Just about
everyone I know thinks of Jack Kerouac as a novelist who wrote poetry. But what about Gilbert
Sorrentino? Before Mulligan
Stew and the other long prose fictions that made Sorrentino justly famous
as a novelist, he was a successful poet (and a superb critic of
poetry). Along with the then-LeRoi Jones, the always-on-the-road Paul
Blackburn, and youngsters George Economou, Rochelle
Owens, Robert
Kelly
& Clayton Eshleman, Sorrentino was part of Projectivism’s presence in &
around Manhattan
Another poet
with an even more ambiguous relation to these genres has been Toby
Olson, again a second generation Projectivist. Because he’s published in
both forms throughout his life, I’ve always suspected that his work has been
underestimated in each form. The very same silliness that bedevils the
bookstore clerk who cannot decide whether Vikram Seth’s Golden
Gate is fiction or poetry*, let alone Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, plays out in the minds of readers more generally when it
comes to considering the lifework of different authors. Case in point: Hilda
Doolittle.
Almost
everyone thinks of Doolittle as a poet who also wrote some fiction, as well as
translations & memoirs. Yet H.D. published, for all extents and purposes,
just a dozen or so books of poetry during her lifetime, going long periods
between volumes after the appearance of her first Collected Poems in 1925. And that number shrinks if you treat Trilogy as one book, instead of three.
During this long productive career – just under half a century – Doolittle also
wrote 19 novels and collections of stories, according to Susan Stanford
Friedman’s 1987 chronology of H.D.’s writing, published in the special issue of
Sagetrieb devoted to Doolittle’s
work. They include the following:
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Paint It Today, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Asphodel, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Pilate’s Wife, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Palimpsest, novel (interlocking stories)
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Nike, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Hedylus, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>HER, novel (published as HERmione)
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Narthex, novella
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>The Usual Star, stories
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Kora and Ka, novellas
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Nights, novella
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>The Hedgehog, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>The Seven, stories
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Bid Me to Live, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Majic Ring, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis
of a Dream), novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>White Rose and the Red, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>The Mystery, novel
<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>Magic Mirror, novel
Not all of
these novels ever made it into print. Friedman’s note for Nike simply reads “Destroyed.” Biographer Guest politely notes that
“Hipparchia: War Rome (Circa 75 B.C.)” has “none of
the polish or professionalism” of H.D.’s later work,
and I would pass a similar judgment on Paint
It Today. Friedman lists Pilate’s
Wife as “submitted and rejected,” & White
Rose and the Red as “probably rejected.” Yet 19 booklength works over a
35-year span (H.D. appears to have begun writing fiction in 1921, after her
life began to stabilize somewhat with the presence of Bryher; the final item, Magic Mirror, was written in the
mid-1950s) demonstrates a considerable emphasis, a commitment of time &
effort. Indeed, between the first Collected
Poems in 1925 and her next book of poetry, Red Roses for Bronze, in 1931, Doolittle produced seven novels
& collections of stories, plus the verse drama Hippolytus Temporizes plus her work on the film Borderline.
One could
make the case that Doolittle was, in fact, a novelist – tho not a successful
one – who wrote poetry at least as much as she was a poet who wrote fiction.
While that may seem like a difference within a distinction (& vice versa),
it has, I suspect, real consequences in terms of how H.D. saw herself &
thus how she envisioned her career as author. Did she feel satisfied? Was she pleased at what she had accomplished? These
are, I think, legitimate questions. During a poet’s life, they have everything
to do with how the writer decides what’s
next, and even how to proceed. At
one level, the writer in me would love for an Emily Dickinson, say, to
understand the breadth & depth of her achievement, the power of her impact
on the world. At another, younger writers are constantly confronted with
options, nearly every one of which is an incentive to stop writing poetry. What
if, for example, Jack Spicer had finished his detective novel & it had
proven to be a best-seller, followed with a major motion picture? What if, in
precisely the other direction, Trout
Fishing in America had not been so fabulously successful? Would Richard
Brautigan still be alive today? Would there be a west coast tradition of the humorous
lyric as widespread as that which flowed from the New York School
In
practice, I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest that this is how Doolittle saw
herself, albeit I am still acquainting myself with the territory & I have a
long way still to go. Nonetheless what I want to be conscious of, at least for
today, is how the H.D. we know / I know is a construct. That is, we define her
as the poet & in so doing condition many of our responses to new
information, setting our expectations accordingly. The fiction that is in
print, such as it is, for example, appears to have been published to fill out
the oeuvre of the poet, not because anyone thought that it might transform a
history of the novel (although, in fact, it is
historically important to the degree that H.D. was writing overtly lesbian
fiction at time when this was hardly done at all, & only at some risk). Which is to say that all of the reasons for publishing H.D.’s
fiction have little or nothing to do with its actual quality as fiction.
* Hint: bad
fiction, worse poetry.
