When H.D. went to Freud in Vienna to undergo psychoanalysis, both acknowledged the interpretability of dreams, but the two upheld markedly different beliefs concerning the origin and nature of the dream image. As a former member of the Moravian sect in Pennsylvania, an inheritor of American Transcendentalist sensibilities, and a progenitor of Modernist artistic aesthetics, H.D. believed that the hieroglyphic language of dreams, like the verbal image created within the Imagist movement, conveyed a higher reality than the material of the observable world (Psyche Reborn 99). For her, the products of the unconscious mind were a reliable source of a higher truth that is unavailable to the physical senses. Dreams, therefore, could inspire, warn, or preview the future.

Writing of her momentous dream/vision of the Egyptian princess about which she conferred with Freud, H.D. explains: "For myself I consider this sort of dream or projected picture or vision as a sort of halfway state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who, for lack of a more definite term we must call psychics or clairvoyants" (Tribute 41). Rejecting Freud's suggestion that the vision betrayed her desire to reunite with her mother, H.D. interprets the event as an indication of her future role as a prophet. She speculates that she may found a new, much-needed, post-war religion.

Freud the materialist, on the other hand, defined dreams as strictly somatic constructions, arising within the individual from the unconscious, assembled from random impressions gathered from the recent past, emphasizing the trivial rather than the essential (Interpretation of Dreams 206). The pictorial language of dreams is infantile, regressive and archaic--a leftover subsidiary of primitive religions that had once served as mass delusions. Purveyors of psychical rather than material reality, they allow access to the individual's beliefs or delusions concerning the facts of the outside world. To believe that dreams and visions articulate a higher, spiritual reality is, in materialist terms, primitive. Freud seems to have H.D. in mind as he accounts for the continued belief in the spiritual potential of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams:

It would be an error to suppose that the theory of the supernatural origin of dreams lacks followers even in our own times; for quite apart from pietistic and mystical writers-who cling, as they are perfectly justified in doing, to the remnant of the once predominant realm of the supernatural until these remnants have been swept away by scientific explanation-we do not infrequently find that quite intelligent persons, who in other respects are averse to anything of a romantic nature, go so far as to base their religious belief in the existence and co-operation of superhuman spiritual powers on the inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreams. (153)

In Tribute to Freud, H.D. seems at times to give way to Freud's materialist conception of the dream-state. In her extended discussion of her "writing-on-the-wall" vision, she entertains possible interpretations that would render the experience a somatic event. Perhaps the vision represents "suppressed desire" for "signs and wonders," perhaps a suppressed desire "to be a Prophetess, to be important anyway," a desire Freud characterized as megalomania. Or, perhaps "this writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the artist's mind . . . projected from within . . ." (51). Though she tends to "cling" to the "romantic" notion that her own dreamlike experiences were comparable to those divinely inspired dreams narrated in the Bible, her interpretations of those experiences begin to merge with those of Freud. She seems to be testing a materialist position against her own inherited religious viewpoint.

In Trilogy, we find a near replication of H.D's entertainment in Tribute of the Freudian view concerning the Dream. The dream-vision of the Lady's precipitous advent forms the centerpiece of "Tribute to the Angels." The voice of Part 25 finds herself in a confused though seemingly concrete setting as she speaks:

for it was the ticking minute by minute
(the clock at my bed-head,

with its dim, luminous disc)
when the Lady knocked;

I was talking casually
with friends in the other room . . .

and she was standing there,
actually, at the turn of the stair. (89)

for before I had time to speak,
I realized I had been dreaming,

that I lay awake now on my bed,
that the luminous light

was the phosphorescent face
of my little clock

and the faint ticking
was the clock ticking. (90)

At the same time, however, she clearly portrays the dream-experience as a somatic event, as Freud would define it. As the speaker moves from wakefulness to sleep, elements from her physical surroundings--the clock's glow, its ticking--imprint themselves onto the dream experience. Pointedly, the speaker recognizes that, even though she is enchanted by the Lady's arrival, this event is a dream. She links the Lady's luminosity to the clock's glow, the Lady's knocking to the ticking clock. These elements of the speaker's physical setting are just the kind of trivialities of the recent past that Freud identifies as the stuff of dreams. Susan Edmunds suggests that H.D's association of the Lady with the clock allows the Lady to countermand death's imminence as it is represented by the clock's ticking off of time, offering spiritual transcendence as a means to bypass the physical life's unarguable finiteness (66). Truly, by presenting the physical elements of the glow and the ticking alternately as the Lady then as the clock, H.D. does associate the Lady with death. Ironically however, if the dream is a strictly somatic experience as it is described in the above lines, then the Lady is actually synonymous with the clock, and may therefore represent the surety of death itself, thereby conveying the inadequacy of the supernatural to afford delivery from the inevitable. When the speaker reiterates as she describes the experience that "this was a dream of course" (89), "I realized I had been dreaming"(90), she may effectively undermine any spiritual legitimacy with which the Lady might be endowed.

Later in "Tribute to the Angels," the speaker recovers the spiritual realist stance, depicting the now seemingly valid supernatural vision of the Lady as an amalgam of a number of artistic Marian representations. Two more elements of the expanded description of the vision, though, again work to undermine its legitimacy. First, the speaker marvels that "the Child was not with her" (97)--Mary bears no Christ child to distinguish her as the portal through which immortality is offered to the world. This vision of Mary does, as Friedman asserts, represent the alchemical reinvention of the divine, specifically "the divine spirit in its female manifestation as the force of Love and the power of rebirth" (Psyche Reborn 253). Simultaneously though, we can detect the sting of the materialist's critique: the Lady is barren, she carries no Child to redeem humanity and offer immortality.

Secondly, though the Lady is bereft of a Child, "she carries a book but it is not / the tome of ancient wisdom, / the pages . . . are blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new . . ." (103). The blank pages of the Lady's book might imply infinite future possibility, the ushering in of a new age and a new religion yet to be constructed, the call for a new philosophy to be penned by the Poet. Or, in light of materialist-inspired doubts, the blankness of the pages may represent the un-determinability of the future, the unlikelihood of a resurrected, immortal life that the Child would offer.

The speaker introduces the blank book in response to the voice of an interpreter who has entered the scene of the vision. This voice offers a conventional explanation of the speaker's vision based on familiar Biblical material relating to women, perhaps echoing Freud's practical, materialist interpretations of H.D's dreams and visions:

[T]his is the new Eve who comes

clearly to return, to retrieve
what she lost the race,

given over to sin, to death;
she brings the Book of Life, obviously. (101)

I see her as you project her,
not out of place

flanked by Corinthian capitals,
or in a Coptic nave,

or frozen above the centre door
of a Gothic cathedral;

you have done very well by her . . . (102)

This assumption nullifies the vision as a valid supernatural experience of a feminine Divine, rendering it instead a purely somatic event. In response, the speaker must then argue for the authenticity of the experience, insisting on the spiritual reality of the Lady. She is, says the speaker, "the counter-coin-side / of primitive terror"; "she is not-fear, she is not-war" (104). Tainted by the materialist's disbelief, these characterizations of the Lady pose her as the very negation of a masculinist world. Ironically, though, as negations these terms cohere to their opposites, calling attention to the very cultural maladies--primitive terror, fear, war--that the Lady has arrived to remedy. The pervasive influence of materialist thought on the speaker is evident. As she struggles to free the Dream from dismantlement by a materialist epistemology, she becomes almost confused in her frustration, answering the interpreter's claim that the vision merely reinvents the Biblical and classical renderings of the feminine with the equivocal response that it is "the same--different--the same attributes, / different yet the same as before" (105). The impact of materialist thought on the speaker is thus clearly inferred.

As we reflect on the interchange between speaker and interpreter in "Tribute to the Angels," we may discover the message of the interpreter prefigured in Freud's discussion of the function of dreams:

The dream is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being played by the hand of a musician, is struck by some external force; the dream is not meaningless, not absurd, does not presuppose that one part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part begins to awake. It is a perfectly valid psychic phenomenon, actually a wish-fulfillment; it may be enrolled in the continuity of the intelligible psychic activities of the waking state; it is built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity. (Interpretation of Dreams 176)

The Conflict: Will We "Rise from Death and Live"?

H.D's Tribute reveals that the one point upon which she and Freud disagreed most definitively was concerning the possibility of an afterlife. In 1929, he had responded to a friend's assertion that the experience of an "oceanic" feeling upon which religious systems and belief in immortality are based is common to humankind, reporting of his own experience: "I cannot discover this 'oceanic' feeling in myself" (Civilization and Its Discontents 11). As a rationalist and materialist, Freud could entertain no possibility for which there appeared no observable evidence. He thus gives voice to the cultural malaise, based on the usurpation of religion by science in the early twentieth century, to which Modernist artists felt compelled to respond. H.D., in contrast to Freud's lack of "a feeling," admits to having "accepted as part of my racial, my religious heritage, the abstract idea of immortality . . ." She admits to worrying, therefore, over the fact that "he [Freud] had no idea--it seemed impossible--really no idea that he would 'wake up' when he shed the frail locust-husk of his years, and find himself alive" (Tribute 43). For H.D. the afterlife was an unquestioned spiritual reality. Considering the extended relationship between the two during 1933 and '34, the question poses itself: what becomes of this fundamental disagreement? Does H.D., as a patient or student (her role seems to vary in Tribute) of the "blameless physician" (xv), hold to her admittedly inherited tradition of belief in immortality? Does this belief survive to find untroubled expression within the pages of Trilogy? Or was she perhaps more profoundly influenced by the physician's founding postulate, that "[b]elief in the soul's survival, in a life after death . . . [is] the last and greatest fantasy, the gigantic wish-fulfillment . . ." (Tribute 103), than has been considered up to the present?

Trilogy, in its offering of a new, feminized theological roadmap to immortality, refurbishes the fundamental disagreement that Freud and H.D. maintained during their interchange a decade earlier. In this long poem, spiritualism and materialism meet head-on, as a prophetic feminine voice offers the promise of imminent spiritual renewal from within the context of the potentially apocalyptic setting of a masculinist war-time world. Consequently, the rhetoric of impassioned spiritual realism asserts itself in company with the science-based, reductive language of the materialist throughout the work. The modernist quest to recover transcendent meaning from the chaos of a war-torn milieu occupies the pages of the long poem, representing, according to Friedman, "H.D's refusal to accept the materialist definitions of reality that establish so devastatingly the spiritual waste land of modern life" (Psyche Reborn 98). I suggest that, while the voice of the spiritual realist is clearly heard in Trilogy, its ability to prevail over the influence of a competitive materialist epistemology is not so clearly demonstrated.

Questions concerning the real nature of death weave their way into H.D.'s verse in Trilogy, serving as one of the elements that establish connection and continuity between the three parts of the long poem. "The Walls Do Not Fall" begins with a description of a war-devastated setting in which "ruin opens the tomb" and "the shrine lies open to the sky" (3). The setting promises to open these sacred enclosures, to expose them to the light of observation, to reveal their long-held secrets. The initial speaker of the poem holds out hope of spiritual renewal in the midst of destruction, insisting that "inspiration stalks us / through gloom" and that "Spirit announces the Presence"(3). Redemption through the advent of a transcendent force seems to be promised.

Later, however, the poem's voice speaks as a worm--an ambiguous creature in terms of its relation to the subject of death. For the worm may seen on one hand as a transcendent being, one that enters the grave of the cocoon and emerges in a new, more aesthetically pleasing form. On the other hand, the worm is also commonly regarded as that which consumes the bodies of the dead; it is intimately connected to the body's irreparable dissolution at death. In H.D's presentation of the worm, we see illustrated the conflict between the materialist and spiritualist conceptions of death. Later, these conceptions take voice; we hear two speakers address each other, one saying ". . . so what good are your scribblings [speaking of the books burned during the war]" (17). The other replies, "this--we take them with us beyond death" (17). One voice, representing "the Sword" in the poem, adopts the materialist view; the other, representing "the Word," speaks in faith. The faithful voice speaks again after several lines, this time acknowledging a conflict concerning the nature of death:

So, in our secretive, sly way,
we are proud and chary

of companionship with you others,
our betters, who seem to imply

that we will soon be swept aside,
crumpled rags, no good for banner-stuff . . . (19)

we are voyagers, discoverers,
of the not-known,

the unrecorded;
we have no map;

possibly we will reach haven,
heaven. (59)

In "Tribute to the Angels," the question concerning the nature of death is carried forward, foregrounded by the chant that echoes through the sections: "[W]e pause to give thanks that we rise again from death and live" (61, 70, 87, 110). The repetition of this affirmation alludes to the cycles of repeated prayers, the most familiar of which being the Hail Mary, prayed by Catholics, who venerate the mother of Jesus. Such a connection seems appropriate, since this portion of the long poem depicts the alchemical creation of a composite feminine deity: a co-mingling of Mary, Venus, Aphrodite, and Astarte--the Lady whose arrival is described beginning in section 25. The chant works simultaneously, however, to perpetuate the sense of ambivalence about the afterlife expressed at the end of "The Walls Do Not Fall." An equal ambivalence toward the goddess herself as a savior, a guarantor of an afterlife, is implied by the Poet's admission in section 13 that she has been called upon by her patron to "invent" a name, a persona for this product of the crucible (76). The association of the feminine deity's arrival with a para-scientific process that involves the cohesion of a number of material elements into a new substance seems to call the Lady's legitimacy into immediate question. She may, in spite of the entrancing descriptions of her in this poem, appear very like the "Christos-image" in section 18 of "The Walls Do Not Fall," which "is most difficult to disentangle / from its art-craft junk-shop / paint-and-plaster medieval jumble / of pain-worship and death-symbol" (27). When the Lady materializes in "Tribute to the Angels," she is literally materialized: constructed of found elements from Classical and Christian tradition and amalgamated by the unconscious of the dreamer who envisions her. While H.D. may narrate the purposeful construction of a feminine goddess to demonstrate that a woman mystic can do just that, the narration seems equally to indicate that the act of constructing a deity is just that--a construction-- and that it points to the conspicuous absence of the higher truths for which the spiritual realist searches.

In "The Flowering of the Rod," the conflict between the two ideologies--Freud's and H.D.'s --reaches its peak. DuPlessis infers that the relationship that develops between Kaspar and Mary mirrors and perhaps parodies the relationship between H.D. and Freud (96). In fact, the description of Mary's journey to Kaspar's home in section 13 reads remarkably like H.D.'s account of finding her way to Freud's apartments in Vienna in Tribute (3). And the account of Kaspar's vision and its subsequent interpretation, notes DuPlessis, seems to mock Freud's dismissive interpretation of the poet's Corfu vision, also narrated in Tribute (96). That H.D had her own and Freud's dissonant philosophies in mind as she wrote "The Flowering of the Rod" is readily apparent.

The complexity of the debate over the possibility of an afterlife, however, is demonstrated even before the interchanges between Kaspar and Mary are narrated. In the first section, resurrection is offered as the predicted culmination of the individual's endurance of war's inevitable destruction. Those who seek the renewed, transcendent life are likened to a flock of wild geese in flight. In section 5, these metaphorical birds are described:

but who knows the desparate urge

of those others--actual or perhaps now
mythical birds--who seek but find no rest

till they drop form the highest point of the spiral
or fall from the innermost centre of the ever-
narrowing circle? (119)

they will not swerve--they have known bliss,
the fruit that satisfies--they have come back--

what if the islands are lost? what if the waters
cover the Hesperides? they would rather
remember--

remember the golden apple trees;
O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop
one by one,

for they fall exhausted, numb, blind
but in certain ecstasy,

for theirs is the hunger
for Paradise. (120)

The passage describing the death-plunge of the geese undoubtedly recalls H.D's consideration of the death of J.J. van der Leeuw, a fellow-patient of Freud who attended regular sessions preceding her own. She had passed him on the steps repeatedly until he flew his own plane to Johannesburg, and crashed. Ruminating over this occasion, H.D. writes:

[b]ut we are in a city of ruin, a world ruined, it might seem, almost past redemption. We must forgo a flight from reality . . . we are not ready for discussion of the Absolute, Absolute Beauty, Absolute Truth, Absolute Goodness. . . . Oh yes, Professor, I know it very well. But I am remembering the injunction you laid upon me and I am thinking . . . of the Flying Dutchman [H.D.'s nickname for van der Leeuw], who, intellectually gifted beyond the ordinary run of man . . . yet flew too high and flew too quickly. (Tribute 85)

Later in "The Flowering of the Rod," Kaspar, both an Arab merchant and visionary--both, in effect, a materialist and spiritual realist--seems to take flight like the geese in section 5. In sections 31 and 32 he is permitted an apparently aerial view of lands "out-of-time" (153). Seeming to circle higher and higher like the geese, he views "Paradise / before Eve . . ." (155). As this panoramic vision that encompasses prehistory gives way to a scene reminiscent of Christ's Nativity, Kaspar finds himself, one of the Magi, finally in the presence of Mary, whom he has met in other times in the guises of other New Testament Marys. In this climactic scene, though, Kaspar's attention is arrested not by the Christ child, but by "the bundle of myrrh / she [Mary] held in her arms" (172). As in the vision of the Lady in "Tribute to the Angels," Christ, the reputed Savior, the eventual firstborn from the dead, is noticeably absent. This time in the child's place in the woman's arms is myrrh-a substance used to anoint or embalm the dead. If Kaspar has up to now soared to the height of his visionary experience, perhaps this final image initiates his ecstatic deathward plunge. As the final scene of the long poem, the image of the Marian figure bearing only a funerary spice seems to speak to the conflict between H.D. and Freud concerning death. The unsettling and inconclusive ending of the poem seems to indicate that the conflict persists for H.D.

Divine Wordplay: Gods as Commodities

Of course, mentions of myrrh recur throughout Trilogy. It appears initially with the first reference to the Mage in "The Walls Do Not Fall"(10). It is associated and even equated with Mary in "The Flowering of the Rod." Its great cost and the fact that its properties are believed to be eternal are celebrated in section 14. Aliki Barnstone proposes that "H.D. sees myrrh as poetry because of its association with immortality, sacredness, and resurrection" (176). If that is the case, then the final image in Trilogy lends preeminence to the Poet who opposes the materialist's comments throughout the text. The poem has been a complex demonstration of the feminine and redemptive power of poetry to convey higher truths. Mary--a number of Marys--replace Christ as Savior, establishing for H.D. and those who will hear her message a new post-war religion with a feminine deity at its head. I suggest that the text is not so clearcut. If we regard myrrh as strictly a substance, as the costly commodity that Kaspar possesses in his alabastar jars, as the powdered preparation with which the Egyptians filled the cavities of corpses, its significance shifts dramatically. Myrrh loses its mystical properties and joins the ranks of common material goods.

In Tribute, H.D. recalls an incident with Freud that may invoke a materialist interpretation of the references to myrrh in Trilogy. She recalls having sent Freud gardenias and enclosing a card that read, "To greet the return of the Gods." Freud sent a return note revealing that some people had read her word "gods" as "goods" (Tribute 11). H.D then notes of the collection of idols surrounding "the Professor" in his office that "[t]he Gods or the Goods were suitably arranged on ordered shelves." H.D. came to Freud anxious to delve into her own dreams and vision which included, she felt, complex signs and references to classical and religious myth. She was anxious to summon the gods into the products of her own unconscious in order to derive a spiritual reality. Freud handily discouraged her purposes by transforming the spiritual to the material, the gods to the goods.

The influence of Freud's wordplay is observable in Trilogy, where the mystical Lady in her various guises is metaphorized as myrrh. For just as readily as H.D. is able to spiritualize the material realities of a war, she also material-izes the spiritual beings in the poem. As Freud turns gods to goods, so H.D. turns Mary to myrrh (135). Myrrh is the "precious merchandise" (132), the exchange value of which drives the economy that leads Kaspar to his final visionary experience. No sooner, it seems, does H.D. conceive of a feminine deity than that deity is commodified by Freud's materialist epistemology.

Paradigmatic of this reduction of deity to the material is the reference in "The Flowering of the Rod" to the birth of Adonis. In this passage, Mary transforms into Myrrha, the goddess who is reduced to a myrrh tree from which Adonis is born:

. . . I shall be Mary-myrrh;

I am that myrrh tree of the gentiles,
the heathen [. . .]

she wept bitterly till some heathen god
changed her to a myrrh-tree

I am Mary, I will weep bitterly,
bitterly . . . bitterly. (135)

Conclusion

In terms of the conflict inspired by her relationship with Freud, H.D. expresses her maintained ambivalence in Trilogy. As a sustained argument between materialist and spiritual realist, the poem projects a recognizably Modernist inconclusiveness. If we now recover what we set aside in the beginning--the feminist thrust of the poem's central image: the Lady in all her guises--we find this image to be inextricably complicated by the sustained conflict. At the same time that the Lady may herald a new, feminized theology, her presence is visionary, the product of an admitted dream. The Lady arrives, but her Presence is perplexed by the possibility that dreams may be nothing more than the effort of one individual's unconscious to synthesize its content with the trivial physical realities of the individual's recent past. The possibility of this new deity's ability to offer immortality by posing as a feminine redeemer is likewise undermined by uncertainties projected in the descriptions of her appearances. Finally, the deity herself is implicated with the material world in the poem, reduced to commodity status, stripped of spiritual reality. She stands ambiguously as both spiritual and material, triumphant and disqualified.

By sustaining rather than resolving the poem's central conflict, H.D. establishes Trilogy as, if such a description can apply, a conventional Modernist long poem. She begins with the question of whether or not she wants to found a new religion. In the long poem, she proceeds to do so, attempting to offer the post-war world new hope. Her project, however, is confounded by the domination of the materialist ideology against which the new theology is formulated. While H.D. may never have fully given in to Freud's perspective, she nevertheless gives substantial place to it, making of Trilogy yet another lamentation over modern cultural malaise.

Barnstone, Aliki. "Introduction." Trilogy. H.D.

Chisholm, Dianne. "Pornopoeia, the Modernist Canon, and the Cultural Capital of Sexual Literacy: The Case of H.D." Dickie and Travisano. 69-94.

Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism: 1910-1950. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Dickie, Margaret and Thomas Travisano. Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.

Doolittle, Hilda. Tribute to Freud. New York: New Directions, 1974.

----. Trilogy. New York: New Directions, 1998.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H.D.: The Career of That Struggle. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Edmunds, Susan. Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis, and Montage in H.D.'s Long Poems. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.

----. "When the "Long" Poem Is a "Big" Poem: Self-Authorizing Strategies in Women's Twentieth-Century "Long Poems." LIT 2 (1990): 9-25.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

----. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Random House, 2995. 149-520.

Hughes, Gertrude Reif. "Making It New: Hilda Doolittle, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the Feminist Potential of Modern Poetry." American Quarterly 42 (September 1990): 375-401.

Kaufman, Michael. "Gendering Modernism: H.D., Imagism, and the Masculinist Aesthetics." Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings. Eds. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1997. 59-72.

Keeling, Bret L. "H.D. and 'The Contest': Archaeology of a Sapphic Gaze." Twentieth Century Literature 44.2 (Summer 1992): 176-202.

Kibble, Matthew. "'The Still-born Generation': Decadence and the Great War in H.D.'s Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 540-567.

Laity, Cassandra. "H.D., Modernism, and the Transgressive Sexualities of Decadent-Romantic Platonism." Dickie and Travisano. 45-68.

Rainey, Lawrence S. "Canon, Gender and Text: The Case of H.D." College Literature 18.3 (October 1991): 106-26.

Introduction

Lehigh University was founded in 1865 and is located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I spent most of the 1950's on the Lehigh campus both as an undergraduate student and as a graduate student. One of my hobbies was to study graffiti that had been put in place by Lehigh students years before. It could be found scribbled on brickwork, scratched into blackboards, or carved into woodwork. When an inscription bore initials and class year it was often possible, with the aid of the alumni directory, to determine the name of the author. It was interesting to see what became of them in later life. This led to another pastime, which was to examine library material that dealt with Lehigh's earlier days. One prominent name that came up was that of Professor Mansfield Merriman (1848-1925). He was a longtime head of civil engineering, a prolific textbook writer, a genealogist, a fine mathematician and statistician, and a practical joker. A more complete account of his life is in order, a few snippets of which appear later in this account.

Memory is a curious grab bag. Another Lehigh name that I retained for half a century was that of a professor Doolittle. I did not recall his first name nor his field. After some time Googling I found in the 1890 census a Lehigh professor named Charles L. Doolittle. He is listed as living at 118 Church Street in North Bethlehem. His wife's name was given as Helen, and he had five children. This was the starting point of a lengthy search into the life and accomplishments of Charles Leander Doolittle (1843-1919). Most of what I know about him was gleaned from the Internet and from the published writings of his daughter, Hilda.

The Lehigh Years (1875-1895)

In 1875, at the age of 32, with a recent baccalaureate in civil engineering from the University of Michigan, Doolittle settled in Bethlehem. He had been hired to occupy the professorship in astronomy that had recently been vacated by Hiero B. Herr. Herr had been preceded in that role by Alfred M. Mayer, who had moved on to the Stevens Institute. Through Mayer's efforts Lehigh trustee Robert H. Sayre was persuaded to provide $5000 in 1868 for the construction and equipping of an astronomical observatory-henceforth known as the Sayre Observatory. The building is still in existence, but it is not in its original location. It has not been used as an observatory for decades.

There were two original telescopes at the Sayre Observatory-a six-inch equatorial telescope and a dilapidated zenith telescope. The latter had been manufactured by E. & G.W. Blunt in 1868. It had been found to be unserviceable by the U.S. Coast Survey and was then sold to Lehigh. It was repaired by Edward Kahler in 1875 and was used extensively by Doolittle for the next 20 years.

The Sayre Observatory was a dual-purpose facility. It served as a laboratory so that undergraduates could gain experience in field astronomy. In the hands of a skilled researcher such as Doolittle, the Sayre Observatory could also be used as a source of astronomical data suitable for publication in scientific journals. Doolittle was an extensive publisher of his observations. This is remarkable since it is doubtful that his academic career rested upon a record of publication. He had other administrative duties, including being the head of the mathematics faculty.

Doolittle's first few months in Bethlehem must have been sad. He arrived in 1875 with a pregnant wife and two small children. The children were eight-year-old Alfred and six-year-old Eric. His wife was the former Martha Farrand (1844-1876) whom he had married in 1866. She was from Ontario, Indiana, as was Doolittle. She had been a music teacher at the La Grange Collegiate Institute, a church-related preparatory school with which Doolittle had also been affiliated. By the spring of 1876 both Martha and their infant daughter, Alice, had died. A contemporary obituary said that the family lived at "University Grounds," which seems to imply that there was faculty housing on the Lehigh campus.

Resolutely, Doolittle continued to perform his duties of teaching and research. In 1882 he married Helen Wolle (1852-1927) who was from a prominent Bethlehem Moravian family. She was a music teacher, as was Doolittle's first wife, Martha. Helen's brother was J. Fred Wolle, a well-known musician who founded the Bethlehem Bach Festival in 1900.

In 1885 Doolittle had published the first of several editions of his book, A Treatise on Practical Astronomy. This book, all 642 pages of it, is available on the Internet-merely go to Google Books and insert the title of the book. By a scanning of the book the grasp that Doolittle had on the subject becomes clear.

Doolittle's research interests were both eclectic and focused. From his earliest times at Lehigh and throughout his professional career he was consumed by the proposition that the latitude (and longitude) of a fixed point on the earth's surface may be undergoing continuous variation. This variation, if it existed, could be counted upon to be quite small. Nonetheless Doolittle set out, using the second-hand zenith telescope, to attempt to measure the effect. In 1879 he published the first of a series of papers on the subject. This was followed by about 10 more journal articles concerning the latitude of the Sayre Observatory.

The Flower Observatory (1895-1912)

In 1895 Doolittle left Lehigh to be the first director of the newly formed Flower Observatory. It was located in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and was a part of the University of Pennsylvania. This observatory was well equipped and allowed him to continue his research into the variation of latitude using superior instruments. He continued his directorship and his research until 1912 when he retired. His second son, Eric, succeeded him as director.

Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) has been described as America's Unofficial Astronomer Royal. He delivered the dedicatory address for the Flower Observatory in 1897. At that time he said that the problem of the variation of latitude was an important concept and that Doolittle had distinguished himself in the subject and that the Flower Observatory would continue to do research in this cause. Newcomb described the new instruments that were available to Doolittle as "the finest instruments ever used for the purpose." After a few years of using these exceptional telescopes Doolittle felt the need for a different type of instrument that would allow for simultaneous and confirming measurements of the difficult-to-measure variation of latitude.

To this end Doolittle obtained funds from Joseph Wharton (the same Wharton who endowed the school of business at UP) for the construction of an instrument that he called the Wharton Reflex Zenith Tube. Doolittle designed this instrument along the lines set forth by the British astronomer George Airy (1801-1892) in 1848. Starting in 1903 and for the next several years Doolittle used a zenith telescope and the Wharton Reflex Zenith Tube in parallel in an effort to further document the variation of latitude. These instruments were used in combination until Doolittle retired in 1912 when he concluded that "the Wharton Instrument has proven in some respects less satisfactory than was hoped."

This disappointment with the Wharton Reflex Zenith Tube may be full of irony. The instrument relied upon an open pool of mercury to provide a level reflecting surface. This pool had to have its level properly maintained and its surface had to be skimmed occasionally to remove impurities. Although there is no supporting evidence, several years of breathing mercury vapor could hardly have had a positive effect on his physical and mental health. Open containers of mercury would not be allowed in the workplace today.

Doolittle died in 1919 at the age of 76.

Doolittle's Children

Doolittle had eight children, but two of them (Edith and Alice) died in infancy. The surviving children achieved varying degrees of success.

Alfred (1867-1921) was born to Doolittle's first wife in Ontario, Indiana. He received an AB from Lehigh in 1887 and then became an instructor of mathematics and astronomy from 1889 until 1891. He went on to lead an uneventful life as instructor of mathematics and director of the astronomical observatory at the Catholic University of America from 1889 to 1901 and from 1906 to 1913. He also served at the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington.

Eric (1869-1920) was also born in Ontario, Indiana, to Doolittle's first wife. He was educated in Bethlehem schools and received a baccalaureate in civil engineering from Lehigh in 1891. After serving as an instructor in mathematics and astronomy at Lehigh from 1891 until 1892, he took additional instruction at the University of Iowa and at the University of Chicago. In 1896 he joined his father at the Flower Observatory. When his father retired in 1912 Eric took over as the director of the Flower Observatory. Eric developed a reputation as a first-class astronomical observer in his primary field of double stars. He died a year-and-a-half after his father. Judging from the relative number of obituaries which appeared in scientific journals, Eric may have been better known than his father.

Gilbert (1884-1918) was the first surviving child of Doolittle's second marriage since his older sister, Edith, died in infancy. He moved away from Bethlehem in 1895 when his father accepted the directorship of the Flower Observatory. He received a baccalaureate in 1905 and a master's degree in 1915 both in civil engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He served as a captain in the army during the First World War. He was killed in France 16 days before the Armistice.

Hilda (1886-1961) was the only surviving female child. She wrote a book entitled The Gift which in part chronicles her Moravian upbringing in Bethlehem (an abridged edition was published by New Directions in 1982; the complete text, edited by Jane Augustine, was published by the University Press of Florida in 1998). She is a major Modernist writer who wrote in a wide variety of genres. Ezra Pound (1885-1972), to whom she was at one time engaged, suggested to her the nom de plume H.D., by which she is still known. By far she is the most famous of this branch of the Doolittle family.

Harold (1887-1968) was born in Bethlehem. He received a baccalaureate in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1909, and he became an executive for Koppers Coal and Coke Company. Hilda relied upon him to provide financial advice.

Melvin (1894-1963) was born in Bethlehem and was an infant when the family moved from Bethlehem to Upper Darby. Actually, his name was Charles Melvin, but he was usually known by his middle name. He became an electrical engineer and because of his understanding of the new field of radio he assisted his half-brother Eric in determining the longitude of the Flower Observatory in 1914. He became an executive of the Ford Motor Company.

Many of these children, their parents, and other close relatives, are buried or memorialized at the Nisky Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem.

The Doolittle-Merriman Connection

The town of Wallingford, Connecticut was founded in 1670 largely by residents of near-by New Haven. They were looking for new land to homestead. Two of the town's founders were Abraham Doolittle and Nathaniel Merriman. Genealogical records reveal that Charles L. Doolittle was a seventh generation descendant of Abraham Doolittle, while Mansfield Merriman was a sixth generation descendant of Nathaniel Merriman. It is remarkable that the Doolittle and Merriman families should reunite on the Lehigh campus in the 1870s. Doolittle was the head of mathematics and astronomy while Merriman was the head of civil engineering.

Doolittle and Merriman had much in common. They were good at mathematics, although Merriman had superior credentials. His PhD was from Yale in 1876 and was said to be the first such degree to be granted in statistics in the United States. They both wrote extensively about the method of least squares. Merriman authored two books on the subject, both of which are available on the Internet. The first, Elements of Least Squares appeared in 1877, while the second, A Text Book on the Method of Least Squares, came out in 1884. Doolittle devoted the first 69 pages of his 1885 book, A Treatise on Practical Astronomy, to the method of least squares. Doolittle did not reference Merriman who was clearly an expert on the subject. During the years that they were both at Lehigh (1878-1895) they were headquartered in Packer Hall and probably met daily. They attended many of the same professional meetings and they represented Lehigh at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In a news release heralding Merriman's contribution to the solving of pentic equations, Doolittle is quoted as saying that this is the greatest discovery in mathematics since Descartes formulated his biquadratic solution. For more nonsense enter "diaphote" into a search engine.

Genealogy and Early History

Most of the Doolittles in the United States are descended from Abraham Doolittle (1620-1690) of Wallingford, in what is now Connecticut. In his time, large families of the dozen or more children were common. When a wife died her husband would remarry so as to continue the process. As the generations evolved, and with limited migration, land suitable for a homestead became scarce. Abraham's great-great-great-grandson Willard Doolittle (1782-1843) was from the New Haven area. In response to the need for land and possibly because of the bitter summer of 1816 he moved to up-state New York. When the town of Ontario, Indiana, was formed in the 1830s Willard moved his family there. Soon after they arrived in Indiana, Willard's son Charles married Celia Sanger in 1840. Charles and Celia produced four children. The older of the two boys was named Alvin (1841-1864?), while his brother is our subject, Charles L. Doolittle. Both Doolittle boys served in the Civil War, but only Charles survived. It is reported that their mother, Celia, expressed regret that the fate of her sons had not been reversed. Possibly this was a factor in Doolittle's development-he wanted to prove himself to his mother.

Doolittle received a good secondary education at the La Grange Collegiate Institute that was a local church-related school. From there he went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He seemed to have studied there, on and off, for a decade, finally receiving a baccalaureate in civil engineering in 1874. During this time at Michigan he also studied at the Detroit Observatory (in spite of its name it was located in Ann Arbor) with James Watson, the director. From 1873 to 1875 he was employed by the Northern Boundary Survey to do both office and field work. This survey was a major undertaking since it sought to establish the location of the US-Canadian boundary from the Lake-of-the-Woods to the Rocky Mountains. The boundary had been established by treaty to be the 49th parallel. Because the location of the parallel was known only approximately, entire settlements were unsure whether they were in the US or Canada.

Also serving with Doolittle on the Northern Boundary Survey was the astronomer Lewis Boss (1846-1912). In 1876 Boss became director of the Dudley Observatory at Albany, New York. Remarkably, both Boss and Doolittle terminated their respective directorships in 1912, and both were succeeded in that role by a son.

Latitude Variation and Polar Motion

To grasp the nature of Doolittle's main focus it is necessary to appreciate the problem of latitude variation or of polar motion.

In 1764 the mathematician Euler (1707-1783) analyzed the motion of our planet as if it were a rigid ellipsoid with substantially the same dimensions as the earth-that is, slightly flattened from north to south and somewhat larger about the equator. A body of this shape is most stable when it rotates about its minor north-south axis. However, if this situation were to undergo a perturbation of sufficient strength, the axis of rotation would change from being fixed to one that traced out a circular cone. Stated otherwise, the poles would not remain fixed, but would slowly move in small circles about their mean polar position. Euler predicted that it would require 10 months to complete the circles. If this polar motion actually took place it would have a small but important influence on coordinates of fixed locations on the surface of the earth. If the poles were to roam about in a circular fashion then the position of a fixed point on the earth's surface would also undergo a corresponding motion about its mean location. In effect this indicates that the latitude and longitude of a point on the surface of the earth would undergo continuous change. For most applications the effect is so small as to be insignificant, but for many astronomical observations it is necessary to know very accurately the location of the observatory. When the observatory moves from its presumed location this could manifest itself in observational errors if not properly accounted for. Thus the prospect of polar motion loomed as an important aspect in the minds of astronomers. Early astronomers tried their best to detect and measure the effect but their efforts were largely inconclusive in part because the changes were so slight and in part because they were influenced by Euler's prediction of a 10 month period.

Seth Carlo Chandler (1846-1913) never attended college but while he was still in high school became a "computer" for the well-known mathematician Benjamin Peirce (1809-1880). A "computer" was employed to perform routine arithmetic calculations. This position required competence in the use of tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions, and in the accurate completion of the indicated mathematical details. He went on to a similar position with the prominent astronomer Benjamin Gould (1824-1896) where his computational abilities were further expanded. Gould secured a post for Chandler with the US Coast Survey where his duties were enlarged to include familiarity with and use of astronomical instruments, and the preparation of technical reports. When Gould left the Coast Survey to practice astronomy in Argentina, Chandler took a position as an actuary, but he continued his interest in astronomy. As an amateur he made many contributions to the discovery and cataloging of variable stars before turning his attention to the more accurate determination of latitude. To this end he invented a simple instrument called the "Almucantar" which he used to produce relevant data. He also examined data taken by other observers. Subsequent analysis seemed to show that there was a variation of latitude with time. His analysis suggested that the variation was periodic in nature with a major period of 14 months (not 10 months as Euler predicted) along with a superimposed period of 12 months. These two modes would interact-sometimes they would reinforce and sometimes they would cancel. This could account for puzzling results encountered by many data takers. Also, Chandler's work showed that polar motion was not circular but instead was more complicated. He published his findings in a series of papers beginning in 1891. Today we know that polar motion is more intricate than that given by Chandler's model. There is no simple formula for predicting polar motion.

Karl Kustner (1856-1936) is another figure in the controversy about the existence of polar motion and latitude variation. Armed with an exceptionally fine instrument called a universal transit he was able to discern that latitude most probably varied. He published this in 1888.

Doolittle's Legacy and Other Issues

Doolittle's life had its ups and its downs, punctuated by achievements and disappointments. It was his life's work to unravel the related mysteries of latitude variation and polar motion. In spite of frustrations he seemed to have enjoyed the quest. Why else would he so tenaciously continue to use a second-hand zenith telescope during his 20-year stay at Lehigh? Another hardship involved the tremendous amount of hand calculation that was involved in his book and in each journal article or research report. The effort involved in preparing these publications is breathtaking. Tasks that today are done routinely by computer were in Doolittle's time done by hand. Simultaneous equations involving several variables were solved manually. Publications usually contained tables. Typically, the first of the several tabular columns was devoted to a long list of the observed data. The remaining columns were derived from the first column, the entries of which had to be generated by laborious hand calculation. Usually the number of digits involved in the computation would preclude use of a slide rule.

Astronomical observations can be formidable. For much of his stay at Lehigh, Doolittle lived in the North Bethlehem Moravian community on Church Street. He would walk between his house and the Lehigh campus by taking the old covered bridge that preceded the Hill-to-Hill bridge. On clear nights he would take this route to and from the Sayre Observatory. His daughter, Hilda, recounted seeing his beard covered with ice upon returning from a cold wintertime session at the observatory.

Most Lehigh students probably did not value the rigors that Doolittle imposed upon them. An exception to this appears to be Richard Hawley Tucker (1859-1952). He received a baccalaureate in civil engineering from Lehigh in 1879. Doolittle influenced him to seek a career in astronomy. Upon graduation he became an assistant to Lewis Boss at the Dudley Observatory at Albany. After four years there he instructed at Lehigh for a year and then went on to a distinguished career at the Lick Observatory in California. Lehigh awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1922.

Doolittle could not have known how important the accurate knowledge of polar motion and latitude variation were to become. Global positioning by means of earth satellites relies heavily upon this information. Doolittle was a pioneer in the field even if history has not been kind to him. Consider the comments of Herman S. Davis which appeared in the journal Science in 1903 and concerned a major retrospective report of Doolittle's early research efforts:

"This series is of exceptional value as being the earliest, as well as the most prolonged, thus far made in the investigation of latitude variation. It was begun seven years before the first proposal by Fergola at the session of the International Geodetic Association in Rome, that there should be an observational test of the constancy of latitude, and eight years before Kustner began his observations whereby the discovery of variation was first boldly announced as proven."

Doolittle's immediate family was probably a mixed blessing. His surviving children were successful, but two of his children died in infancy. His first wife died in her early 30s, probably from complications of her final pregnancy. One son (Gilbert) died in the final days of WWI. His daughter, Hilda, although brilliant, was an academic disappointment, and he seems to have feared for her living a bohemian lifestyle abroad. The oldest son, Alfred, lived in Washington, which was an easy train ride from Philadelphia, yet there appeared to be little communication between father and son. Both Alfred and Eric, who were children of Doolittle's first marriage, died in their early 50s shortly after their father. This suggests that neither son enjoyed good health. Doolittle's abrupt cessation of intellectual activities in 1912 presages a decline in health. The cause of his death in 1919 is not known.

Doolittle was scooped twice. In the first instance Kustner announced in 1888 that latitude variation was definitely confirmed. Doolittle surely was convinced of this prior to Kustner's declaration, but possibly because he lacked confidence in his second-hand zenith telescope, or because his data did not adhere to Euler's model, he felt uncomfortable making such a pronouncement.

The second scoop came at the hand of Chandler. Euler's model held that the poles move in circles with a period of 10 months. It has been suggested that Chandler was not familiar with Euler's work, and so was unencumbered by it. By an empirical analysis of the relevant data he developed a model that suggested that there were two superimposed polar motions-one with a period of 14 months while the other had a period of 12 months. This meant that polar motion was not circular, which explained the confusion encountered by those who were looking for circular motion. Although Chandler's model turned out to be inexact, it was still a triumph and may have caused embarrassment to other workers in the field.

How should Doolittle's life and work be evaluated? He was competent, energetic, and respected in his lifetime. He authored some 50 paper and reports. The University of Michigan awarded him an honorary ScD in 1897, just two years after he left Lehigh. Years later, in 1912, Lehigh gave him an honorary LLD. His life was saddened by the deaths of his brother, three of his children, and one wife. He never achieved the big discovery that would preserve his reputation. Today his name barely rates a footnote and then he is occasionally confused with his son Eric.

In closing, here are the final words of Doolittle's obituary that were written by R. H. Tucker, who was his student and colleague:

"He was a man of singular modest temperament, genial in manner and straight forward in character. These qualities were recognized by his students-one of the real tests of a man-as they have been by a wide circle of friends."