“Into the Archive” is a column by Angel Hu, exploring material within the Yale archive with an emphasis on queer and marginalized voices.
You are even a world,
a planet,
and pass from history
and the day’s event
to myth and phantasy
–H.D., Body and Soul
In the Beinecke Library, hundreds of boxes are hidden away from plain sight, yet waiting to be explored. Letter after letter filed away into manila folders, handwriting cramped into the corners of postcards, and photographs of smiles and laughter now frozen in time – all proof of the life that once imbued the now worn pages. One can’t help but wonder how all these materials ended up at the Beinecke. Who is allowed to witness these deeply intimate moments? And how do we reconcile the material evidence with our own interpretations?
***
Hilda Doolittle—or H.D.—was a 20th century American writer known for her experiments in the modernist movement. Her writings, primarily poetry, often reconstructed classical Greek mythology through vivid imagery and situated them within the female experience.
Her unpublished writings and manuscripts, intimate letters to lovers and friends, personal diaries and documents, and astrological charts – housed in the Beinecke Library – allow us to see to the many selves she embodied and the lives that colored her poetic images. Though the pages remain motionless, suspended in one moment of history, H.D.’s voice traverses through eras, traditions, and identities, extending from concrete images of nature to the symbolic realm of the heavens and the unconscious.
H.D.’s influence echoes beyond her own archive. Her 30-year friendship with a woman named Silvia Dobson – a schoolteacher and writer from London – illuminates the traces of H.D. that cannot be found within her published writings or public accounts of her life. Dobson preserved 255 letters from H.D. and, after H.D.’s death in 1961, sold them to the Beinecke Library. She took care to number each page and add context to the intimacies that once remained a secret shared only between them. A shared fascination with astrology once drew the women together – their correspondences brimming with speculations on friends’ star charts and analyses of horoscopes. They ventured into the unknowable–astrology, mysticism, and the occult–to untangle their everyday lives and psyches. Alone, Dobson would be left grappling with the mysteries that still surrounded a person she once knew so well.
The birth charts of H.D. and seven friends.
“Can I recover, rediscover this poet-person who meant so much to me, who gave so much to me, so many years ago?… I have respected her need for privacy, for secrecy, though I intend to tell the truth about my own inbeing,” Dobson ponders in her notes.
On the first page of Dobson’s notes, she recalls an excerpt of a poem sent by H.D. never published or even shown to anyone else. It read:
… what is a kiss between friends?
friends take and forget
but I will
and you will not-
how can I cope
with your fever, your fervour,
your hope?
Years later, Dobson would still be attempting to fill in the empty spaces that H.D. left behind. Who was the H.D. that had breathed so much life into Dobson’s world, and who is the echo of H.D. that we encounter today through worn, faded letters and scrawled pencil markings?
Like the ever-changing positions of the planets and stars, Dobson’s relationship with H.D. was marked by tumult. In Dobson’s words, the pair shifted between “advice, affection, ideas, encouragement, as well as reproof, deflationary tirades, intolerance.” Instead of reconstructing who H.D. was at one point in time or through one particular narrative, Dobson surrenders herself to the multitude of voices that H.D. embodied.
Dobson first encountered H.D.’s writing in 1933 through poems like “Helidora,” “Lais,” and reinterpretations of Sappho’s fragments. These poems reimagined the Ancient Greek tradition and pulled Dobson into a world of mystery from that moment onwards. “Was H.D. a man or a woman? Alive or dead? Were these tender fiery miraculous poems written in Greece. the USA, Paris, Rome, or from across Lethe water? Enchanted, I sent off a rapturous letter of appreciation…” Dobson reflects.
H.D. responded in January of 1934, inviting Dobson to her home in Knightsbridge for tea. Already, Dobson was feeling “inanely intense, and fluctuated between Cloud Nine and Styx Crossing for the rest of the week.”
Dobson, reminiscing about their first meeting, recalled a moment when H.D. dropped an amber-beaded necklace whose “glittering scattered gold” resembled “a star pattern, maybe someone’s astrology chart.”
From then, the two women began discussing their studies of astrology. “Interpretation baffled me, yet I enjoyed calculating zodiac birth maps. H.D., correlating mythology with astronomical knowledge, would decipher character traits from my chart set-ups,” Dobson recalls.
Dobson’s Sun sign was in Gemini and H.D.’s was in Virgo, both signs ruled by Mercury–the planet associated with thought, communication, and expression. Using a “complicated method” to align the position of the Moon in the birth chart with the Ascendent at conception, Dobson determined that H.D.’s ascendent sign was in Sagittarius. The two women continued to discuss the progression of the planets and the characteristics of each zodiac sign. “I drew two circular charts for [H.D.], one comparing planets, the second house position. These concentric circles correlated our relationships,” Dobson reminisced.
Along with Dobson’s sister Mollie, they assembled a notebook of illustrations of astronomical symbols and readings of natal charts belonging to H.D.’s friends: fellow modernist writers Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot, and her psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.
Illustration of the zodiac signs by Dobson’s sister Mollie.
Astrology provided an intimate, unspoken connection for Dobson: physical proof of H.D.’s devotion to her and the lives they envisioned among the stars. Yet Dobson looked back on these letters with a bittersweet note. Her nostalgia was punctuated by lingering uncertainty and insecurity. “They record a humane, temperate friendship, much more important to me than it was to H.D,” Dobson writes of the letters.
H.D. signed every letter to Dobson with the nickname “CAT,” accompanied by a pencil sketch of a cat with a spiral tail — a symbol of consistency and intimacy shared by the women.
H.D.’s cat signature.
Despite the ambiguous nature of their relationship, their hesitancy to explicitly define it as queer, and their growing distance as they began to orbit further and further away from each other, H.D.’s influence still extended far into Dobson’s literary pursuits, helping her “evolve as a poet and writer.” As Dobson notes, “I must have been aware that my life no longer revolved, like a fixed star, around H.D.’s planetary universe. Yet I went on following her bright light, determined to storm the literary world with some sparkling work of fiction.”
What was merely another series of correspondences in H.D.’s vast archive became Dobson’s entire world. While Dobson spent “half a century of acting as a straight person,” she explicitly named her feelings towards H.D. as “love.” Throughout the archive, Dobson brings her queerness into witness and carries her love for H.D. to the forefront of her archival memory.
