Nights.
Privately Printed Limited First Edition
[Doolittle, Hilda]. Helforth, John. Nights. (Dijon: Printed by Darantière, 1935).
8vo.; unopened; beige printed wrappers; small pen mark on upper wrapper; small chip to lower wrapper. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, 100 copies the entire edition. With a prologue and twelve chapters. Written under the pseudonym John Helforth, Nights was privately printed and distributed by “friends of the author,” according to the colophon. The chapter heading on p. 68 is misspelled (“NIHGT III”). The first American edition of Nights did not appear until 1986 (New York: New Directions), and included a new introduction by H.D.’s daughter, Perdita Schaffner.
Each chapter in the novella represents a night of lovemaking in the life of protagonist Natalia Saunderson, a character H.D. modeled after herself. Like H.D., Natalia is a poet with sexual feelings for both men and women. In a letter written to Sylvia Dobson on July 27, 1935, H.D. refers to Nights as:
a sort of veiled (not so veiled) study in sex, auto-eroticism and the wrong people making love. I wrote it the first year of Kenwin, inspired by some rather devastating memories of R. A. [husband Richard Aldington], and my attempts to 'find myself' ... Also, I use a new name, and it seems to have come off, John Helforth, who you may remember, was the mouth-piece of some of my ideas in Kora and Ka. (Dobson. Notes [unpubl.], pp. 150-153)
A beautiful copy.
(#5755)
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