Domhnall

Initially this seemed worth reading on the grounds that it is autobiographical, because I have been introduced to H.D. through her poems; her skills as a poet are reflected in the superb writing, which sustains interest regardless of plot, being beautiful, but it never seems to me to particularly address the origins of H.D.’s poetry; nor do I have great sympathy for the existential angst of a poor little rich girl, for the repeated snobbery of social class [is that the basis for Pound’s arrogant refinements of taste?] and the casual racism that scars so many American writers (the fish cannot see the water); instead it is an achievement in its own right as a novel, as an exercise in modernist writing, as an exercise in phenomenology, with the author’s own life as material more than as subject; I think it might be fruitful to place it alongside Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [home of the semi-colon] as an existentialist work and, surely, a feminist one.