10. H.D. to George Plank, March 31, 1925, unpublished letter, Beinecke Library. For a detailed account of the complexly interrelated novels of H.D.’s “Madrigal Cycle” (Paint It To-Day, Asphodel, Madrigal), see Friedman, ch. 3.
11. H.D. and the Greggs left for France in the summer of 1911; Asphodel is less precise about this date, at one point suggesting that it may have been 1912.
12. H.D. to Bryher, April 18, 1949.
13. See Robert Spoo, “H.D.’s Dating of Asphodeclass="underline" A Reassessment,” H.D. Newsletter 4(Winter 1991): 31–40.
14. Cf. Friedman, pp. 107, 171–72.
15. From “L’Art Philosophique,” in Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1961), p. 1099. “What is pure art according to the modern conception? It is the creation of a suggestive magic simultaneously embracing both object and subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself” (my translation).
16. Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations: A Selection, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 13–14.
17. The covering sheet and title page of Asphodel contain three versions of the title, all based on the quotation from Landor: “Asphodel,” “Fields of Asphodel,” and “This Side of the Grave.” The last mentioned was struck out by H.D., leaving the first two as options. I have chosen “Asphodel” because it is the tide H.D. used most often when alluding to the novel in letters and memoirs. “Asphodel” probably also refers, as Friedman points out, “to Odysseus’s descent to the Underworld, where he sees the shade of Achilles stride off into ‘fields of asphodel,’ ” and to certain early poems by Aldington (p. 386n). H.D. used the title “Amaranth” for one of the trilogy of poems she wrote in 1916 about her relationship with Aldington.
18. William Carlos Williams also noted the interdependence of love, death, and the imagination in his late poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”
19. H.D.’s composition process typically began with rough pencil drafts in notebooks, followed by her own typed draft of the material she had written. She then had her typist prepare a fair copy. The typescript of Asphodel may be the work of her typist.
20. Two small exceptions should be noted. The typescript of Asphodel contains two versions of page 147 of part 1; both are carbon copies on identical typing paper, one page containing a sentence which the other omits. I have retained the sentence. Also, a short selection from chapter 15 of part 1 was published in an appendix to Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910–1912, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988). I have taken this published excerpt into account and have departed from its text (which I also edited) in a few minor readings.
21. H.D. to Marianne Moore, January 19, 1952, unpublished letter, Marianne Moore Papers, V:23:33, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.
22. Late in life, at the urging of Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. went through her published and unpublished writings and attempted to regularize comma usage and other accidentals, though at times she found the task uncongenial and left it to Pearson. I have decided not to impose this late practice on a work H.D. produced in the 1920s, when her creative assumptions and attitudes toward publishing were different.
23. Readers may wish to compare this edition of Asphodel with the text of the first four chapters of Paint It To-Day, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis and published in Contemporary Literature 27(1986): 440–74. With some slight differences, they implicitly make the same distinction I have made between H.D.’s orthography and her punctuation.
24. A comprehensive list of significant editorial changes to the Asphodel typescript will be published in the H.D. Newsletter, ed. Eileen Gregory (Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture).
Asphodel
“There are no fields of asphodel this side of the grave.”
PART I
1
France. France swirled under her feet for now that the boat was static it seemed, inappositely, that the earth must roll, revolve and whirl. Hermione clutched the railings of the stairs and the broad flight of stairs leading upstairs whirled and turned with her as the narrow cabin step ladder of steps leading down into the sordid ship’s belly had never, it appeared, even in its worst days, done. The memories of sea storm were pacific compared with this thing: stairs that inappositely whirled under her and a bed that when she flung herself upon it, heaved and swayed under her, heaving and swaying and swaying with the heave and sway of faded rose buds in loops that was the almost effaced but still reliable pattern of the salmon-coloured paper of the wall she stared at. Stairs in her imagination heaved and sank under her. She seemed about to float away, lax, bodiless.
“There is nothing wrong with you.” Madame Dupont, their boat acquaintance, had stayed with them, had the room down the corridor one remove from the rooms of Hermione and the two Rabbs. “There is nothing wrong with you.” Hermione managed to heave aloft on one elbow and by a determined and valiant effort keep the bed steady under her elbow while she listened. “There is nothing wrong with you.” A dark figure stood in the doorway. It drew nearer. It was clothed like a sister of charity in black, it had a black hat pulled over its eyes, the very hat they had all so bargained over this morning, shopping in Havre with Madame Dupont. Madame Dupont, had insisted on it. “My sister and my brother-in-law will be so shocked to see me back from New York without the proper black things. I didn’t get them in New York as they are so expensive.” Madame Dupont had arranged her mourning to suit her purse and her convenience. Was it French simply? Putting on black when she got to Havre, saving her best black, not wearing black on the boat. This mourning de convenance seemed suddenly to Hermione inconsolably amusing. She would begin to laugh and laugh and laugh. She would never be consoled. Imaginez vous, buying the things in Havre where it was cheaper. . cheaper for someone you cared for, but Madame Dupont hadn’t even cared for her mother. Said so. Told them frankly “you see. . he was a very old man. But even that. . in France. . But you see. .” and she had whispered the tale of her dot-less marriage with a rich old man who had (whispers) and her mother knew it. French. France already on the boat had come true. . just that horrible story, true. Things happened out of de Maupassant, any de Maupassant story might come true, Boule de Suife, fat pretty cocotte in the railway carriage going to bed with the Parisian officer (Bouile de Souife was it?) and then everyone cutting her afterwards. . that was France, de Maupassant was true. Literature was true. If de Maupassant was true then life and letters met, were not sub-divided, hermetically shut apart. Helen thy beauty is to me was still hermetically sealed and a star, but de Maupassant in one terrible instant became real, a reality. Terrible and strong. They said it was Flaubert’s illegitimate child. Writing. How marvellous. Writing. She must write. Hermione must write. She must write this: salmon-coloured wall paper. . faded; elegant Louis Seize gilt clock (on the elegantly empty mantel piece) that doesn’t go; standing in the door-way a grotesque figure, stiffly erect, in the correct posture of her new cheap mourning, Madame Dupont saying, “but there is nothing wrong with you.”