivotal. Historian Robert H.
Wiebe writes that "Nationalism is the desire among people who
believe they share a common ancestry and a common destiny to live
under their own government on land sacred to their history/' a def
inition highlighting the land as "sacred" (5). As an expatriate,
H.D. left behind her community and her citizenship, but in
the imaginative space of her poetry, she could retain, and
even revere, the sacred land of her childhood in the U.S. In
Sea Garden, as in much of H.D.'s writing, the Greek qualities
for which H.D. is better known are superimposed onto
American places, which become the bedrock for all her land
scape imagery. Always alert for opportunities to mingle the
ancient and the contemporary as well as her American past
and her European present, H.D. uses the American land, in
scientific detail, in her imagery.
Certainly, H.D. infused the landscape of Sea Garden
with her penchant for Greek allusions, and, following closely
upon her 1912 visit to Capri, the volume is also inflected by
H.D.'s travel to that island (Guest 53). However, while the
allusions may be Greek, the landscape is American, accurate
ly rendered by a woman who grew up in a family of scien
tists. From her father, a prominent astronomer, and her
grandfather, an influential botanist, H.D. inherited scientific
habits of method and precision which influence her poetic
technique, as Adalaide Morris and Charlotte Mandel have
demonstrated. Morris sees H.D. "reproduce" her grandfa
ther's "delicate language, his transfixed, interrogating gaze,
and his push for taxonomic precision" (199). Mandel writes,

Hilda Doolittle was born at the full of the

Victorian-style quest for scientific knowledge by
diligent personal observation, collection, nota
tion and classification.... From birth, she was

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6 Annette Debo

influenced by these devotions to exactitude at

reading the universe, interpreting meaning that
would be evoked by avid study of detail and its
accurate rendition into drawing and written
symbol. She absorbed the discipline of their con
centrated search, and its mystery, for the myriad
specific tiny plants and orbiting sky-presences
were invisible to the naked eye. (301)

This discipline and eye for detail give to Sea Garden a botani
cal accuracy and a proclivity "to model the ancient Greek cat
alogue form almost into a naming of species" as in "Sea
Gods" with its myriad forms of violets: wood violets, stream
violets, blue violets, river-violets, yellow violets, bird-foot
violets, and so on (Mandel 307). Her "catalog" replicates the
many variations of a species, much as a nature illustrator
might create a book of northeastern flora or a nature writer
might record her explorations.
Not only do the poems read like botanical catalogs at
times, but their imagery of the landscape and vegetation is as
authentically drawn as the algae her grandfather painstaking
ly hand drew and colored for his two internationally recog
nized studies. The sources for H.D.'s imagery are found in
her experiences in the U.S., akin to the local research in ponds
and streams upon which her grandfather relied. Her cousin
Francis Wolle testifies to her training in the local flora and
fauna in their summer romps as children: "Chiefly under
Eric's [H.D.'s brother, a scientist] guidance we got to know
the birds, plants, and wild flowers" (33). H.D. began Sea
Garden only a year after leaving Pennsylvania for Europe, and
the Northeastern coast as well as the Pennsylvanian country
side clearly emerge in Sea Garden's imagery.
Moreover, Sea Garden's patterns of imagery locate the
freedom for which the speaker longs in that landscape. Many
critics have addressed how the American land and the fron
tier affected the development of an American identity in the

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 South Atlantic Review 7

Europeans who settled in the U.S. A dominant strain of

thought pertaining specifically to women is that women were
complicit in domesticating the land, in transforming vast
forests into orderly orchards and gardens, as persuasively
argued by Annette Kolodny. Similarly, Vera Norwood has
shown how middle-class white women developed an interest
in nature but managed to keep it within their gender role: "an
enclosed flower garden filled with beautiful women at their
ease remains a classic image of woman's proper role in
nature" (xviii). These women found acceptable outlets in
becoming landscape and garden designers, writing about the
nature near to hand, creating scientific illustrations, and
painting and photographing the environment. On the other
hand, Stacy Alaimo claims an opposing view, that "many
women have, in fact, invoked nature in order to critique cul
tural roles, norms, and assumptions and to escape from the
confines of the domestic" (15). She continues,

These women looked outward toward a natural

realm precisely because this space was not
already designated as "truly and unequivocally
theirs" and thus was not replete with the domes
tic values that many women wished to escape.
Nature, then, is undomesticated both in the sense
that it figures as a space apart from the domestic
and in the sense that it is untamed and thus
serves as a model for female insurgency. (17)

It is into this tradition that H.D. falls.^

Sea Garden is about freedom of the spirit, and
"absolute freedom and wildness," to use Henry David
Thoreau's phrase, is found in uncontaminated nature (161)5
While H.D. preferred living with European people, she con
sidered the American land more alive and vibrant, and her
valuation of the landscape, like the relationship she senses
with the land, echoes Transcendental beliefs.^ The most

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8 Annette Debo

favored landscape is the coast; its wildness is alluring and

promises escape and adventure. More than half a century
earlier, Thoreau looked to the West for wildness: "The West
of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what
I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preser
vation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search
of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and
sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and
barks which brace mankind" (185). Thoreau locates the wild
ness for which he longs in the West because of the mythos of
the frontier as a vast, unsettled wilderness, a mythology
which ignores the earlier inhabitants of the Americas, consid
ering only the land conquests of the European settlers. By
1890 this frontier had been officially closed, ending the fiction
of endless, empty land. Therefore, H.D., writing in 1916, uses
the sea as her imaginative space for locating wildness because
it cannot be settled or domesticated by any people. Its yearly
storms shift miles of sand, wreck boats, and tear down hous
es, and in its violent nature lies its value as an untamable
space, a place of absolute freedom.
Thus, Sea Garden's most prominent and revered land
scape is the Atlantic coast, which H.D. visited many times
and cherished. In fact, in a letter to her childhood friend
Mary Herr, H.D. names Maine "a place of mine," emphasiz
ing the significant role it continued to play for her/ While
growing up, H.D., her best friend Margaret Snively, and
another neighbor Matilda Wells would spend several sum
mer weeks on Bailey Island in Casco Bay, Maine with
Matilda's family. H.D. also went to the Snively cottage in
Watch Hill, New Jersey with Margaret (Guest 17-18). In her
correspondence with H.D. in the 1950s, Margaret fondly rem
inisces about those summers:

Do you remember the day when "Hilda, Matilda,

and Me" went up the creek and went in bathing in
the altogether and had only just got dressed again

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 South Atlantic Review 9

when a rowboat of boys came round the bend?

And the other time when we were stormbound
up the creek and a boy named Allen rescued us and
Father made me go up to his house with him to
express our thanks? I did feel an awful fool and I
guess Allen did, too. That was a fine free life we led
there.8

These trips were special, a far distance to travel at the time, as

H.D.'s cousin Francis Wolle testifies that "to the rest of us
who had never been further than the Jersey Coast for a vaca
tion this seemed a tremendous trip and a great honor" (34).
This Atlantic coast is the same landscape constructed
in Sea Garden where H.D. is not so much planting a sea gar
den as she is faithfully recording into her poetry the flowers
which naturally adorn the seashore. For the flower poems?
"Sea Poppies," "Sea Lily," "Sea Violet," "Sea Rose," and "Sea
Iris"?H.D. chooses plants that can survive on the edge
between land and sea, in the danger this exposed position
promises them, as many critics have noted. However, what
has not yet been acknowledged is that these flowers are actu
ally wildflowers native to New England. The sea poppy of
the poem is "treasure" "caught root / among wet pebbles"
with a more potent fragrance than the more cultivated pop
pies growing in meadows. The persona values the flower,
which becomes "fruit on the sand," in the space between the
pines, the boulders, and the sea (H.D., Collected 21). In actu
ality a wildflower of southern New England, the golden sea
poppies grow on gravelly beaches and in waste places
(Newcomb 142), places where life is perilous and where gar
den plants, accustomed to the luxury of cultivated beds,
could not grow. Similarly, growing on the sea's edge, the sea
lily is anchored to the land underwater. A sea lily is really an
invertebrate marine animal whose body resembles a land lily,
and the lily of the poem has the privilege of having its great
head "drift upon temple-steps" but it is also "shattered / in

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10 Annette Debo

the wind," since it has to accept the violence of the ocean in

which it lives. The sand cuts the flower and "yet though the
whole wind / slash at your bark, / you are lifted up" ?the
lily triumphs over the power of the sea (H.D., Collected 14).
Likewise, the true sea violet, a coastal flower with a violet
color and a white throat, grows in sandy soil along the south
ern coast of Maine (Newcomb 34). H.D. values it beyond the
scented white violet and "greater blue violets" which "flutter
on the hill." The poem's sea violet is paradoxically "fragile as
agate," hardy enough to withstand the wind and shells of the
"sand-bank." This violet has a "frail" grasp on the sand but
survives. In fact, it not only survives but becomes a star
edged with fire, a powerful symbol for how the outwardly
"frail" can persevere in the harshest elements (H.D., Collected
25-26).
Not only the flowers, but the seashore itself in Sea
Garden is New England imagery?a beach of gravel or sand,
or craggy rocks meeting the sea directly?also based on
places H.D. personally knew. "The splendour of your ragged
coast" in "The Shrine" and the "gulls and sea-birds that cry
discords" in "The Wind Sleepers" recall Casco Bay in south
ern Maine, near Portland (H.D., Collected 10,15). The Maine
coast provides images for H.D.'s "safe crescent" beaches, her
cliffs and shoals, her beautiful graves which lure the boats
into a place with no shelter. The coast provides allure to
boats on the open sea?"honey is not more sweet / than the
salt stretch of your beach"?but the boats are beaten by the
sea, finding no safe landing place on the rocky coast (H.D.,
Collected 7, 8). The steep cliffs, the craggy coasts, the rocks
meeting the sea evoke the southern side of Casco Bay, Cape
Elizabeth with its "endless line of rock coasts, with here and
there a fine bluff . . . combinations of cove and cliff of distin
guished beauty" (Nutting 52). Here, the rocks abruptly clash
with the ocean, providing a panorama for H.D.'s many strug
gles with the sea or the borderline between elements.

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 South Atlantic Review 11

II

In HERmione, the land becomes an active spirit which

exerts power. Instead of staying peacefully outside the civi
lized home, the land invades the home, blurring the lines
between the exhilarating woods and the stultifying domestic
sphere. Hermione, in fact, invites it in to help her escape the
rigidity of her gender role. Even more importantly, the land
becomes an integral part of Hermione's character; its influ
ence helps shape the woman she is becoming. Additionally,
the land plays a central role in her choice to become a writer;
within this novel's parameters, she must be able to represent
the land accurately in her work to qualify as a writer.
As in Sea Garden, H.D. continues her scientific render
ing of the American landscape in HERmione, and she models
the novel's setting on the Doolittle house in Upper Darby
where the family moved in 1896 when H.D.'s father became
the Director of the Flower Observatory at the University of
Pennsylvania (Guest 16). The Director's residence was on
seven acres, along with the Observatory buildings. H.D.'s
father describes it:

The Observatory is located in an agricultural

region away from the distur bances due to the
heavy traffic and electric illumination of the city;
the elevation is high and altogether thelocation
quite as favorable as can belooked for in the
immediate vicinity of a large city, at the same
time it is easily accessible. By the recently con
structed Newtown Square electric railway it may
be reached from the University buildings, West
Philadelphia, in thirty minutes or less. (Doolittle
123)

This then is the landscape of HERmione: a house surrounded

by working dairy farms, orchards, open fields, and woods?

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12 Annette Debo

"Gawd's own god-damn country," as George Lowndes,

Hermione's sometime fianc? (a character based on Ezra
Pound), calls it (84)?but one that is also bordered by the
West Chester Pike and is only a short trolley ride from down
town Philadelphia.
In HERmione, instead of the land representing the
spirit as in Sea Garden, the land becomes an active force to
which the house and its occupants belong. In fact, this house
is submerged in its environment; the outdoors invades the
home. In contrast to pioneer women who were domesticat
ing the wilderness (Kolodny 12), H.D. rejects domesticity,
which she can afford to do because she is not facing the actu
al frontier like the pioneers and because her class standing
provides her with the luxury of servants who do many of the
everyday household tasks. For her, "progress" means return
ing domestic spaces like the home and the kitchen to a wild
state because the wilderness is liberating, precisely because it
can only now be fantasized. This house is filled with lilies
and wild azalea boughs, and intimately grounded in its land.
Screen doors slain, honeysuckle overruns the porch, and the
dog Jock invades the kitchen.
Like the wild invasion encroaching on the home's
domesticity, Hermione is more often in the woods than in the
house where her mother Eugenia and all her expectations for
Hermione reside. Significantly, H.D. inflates the bucolic
nature of her setting, rendering it as primeval, a space engen
dering "female insurgency," to use Alaimo's words, rather
than an outlying city suburb. At times, the surrounding
woods and river become "torrents of white water running
through deep forests," using the myths of a rustic, wild
America (H.D., HERmione 6). This land, primeval and pow
erful, does not remain a benign backdrop for the action but
becomes an integral part of Hermione's character.
Significantly, at several points Hermione is figured as a tree?
an indigenous being, with long stabilizing roots in
Pennsylvania?demonstrating the way the place of her birth

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 South Atlantic Review 13

inextricably shapes her. She thinks,

Pennsylvania. Names are in people, people are

in names. Sylvania. I was born here. People
ought to think before they call a place Sylvania.
Pennsylvania. I am part of Sylvania.
Trees. Trees. Trees. Dogwood, liriodendron
with its green-yellow tulip blossoms. Trees are
in people. People are in trees. Pennsylvania.
(H.D., HERmione 5)

The immediacy of this relationship articulates the extent to

which Hermione has been shaped by the forests themselves.
However, the forest contains, as well as shapes,
Hermione who is often walking in a maze-like forest of lirio
dendron, oak, dogwood, larch, and tulip trees (H.D.,
HERmione 3-5). The maze atmosphere and tall, blowing trees
also serve to represent her confusion as she reels from failing
at mathematics in college and tries to determine what she will
do, since, in her opinion, she is grown too large (in age and a
pun on H.D.'s 5'11" frame) for the house and has not "ever
done anything" (109). The woods shelter, yet as in "Pursuit,"
they also confuse with their immensity and sameness, leaving
little trace of individuality: "Trees, no matter how elusive, in
the end, walled one in. Trees were suffocation" (7-8). These
trees, actually open woods around cultivated farmland and
no longer part of a frontier, become, in their symbolism, thick
and close like the ancient American forests. They muffle
sound and action, even giving Hermione the impression of
being underwater, drowning as well as suffocating. Either
way, the trees stifle her ability to breathe and live. For
Hermione, the way out of this maze is to head for the coast.
Escape, as in Sea Garden, lies at the seashore, which is the way
she understands freedom. From her family's suffocation,
Hermione envisions a solitary escape, albeit an impossible
one, to their beach cottage at Point Pleasant, New Jersey: "The

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14 Annette Debo

circles of the trees were tree-green; she wanted the inner lin
ing of an Atlantic breaker_Pennsylvania could be routed
only by another: New Jersey with its flatlands and the reed
grass and the salt creeks where a canoe brushed Indian paint
brush" (H.D., HERmione 7). The seashore pulls at Hermione
with its flatlands, rather than crowding trees, and its promise
of danger and adventure.
In essence, then, inland Pennsylvania and the coast
seem irreconcilable and represent a fundamental opposition
in Hermione, bequeathed by her father and mother.
According to the novel's logic, Hermione's feelings for place
are genetically directed; an attachment to place is embedded
in a literal, biological way:

In Pennsylvania, Carl Gart had found a sort of

peace and a submergence of the thing that drove
him, that had driven his people to New England
and then West to trek back East. In Eugenia Gart,
the fibres were rooted and mossed over and not
to be disrupted. If Eugenia Gart pulled up her
mossgrown fibres, Pennsylvania itself would
ache like a jaw from which has been extracted a
somewhat cumbrous molar .... In Hermione
Gart, the two never fused and blended, she was
both moss-grown, inbedded and at the same
time staring with her inner vision on forever
tumbled breakers. If she went away, her spirit
would break; if she stayed, she would be suffo
cated. (H.D., HERmione 9)

Because she inherited from both parents, Hermione contends

with both desires?to stay and to leave?and both have a
price, a breaking of spirit or the threat of suffocation.
Eventually, Hermione plans to leave, to be directed by "her
inner vision on forever-tumbled breakers," but part of her is
moss-grown already, embedded into the American subsoil

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 South Atlantic Review 15

that she carries with her forever.

As well as controlling her character's development,
the land is pivotal in shaping Hermione's sense of what it
means to be a writer. Although Eugenia comments that
Hermione ought to go on writing her "'dear little stories,'"
mediocre magazine writing no longer satisfies Hermione; she
wants to become an artist (H.D., HERmione 80). And in this
novel, being an artist is tied to the ability to write in a way
that is evocative of place. Hermione laments that she did not
continue with her music and that she cannot paint; she needs
artistic skills to capture the "'composition' of elements" that
make up a place:

Music might have caught the trail of the grass as

she ran on across the meadow and the deep note
made by a fabulous bee that sprung into vision,
blotting out the edge of the stables, almost blotting
out the sun itself with its magnified magnificent
underbelly and the roar of its sort of booming. The
boom of the bee in her ear, his presence like an
eclipse across the sun brought visual image of the
sort of thing she sought f or ... it had not occurred
to Her to try and put the thing in writing. (13)

As the novel progresses, however, Hermione increasingly

sees writing as a way to capture "the thing"?the trail of
grass, the bee and his eclipse, Pennsylvania?and to redeem
her failure at college: "Writing was an achievement like play
ing the violin or singing like Tetrazzini" (71).
As her writing develops, Hermione finds that her
emphasis on Pennsylvanian materials positions her as a
specifically American writer, as opposed to the European tra
dition which carries more cach? with her worldly friend
George. Unlike Hermione, George tries to reject ties to
American literature and art, which, to him, lack the sophisti
cation and development of their European counterparts, and

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16 Annette Debo

so she rejects his view and satirizes his youthful pomposity.

While walking in Hermione's woods, George parodies the
opening lines from Longfellow's poem Evangeline: ""This is the
forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,' (George
intoned dramatically; she knew why she didn't love him)
'bearded with moss and with garments green, indistinct in the twi
light'" (H.D., HERmione 65). Stubbornly resisting George's
preference for European art, Hermione thinks, "why couldn't
George ever let me alone to see things in my own way, to
enjoy things even if they are provincial?" (133) George
laughs at her parties and makes the museum offerings seem
dowdy: "'Don't look at those things' [he says] and if this is
what Europe does to people, Hermione thought, I don't want
Europe" (135).

Ill

In Paint It Today, as in Hermione, the land wields

power, shaping the central character, Midget, much the way
it shaped Hermione. However, in this novel, that power
operates at a much deeper level: formative environments cre
ate an essential difference between Americans and the
English, thereby inextricably separating Midget from her
European peers. Even though Midget has moved from the
U.S. to Europe, she remains rooted in the American land of
her youth. In describing how Midget's character is formed,
H.D. writes, "I know that the important things in the temper
ing of a soul are perhaps the rough, the commonplace, that
seem to youth and early maturity unimportant, stifling, even
inhibiting surroundings or conditions .... I am trying ... to
give a picture of that being, that spider, that small, hatched
bird, that flawless shell that once contained an unborn being"
(H.D., Paint 6). The "small, hatched bird" is Midget, and her
"flawless shell" is the Pennsylvania in which Midget grew
up, where the novel opens. The shell, or the place, is what
"tempers" the soul and creates the person.

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 South Atlantic Review 17

When describing Midget at the beginning of the

novel, H.D. literally describes her as her environment, again
emphasizing the land's ability to shape identity: "Her por
trait? Find her on the trail of the Pennsylvania foot-hills
breaking her first bunches of the wax-pink mountain laurel;
find her with a screwed-up knot of precious wild arbutus, or
the first wandlike bough of dogwood" (5). The mountain lau
rel, arbutus, and dogwood, all native plants to the
Pennsylvania woods, become synonymous with Midget; she
becomes a native part of her surroundings, as indigenous as
the plants.
However, where HERmione ends with the central
character located in the American landscape, Paint It Today
transports that character to Europe and yet retains the
ingrained sense of American identity. As for many expatri
ates, for H.D. the U.S. becomes more easily definable in con
trast to Europe and more easily appropriated for the imagina
tion after she herself left. The American landscape remains
the dominant influence in Midget's perceptions, and she con
tinually compares what she is seeing in her travels to what
she had experienced in the U.S. While she grows to prefer liv
ing in Europe, the U.S. landscape remains more alive for her,
and we see that Midget remains an American artist despite
her decision to live in Europe: "Here in France, at Etaples, the
people were a reality. In America, it was the white sand that
lived, the wind, the stainless rout of stars" (H.D., Paint 16).
All aspects of environment in Europe pale against the U.S. as
when watching a sunset Midget thinks, "this was not the sun,
this flameless, low-swinging, mid-European substitute" (15).
Even the wind in Europe "was not yet wind, not wind that is
when contrasted with that rush of swords that cut the sand
stretches into snow and ice patterns and blared through the
Maine pines and tore in mid-summer, tornadowise, walnut
and tough oak branches from the walnut and great oak trees"
(14). This rough wind is the same one cutting sand across
flower petals in Sea Garden and ripping through the dense

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18 Annette Debo

forests in HERmione.
Having established a basic difference between Europe
and the U.S., and having endowed the American landscape
with a certain power continental society lacks, H.D. develops
that difference as one which creates a permanent, essential
ized separation between peoples according to the environ
ment of their youth. In London, Midget can fit in, appear to
be English, "tall to the breaking-in-the-middle point, with
fluttering hat brim and tenuous ankles, as of their own
world" (H.D., Paint 18), and the literary people she meets are
always surprised when she reveals that she is American, an
alien in their country. Her American identity separates her
from these English acquaintances, "in time, in space, a thou
sand, thousand years" apart (19). And what separates her is
her sensual experience of the American land, of specifically
grapevines in one case. Midget is at a party, "patter[ing] rub
bish with the best" when she hears a woman describing
French vineyards second hand, as her friend in France has
described them to her: "'He says he will have a house party
and invite me especially next spring. It is indescribable, he
says'" (17), and as the woman describes the "indescribable"
event she hasn't seen, Midget reflects on the grapevines she
has seen. Over her back porch in Bethlehem, H.D.'s house
had a grape arbor, a favorite place for her and her cousins to
play. The memory of touching, seeing, smelling those blos
soms just as they open is a fragrance H.D. inscribes into her
writing and her construction of American identity. The fra
grance is "cold," "identified with the tiny green feather
bunches curling out from the very young, very small under
furred, red-tipped leaves of the grapevine. This was the fra
grance of the grape flowers, if flowers these young spikes,
resembling the unripe lilac blossoms, could be called" (19).
The fragrance of Midget's American past is essential to her
identity and delineates the line between herself and the
English people she is meeting. Midget is different because of
what she has experienced in her youth through her senses

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 South Atlantic Review 19

and her connection to the land.

Positing environment?the fragile eggshell, the senso
ry experience, the influence of seasons?as the crucial compo
nent constructing identity, rather than the literary and social
culture one is born of and into, positions H.D. as an environ
mental determinist. H.D. clinches her emphasis on environ
ment with the bald announcement, quoted in my introduc
tion, that "language and tradition do not make a people, but
the heat that presses on them, the cold that baffles them, the
alternating lengths of night and day" (H.D., Paint 20). The
physicality of place?the summer heat, the cold, the length of
daylight in each season?forms people, as Midget is formed
by the U.S. In some ways, this position is isolating because
Midget remains an outsider in Europe, an exotic waiting to be
caught. Alternatively, Midget's position gives her an out
sider's insights, and her essentialized American identity can
travel with her wherever she goes. Midget has earned that
identity by living in the American environment, breathing the
air, living through the seasons, and experiencing grape blos
soms.

Reading H.D. as a writer who so emphasizes place

alters our critical view of her work. Much of her current crit
ical reputation rests on her reliance on experimental strate
gies, quite evident in the three texts interrogated here as well
as throughout her career. But extensive exploration of that
dimension of her work, and the corresponding critical asser
tion that her content is disconnected from the U.S., easily
obscures H.D.'s equally strong reliance on physical place as a
shaping factor in her work. She is too often imagined as exist
ing in an imaginary Greek world; past critical discussions
even interrogate the authenticity of the Greece she creates. In
contrast, here I have shown that in H.D.'s landscapes while
the Greek layer may be the top layer of H.D.'s palimpsest, it

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20 Annette Debo

is overlaid upon a very real portrayal of the northeastern U.S.

H.D.'s images, at their roots, are American, but even more
significantly, these places exert the power to shape her char
acters' identities and ultimately H.D.'s own art, firmly align
ing her texts with her own geographic roots.

Western Carolina University

Notes

1 This article is a revision of the second chapter of my dissertation.

2 This letter is also used by Eileen Gregory to support her exploration of
H.D.'s involvement in hellenism. Gregory argues that the passage I have
quoted here is often used as a means of collapsing H.D.'s hellenism into
biographical and psychological matter?as though her early hellenic orien
tation were only a mask or shield for personal problems later cogently
unraveled by Freud. Such a biographical interpretation misses the com
plexity of the hellenic fiction itself, reducible neither to biographical or
Freudian allegory nor to literary conventioi?s. (Hellenism 33)
My argument in this article avoids the pitfalls that Gregory critiques, but I
clearly have interpreted H.D.'s letter in a far different way than her. I find
Gregory's objectives in H.D. and Hellenism compelling, but I do believe that
if critics restrict H.D. to a hellenic sphere, we have done her a disservice.
Therefore, my work complements Gregory's, opening new spaces in H.D.
studies.
* Friedman was countering the claim that in Sea Garden "the landscape .
.. is never anchored in human geography because... the 'country' is imag
inary and symbolic" made by Barbara Guest (qtd in Friedman 98). In addi
tion, Gregory sees in Sea Garden a consistent landscape, but she does not
identify that landscape with a specific place ("Rose" 139).
4 The scope of this article prevents me from developing a full analysis of
gender here. However, chapter three of my dissertation addresses the
intersection of gender and nationality.
5 Many H.D. critics have read the symbolism of Sea Garden's flowers as
resistant to domestication and in favor of danger and wilderness. I am
working in the same vein but claiming a broader reading of nature and
spirit.
6 Friedman was the first to connect H.D. to transcendentalism. She writes
that H.D.'s "use of nature as objective correlative for spirit attested to her
American literary heritage?the Transcendentalism of Emerson and
Thoreau" (99).
7 H.D. to Mary Herr. 1944. Hilda Doolittle Collection, Special Collections

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 South Atlantic Review 21

Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. I would like to thank H.D.'s

Estate for permission to quote from H.D.'s unpublished letters and pub
lished texts. Copyright 1925 by Hilda Doolittle. Copyright ? by The Estate
of Hilda Doolittle. Copyright ? 2004 by The Schaffner Family Foundation.
Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
8 Pratt to H.D. 9 July 1956. The Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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