Customer Reviews

Asphodel

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With _Asphodel_, Hilda Doolittle takes her readers across the Atlantic and introduces them to the literati of the early twentieth century. Her thinly veiled portrayals of Ezra Pound, Dorothy Shakespear, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence are insightful and perhaps far more accurate than any biography would dare to be. While it is difficult to believe that she was as naive an ingenue as she attests, it is harder still not to sympathize with the youthful poet determined to succeed abroad even though discarded by the charming but inattentive Pound. This novel is one of H.D.'s best, clearly as strong an example of her writing as _Bid Me to Live_ and _Paint it Today_. While still not consdered a first-rank Modern, Hilda Doolittle is arguably one of the most important literary figures of her day. Her description of the Moderns abroad is flawless and no examination of the Modern era can be complete before reading her prose.

H.D. was seized by a flash of wisdom when she pencilled "DESTROY" across the manuscript of Asphodel; it's a pity her eager publishers didn't heed her sense. As I understand it, this text was coveted by feminist and LGBT scholars who wanted to recover a major work by a lesbian modernist. Unfortunately, Asphodel is major only in the sense that it is long, and modernist only insofar as its landscape is obsessively internal. As for any "lesbian" theme, there's nary a hint of affection, much less desire, for another human being in this tedious aria of self-justification. H.D lays waste to page after page with bitter monologues about how her own exquisitely quivering sensitivities are forced to suffer everyone else's idiocies. It's like reading the diary of an unpopular and astonishingly dense fifteen-year-old.

Wade through this only if you're an H.D. scholar, or if you're really into playing guess-the-literati.