This novel, a never before published Roman a clef by the famous imagist writer, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), that explores H.D.'s love for women, is a lyrical recreation of the love and loss of her friend and first love, Frances Gregg, and of her later meeting with Bryher who was to become H.D.'s lifelong companion. Spanning the years from H.D.'s childhood in Pennsylvania to the birth of her daughter, Perdita, in 1919, this turbulent love story is set against the backdrop of World War I, H.D.'s involvement in early 20th century ...
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This novel, a never before published Roman a clef by the famous imagist writer, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), that explores H.D.'s love for women, is a lyrical recreation of the love and loss of her friend and first love, Frances Gregg, and of her later meeting with Bryher who was to become H.D.'s lifelong companion. Spanning the years from H.D.'s childhood in Pennsylvania to the birth of her daughter, Perdita, in 1919, this turbulent love story is set against the backdrop of World War I, H.D.'s involvement in early 20th century London literary circles, her brief engagement to American poet, Ezra Pound, and her shattered marriage to British novelist Richard Aldington. Paint it Today is H.D.'s most lesbian novel, a modern, homoerotic tale of passage which focuses almost entirely on the young heroine's search for the sister love which would empower her spiritually, creatively, and sexually. Cassandra Laity's introduction places H.D.'s love for the sexually magnetic, betraying Gregg and for the more nurturing and loyal Bryher in the context of the lesbian romanticism of early modern fiction. her annotations of all Greek references and literary quotations, m as well as, biographical facts represented in the text, provide nuance and detail to this engrossing work.
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Seller's Description:
Good. Good condition. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains.
This is one of H.D.'s early autobiographical novels that she refused to publish during her lifetime--for good reason. Like most modernist texts, there is much to study in this very short novel (more of a novella, really). All of H.D.'s novels explore her relationships with outstanding literary figures like Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Bryher. "Paint it Today" is a meditation on H.D.'s ("Midget") formative relationship with Fayne Gregg ("Josepha") with brief cameos of Pound ("the fiance"), Aldington ("the companion") and Bryher ("white althea").
This novel is important to the H.D. canon for a number of reasons: for starters, its peculiar use of statuary as part of a lifelong hermetic symbol-system and its record of her golden first years with Bryher, when neither Pound nor Aldington were eclipsing or controlling her creative life. In this novel, the characters who represent these men are quite comically referred to without proper names.
Cassandra Laity's introduction draws important parallels between H.D.'s Romantic prose style (much more so in this novel than in her other novels) and the Decadents as a form of "encoding" forbidden passion; trust me, you won't be needing your secret decoder glasses. You also won't be needing a dictionary of allusions, thanks to Laity's annotations. Less convincing is Laity's characterization of Josepha as a bisexual femme fatale since Midget pulls off a gender-bending epistolary backstab of Josepha/Gregg herself, and the entire novel is dedicated to Fayne Gregg as a kind of nose-thumbing. Laity's psychoanalytic characterization of the narrative (unintentionally) pathologizes the relationships between Midget and Josepha/althea, which could be justified as a useful external pedagogy if "PIT" had been written during or after H.D.'s sessions with Freud.
The novel does not contain much detail about WWI even as a backdrop; the dark days of H.D.'s life during that period are metaphorical rather than descriptive. As in her other autobiographical novels, the war background only serves as a proxy trauma for betrayal (by Aldington, Pound and Cecil Grey). In this case, H.D./Midget's feeling of betrayal by Fayne Gregg/Josepha.
The best part of the book is the loving foreword by Perdita Schaffner (H.D.'s daughter) about the menage she was raised in.
