Hermione Read online

  HERmione

  To

  F . . . . . .

  for

  September 2nd

  PANDORA’S BOX

  It’s all over now, I tell myself. Over and done with. What happened, happened. The past is past. Don’t delve and dredge. Cut down on nostalgia, that too can be insidious. Concentrate on the present, gird for the future.

  But the past will not leave me alone. It pulls me back and under. It surrounds me. The more remote it may be, the closer the encirclement.

  A couple of years ago, Donald Gallup showed me around the Beinecke Library. Time was short. The tour had to be brief, a mere introduction. We walked the aisles briskly. He pointed out this and that. Shelves of first editions. And unpublished manuscripts, the contents of the proverbial “trunk.” Correspondence: endless rows of filing cabinets packed tight, serried, and labelled Lawrence, Pound, Aldington, McAlmon, Stein, Beach, Richardson, Freud . . . on and on. These people seemed to have spent their lives writing letters. I wondered how they ever got any work done. I was overwhelmed by this collective presence, and all the ideas and conflicts and torments. I resolved to come back. I had legitimate entree. I would immerse myself for days, months—years.

  I put it off. I wasn’t ready. Too much too soon, and, at the same time, too late—and much of it disturbing. Pandora’s Box. Leave it be, let it lay. So I left it to the professionals, the scholars. They had the time, dedication, patience—and detachment.

  I answer queries and consider permissions requests. I read copies of work-in-progress. Pandora’s Box has been opened for me, selectively, and not all at once. I face the contents in the privacy of my home. As I expected, there are skeletons and poltergeists. But uplift too, illuminations. I’m learning so much—a scholars’ pupil, trailing them in a postgraduate course of my own.

  The autobiographical novel, HERmione, has most recently emerged from the “trunk.” Completed in 1927. I was present at the creation. Right there, in person. Not there in spirit. Osmosis was absolutely nil. Hush, hush, whisper who dares. “Your mother is working.” In her room, behind a locked door. Funny kind of work; endless silence, followed by a barrage of typing. I wanted to be in that room. I resented being hauled away. I didn’t know what I know now: that small children and literary endeavor do not mix.

  I also know now, with the full weight of hindsight, that I was part of a very bizarre menage. We lived in great seclusion, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. I had two mothers. My real mother, H.D., who lived on an exceedingly rarefied plane. And her surrogate, Bryher, who took care of reality.

  H.D. was very beautiful, quite magical in appearance—tall, gaunt and graceful, with exquisite bone structure and searching grey eyes. She was also very excitable. Her descents into everyday life were an ordeal. She over-reacted. The least disruption set off total frenzy. I worshiped her. I was in awe of her. Maternal love was true, but she showed it sporadically, in sudden impulsive rushes. We did share quiet tender times. They, I, had to be quiet, though.

  Bryher’s ideas veered between free-wheeling experimentation and old-world discipline. “Hippo, hippo” she would yell, pursuing me with a hippo hide whip. And I was stood in corners, and deprived of dessert like any bad Victorian child. Well warranted, I have no doubt. I was often rambunctious. In their different ways, both mothers gave me a lot of affection. I felt cherished. I just never knew what was going to happen next. Lacking any other frame of reference, I accepted that as the norm.

  H.D.’s official name was Mrs. Richard Aldington, mine Frances Perdita Aldington. What of Mr. Aldington, the missing father? Where was he, why did he never come to see us? My questions were always met with a shush and a change of subject.

  Bryher was Mrs. Robert McAlmon. He came and went. The mothers complained when he went. When he came, they were a quarrelsome trio. Voices were raised, tables pounded, doors slammed. I liked him. I recognized another loner, not entirely at ease in his surroundings. I tried to console him. I too had a typewriter and a room of my own. I wrote him long letters, “miracles of Gertrude Steinese prose” he later recalled, in Being Geniuses Together. I cut out tiny cardboard Christians and threw them to my collection of stuffed lions. His armchair was the Colosseum, he the audience of thousands. Then the adults would break up our game and start arguing again. And discussing matters way over my head. Bandying odd names. Ezra and Pound—separate characters I assumed, since I was not really listening to the context. Joyce and Lawrence, whoever they might be. Sylvia Beach; nice name, it sounded like a tall silvery tree. Frances Gregg. “A very dear friend,” my mother had once told me, “beautiful and good, that’s why I named you Frances Perdita.” I was under a table, probably grooming the lions for their next public appearance, when I was startled to hear Bryher, “Don’t mention Frances Gregg, ever again. She is very dangerous.”

  Physical danger was the only kind I could imagine. She must be around somewhere, prowling the neighboorhood with a dagger, lurking in ambush. We shared the same name, so she was out to get me.

  Bryher’s edict was enforced. Frances Gregg was never mentioned again.

  My entourage dispersed now and then, and inexplicably—packing suitcases all of a sudden, talking about London and Paris, agitating over tickets. Although they never let me in on their plans, everything was prearranged, for then two wonderful old ladies arrived to take care of me—my grandmother, Helen Doolittle, and her sister, my great-aunt Laura. This change of guard transformed the whole atmosphere. They brought calm. They didn’t type, they never argued. They were always accessible, and concerned. They listened. They told bedtime stories. They were also very firm. I knew what to expect and what was expected of me. They were so adorable and we had such fun together; I wanted to please them. The hippo whip remained on its hook.

  It was a wrench when they left. “Don’t cry, we’ll be back next year.”

  In 1927, I was at last considered old enough to travel. I accompanied H.D. and Bryher to London. Robert McAlmon had dropped out of our group. Grandma joined us without Aunt Laura who had stayed home this time. The two of us rode on buses and explored parks and museums. Then, another emotional parting, at Waterloo Station. A train was carrying her off to the States. The boat train. How would they fit it onto the boat; would she have to stay in her compartment all the way? Foolish questions. No one paid them any heed, not even Grandma, flustered, counting up her luggage. It was all very confusing and sad.

  She died later that year.

  Now she has come hack; one of those inescapable voices from the past—in a giant leap and a double loop of chronology. Eugenia Gart, Hermione’s mother. My mother’s mother, not yet my grandmother. The tale is set in an era before I was born. I also meet “Ezra and Pound” as the impetuous suitor, George Lowndes. And the “dangerous” Frances Gregg, alias Fayne Rabb—the counterpoint of the love story. Not an easy book. It shifts and jumps, and repeats itself. The voice is frequently overwrought—just like the author’s in real life. Yet there is a strange hypnotic force. I’m caught up in the momentum. Then held up by jolts of recognition, clues and double clues, references and cross references—and the play on names.

  People are in names, names are in people, she says. And further along: names are in people, people are in names.

  Names, people; split dimensions. The protagonist is a divided personality, Her and Hermione. Hermione of Greek mythology, daughter of Menelaeus and Helen. Also, most significantly to me, Shakespeare’s misunderstood heroine of The Winter’s Tale, mother of Perdita.

  Now, having finished the book, I feel deserted. And haunted beyond the last page. What will become of all these people? There should be a sequel. And, of course, there is. Bid me to Live, for one. And more in the trunk. I turn back to the first page, and the dedication. To F . .
. . . . September 2. To Frances on her birthday. Also Bryher’s birthday, shared in armed truce. Astrologers can make of that what they will.

  I recognize one certainty in my future. I’ll never escape the past.

  PERDITA SCHAFFNER

  PART ONE

  I

  one

  Her Gart went round in circles. “I am Her,” she said to herself; she repeated, “Her, Her, Her.” Her Gart tried to hold on to something; drowning she grasped, she caught at a smooth surface, her fingers slipped, she cried in her dementia, “I am Her, Her, Her.” Her Gart had no word for her dementia, it was predictable by star, by star-sign, by year.

  But Her Gart was then no prophet. She could not predict later common usage of uncommon syllogisms; “failure complex,” “compensation reflex,” and that conniving phrase “arrested development” had opened no door to her. Her development, forced along slippery lines of exact definition, marked supernorm, marked subnorm on some sort of chart or soul-barometer. She could not distinguish the supernorm, dragging her up from the sub-norm, letting her down. She could not see the way out of marsh and bog. She said, “I am Hermione Gart precisely.”

  She said, “I am Hermione Gart,” but Her Gart was not that. She was nebulous, gazing into branches of liriodendron, into network of oak and deflowered dogwood. She looked up into larch that was now dark, its moss-flame already one colour with the deciduous oak leaves. The green that, each spring, renewed her sort of ecstasy, this year had let Her down. She knew that this year was peculiarly blighted. She could not predict the future but she could statistically accept the present. Her mind had been too early sharpened.

  She could not know that the reason for failure of a somewhat exaggeratedly-planned “education,” was possibly due to subterranean causes. She had not then dipped dust-draggled, intellectual plumes into the more modern science that posts signs over emotional bog and intellectual lagoon (“failure complex,” “compensation reflex”) to show us where we may or where we may not stand. Carl Gart, her father, had been wont to shrug away psychology as a “science.” Hermione Gart could not then know that her precise reflection, her entire failure to conform to expectations was perhaps some subtle form of courage.

  It was summer. She wasn’t now any good for anything. Her Gart looked up into liriodendron branches and flat tree leaf became, to her, lily pad on green pool. She was drowned now. She could no longer struggle. Clutching out toward some definition of herself, she found that “I am Her Gart” didn’t let her hold on. Her fingers slipped off; she was no longer anything. Gart, Gart, Gart and the Gart theorum of mathematical biological intention dropped out Hermione. She was not Gart, she was not Hermione, she was not any more Her Gart, what was she?

  two

  Her Gart stood. Her mind still trod its round. I am Her Gart, my name is Her Gart. I am Hermione Gart. I am going round and round in circles. Her Gart went on. Her feet went on. Her feet had automatically started, so automatically she continued, then stumbled as a bird whirred its bird oblivion into heavy trees above her. Her Gart. I am Her Gart. Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure.

  Her eyes peered up into the branches. The tulip tree made thick pad, separate leaves were outstanding, separate bright leaf-discs, in shadow. Her Gart peered far, adjusting, so to speak, some psychic lens, to follow that bird. She lost the bird, tried to focus one leaf to hold her on to all leaves; she tried to concentrate on one frayed disc of green, pool or mirror that would refract image. She was nothing. She must have an image no matter how fluid, how inchoate. She tried to drag in personal infantile reflection. She said, “I’m too pretty. I’m not pretty enough.” She dragged things down to the banality, “People don’t want to marry me. People want to marry me. I don’t want to marry people.” She concluded, “One has to do something.”

  The woods parted to show a space of lawn, running level with branches that, in early summer, were white with flower. Dogwood blossom. 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.

  three

  Pennsylvania had her. She would never get away from Pennsylvania. She knew, standing now frozen on the wood-path, that she would never get away from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania whirled round her in cones of concentric colour, cones . . . concentric . . . conic sections was the final test she failed in. Conic sections would whirl forever round her for she had grappled with the biological definition, transferred to mathematics, found the whole thing untenable. She had found the theorem tenable until she came to conic sections and then Dr. Barton-Furness had failed her, failed her . . . they had all failed her. Science, as Bertram Gart knew it, failed her . . . and she was good for nothing.

  Music made conic sections that whirled round in circles but she was no good for music and in Pennsylvania it had never occurred to people to paint green on green, one slice in a corner that made a triangle out of another different dimension. Such painting, it was evident to Her Gart (static, frozen in early summer on a woodpath) must lead to certifiable insanity.

  Seeing in a head that had been pushed too far toward a biological-mathematical definition of the universe, a world known to her as Pennsylvania go round and form worlds within worlds (all green) Her Gart said, “I am certifiable or soon will be.” She realised precisely that people can not paint nor put such things to music, and science, as she saw it, had eluded her perception. Science as Carl Gart, as Bertrand Gart defined it, had eluded her perception. Her Gart went on. “I must hurry with the letters.”

  She flung herself down, the letters flung down with her. Pennsylvania contained a serviceable river, more rivers than one dreamt of, torrents of white water running through deep forests. A river and white streams held nothing . . . nothing . . . she wanted sand under bare heels, a dog, her own, some sort of Nordic wolfhound; a dog that would race ahead of her while breakers drew up, drew back; she wanted a dog, nothing else, no one else. She wanted to be alone on some stretch of sand with dunes rising at the back and, behind sand dunes, stretches of fibrous marsh grass, Indian paintbrush and the flat, coloured water lilies.

  Another country called her, the only thing that would heal, that would blot out this concentric gelatinous substance that was her perception of trees grown closer, grown near and near, grown translucent like celluloid. The circles of the trees were tree-green; she wanted the inner lining of an Atlantic breaker. There was one creature that could save her, a hound, one of her own choosing, such a hound as she had often dreamt of, and one country . . . a long sea-shelf. 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 paintbrush.

  She felt herself go out, out into this water substance. Water was transparent, not translucent like this celluloid treestuff. She wanted to see through reaches of sea-wall, push on through transparencies. She wanted to get away, yet to be merged eventually with the thing she so loathed. She did not struggle toward escape of the essential. She did not sigh as people did in those days, “Well, I’ll some day get to Europe.” Europe existed as static little pictures, the green and mosaic of several coloured prints of Venice and Venice by moonlight. Paul Potter’s Bull and the lithographic prints to ruin Turner’s victory. Pictures were conclusive things and Her Gart was not conclusive. Europe would be like that. She had felt no rise of emotion at the turn of speech that led “faculty ladies” in their several manners to coo, “Pollaiuolo at Vicenza, no it was Crivelli, don’t you remember, at Verona?” Verona, Vicenza, Venice even, were so many boxes of coloured beads to be strung or to be discarded. Her Gart wanted a nobler affinity. She did not know what it was she wanted.

  She wanted the Point. She wanted to get to Point Pleasant. She wanted the canoe, she wanted a
mythical wolfhound. She wanted to climb through walls of no visible dimension. Tree walls were visible, were to be extended to know reach of universe. Trees, no matter how elusive, in the end, walled one in. Trees were suffocation. “Claustrophobia” was a word that Her Gart had not yet assimilated.

  “Agoraphobia” rang some bell when Mrs. de Raub said, “I have agoraphobia, fear of the market place you know.” Yet though a distant bell rang somewhere, it followed with no wide door opening. Her Gart had no a, b, c Esperanto of world expression. She was not of the world, she was not in the world, unhappily she was not out of the world. She wanted to be out, get out but even as her mind filmed over with grey-gelatinous substance of some sort of nonthinking, of some sort of nonbeing or of nonentity, she felt psychic claw unsheathe somewhere, she felt herself clutch toward something that had no name yet.

  She clung to small trivial vestiges, not knowing why she so clung. Like a psychic magpie she gathered little unearthed treasures, things she did not want, yet clung to. She said, “What made me think of that slipper pincushion with Maria Frederick embroidered in pinheads on it?” She opened eyes that snapped wide open like metallic open-and-shut doll eyes. The eyes were glass now, not filmed with psychic terror. She saw trees now as trees. She said, “How funny . . . I thought I had got at something and I remembered the green blue ribbon pincushion cut out like a slipper, with Maria Frederick on it.”

  four

  It was obvious she could never find it. It was a root whose fibres held her to a small cabinet, to Dresden china brought direct by European forbears and willow patterns, tribal vestiges. Tribes must hold to relics, a cameo and a miniature with braided locks under glass on the reverse side, and several steel engravings of portraits, now ensconsed in their proper galleries. Pennsylvania held her to things of no actual value, small totems that meant some tribal affinities with European races. In Europe were races who had sent out their more energetic and more mystically-inclined offspring, their scourings and their scions to Pennsylvania. 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.