["Bid Me to Live"] evokes the England of the Imagists and of World War I, those times when, as she says, "Jocasta danced with Philoctetes." H. D.'s central character, Julia Ashton, is a poet whose marriage to another poet is disintegrating. Her husband Rafe, home on leave from the Western Front, becomes involved with a girl who lives in a room above the Ashtons' Bloomsbury flat: "I love you, I desire l'autre," Rafe tells Julia, who drifts into a love affair with a musician. But all the while she is magnetized by a writer named Frederick (Rico), who cannot easily be magnetized away from his "great Prussian wife."

Rico is very plainly D. H. Lawrence (Lorenzo), and his physical as well as his spiritual-artistic resemblance to Van Gogh is one of the leitmotifs of this novel, which among other accomplishments adds some interesting bits to the Lawrence legend. The curious will find much else here that can be tagged, for the people, episodes and atmospheres in the story share a cousinship with many of those in novels by Lawrence ("Aaron's Rod," "Kangaroo") and Richard Aldington ("Death of a Hero"), in the London poems of Ezra Pound, in the autobiographies of Aldington, John Cournos, Cecil Gray and others, and in the books about Amy Lowell by S. Foster Damon and Horace Gregory. The fun the reader has in discovering who's who in the masquerade is, of course, of secondary importance, though in the case of others besides Lawrence the material provides some bizarre if minor contributions to literary history.

The London scenes in the story are balanced by West Country interludes, and the main pattern of the action is symbolically repeated in charades the characters perform and in quoted samples from Julia's work in progress, "Orpheus." In method and tone, particularly in its use of interior monologue, H. D.'s book often seems to be a period piece, a product of yesterday's avant-garde. Poetic without being a prose poem, it looks fairly thin beside the chunkier novels that are so common today, but its cool nuances have a vitality that carries it along. And "Bid Me to Live" has a consistent clarity of vision as it probes the delicate tissues of human relationships while revealing so much of the complex structures of a woman's consciousness.