Asphodel

Introduction

H.D.’s Asphodel is a work with a strangely disembodied reputation, a sort of phantom novel that makes frequent appearances in the criticism on H.D. yet, until now, has had no public, practical existence. Although it has occasioned important exegesis,¹Asphodel itself has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s, a modernist text akin in its experimental form and spirit to Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage. Its absence from the canon has created a significant historical and aesthetic lacuna, impeding a full appreciation of H.D.’s life and work. Although most serious students of H.D. can outline the plot of Asphodel, only those who have read the manuscript at Yale University know more of the actual text than the fragments reproduced in the criticism. It might have intrigued H.D. to learn that this novel of lesbian and heterosexual love would one day have a status curiously similar to that of the poems of her beloved Sappho.

Along with Paint It To-Day (written in 1921), Asphodel represents one of the earliest surviving examples of the sustained experiments in autobiographical fiction that H.D. began in an effort to free herself from “an old tangle”² of troubled thinking about the events of her past — in particular those of World War I — and to move beyond the “H.D. Imagiste” role which seemed to tighten about her after the publication of her first volume of poetry, Sea Garden, in 1916. Asphodel is in many ways the aesthetic antithesis of the crystalline imagist poem: quirky and nebulous rather than tightly focused and exquisitely controlled; repetitious and recursive instead of immediate in its effect; intensely personal and psychological rather than “objective” in its dramatization of the perceiving mind. Like H.D.’s later prose writings — but perhaps even more broodingly and insistently—Asphodel repeats charged images and idées fixes, altering them incrementally as the narrative proceeds, pushing them painfully and reluctantly toward what Susan Stanford Friedman has referred to as “the analytic clearing of understanding and control,”³ or what the novel calls, more skeptically perhaps, those “fields of asphodel” not met with on this side of the grave. Gertrude Stein described a related process in The Making of Americans: “Always repeating is all of living, everything that is being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding.”⁴

First composed in 1921–1922 and probably revised a few years later, Asphodel is, from one perspective, an early version of the quite different autobiographical novel H.D. completed decades later under the title of Madrigal (published in 1960 as Bid Me to Live [A Madrigal]). H.D. considered Madrigal the final, most satisfying version of her “story of War I,” a story she had been evolving for decades: “I had been writing or trying to write this story, since 1921. I wrote in various styles, simply or elaborately, stream-of-consciousness or straight narrative. I re-wrote this story under various titles, in London and in Switzerland.”⁵ In 1959 she told her friend and literary agent Norman Holmes Pearson that “[Madrigal] Phoenix-ed out of Asphodel that was put far away & deliberately ‘forgotten’ ”⁶ Her retrospective characterization of Asphodel as an early “version” or “edition” of Madrigal, together with her belief that it lacked the latter’s “daemonic drive or. . daemon” (one of H.D.’s words for “genius”),⁷ made her reluctant to preserve copies of Asphodel. In 1949 she asked her companion Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) — somewhat tentatively — to “destroy” the copy of the manuscript in her possession;⁸ a decade later she wrote Pearson: “If carbons [of Her and Asphodel] ever turn up, please destroy them.”⁹

Fortunately, for us and for H.D., one copy survived, despite the fact that its title page also bears the instruction “DESTROY” scrawled in H.D.’s hand. It is true that part of Asphodel overlaps with the period covered by Madrigal—the later years of World War I — and both novels contain characters based on H.D.’s husband Richard Aldington and her lover Cecil Gray. But much of Madrigal focuses on the D. H. Lawrence figure, Rico, who never appears in the earlier novel; and Asphodel, which traces H.D.’s life from her departure for Europe in 1911 to the birth of her daughter in 1919, has a temporal scope and a range of characters Madrigal never attempts. Like Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Bryher’s novel-sequence Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923), Asphodel is an autobiographical bildungsroman, a work whose fidelity to the actual events of H.D.’s life, while it should never be taken entirely for granted, is on the whole remarkable. She explained in 1925 that “the things I write are all indirectly (when not directly) inspired by my experiences.”¹⁰ (See the Appendix for capsule biographies of the persons behind the fictions of Asphodel.)

Asphodel follows Hermione Gart (the H.D. figure), Fayne Rabb (Frances Gregg, H.D.’s friend from Philadelphia), and Fayne’s mother, Clara, on their trip to Europe in 1911–1912,¹¹ first to France and then to London where Hermione contends with the domineering George Lowndes (Ezra Pound), the young American poet to whom she had been engaged for a time back home and who now introduces her to his circle of literary friends in London. Asphodel is a valuable and intimate account of female expatriation, a portrait of young artists whose experiences are very different from those of their male counterparts. More vulnerable than men to familial threats and manipulation, deracinated female artists feel a correspondingly greater pressure to marry and legitimate their expatriation, to purchase freedom with yet another compromise with patriarchy.

Rather than succumb to this pressure, Hermione urges Fayne, who is planning to return to America, to live with her in London in a bohemian ménage of their own fashioning. The impassioned speech in which Hermione affirms her love for Fayne (“ ‘I, Hermione, tell you I love you Fayne Rabb’ ” [p. 52]) and defends the lesbian lifestyle she imagines for them is the climax of part 1. Despite her eloquence, however, she fails to persuade the defensively spiteful Fayne, and her shock is soon compounded when Fayne writes from America that she is going to be married to a respectable lecturer on literature. Part 1 of Asphodel ends with the ominous suicide in Paris of a friend of George’s, an unmarried American expatriate named Shirley Thornton (based on Margaret Cravens, who killed herself in June 1912) who had come to France to study piano. The final paragraphs of part 1 hint at Hermione’s temptation to avoid Shirley’s fate by marrying a young English poet she has met, Jerrold Darrington (Richard Aldington).

Part 2 jumps ahead to 1915. Now married to Jerrold, Hermione is recovering from the stillbirth of her child. The war has been raging for some time, splitting consciousness into what Hermione calls “pre-chasm” and “chasm” thinking, a fissure that is dramatically figured by the temporal gap between parts 1 and 2. Like Rose Macaulays Non-Combatants and Others and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Asphodel is in part a war novel that focuses on women’s lives at the home front. It also traces, as other works by H.D. do, the transformation of the Aldington figure, after his enlistment in the army, from androgynous “faun” and poetic brother into a jaunty, lascivious Mars who is unfaithful to Hermione. It seems to Hermione that Jerrold’s civilian self — the person who had restored her confidence in her writing — has been buried beneath a lava flow, along with other prewar treasures like art, beauty, and love; life is now a matter of zeppelin raids, tabloid jingoism, and “guns, guns, guns, guns.” Estranged from Jerrold, Hermione joins Cyril Vane (the Cecil Gray figure) in Cornwall and soon learns she is pregnant with Vane’s child.

Inspired by legends of Druids and Phoenicians, Hermione fancies herself a “Morgan le Fay” and her child the product of a visit from the god Helios — a private myth that gives Hermione a kind of Madonna/witch identity, restoring to her some of the playfully subversive innocence she had enjoyed with Fayne. (George had said in part 1 that she and Fayne would have been “burned in Salem for witches” [p. 50].) Hermione decides to keep the baby and, following a period of solitary self-communion, meets the wealthy but troubled Beryl de Rothfeldt (the Bryher figure), who helps her during the later stages of her pregnancy. After a frightening encounter with a jealous, vengeful Darrington back from the trenches, Hermione succeeds in breaking away from him and establishing with Beryl the very ménage that Fayne Rabb had earlier renounced, except that this one is augmented by Phoebe, Hermione’s daughter, whom Beryl promises to take care of as if the child were a “puppy.” Salvation is mutual at the end of Asphodel: Hermione has escaped a series of destructive relationships, and Beryl has promised to stop threatening suicide.

Even so brief a synopsis as this suggests that Asphodel is less an early version of Madrigal than a snugly fitting sequel to H.D.’s autobiographical novel Her (written in 1926–1927 and first published by New Directions in 1981 as HERmione), the story of Hermione’s life in Philadelphia in the period before her departure for Europe. H.D. herself called Asphodel “a continuation of HER,”¹² and there is evidence that she revised Asphodel around 1926–1927, possibly to recast the 1921–1922 version as an aesthetically consistent sequel to Her.¹³ Asphodel completes the Ezra Pound and Frances Gregg stories begun in Her, and extends and consummates that novel’s madrigal-like rhythm of relationships, the weaving in and out of variations on the beloved. The ambiguous image of Fayne Rabb waiting alone in Hermione’s “little workroom” at the end of Her is clarified in Asphodel, where Fayne indeed continues to blight Hermione’s artistic hopes and her emotional life, just as George Lowndes has done. It is not until Beryl arrives on the scene that Hermione can begin to connect her art with her emotional and domestic needs. Hermione’s lonely walk through the snow at the end of Her is rewritten at the conclusion of Asphodel by a new domestic economy that converts the demoralizing love triangles in which she has been enmeshed into the “triptych,” to use the novels phrase, of Hermione, Beryl, and the infant Phoebe, an unlikely holy family but a mutually supportive one. In this sense, the Her-Asphodel sequence is an extended tribute to Bryher. That Asphodel has a candid lesbian theme may have been one reason that H.D. wanted typescripts of the novel destroyed; that it is the story of H.D.’s journey to a life with Bryher probably made the two women reluctant to put a match to all copies.

In terms of aesthetic construction, Asphodel, like many works of high modernism, reveals a dual impulse toward strong formal control and experimental abandon. For example, the two parts of Asphodel are almost geometrically balanced, each containing fifteen chapters of comparable dramatic and thematic development. Yet the writing style is dense, elusive, digressive; paragraphs are unusually long, more like movements of a musical composition than units of narrative; dialogue is expressively congested and often not clearly attributed. Authorial voice and point of view are generated almost entirely from Hermione’s perspective, from her intense, sometimes feverish stream of consciousness. Asphodel is an important experiment in “stream-of-consciousness” technique, yet H.D. adopted neither the psychological immediacy of Joyce’s “interior monologue” nor the authorially mediated, third-person-limited voice of Woolf, but rather a fluid, shifting combination of these modes, a style capable of veering in the space of a few pages from third-person-limited narration (“she was somehow dehumanised and he was seeing it” [p. 141]) to a generic, historical “you” (“Wine went to your brain and you knew there was no division now” [p. 142]) to first-person memoir (“We were two angels with no wings to speak of” [p. 142]) to sudden, visceral interior monologue (“God sends things to people” [p. 143]).

This kaleidoscopic (or perhaps cinematic) effect is occasionally punctuated by passages of direct, urgent authorial address to the reader, particularly when war is the subject: “some god had set a head there in a restaurant (imagine it but I know you can’t quite realize it) in that odd 18, 18, 18. Do you know what I mean? In 1918 there was one head. . ” (p. 141). These oscillations of authorial voice reflect the uncertain boundary between autobiographical fiction and personal memoir, between the writing subject and the self as a projected, dramatized “other.”¹⁴ On the whole, H.D. moves skillfully between these narrative positions or stances of the self, so skillfully that she seems to fulfill one of Baudelaire’s conditions for modern art: “Qu’est-ce que l’art pur suivant la conception moderne? C’est créer une magie suggestive contenant à la fois l’objet et le sujet, le monde extérieur à l’artiste et l’artiste lui-même.”¹⁵

This unfettered authorial voice, with its variety of moods and inflections, is well adapted to a story that proceeds by repeated motifs and situations. An especially insistent pattern is that of the woman endangered by a hostile, uncomprehending society. From Hermione’s doleful meditations on loan of Arc and Marie Antoinette to the very real perils besetting her relationship with Fayne Rabb, to the suicidal thoughts of Shirley Thornton and Beryl, women in Asphodel frequently feel threatened with some form of punishment or death, especially if they are “odd” visionaries with artistic inclinations (“Shirley was like Cassandra smitten by the sun-god” [p. 103]). Hermione experiences guilt after the death of Shirley, for she feels that she might have averted the tragedy if she had reached across to “this authentic sister, tangled in a worse web than she was” (p. 105). Yet Hermione’s failed friendship with Shirley at the end of part 1 is structurally balanced by the sisterhood she achieves with Beryl at the end of part 2. Like Shirley, Beryl is a thwarted artist who contemplates suicide; both women have wide, staring eyes filled with pain and private obsession. Hermione’s offer of love together with the opportunity to care for her baby cures Beryl’s frightened eyes, restoring them to “child’s eyes, gone wide and fair with gladness” (p. 206).

Beryl represents the happy culmination, the telos perhaps, of a long series of love affairs in Hermione’s life, each an approximation to the ideal but not its realization. Together, Her and Asphodel offer a variegated pageant of beloveds: George Lowndes, Fayne Rabb, Jerrold Darrington, Cyril Vane, Beryl. In a moving passage in Asphodel, Hermione thinks of her lovers as flowers woven into “a veil, the veil of Aphrodite” (p. 136). This “veil of Loves,” a product of imagination’s triumph over personal hurt, is fashioned so as to exclude no one, for “one flower cannot disown another” (p. 136). This strange, generous fabric is an image of the Her-Asphodel sequence itself, a figure for H.D.’s textual weaving and reweaving of her past. Despite her intense, demanding nature, Beryl comes to occupy a privileged place in Hermione’s veil of Loves, offering an end to torment and the beginning of a new domestic and artistic life in a financially secure relationship. The Bryher figure would not fare quite so well in H.D.’s fiction of the later 20s and 30s — H.D.’s veil of Loves was as honest as it was inclusive — but here at the end of Asphodel flaws and inadequacies are lost in the glow of Beryl’s eyes, “the eyes of an eagle in a trigo triptych” (p. 206).

Asphodel is unashamedly about pain and suffering. The novel’s deceptively idyllic title actually implies the very opposite of contentment and easy optimism, as the epigraph taken from Walter Savage Landor makes clear: “There are no fields of asphodel this side of the grave.” In Landor’s imaginary conversation “Aesop and Rhodope,” the aged fabulist lectures the young slave Rhodope on the advantages of an early death:

Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodope! that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.¹⁶

H.D.’s substitution of “asphodel” for “amaranth” is typical of her quotational style and may have been unintentional.¹⁷ The entire passage from Landor is relevant, for it contains several themes that haunt the pages of Asphodel: premature death; the impermanence of love and of the beloved; the elusiveness of the present moment and its lack of meaning apart from what precedes and follows it; the desire to transcend pain in the here and now tempered by an awareness that no such transcendence is possible this side of eternity — except perhaps in the activity of the artistic imagination, as Landor’s rich cadences suggest, and as Hermione herself concludes at one point: “Imagination is stronger than reality” (p. 136).¹⁸

Aesop’s sobering counsels about the inevitability of suffering represent one aspect of Asphodel. But this modern bildungsroman is also about a woman’s realization that undeserved agony must end before a productive life can begin: “You suffer toward sea-change but there was an end to legitimate suffering, this suffering of Hermione’s was illegitimate” (p. 199). The pun on “illegitimate” hints at one source of Hermione’s pain — Jerrold’s refusal to register Phoebe as his child — but this same infant, while it drives a wedge between Hermione and her husband, helps solidify the bond between her and Beryl: a little child shall lead them. By the end of the novel Phoebe has become an outward and visible sign of Hermione’s inward and spiritual rebirth, her emergence from the cocoon of her past. Asphodel takes H.D.’s life up to 1919—a crucial year in her personal fortunes — halting just short of one of the most prolific decades of her artistic life, the decade that gave birth to Asphodel itself.

A Note on the Text

The sole extant version of Asphodel is a typescript of just under 400 pages at the Beinecke Library, Yale University; no draft material or notes have come to light, and references to Asphodel in H.D.’s letters are rare and of little use for textual editing. The typescript is a complete, legible carbon copy on ordinary typing bond; no ribbon copy has survived. Various statements by H.D. suggest that Asphodel was first composed in 1921–1922 and then revised a few years later, but the precise date of the surviving typescript is uncertain, as is the identity of the typist.¹⁹ While part 1 has a few revisions in H.D.’s hand, part 2 contains none; minor corrections are typed over erasures on the carbon throughout. It is not clear how polished a draft this typescript represents, but the large number of spelling and typing errors suggests that this copy did not receive the usual scrutiny and revision that late typings of other works by H.D. reveal. It is possible that changes made to the lost ribbon copy were not transferred to the carbon copy.

As the Beinecke typescript was the sole possible basis for this edition, the usual avenues of editorial problem-solving, such as collation of editions and comparison of alternative manuscript readings, were closed to me.²⁰ Total authority for editorial changes brings with it total answerability for those changes, and I have tried to exercise caution for H.D.’s sake and for my own. Whenever possible, I consulted other published works by H.D., in particular lifetime editions, for analogous or related textual details, although I regarded these peripheral texts as heuristic rather than binding. Occasionally the typescript contains a word or phrase that seems garbled; in these cases I have relied on my judgment, taking care to avoid over-ingenious solutions.

H.D.’s spelling offers a special challenge. She frequently misspelled both common and uncommon words, including foreign words, which she sometimes rendered phonetically. She was aware of this tendency and expressed concern over it, writing Marianne Moore as late as 1952: “I still have a sort of Puritan complex, I must spell correctly.”²¹ I have corrected approximately 300 misspellings (around 170 different words) for this edition. I have retained certain unusual spellings, however, either because they are attested variant spellings or because they are especially characteristic of H.D. and appear in other texts by her (some published during her lifetime): “blurr,” “hybiscus,” “hypatica,” “cotton wadging,” “baptismal fount,” “carn,” “unwieldly,” “etherialized,” and others. Although British spelling predominates in the typescript, certain words fluctuate between British and American spelling (“realised” and “realized,” for example); I have not altered these spellings, regarding them as a significant manifestation of H.D.’s expatriate temperament.

Due to H.D.’s spotty revision of the typescript, some proper names and place-names waver in spelling (“Hermione”/“Hermoine”; “Lowndes”/“Lowdnes”), or appear in variant versions (“Captain Tim Kent”/“Captain Ned Trent”); I have regularized these spellings and variants. In general, I have treated misspelled names as ordinary misspellings, changing “Shelly” to “Shelley,” and “Houkashi” to “Hokusai,” for example. I have occasionally allowed the external, historical referent of a name to determine spelling when it seemed clear that H.D. had that referent in mind. For example, I have altered “Milais” to “Millet” (the painter of the Angelus); “Sir John Sloane” to “Sir John Soane” (the founder of the Soane Museum in London); “Cryseus” to “Chrysis” (the character in Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite); “Quai des Fleus” to “Quai aux Fleurs”; “Monte Solario” to “Monte Solaro.” But even this category contains exceptions. For example, in part 2, Hermione thinks of General Trent of “Ladyburg,” and though she clearly means the famous siege of “Ladysmith” during the Boer War, the possibility of comic wordplay made me reluctant to interfere. In certain cases, H.D. intends a name or place-name to be typical rather than historical, as when she gives “Krissenden” and “Chissingham” as towns in Buckinghamshire. I have not tampered with these names.

Literary quotations and allusions in Asphodel are often free and imprecise, and I have made no changes in these passages except to correct spelling and other accidentals. As noted above, the title of the novel itself is the result of “misquotation,” and the line between error and creativity in such cases is hard to draw. Occasionally H.D.’s citational habits produce an awkward phrase — as when, recalling Poe’s “To Helen,” Hermione thinks of “those Nemean barks of yore” instead of “those Nicean barks of yore,” or when Jean Valjean is referred to as “Jean Jean”—but such “errors” are allowed to stand.

Similarly, I have made relatively few alterations in H.D.’s punctuation. To grant H.D. her punctuation is to respect her syntax, the special rhythms and “voices” of her text. Her use of commas is loose and impressionistic, a practice appropriate to the free, experimental style of Asphodel. The narrative has a fluent, intimately “spoken” quality, and commas often indicate a voice pause or an emotional hiatus rather than a division of syntax; in this they are not unlike Emily Dickinson’s dashes. Only in cases of unusual awkwardness — about two dozen in all — have I added or subtracted commas.²² H.D.’s liberal use of hyphens (“scape-goat,” “super-natural,” “cock-tails”), along with her related tendency to split certain words into two (“court yard,” “any more,” “al fresco”), has been retained almost without exception. H.D.’s form of the dash — a single hyphen flanked by spaces — has been altered to American style. Dialogue passages in Asphodel are long and complex, occasionally blurring the distinction between speakers. H.D. (or her typist) evidently had difficulty with these passages as well, for quotation marks are omitted or misattributed in about ninety places. These I have corrected, taking context as my guide. Except in instances where hasty typing and inattentive revision resulted in obvious errors, I have retained H.D.’s italicization and capitalization. At this period she tended to italicize quoted phrases and passages, especially of poetry, but usually left foreign words and phrases unitalicized. Accents in foreign words have been added or corrected where appropriate. H.D.’s intricately rambling paragraphs and her spacing between chapter sections are reproduced exactly as in the typescript.

In general, I have proceeded in terms of a flexible notion of H.D.’s “sensibility,” a heuristic concept that has allowed me to accept a traditional model of authorial intention while remaining alert to the exigencies of an experimental modern text and sensitive to current theories of feminine writing. My decision to correct H.D.’s spelling but to leave her punctuation virtually unaltered — to regard the former as error and the latter as creative idiosyncrasy — is of course artificial to a certain extent.²³ But the resulting text is, I believe, one faithful to H.D.’s intentions, insofar as these can be inferred or reasonably posited, and to the spirit of her prose writing as registered in the typescript of Asphodel and other published and unpublished works by her.²⁴

R.S.

Notes

1. See especially Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 3 (“Madrigals: Love, War, and the Return of the Repressed”).

2. H.D. to John Cournos, July 9 [ca. 1920–1921?], in “Art and Ardor in World War One: Selected Letters from H.D. to John Cournos,” ed. Donna Krolik Hollenberg, The Iowa Review 16(1986): 147–48. This letter may have been written in 1918 or 1919.

3. Friedman, p. 141.

4. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 276.

5. H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton [Notes on Recent Writing],” ed. Adalaide Morris, The Iowa Review 16(1986): 180.

6. H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, October 14, 1959, unpublished letter, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

7. Ibid.

8. H.D. to Bryher, from Lausanne, April 18, 1949, unpublished letter, Beinecke Library.

9. H.D. to Pearson, October 14, 1959. Even as she urges Pearson and Bryher to destroy “carbons” of Her and Asphodel, she indicates that there are “MSS.” of the novels in her possession. She seems to have been worried about the existence of multiple copies and obsolete versions, but there is no indication that she wished to destroy all copies. The letter to Pearson reveals that she had her own typescript of Asphodel as late as 1959, two years before her death.

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 Asphodel: 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).