The last of H. D.’s many autobiographical novels, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) portrays the struggles of a female writer to realize her personal and artistic identity. The entire novel is mediated through the mind of Julia Ashton (H. D.), moving from the breakup of her marriage with Rafe (the British poet Richard Aldington) set in wartime London to a liberating relationship with the young composer Vane or Vanio (Cecil Gray) in the Cornwall countryside. Overlying this general movement is Julia’s vexed relationship with Rico Frederick (D. H. Lawrence). The novel is also an important example of World War I fiction from a female point of view, in which Julia experiences the war as shattering the identity she had before the war as both a woman and a writer, and the novel recounts her psychological struggle out of war shock to a new and less dependent realization of herself.
Bid Me to Live is stylistically demanding, and in characteristic modernist manner, Julia’s thoughts seemingly drift at random, relying heavily on free association and the repetition of key images to establish a sense of coherence. Through roughly the first half of the novel, Julia’s thoughts attempt to stop time or to escape the present as a consequence of the difficulty she has in coming to terms with her immediate situation. In some scenes, such as when she is confronted by her husband’s mistress, Bella Carter (Dorothy Yorke), the outward action is minimal and static, yet Julia’s thoughts consist mostly of flashbacks, indicating her confusion and discomfort. At other times, she focuses on the physical details of her room in an effort to achieve mental stability while blocking out the outside. This somewhat claustrophobic style begins to give way when she meets Vane, particularly when she moves out to the Cornwall countryside.
The primary reasons for the breakdown of Julia’s marriage are twofold: some time prior to the opening of the novel, Julia suffered a stillbirth, as a result of which she is afraid of getting pregnant again, and Rafe’s war experiences have had the inevitable effect of emphasizing his masculinity while repressing his more sensitive artistic nature. With Julia’s acquiescence, Rafe is sexually involved with Bella, who lives in the same building, although he remains strongly attached to Julia aesthetically and intellectually—as he remarks to Julia: “I love you, I desire l’autre” (56). Reluctantly, Julia comes to the painful realization that she cannot recapture the balanced, aesthetically based relationship she and Rafe had before the war, which is glimpsed in flashbacks, so she gropes toward a new sense of herself.
It is Rico’s presence that hovers most persistently in Julia’s mind, although his appearance in the immediate action of the novel is quite brief, when he and his wife, Elsa (Frieda Lawrence), take temporary refuge in the Ashtons’ London apartment after being evicted from their Cornwall cottage because Elsa is German. Psychologically, Julia turns to Rico because he was among the first to give her affirmation as a poet in the prewar period, and so he serves as partial compensation for the loss of Rafe. Rico challenges Julia to “kick over your tiresome house of life” (80), but, like Rafe, is dismissive of aspects of her writing. During the Fredericks’ brief stay with the Ashtons, Julia interprets Rico’s ambiguous statement, “you are there for all eternity; our love is written in blood . . . for all eternity” (78), as an invitation to enter into a closer relationship, only to have him withdraw from her touch “like a hurt animal” (81), when she attempts to approach him the next day. As several commentators have pointed out, in her depiction of Rico, H. D. implicitly critiques Lawrence who in his works advocated the body, touch, and sexuality, but in his own life was often rather inhibited.
With the departure of the Fredericks, Vane arrives and literally draws Julia out of the closed shell of her room and debilitating relationships by persuading her to venture out, despite a Zeppelin air raid, for dinner and a film. The move out of London into the Cornwall countryside is clearly a progression away from war and her past into a setting of spiritual renewal and redefinition. In contrast to the cramped and frequently intruded-upon apartment in the city, she has her own workroom, and when she goes out for walks, she feels in touch with natural and archaic powers. Although her relationship with Vane is in a sense a revival of the artistically balanced relationship she previously had with Rafe, Julia continues to feel the prevailing presence of Rico, who she senses is responsible for sending Vane to her.
Unexpectedly in the penultimate chapter, the narrative switches to the first person as Julia directly addresses Rico in a notebook she does not intend to show him. This reflects Julia’s renewed sense of confidence as she replays a common H. D. strategy with respect to various male mentor figures and lovers in her life, who have in one way or another rejected her or failed to fairly understand her writing. On the one hand, Julia needs to resist psychologically the sting of Rico’s criticisms of her work, as well as his spurning of a more intimate relationship. At the same time she wants to sustain their relationship on a newly conceived basis that does not depend on whether or not he reciprocates. This deeper basis is aesthetic and spiritual, and the concluding pages of the novel are a paean to the creative spirit. Julia adopts the term gloire (taken from a poem by Lawrence) and uses the example of van Gogh’s paintings, in which, for example, a tree is not merely the result of the creative impulse but is its very embodiment: “Because of him alive in the cypress tree, alive in his mother, the cypress would be deified” (181). Identifying this sense of gloire with the maternal creativity of birth, Julia insists on a nongendered source of creativity that Rico is effectively repressing in his gender-based criticisms of her work. Thus the novel ends not only with Julia’s assertion of her own gloire and the authenticity of her work, but also with an implicit challenge to Rico to rediscover the true springs of his own genius.
Sources
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
H. D. Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal). New York: Dial Press, 1960.
Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. H. D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991.
Milicia, Joseph. “Bid Me to Live: Within the Storm.” In H. D. Woman and Poet, edited by Michael King, 279–288. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.
Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. “Style in H. D.’s Novels.” In H. D.: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, 27–44. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
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