This excerpt from The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream) by Delia Altonby H.D., edited by Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere, is reprinted courtesy of the University Press of Florida.
336 pages
Cloth: $55.00
ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3066-1
Pubdate: 9/16/2007
To order from University Press of Florida
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Photo of H.D. from 21 April 1947 is reprinted with permission of the Schaffner/New Directions H.D. estate and the Beinecke’s digital collection of H.D. photographs at Yale University.
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Interview with Cynthia Hogue
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Cynthia’s chapbook Under Erasure
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Excerpts from The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of aDream), by Delia Alton
A novel by H.D.
Notes by Cynthia Hogue
Excerpts from and notes on the first edition of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of aDream), by Delia Alton. Eds. Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere (Gainesville, FL: UP of FL,2007). 336 pp. hardbound.
- Having lived with The Sword Went Out to Sea, by DeliaAlton, off and on, for the better part of four years over the course of editing this firstedition, I have come to understand it in particular ways. Although it was drafted as the modernistpoet, H.D., was recovering from a psychotic breakdown after the end of World War II, I and myco-editor, Julie Vandivere, came to see the text not as a record of madness but as a civilianwoman’s testament to war’s madness. During World War I, H.D. was in London, newly wed, and whileher husband was at the front, she suffered a still birth (their daughter). Her brother was killedthe next year, her father died soon after of grief, and her marriage ended. With the birth of hersecond child, her daughter Perdita (fathered by the composer, Cecil Gray), mother and baby almostdied of influenza in 1919. Those were traumatizing, watershed years for the young American poet,and she would try to work through their meaning for the rest of her life—through writing,psychoanalysis (with Freud himself), and through involvement in various wisdom traditions.Remaining in London during the Blitz in World War II, H.D. tethered her being, her identity as poetcombined with her need to feel of use, to her involvement in Spiritualism. To put it in context,such a practice was, understandably, not uncommon in civilian populations under duress and during awar.
H.D.’s World War II roman à clef, The Sword Went Out toSea, tells the story of how the H.D. surrogate, Delia Alton, developed a Spiritualist circle inLondon during the Blitz and began to channel the spirits of dead airmen. Sometime before Christmas,1941 (shortly, in fact, after the attack on Pearl Harbor), H.D.-Delia decided that she would forthe first time conduct “psychic research work.” H.D. had delved deeply into the study ofoccultism, “the study of (or search for) a hidden or veiled reality and the arcane secrets ofexistence.”1 In the 1920s, she had had a couple of ecstatic, out-of-time visions to which shewould also return imaginatively in her poetry and prose for the rest of her life (in the excerptthat follows, she refers to one such experience, a vision with a shipboard acquaintance, PeterRodeck, called in the novel Peter Van Eck, which she may or may not have imagined). H.D. wasconversant with theosophy and also with the popularized image of psychic mediums as humantelegraphic “receiving stations,”2 but she had never engaged in Spiritualism before 1941,when her decision to undertake “psychic research” coincided almost to the day with theU.S.’s decision to enter WWII.
H.D. spent the whole of the warin London in her apartment on Lowndes Square, which she shared with Bryher, her lifelong friend,during the Blitz. During the worst years, her spiritualist activities became the center of herlife, her raison d’être. Initially, she joined a psychic research society, called in the novelStanford House. From 1942-1944, H.D.-Delia and the more skeptical Bryher (Gareth) established aspiritualist circle, called in “the Movement” a “home-circle,” with the youngEurasian medium, Arthur Bhaduri (Ben Manisi), and his mother (Ada Manisi). In the followingexcerpt, Delia consults Manisi at Stanford House about her writing the story of the WWI years,which had stalled. The details that emerge from the session convince her of the authenticity ofManisi’s gift.
From:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Stanford House started the whole thing. It was the young Eurasian.Before Christmas 1941, he suggested that, as a new member of his class, I might like to have anextra session. I went one chill afternoon. I explained that I had done no previous work of thissort. He drew the faded-rose curtains across the London fog. He felt around for a clue. To savetime, I told him frankly that there was really no-one in my life that I wanted to discuss. I knewwhere I was or thought I did. Still, the past was there.
“Yes;” I explained, “five years ago or ten yearsago, I might have come for help about some person. In fact, it is because I have given up thethought of that person or people, in a personal sense, that I felt free to come at all. It is mywriting that matters.” I did not want to talk about my writing, but I felt frustrated when Ilooked back and recalled the number of times I had re-written that novel of myself and Peter vanEck, after the last war.
Having said that I didn’t want adviceabout anyone here or communications from anyone there, Mr. Manisi went off at a tangent.
“Wait a minute — here is a stretch of desert; sand;it’s so warm. Here is a wall, no, not a wall, yes — I mean — did you ever do anyexcavating?” I said no, trying not to think of Peter van Eck. “Here is a long track inthe sand. It goes on. There are foot-prints. Now the foot-prints branch off. There are two tracks.This gentleman is no longer in your life.” But I had not mentioned a gentleman and had beencareful to imply that I didn’t want to. Look — he’s running his hand over a box. It mustbe a coffin. Why, look this is very interesting. There’s blue here, but very blue —”
“Lapis-lazuli,” I suggested.
“Well, something stone — and the pictures are set in thelid, not painted. He is measuring the — the — ”
“Tomb,” I said, remembering Mr. van Eck’s descriptionsof his work in Asia Minor and in Egypt.
“Well, or temple.It’s small.” Mr. Manisi went on describing museum objects, but that was easy, even if he hadnever been to Egypt. I interrupted him:
“Do you knowEgypt?”
No, he had never been out of England. But he wenton,
“Now, if this were a little earlier, it would be—”
“The Shepherd Kings.”
“No—no—it’s —”
I began to feel uneasy. Iparticularly wanted to get away from that time. I had lived too much with the memory of Karnak. Ihad tried to write about it, but the writing wouldn’t come true. I again prompted him,
Mr. Manisi’s thin hands emergedfrom the winter twilight. They were as golden as the sand he spoke of. I thought how beautiful hishands are. He said, “Throw it away.” He lifted it, as if it were surplus cargo on a boat,and flung it, as it were, over the deck-rail.
I don’t know how long we had been talking, but Iknew he was very busy so I fastened up my coat and began looking for my gloves. .
“Wait aminute — ” said Mr. Manisi. “There’s a lady here. I thought it was your mother, butshe says, `Tell Sister and Garry that I never forget their Christmas.’ ”
[. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .]
I say, I wasjust shocked, shocked because this last remark, in its simplicity, meant so much more to me thanthe minute details Mr. Manisi gave me of things that Peter van Eck had described to me, on thatboat. Certainly, Manisi had got hold of something. But this third winter of the war, after thedreadful nights and the growing squalor of the days, I was somehow too near reality to care anymore for the dream that had kept me alive for so many years.
“I thought this lady was yourmother, but she calls you sister.” She had always called me sister — no, not always— but it was my mother speaking.
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- When I read from Sword inTucson, Arizona with the editor of this journal, Rebecca Seiferle, who kindly invited me toexcerpt a little of the novel in these pages, I remember looking up at the audience and thinking,They must think Sword —and perhaps its editors—crazy! I said to them, “Iknow this is an eccentric work, but think of it as a working-through of grief, and also as apacifist text.” I needn’t have worried. Tucsonans are as familiar with the wisdom traditionsas was H.D. in her day, and altogether unfazed by hearing excerpts from the novel (I was, ofcourse, projecting my own fears of censure). It was a good reminder that the operations ofprojection cast a filtered and flickering light—even for those of us who have never been inwar’s harm’s way.
In the excerpt that follows, Delia’s “home-circle” has broken up andthe war is over, but Delia — who has been trying for some time to work with anotherSpiritualist, Lord Howell (Lord Dowding, who was Air Chief Marshall during the Battle of Britain in1940 that kept the Nazis out of England)—refuses to stop. She continues the table-tappingalone (against Lord Howell’s and Gareth’s counsel). Delia believes that the table is, in thisscene below, tapping out messages from downed RAF pilots who are trying to communicate a messagefor Lord Howell through Delia, to warn the world about the dangers of the bomb. Delia agrees tohelp them.
What Delia first spells out, R-A (RA, as Amen-Ra), is All-Father, who figures centrallyin the first part of H.D.’s long, syncretic poem, Trilogy, written during WWII. To aid theairmen, the Mayan (or Aztec) spirit guide, Z, also comes through to speak to Delia. By theexcerpt’s end, Delia has imagined that she is chosen to take the messages because of her trainingin “rhythm, metre and musical notation” as a poet. All civilians were put to work inLondon during the Blitz except for those over fifty, which H.D. was by then, so in some sense,Spiritualism gave H.D. a means to “work,” and significantly, a way to contribute to thewar effort and, she hoped, to help others.
From Wintersleep. Part 1, chap. 2,“Round Table,” pp. 28-30
I was so happy with the table. I was tempted to make out a list of the words we had used, but Ithought better of it. There would be time enough for that. R-A spelt the table. Well, that was nodoubt, rare. We had had the word often enough. “All right, rare;” I said. “Go on.”The table tapped R, again. It was like that. The table didn’t like being interrupted. It had takenme some time to convince it that it need not, inevitably, spell a familiar word to the end. It cameback to A and stopped. I repeated, “I said, rare,” but that didn’t satisfy it. A-B-C-D-E-F,the table tapped and stopped. “Oh, I see, this isn’t rare, then?” The table said “Yes,” butthat didn’t mean anything. “I don’t understand, go on.” It went on, R-A-F, it started all overagain. “R-A-F what? Go on,” I said impatiently. R-A-F, the table repeated stubbornly.
“R-A-F doesn’t mean anything.” R A-F doesn’t mean anything.
Well, there it was. It was asif they had been waiting for a new telephone-girl to learn the technique of the switchboard, beforethey manifested or announced themselves. I say “they” for eventually, in fact almost at once,there were a number of them. But why for me? I didn’t know any of them. They seemed to want me towork for them. I was deeply touched. It was Ralph who made me cry most. You see, I had not cried,except for occasional neurotic or purely physical outbursts (when I had an abscess, for instance)since Geoffrey — Well, that was the worst of it. I hadn’t accepted the fact of his death, norof John’s. John’s? There was a slow, deliberate voice speaking. “Re-incarnation is not a thing thatreally matters.” No, no, it didn’t matter. I was crying because Ralph said — what was itRalph said? I had said, “Are you RAF boys who were lost in the Battle of Britain?” Ralph said,“Lost we are found.”
I say, how can you accept reincarnation? Because any of these boysmight have been John come back — or even Geoffrey.
That is how I felt about them. Therewas Lad, there was Larry. There was John, but whether this was the original John or another, Ididn’t know. Someone was in the background. I had called him John, at first, but finally I decidedhe must be Z. (Of Z, more later). Z would say, “Wait” and I would wait. Then he wouldannounce Lad or Larry or Ralph or John. When he first announced or introduced John, I decided thatJohn must be one of them, after all. John said, “Are you ready?” “Of course, I’m ready,”I said and suddenly realized that that was how the wing-commander ordered the squadron to be off.It wasn’t a command, really. It was an indication only that he himself was waiting. Well, it waslike that. John spelt, J-O-H-N.
I said, “Yes, I know. Z” — for they called him Z, too— “has told me it’s you, John.”
He spelt J-O-H-N again.
“What is it? Is thisanother John?”
“Yes.”
“Well, all right, what can I do about it?”
“J-O-H-N T-A-B-L-E,” he spelt.
“Yes, I know, John. The table is for you. I was sohappy when you all came.” It seemed that we were stuck, somehow. I had said all this before. Iwaited, wondering. He waited too. “Is there anything I can do about it? I mean, anythingspecial.”
“Yes,” he said, and waited again. (This is a most subtle and intriguingform of communication. I suppose it’s a sort of thought transference. He wanted me to find out whathe wanted, what they wanted.)
“Will you help me, John? Will you give me some clue, someword?”
“D-O-O-R O-P-E-N-S,” spelt John.
I knew that a door had opened. “I know,John,” I said. It was like speaking to a child. No doubt, they too, felt they were speaking toa child. I could feel their burning intensity, but I did not want them to feel my own frustration,my impatience. “May I wait a minute?” “Yes.” They did not stay very long at first and Iwas afraid they might go away. It seemed to be a sort of tradition or convention to use first namesonly. But I felt they wanted another John. If they wanted me to help them, they must break whatapparently, was their rule.
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me John’s other name,” Isaid.
“H-O-W-E-L-L,” spelt John.
It is true that Lord Howell had not always been LordHowell. He had signed his name, as is customary, Howell only. I remembered then a reference in thenews cutting that Manisi had brought me, to the brilliant career of Sir John How-ell, in the lastwar.
“I’ll do everything I can,” I promised them. “I’m afraid I can’t do much.” Now Iknew why they had come. They hadn’t come for me at all. They had come for Lord Howell.
“Tablewill very well do,” spelt John. This was a little later.
Now I confess, I began to overdothings. I mean, the books, the papers, the lecture notes, the trip to America even, seemedunimportant beside this burning fact, this fact that I was needed.
“Roses red,” speltLarry one day, and “roses white,” came later from Lad.
“I’ll do my best,” I keptassuring them. “You know he’s a little difficult.”
“Yes,” said Lad emphatically. Itseemed they had an idea. I knew nothing of the technical or scientific side of flying or of flightmechanics. But it wasn’t flying in that sense, it was the old Homeric winged word, that they wereafter. It could be done. It wouldn’t be difficult. They would explain it to Lord Howell. Apparentlythey couldn’t explain it to me, but if Howell would come, they could indicate through me, a newmeans of communication. They didn’t want anyone else, and they didn’t want me to tell anyone ofthis.
They gave me numbers and letters which they said Howell would understand, but they neededhelp. They asked me to tell Lord Howell of this, not to write him.
Later, they would indicateothers. I would be able to help in the beginning. Afterwards, the others would not need me. Itwould need a perceptive ear and to a point, a person trained in rhythm, metre and musical notationto take the first tests. They seemed to think that I would be able to do this. I was mad enough orglad enough to believe it myself.
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- Continuing the“work” alone, H.D.-Delia believes she is channeling messages from RAF pilots killed in theBattle of Britain in 1940, who warn of the broader dangers of the atomic bomb, which Americans havedropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. “I felt the scar,” H.D.-Delia writes in a Gaiaic passagein Sword. “The earth was furrowed with the irrational assaults that man had made on her. She wasalways mother-earth. I felt that man was actually assaulting woman” (54). Perhaps,H.D.-Delia feels the gendered dynamic so deeply because she herself has been positioned asCassandra—written off, patronized, and warning to no avail.
In the passage below, she hastransmitted the substance of the RAF pilots’ messages to Lord Howell, but he has repudiated her“work” and the spirits of the airmen contacting her (he calls them “beings of a lowerorder”). Delia is both shocked and offended, and contrasts Lord Howell’s cheery reports oflife after death in his own Spiritualist writings (to comfort those who have lost loved ones) withthe dark warnings she is receiving about the atom bomb, which could augur “the end of theworld.” Delia transcends the very particular concerns of self-preservation in the passagebelow. Her question of whether the world beyond ours might be a “winter-land” (rather thanthe luminous summer-land that Lord Howell envisions) looks eerily ahead to the cold war imaginationof a “nuclear winter” that would result from a “limited” nuclear war.
From Wintersleep,, Part 1, “Round Table,” p. 34
I said I wasn’t frozen, but I was. Iwas like a tree that bends over in an ice-storm. My top seemed about to touch the ground, but itdidn’t snap off — some connecting wire or a connecting wire — the ice might melt. Ididn’t know what to do. Automatically, I went back to the table. “Wait,” they said.
Perhaps Ishould have stopped the work there. After all, who was I to think I could do anything to stop orstem the dreadful thing that loomed heavy in all our minds? They had come, in a sense, with thecoming of the atom-bomb. I had felt that they had come to stop that.
Psychologically, any-one canwork this out. Garry and I were not afraid of the atom-bomb for ourselves. Having sat up all nightthrough so many raids, we agreed that the bomb would be quick, anyway. That was the short view orthe selfish view to take of it. What of other people? What of the rest of the world? One was afraidof the end of the world. It was the end of this world, anyway. There must be another world, butwhere was it? It was there, somewhere. I had never doubted that. But I had made no real emotionalconnection with it, as my work with Manisi had been for the most part, either impersonal orliterary. Lord Howell had stood out for some sort of extension of consciousness. I wanted anyhow tofeel things in that way, in a rational way. Perhaps that was what was wrong. Perhaps I was toorational. He had written somewhat extravagantly at times, of luminous scenes and summer-landfelicity. Yes, I could accept that too, but I felt there was a qualification about summer-land. Itmight be winter-land, without being Hell or without containing “beings of a lower order.”
Ifwe felt that way about the atom-bomb, what must they feel?
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- H.D. and Lord Dowding bothbelieved in reincarnation, and debated in their letters (see the forthcoming edition of anotherunpublished work, Majic Ring, ed. Demetres Tryphonopoulos) whether the soul journeys throughmany bodies in its quest for realization. In the following dream-scene, H.D.-Delia“synthesizes” the dream of integrating all the self’s parts (hence, H.D.’s original title,Synthesis of a Dream). She is sixteen again, but at the same time (there is no time in ourunconscious), she is the same age as her companion, Lord Howell, who is his actual age in thedream, sixty-three. Delia has returned to her youth in America, and they converse matter-of-factlyabout the bodies discarded by the soul in the process of reincarnating. Irony and humor leavenwhat otherwise seems a serious exchange, and the passage’s reflexivity is, as so often happens indreams, literalized dramatically in the final image of self-regard through another’s eyes (to seeanother as self is one approach to the ethos of compassion).
To-morrow is Palm Sunday. Last night or early this morning, the Synthesis of aDream manifests. We are in America. There is a wooden bench. This is the front-porch of afriend of my mother’s. Her husband has lately directed a production of Iphigenia, given byhis students. Therefore, the dream-year must be 1903. The months must be June. I am therefore,sixteen. But my companion is sixty-three. There is no disparity in our ages, however. We are thesame age.
My mind has satisfied itself. l have written or projected the story of my war years inLondon. I have grieved for my friends there, but a benign Providence has decreed that I am to bespared further suffering. It would be blasphemous to turn back, to reverse this decree of fate.
Afriend and her daughter who lost their home in the bombing, are in my London flat. So, seated onMrs. Atherton’s front-porch (Philadelphia, 1903), overlooking a small town-garden, I explain toLord Howell, “that is the worst of being philanthropic. l can’t ask you to come and talk in myflat.” I open my handbag. I offer him a cigarette. He accepts it.
“Now,” I continuethe conversation, “when l get over there, I want to be cremated. Do they cremate people overthere?”
Lord Howell, true to type, replies, “But we need not worry about what happens toour bodies when we are dead.”
“But these things are important ” I say. “You wrotesomewhere of someone sloughing off, not one but many bodies. He was running across the sand,throwing off his bodies like old clothes. You can’t leave the desert cluttered up with oldbodies.”’
“But,” Lord Howell said, “we won’t have many bodies, you and I, to throwaway. We will step out into nothingness.”’
In my dream, this did not alarm me. However, abody is a useful appurtenance. Why throw it away ?
“But soon,” said Lord Howell, “I willsee myself looking at myself, in your eyes. You will see yourself looking at yourself in myeyes.”
1. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), 22. Owen distinguishes “occultism” from “mysticism,” the latter defined as “an immediate experience of and oneness with a variously conceived divinity,” although, as she notes, those involved in “promoting an ancient wisdom tradition that would be crucial to the establishment of a spiritually enlightened new age” used the two terms “interchangeably” (22).
2. For a discussion that relates Notes on Thought and Vision to H.D.’s WWII masterpiece Trilogy, see Leonora Woodman, “H.D. and the Poetics of Initiation,” in Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition, ed. Leon Surette and Demetres Tryphonopoulos (Orono, ME: 1996), esp. 139-41.
Excerpts from: Eds. Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere, The SwordWent Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream) by Delia Alton, 2007, pages 6-8, 28-30, 34, and 73. Reprintedcourtesy of the University Press of Florida.
I would like to thank my Research Assistant, Claire McQuerry, for help with scanning this excerpt,and to Rebecca Seiferle, great thanks for inviting me to read from the novel with her in Tucson(October 2007) at Casa Libre, www.casalibre.org and to curatethis excerpt. And to my husband, the economist Sylvain Gallais, for his patience and support andhumor, endless love.
