The Gift by H.D. (1982)

Usual story - I was quite ready to hate this. Modernism in its worst incarnation (As a Wife Has a Cow by Gertrude Stein etc) is a pet bugbear. But often I find that the less overt pieces in that slipstream, often just slightly tinctured with experimentation, charm me. This impressed me. Hilda Doolittle's style (this is my first exposure to it) is most likenable to impressionism I think, underpinned with psychoanalytic theory. This is the story of her childhood from a child's minds'-eye-view. It encompasses her brothers, their parents, their wider family group in Pennsylvania around the turn of last century. It retails all the usual unusual tics of these people, but attempts to remain within the unknowing of a child as it does so. So they are not necessarily 'explained' - they are observed, and some explanations that may have been around from a whole variety of sources, are canvassed. Some things are left unexplained entirely. Others the reader can pretty well gauge from other hints in the background, or from the author speaking rarely as her later self. Much of this causation has the fascinating elements of childhood in it - superstition, fears, sublimated wishes...But this book delves back on another plane. The Doolittles came from Moravian stock on her mother's side: the 'middle bit' of Czechoslovakia (as it became) sandwiched between Bohemia and Slovakia. The original immigrants to the States, escaping forms of persecution in Europe, according to this, approached the Native Americans in their push west with kindness, and found much in common; their mysticisms met, and there was some sort of combined idealist push toward a new North American spirit of the brotherhood of humanity. But there are hints here that a treaty was made and then dishonoured. Accompanying this is yet another plane where 'the gift' itself comes in - it is a kind of deeply luminous power of recreating and re-feeling the distant past to which you are connected. HD seems to have experienced a lot of this in her childhood but then felt that she lost it. The last section brings us onto yet another level - she comes into the 'now' of the piece in Blitz London, right in the middle of an attack, with she and Bryher holed up in their lofty flat, and all this matter of childhood flooding back in the extremity and fear of the bombardment. Very glad this was saved and published 40 years later, and like having my prejudices confounded with such style.