I

POUND AND H.D. were the first of the imagists to meet. They were introduced at a Hallowe’en party in Philadelphia, in 1901. Pound had been sixteen the day before; H.D. was fifteen. She was still at school; he was, precociously, a first-year undergraduate, with, as H.D. later remembered, flaming ‘Gozzoli bronze-gold’ curls.¹ Pound was wearing an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic visit. ‘Immensely sophisticated,’ H.D. recalled, ‘immensely superior, immensely rough-and-ready, a product not like any of the brothers and brothers’ friends – and boys we danced with (and he danced badly) … was he showing off?’² Yet when H.D. told him about a friend’s sister, who was suffering from ‘stupid nerve-specialists’, he offered to give her the coat, because he hoped it might ‘cheer her up’.³ H.D. was intrigued by this contradictory figure, his exhibitionism, his flashiness, his exotic cosmopolitanism, his lack of Philadelphian propriety, his impulsive generosity. What Pound thought of H.D. on that occasion is not recorded, though possibly his kindness to H.D.’s friend had something to do with his being taken with H.D.’s beauty. But it was 1905 before their relationship developed.

Both Pound and H.D. lived on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Pound in Wyncote, a suburb to the north, H.D. just outside Philadelphia to the west, in Upper Darby. The outskirts were where the respectable Philadelphian bourgeoisie lived. For all the civilised elegance of Philadelphia’s ordered avenues, the middle classes, largely Anglo-Saxon Protestants, had for some decades gradually drifted to the margins of the city. Some of the Philadelphian aristocracy – twenty-odd families – remained in the best areas of the centre. Also in the centre, though naturally in the less good areas, were the long-established black inhabitants, as well as the continental immigrants, Catholic or Jewish, who had poured in during the last century. H.D.’s family had specific reasons for living where they did, for her father, a distinguished astronomer, was Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of its Flowers Observatory, based in Upper Darby. But neither H.D. nor Pound was native to Philadelphia, and neither found it congenial. That story of the Hallowe’en party, which H.D. told in 1933 when she was beginning analysis with Freud, undoubtedly carries more than one level of meaning. The friend’s sister, one might note, was suffering, not from ‘nerves’, but from ‘stupid nerve-specialists’. In 1901, the most renowned nerve specialist in the States, Silas Weir Mitchell, practised in Philadelphia. Mitchell, whose famous rest-cure was first developed in 1873, is probably best known nowadays through his patient Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who recorded her account of his methods in her nightmarish story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. He treated unhappy, disturbed or disturbing young women with enforced bed-rest, large amounts of food, and the complete absence of intellectual stimulation. As those who have read Gilman’s story will know, writing was regarded as particularly undesirable; passivity, dependence and conformity were the rest-cure’s aims. For H.D., who had come to Freud for help with her writing block, Silas Weir Mitchell must have hovered in her mind as a symbol of all she had found stifling and inhibiting in Philadelphia. H.D.’s relationship with the bizarrely colourful, oddly foreign Pound, deeply though it hurt her, was to make possible her escape from what Henry James described as the ‘charming pink and drab heritage’ of Philadelphia.⁴ Pound, she would later say, was the scorpion sting that set her free.

H.D.’s family had moved to Upper Darby when she was nine, from Bethlehem on the north-east border of Pennsylvania. Her parents, like so many late nineteenth-century bourgeois couples, lived lives shaped by a strict division of gender roles, and as she grew up, H.D. saw in them a cleavage of the world into male and female whose irreconcilability was to haunt her for decades. It was at the heart of the problems she brought to Freud in the early 1930s. Charles Doolittle, H.D.’s father, was born in 1843, and was ten years older than her mother, his second wife: his first had borne him two sons, but died giving birth to a daughter, who also died. As early as H.D. could remember, he was a venerable, bearded, distant figure, much preoccupied with his research, a brooding, forbidding presence at the dinner table. He came from what seemed to her the faraway country of Indiana. His ancestors, she told Freud, were Puritans; they had exterminated Indians and burnt witches. He had enlisted in the Civil War at seventeen, claiming to be eighteen; he had seen, and inflicted, pain and death. He spent every clear night at his telescope, no matter what the temperature; some nights his beard froze to the glass. H.D. was the fourth of six living children from the two families, and the only surviving girl (her mother’s first baby had also been a girl, who died). She was her father’s favourite child, though that to her was a burden rather than a reassurance; and to her pain her mother’s favourite was her older brother Gilbert.

Bethlehem, her first home, was her mother’s birthplace. It had been founded in 1741 by a group of Moravian Brethren, escaping persecution in Europe. They were one of several such sects to be accepted by the tolerant Pennsylvanian Quakers (others included the Amish, the Mennonites, the Schwenkfelders and the Dunkers). The Moravians claimed to be the earliest Protestants, having seceded from the Church of Rome in 1467, though their German Reformed neighbours in Pennsylvania accused them of popish practices. Unusually among Nonconformist Protestants, their rituals were aesthetically satisfying and dense with symbolism. Like the Quakers, Moravians were pacifists, and had a gentle and tolerant way of life. They were cultured, valued learning and had a particularly strong musical tradition; Bethlehem is still famous today for its annual Bach Festival, founded by H.D.’s maternal uncle Frederick. Unlike her father’s ancestors, the Moravians had good relations with their Native American neighbours, and one of the most sympathetic accounts of Native American culture to be published before the twentieth century was written by the Moravian Brethren missionary John Heckewelder, an account that inspired Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Cooper’s portrayal of the Delaware Indians. (A Native American chief, said to be the model for Cooper’s Chingachgook, is buried in ‘God’s Acre’, the original Moravian cemetery in Bethlehem.) H.D.’s mother was artistic; before her marriage, she had begun to train as a painter, and had taught painting and music. But, though her paintings hung in the house, she had ceased to paint when she married. She still played the piano, though she had given up singing. She occupied herself with the children of the two marriages, and with domestic and religious affairs.

Pound’s family were not quite of the same class as H.D.’s – one of several reasons for her parents’ alarm when they feared he might become a prospective son-in-law, or worse. To be more exact, Pound’s father was not the same class: his mother, Isabel, whose family were related to the Wadsworths of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fame, and who had smart New York relations, was not so different from the Doolittles. If Isabel had come slightly down in the world, she made up for that in intense gentility, and awed her neighbours with her ‘high society’ voice.⁵ Pound’s father Homer, unpretentious, earnest, a little slow, ‘the naïvest man who ever possessed sound sense’, as Pound described him, came from a more mixed and rackety background.⁶ ‘Mrs Pound,’ H.D. wrote, ‘was a beautiful woman, well-bred, somewhat affected in manner. One was inclined to be embarrassed and baffled by her little witticisms, her epigrams, as one so often was by Ezra’s. Mr Pound was hearty, informal, very kind.’⁷

In his youth Pound identified, the evidence suggests, with his mother’s family, particularly with his dashing Aunt Frank who had him to stay regularly in the metropolitan delights of New York, and took him for exciting European tours. In later life, however, when he came to denounce the bourgeois propriety so dear to his mother, his sympathies moved more to his father’s side, or at least his own colourful reconstruction of his father’s family history. Yet even as an adolescent and in his early twenties, he would tell his father of problems or scrapes, rather than his more demanding and easily shocked mother. In 1920, when he left England, having buried one version of himself in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s elegant ‘E.P. Ode pour l’Election de Son Sepulcre’, he wrote a quite different burlesque prose account of his origins, entitled Indiscretions, in which the phrase in that ode, ‘born/In a half savage country’, is expanded to 60 pages. Pound’s grandfather Thaddeus had indeed been born in a log cabin, of a Quaker family that had been in the States for over a century, though not perhaps two, as Indiscretions claimed. He married one Sarah Loomis, whose family Pound with dubious evidence claims to have been horse-thieves. It was doubtless part of his rejection of the bourgeois side of his descent that he finally, after considerable wavering, settled on Loomis for his middle name rather than his mother’s surname Weston. Thaddeus moved to Wisconsin, and Pound’s father was the first white child to be born there, being looked after by a Chippewa nurse, and learning Chippewa before English. Thaddeus was always a hero to Pound. He rose to become a senator, and would have been a member of the cabinet had it not been that by then he had left his wife and was living with another woman, this time ‘without sanction of clergy’.⁸ He was a highly successful entrepreneur, and salvaged his stolid and unworldly son’s career at various stages. It was he who obtained Homer the job as land-assessor in the frontier town of Hailey, Idaho, partly in order to have his own rights to silver mines there safeguarded, a task in which Homer singularly failed. Isabel Pound, and her mother even more so, were appalled by the ‘halfsavage’ behaviour of the settlers, and they headed home when young Pound (the Infant Gargantua as he named himself in Indiscretions) was eighteen months old. They lived in New York for a few years, until Homer was offered a job at the Government Assessor’s office in Philadelphia, and they moved first to West Philadelphia and then north to Wyncote, to a comfortably big house, paid for by Thaddeus. The young Pound, much doted on by his parents throughout his life, had four free bedrooms at his disposal, and moved between them, getting into practice for the itinerant life.

Homer’s employment was for many years precarious: government employees had no employment rights and were liable to be sacked without a second thought with every change in policy or administration. The family kept a maid (black, of course) but they were much less well off than many of their neighbours. Homer, however, held on to his job, and rose to become second in command, though never, according to his son, well paid. In Indiscretions, Pound’s first memory of life past the age of three is of visits with his father to the Mint, which was then housed in an imposing building built to resemble the Parthenon. Later H.D. went with Pound to see Homer at work and was amazed by the ‘stacks of gold bars’: looking back, she wondered how much Pound’s later obsession with economics could be traced back to his father’s work: ‘I don’t mean that Ezra wanted the gold for himself. He wanted to change the world with it.’⁹ Pound’s memories of these mounds of gold, each bar too heavy to lift (one of Homer’s favourite jokes was inviting visitors to help themselves), combined with his experience of his own and his fellow-writers’ financial struggles, perhaps lay behind his dogmatic embrace in the inter-war years of Major Douglas’s ill-conceived Social Credit theory. If Social Credit were implemented, it would, he believed, produce plenty for everyone – resources would be properly distributed and prevented from falling into the hands of greedy speculators and the malign banking profession.

Pound, as H.D. knew, all his life made global assumptions based on his personal experience. In Indiscretions he asserted that his family history was a miniature of that of the whole United States. His later vision in the Cantos of an America with an ordered, cultured, beauty-conscious past which had degenerated into a utilitarian, morally grubby and money-centred present surely had its primary model in his home city. In the late eighteenth century, Philadelphia had been politically and culturally the leading city of America. The Declaration of Independence was signed there; hence the city’s honorary title as ‘Birthplace of the Nation’, and its choice for the first centennial celebrations in 1876. Philadelphia was capital of the young United States from 1790 to 1800. Before the American Revolution it had already become the centre of the book trade, of publishing, and of cultural life. The University of Pennsylvania had been established in 1740, the American Philosophical Society founded there by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, and the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1805. But during the nineteenth century Philadelphia lost its cultural supremacy to Boston. It produced no important writers; during Pound’s and H.D.’s youth its most acclaimed author was none other than the nerve specialist Silas Weir Mitchell, who had a second and apparently equally remunerative career as a popular novelist and poet. When Henry James visited the University of Pennsylvania in 1905, it was Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, as the pre-eminent local man of letters, who showed him round. (Silas Weir Mitchell has a mention in Sir Paul Harvey’s 1932 Oxford Companion to English Literature, a compilation which forbears to acknowledge the existence of either Pound or H.D., though Pound – if he ever looked at it – would have welcomed its warm account of Mussolini’s Fascists.) The University of Pennsylvania in Pound’s day had less than 15 per cent humanities students, the vast majority studying medicine, economics or science, and even the humanities courses (to Pound’s lasting outrage) were primarily based on the accumulation of scholarly facts, not on any kind of philosophical or cultural value. All American universities were increasingly moving away from the arts, but the average in 1910 was one-third classical to two-thirds vocational: the University of Pennsylvania was an extreme example.

Politically, Philadelphia’s reputation was very different from its early days. Penn’s City of Brotherly Love, founded on his tolerant ideals, had become a place of intolerance and prejudice. During the nineteenth century racism and xenophobia grew along with the immigrant population; the city that had welcomed religious exiles now burnt down Catholic and black churches. In the years in which H.D. and Pound grew up, the city was managed by Republicans well known for their corruption; indeed in an era when the widespread corruption of American cities was being exposed by muckraking journalists, Philadelphian city politicians were regarded as the most corrupt of all. But what the city of Philadelphia had maintained was its role as a financial centre. In 1770 it had already become the third most important business centre in the British Empire; it became the birthplace of American banking (anathema to the later Pound), and possessed its first stock exchange. The Philadelphia Commercial Exchange was opened in 1868, the Maritime Exchange in 1875, and the Philadelphia Bourse in 1891. It was wealth that allowed the upper and middle classes of the city in their domestic life to remain complacently and oppressively respectable, perhaps why the most famous of the muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens, in his book The Shame of the Cities, described Philadelphia as both ‘corrupt and contented’.¹⁰ There was more artistic life, particularly in the visual arts, than Pound ever gave the city credit for, but, for Pound, Philadelphia typified the victory of commercialism over art, and the worst of provincial philistinism.

Henry James – whose attitude to America had much in common with Pound’s – had a deeply equivocal response to Philadelphia on his 1905 visit there, and his interpretation of the city undoubtedly influenced Pound’s later view. According to the account in The American Scene, the book which for Pound was the ‘triumph of the author’s long practice … A book no “serious American” will neglect’,¹¹ James was at first rather taken with the place, delighted that for once he had come to an American city that, as he put it, ‘didn’t bristle’, a city where, as he looked out of his ‘ample, tranquil window’, the ‘note of the perpetual perpendicular’ was absent. Philadelphian high society – the twenty-odd best families mentioned earlier – was intricately interrelated, ‘every individual was as many times over cousin, uncle, aunt, niece, and so through the list, as poor human nature is susceptible of being’. He felt he was sure to discover that Philadelphia would be, ‘of all goodly villages, the very goodliest, probably, in the world; the very largest, and flattest, and smoothest, the most rounded and complete’. But to his dismay, he found that ‘parallel’ to this ‘most genial and delightful’ elite society, ‘beside it and beneath it, behind it and before it, enclosing it as in a frame of fire in which it still had the secret of keeping cool’ was ‘a proportionate City … organized all for plunder and rapine, the gross satisfaction of official appetite, organized for eternal iniquity and impunity’. In no other place than Philadelphia, he says, except perhaps at Jefferson’s house, Mount Vernon, ‘does our historic past so enjoy the felicity of an “important” concrete illustration’, especially in the ‘amplitude and decency’, ‘serenity and symmetry’ of Independence Hall, where the Declaration was signed. But in the Philadelphian penitentiary he found a mirror-image of the genial club patronised by the best families, this time a club whose members’ faces show them all to be of ‘full-blown basenesses’.

This reading of the American fall into the rank and mercenary abyss would become centrally important to Pound after he left the country, but in his youth he, like H.D., was much more aware of the boredom than of the baseness of Philadelphia, of its smooth surface rather than its murky depths, of what James refers to as its ‘immeasurable bourgeois blankness’, its ‘afternoon blandness … the little marble steps and lintels and cornices and copings, all the so clear, so placed accents in the good prose text of the mildly purple houses, which seemed to wear them, as all the others did, up and down the streets, in the manner of nice white stockings, neckties, collars, cuffs’. The word ‘drab’ appears over a dozen times in the chapter on Philadelphia. According to James, Philadelphia was not vulgar, but its keynote was drabness. According to the Philadelphians, as will become apparent, Pound, by 1908, was a vulgar, strident, if poetic, aberration in its bland, commendably drab, prose text.