Kora & Ka Read online

  INTRODUCTION

  As she took care to note on their title pages, H.D. wrote “Kora and Ka” and “Mira-Mare” in the Swiss canton of Vaud in 1930. She liked to think of them as “long-short stories,” a usefully elastic genre in a period when writer’s block and personal worries often conspired to paralyze her art. H.D. approached the craft of fiction with exhilaration but also with a certain dread. There were things she could say in prose that would be lost in verse—modes of consciousness and nuances of relationship that needed the spacious discursiveness of narrative. Yet she had been earnestly counseled by friends years before to preserve unsullied her reputation for elusive, dryad-like perfection, a reputation won in prewar London where she had been a leading Imagist poet. “H.D.” was not just a nom de plume; it was a warranty for exquisiteness. Prose fiction could only succeed in battering her hummingbird wings and send her crashing to the earth where scurried all the other would-be novelists. Defying this advice yet heeding it too, she wrote large quantities of fiction, tucked most of it away in cupboards, destroyed some of it, and offered little to publishers.

  What H.D. needed was a way to be printed without being published, a seeming contradiction. The answer came at the beginning of July 1934, when her wealthy companion Bryher, daughter of the British shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman, offered “to have fifty copies only printed of any one of your mss. Think what a lot of type you could burn then.” Here was the perfect expedient. Bryher, who was always looking for ways to prod her talented friends into active creation, could also indulge her passion for amateur psychoanalysis: she could play at being literary agent and free her friends from their inhibitions into the bargain. (She was active in promoting psychoanalysis in Britain and gave financial support to a number of well-known practitioners, including Freud.) Bryher settled on the expensive Dijon printer, Maurice Darantiere (whose long-suffering compositors had labored over Joyce’s revisions of Ulysses a decade earlier). Soon, H.D., Robert Herring, and other intimates were busily preparing manuscripts for Darantiere. There were even hopes of luring Marianne Moore into the Bryher factory.

  The complicated circle had arrived at a rare sort of equilibrium. Ringmaster Bryher, high-booted and scarlet-coated, cracked her Freudian whip as her skittish coterie went obediently through its paces. At the end of it all, H.D. had three small volumes to her credit: Kora and Ka (1934), The Usual Star (1934), and Nights (1935; reissued by New Directions in 1986). The neatly printed “booklets” (as H.D. called them), bound in arresting white paper covers, arrived just as she was preparing to leave for Vienna for a second period of analysis with Freud. “This edition of one hundred copies has been privately printed for the author’s friends. No copies are for sale,” read a note opposite the title page. Recipients included Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, Havelock Ellis, Frances Gregg, and Silvia Dobson. Aiken responded quickly. He had enjoyed “Kora and Ka” the most and admired H.D.’s “packing-in of the various levels of awareness or personality, at the same time keeping the narrative vivid and fresh.” Other stories he had found “a little too upholstered, too patterned,” and he worried that the characters were a trifle leisured and decadent. Yet “what you are doing with form, interests me profoundly” (letter of 31 October 1934).

  But it was Marianne Moore’s reaction that really delighted H.D. Characteristically, Moore confessed herself smitten by certain phrases and acutely rendered particulars in the stories, proofs that painful experience had been transmuted into accuracy. “I hope you will never doubt from such worms as myself the admiration which the shining face of your courage evokes” (letter of 15 October 1934). H.D. could not contain her joy. Writing Bryher from Berne en route to Vienna, she crowed, “I have had my first real fan letter from a woman—Marianne, of all people! . . . I am positively limp!!!! I was terrified of M.M. And she wrote THE most beautiful letter. Now I repeat: I have YOU to thank for all this, Fido” (28 October 1934). Bryher’s stratagem had worked; she had struck upon the perfect halfway house between the prison of unpublished silence and the ordeal of the writers’ marketplace. In Bryher’s philosophy, private editions did not really constitute publication at all but rather a means of getting rid of a lump of manuscript against the day when the work could appear, recast perhaps, in the ordinary way. Meanwhile, H.D. could take pleasure in a controlled dissemination of her work and (to the horror of present-day scholars) make gleeful bonfires of her drafts and typescripts. Bryher had found a way to unblock her friends.

  H.D. soon concluded that her Dijon coup and her second analysis with Freud, both coming in the fall of 1934, marked a turning point in her life. She wrote Bryher towards the end of her stay in Vienna: “The printing of the Ka-s was the beginning of this new regime, and I am grateful to that and don’t care much now what happens” (30 November 1934). She often referred to her booklets by some affectionate, bantering term: her “Ka-s,” her “Peter Rabbit books,” her books of “Br[yher] and the Br press.” Late in life, she fetched the small volumes from an attic trunk and found them “very intense and beautifully written,” the atmosphere “so living.” The stories, she noted, “weave over and through the social-texture of the years when Kenneth [Macpherson] and Bryher and I were together in Vaud, or travelling, or separated as in London. They are subtle stories, difficult to re-read.” She added that the tales “enshrined” something of the Bryher and Kenneth of that exhausting, magical period of the late twenties and early thirties (“Compassionate Friendship,” 1955).

  H.D. wrote the stories of Kora and Ka after returning from her first trip to Monte Carlo with Kenneth Macpherson in July 1930. Macpherson was a witty, elegant young Scotsman with a diffuse creative streak who had charmed his way into the lives of Bryher, H.D., and H.D.’s young daughter, Perdita. He became H.D.’s lover and, quite soon thereafter, as if to certify his centrality in the ménage, Bryher’s husband. Christian in “Mira-Mare” has some of the detached charisma of Macpherson, and his relationship with Alex (the H.D. figure), though a little disembodied, captures the note of casual warmth and telegraphic repartee that emerges from the letters of H.D. and Macpherson. “Mira-Mare” was written just before their intimacy was shadowed by Macpherson’s affairs with young men and his impulsive globe-trotting. It is a light, affectionate tale, far less moody than its diptych companion “Kora and Ka.” Macpherson himself remarked on its vivacity in a letter to H.D.: “Darling, it’s gorgeous, full of a rippling, heady gayness, lovely happy story that captures those best qualities of the Coast as they have never before been captured” (24 September 1934). Monte Carlo had become the stamping ground for H.D. and her friends, some of whom set to work on their own “Monte” stories. Robert Herring’s Cactus Coast, printed by Darantiere in 1934, was one of these.

  “Kora and Ka” is decidedly more somber than “Mira-Mare,” a sort of penseroso to the latter’s allegro. The main character, John Helforth, has suffered a breakdown that has forced him to take a leave of absence from his business, the deadening “ferris-wheel” of letter-writing and bean-counting that makes up his personal ring in the hell of London. He thinks of his crack-up as a victory for his “Ka,” the shadow-being that lurks inside him, watching its opportunity to take control. In Egyptian mythology, the ka was a “double” or “dweller” born with every person, a kind of literalized soul that survived the death of its host. But it depended for its immortality on the care of the living, requiring to be nourished with food offerings placed in or near the tomb. In the event that the mummy was destroyed, its ka could reattach itself to a statue or effigy of the dead, and even to drawings or sculptures of articles of food. (In Part I, Helforth contemplates “wooden images” of cows and recalls carvings of grape bunches and wild apricots.) In The Book of the Dead, formulaic flattery is lavished on the ka: “Homage to thee O
my ka, who art my period of life!” The ka could become a very troublesome poltergeist if its needs were not seen to.

  Like so many of H.D.’s characters, but perhaps more tragically than most, Helforth is a deeply divided self, and he uses the shorthand of the ka to express the “broken duality” of his being. The fissured, compound ghosts that inhabit “Kora and Ka” do not admit of a straightforward autobiographical reading. Surely there is a touch of Kenneth Macpherson in Helforth. (Robert Herring quickly spotted his friend in Helforth’s affected hand and lounge suit.) Kora, Helforth’s companion, resembles Bryher in her volcanic temper, her hurt, staring eyes, and her addiction to psychoanalytic clichés. Aspects of H.D. find their way into the two characters as well. Kora’s failed marriage and her ambivalences about children and childbearing reflect H.D.’s experiences in those areas. And Helforth’s war phobia, the true source of his breakdown, is modelled on H.D.’s own complex of repressions and traumas stemming from World War I. She lost a brother in that war; Helforth lost two, Bob and Larry, and cannot stop hating his mother for her patriotic zeal in sacrificing her sons. Helforth himself was expected to go, but the conflict ended before he was of age. He might as well have been there, though. His survivor’s guilt has crippled him as badly as any wounded soldier returning from the Front (his name hints at “hell-forth”). Stripped of a healthy ego, he feels that he merely “ghosts” for his dead brothers. He is in a sense their ka, a shadow fed by his own sorrow and mother-hatred.

  Both stories in this volume are products of postwar disenchantment, though they occupy different regions of the European wasteland. For all its lightsome mood, there is a jazz-age ennui and brittleness to the bright watercolor scenes of “Mira-Mare,” a touch of cynicism in the dialogues. Its three sections (the afternoon, evening, and night of Bastille Day) follow Alex as she tries to shed her self-consciousness through sensuous plunges in the blue sea and vigorous tourism. Helforth’s ego-fragmentation provides the principal structure of “Kora and Ka.” The three sections of Part I are narrated by Ka in an abrupt, leering style that protests subservience to Helforth’s personality. Part II is in the weary, tortured voice of Helforth himself. Both selves seem to vie for mastery in the shorter Part III; and throughout the story, shifting narrative modes, now first-person, now third, echo the characters’ own volatilities. The setting of “Kora and Ka” is uncertain, a place where they speak an unfamiliar kind of French: Switzerland perhaps, or a no man’s land of psychic pain. Like “Mira-Mare,” this story traces a neat diurnal progression: afternoon, late afternoon, early evening. With Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway as powerful models, fiction-writers could abandon temporal sweep for the simple lyrical poignancy of a day’s fated progress into night. All of H.D.’s Dijon stories make use of days or nights for their unity of action and mood.

  There are suggestions of hope in these two tales, but as often in H.D., these suggestions hover in the realm of myth. Greek and Egyptian stories form a ghostly, billowing backdrop to the characters’ lives. Helforth is associated with Dionysus, god of fertility and wine. Early in “Kora and Ka,” he studies a grapevine on the barn wall, and his shoes in the grass make him think of “amputated dead feet,” a fancy triggered by his war phobia, but also a glance at Dionysus’s dismemberment at the behest of Hera (whose husband Zeus had sired the god on Persephone in one version of the myth). Kore or Kora is another name for Persephone, and it seems that Helforth/Dionysus has been drawn to his own Kora partly from the compulsions of his mother complex. Images of cows and serpents, important in Dionysian worship as well as in the cult of Isis, abound in “Kora and Ka”; and in Part III Kora and Helforth sit down to a meal of wine and fruit that has all the resonance of a ritual meal, a kind of last supper presided over by two dying gods. In Greek mythology, Dionysus defies death by being conceived anew (he is the “twice-born” god), and Kore makes her yearly return in the spring from the halls of Hades. Perhaps Helforth, who has been spiritually dead since his brothers went “west,” can now, ten years later, come forth from the tomb (“hell-forth” again). Perhaps Kora can conquer her maternal guilt and the bitterness she feels towards her estranged husband, Stamford. “Now we are Kore and the slain God . . . risen,” proclaims the narrator (Ka? Helforth?) at the conclusion of the story. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

  At their deepest level, “Kora and Ka” and “Mira-Mare” are about the mind of the artist. The ka that usurps Helforth’s being is undoubtedly a kind of madness, a frighteningly “impersonal way of seeing,” a “curse of intimate perception,” an “over-mind or other-mind or over-world experience.” Yet these are precisely the symptoms that H.D. had long before observed in her own creative self (as recorded in her 1919 essay, “Notes on Thought and Vision”). Alex in “Mira-Mare” escapes her intellect by allowing her senses to respond to sea and sun, in contrast to the self-conscious Christian. Swimming out to her rock, she achieves a state of “forgetting-remembering” and passes into mythopoeic consciousness, travelling back in “sub-aqueous” memory through Europe and America to Paestum and to Philae, island sacred to Isis. H.D. was keenly aware of the risks entailed by this other-mind that made aesthetic creation possible, that eclipsed the John Helforth in her and released the ka. They were risks worth taking. Her “Ka-s,” as she lovingly called her little white books, were in a sense her doubles, shadow-souls that would survive her earthly extinction. It becomes our duty, the duty of the living, as prescribed in Egyptian mummy lore, to care for these Ka-s and make sure they do not wander homeless.

  A Note on the Text

  The text that appears here is a photo-reproduction of the 1934 private edition printed by Imprimerie Darantiere of Dijon. In the 1950s H.D. jotted over two hundred corrections into her copies of Kora and Ka (now at the Beinecke Library, Yale). Most of these concern punctuation, but a handful are substantive changes and worth noting here: for “grape-bushes” (11) read “grape-bunches”; for “Kora pushes back” (31) read “Kora pushed back”; for “fed out belching mothers” (36) read “fed our belching mothers”; for “belonging to this minute” (52) read “belong to this minute”; for “sea-pirate sunk back” (65) read “sea-pirate sank back”; for “as old missionary looking dame” (83) read “an old missionary looking dame”; for “a Basque made-up” (84) read “a Basque make-up”; for “platinum grey” (95) read “platinum-blue.”

  KORA AND KA

  VAUD

  1930.

  I.

  1.

  There are two things mitigate against me, one is my mind, one is the lack of it. Kora brought me here. She thinks that I am overworked. I am overworked. Kora is exquisite and helpful. I follow her as a child follows its mother. But she is more to me than any mother could be to any child. She is to me what a materialized substance is to a shadow. Without substance, shadow cannot exist. I cannot exist without Kora. But I am more to Kora than a shadow. I am that sort of shadow they used to call a Ka, in Egypt. A Ka lives after the body is dead. I shall live after Helforth is dead.

  I look across a space of grass that is the colour of the chiffon scarf that Kora wore last night at dinner. The grass is the colour of tea-roses. From the burnt grass, there is a slight burnt fragrance like tobacco scattered across pot-pourri. The hand of Helforth lies affectedly across the grey knee of his lounge suit. The clothed knee is a dummy knee in a window. The shod feet are brown leather lumps. They rest in the grass like amputated dead feet. The hand of Helforth lives the more markedly for this. It is a long hand, affectedly flung there, living. I, this Ka, cannot see the face of Helforth.

  I feel Helforth’s eyes. They are glass-grey eyes. I feel his contempt. It is the contempt of integrity, he has worked too hard. I tear, as it were, the curtain that shuts me from Helforth and I feel Helforth’s eyes widen. When his eyes have sufficiently stared at that wall opposite, I will look out. At the moment, the eyes of Helforth see in detail, wooden images placed on a shelf, two cows, one painted red, the other black. His eyes are focussed there, they are not wide enough for
me yet. He smiles as he notes the red cow has a bell exactly matching in its minute disproportion, those the others wear on the far hill. He sees the red cow, placed at the shuttered window, like a cuckoo out of its clock. The cows are a trifle smaller than the two on wooden platforms that the patron’s small child pulls on uneven wood wheels across the flagstones. These cows, Helforth notes smiling, have been carved especially for this purpose, no doubt by the same wood-carver who cut those various plaques and plates of grape-bushes and cluster of wild-apricot, indoors. The cows relate, by this association, to the house behind Helforth, to the green and the stark white and the black and the grey of its interior. Helforth is abnormally sensitive to various interior focal planes of light.

  He is sensitive to all light. His eyes widen in the blinding sunlight and the sun beats down, incandescent, on his white face. The sun will sear Helforth’s face away and let me come. His eyes will go blank, staring straight into the light and mine will see. I wait for Helforth’s eyes to blind out Helforth. Helforth is amused and delighted with the wooden cow and its disproportionate minute wood cow bell.

  Helforth must see everything. And while his eyes run along a wire where a clematis is trained, I grow impatient. The eyes of Helforth drink in the purple of the clematis blossom and gouge out colour of the rose-clematis. The passion of the eyes of Helforth disregards me, waiting. They come to rest, then, on root-stalk of the vine that clambers up the other side of the barn wall. A straggly tendril pulses toward the passion-flower, through the weight of sunlight. The eyes of Helforth follow the twining insistence of the little tendril. It seems now they will be lost for ever in the purple star. But I know Helforth, and I wait for Helforth. His eyes drop again and rest on the spiral of the grape tendril. Then his eyes fall lower on a sheaf of vine-leaves and on one leaf. As his lids fall and as his mind discards the drug-purple of the lordly blossom, I know he knows that I am waiting. His lids droop to blacken out the heady visual memory of rose and purple, and then widen. His eyes rest on the cool young vine-leaves and I come.