POUND MADE ANOTHER important relationship while at Hamilton, though not this time within the college itself, but one which also played a part in his move away from American Presbyterianism. Whilst staying in New York with Aunt Frank, probably in the late summer of 1904, he met a concert pianist, Katherine Ruth Heyman. Heyman, known to Pound and her friends as Kitty, was a fine musician and international performer. Her main home was in London, but she visited the States regularly. She was another of Pound’s early friends who was of Jewish descent, though Pound may never have known this, as she routinely denied it, preferring to emphasise the double-barrelled Anglo-Saxon credentials of her middle name, Willoughby-Benchley, inherited from her mother.55 Pound wrote home about her, with the arrogance that no doubt contributed much to his isolation at college, saying that it was ‘a comfort to find a person with brains & sense, once in a while.’56 Later he described her as his ‘second’ friend, saying in 1916, ‘My first friend was a painter, male, now dead. 2nd. a Pyanist, naturally 15 [it was actually 11] years plus agée que moi’.57 Williams is ignored in this account; by ‘friend’ in this context Pound clearly means a deeper bond than he felt his relationship with Williams to be.
Kitty was a deeply moral woman, and Pound apparently was not given, as he perhaps archly hints here, the traditional services of an older woman to a young inexperienced lover. Humphrey Carpenter’s suggestion that she was in many ways a mother figure – and perhaps a less demanding one than Isabel – is persuasive. All the same, in poems Pound presented her not just as a muse but as his ‘Lady’ in Provençal, courtly love fashion, even, in one that he dedicated to her, comparing her to Dante’s Beatrice, leading him to higher things.58 She gave him a diamond ring, charging him to keep it for life: he gave it to at least two of his fiancées, including H.D., within the next few years. But like Smith, Heyman was important not just in herself but for the books and ideas to which she introduced him. Kitty undoubtedly helped his appreciation of music, significant in itself, but she was also a student of the occult, and through her Pound was first introduced to the world of theosophical and mystical writings so compellingly attractive to many intellectuals and artists of the period. Theosophy, the most prevalent form of occultism at that time, was a set of beliefs which can be traced back as far as Pythagoras in the West, but which also drew on Eastern religions, combining belief in the possibility of a direct mystical apprehension of spiritual reality, in the esoteric meanings of certain sacred texts, in reincarnation, and in the oneness of all things; in 1875 the Theosophical Society was founded by Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott in New York, though there were numerous splits and dissensions among its followers, theosophy being as prone to sectarianism as any orthodox religion.
From today’s standpoint, it is easy to dismiss the occult as a pastime for cranks and simpletons, an earlier version of New Age gullibility, and literary critics have tended to downplay its appeal to turn of the century and modernist writers. But if Pater, Morris and Rossetti were all engaged on a critique of Western modernity and its values, so were those who turned to the occult and theosophy. The Pre-Raphaelites and Pater returned to – or rather reinvented – the European past as an alternative to a mechanical present, but the occult went beyond Europe, though it often also included Europe’s own suppressed heresies and pagan traditions, so valued by Pater. Turn of the century occultism was the continuation of a counter-cultural evocation of non-Western thought and religion, and of magical, mystic and pagan traditions, which from the Romantics onwards constituted one powerful element in the critique of both institutional Christianity and Western scientific rationalism, and was to remain a significant strand in modernism. Denis Saurat once described the occult as a ‘strange and monstrous alliance’ of ‘all the conquered religions: Gnostic beliefs, Neo-Platonism, hermeticism, Manicheanism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism’.59 The occult was the return of what Western military might and rationality had repressed: it registered the deepest of doubts about Western progress. The Theosophical Society declared itself committed to a universal brotherhood of humanity, open to any race, colour, class, caste or sex, astonishing for its day amidst the hegemony of white supremacy. Its members didn’t always live up to this, but it was one reason so many radicals, feminists and socialists were attracted to it. In political terms, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford has argued, Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy ‘set itself resolutely against British imperialism’,60 and while Pound was never a theosophist in any formal way, and Yeats only briefly so, both thought in terms close to theosophy; their shared enthusiasm for non-Western beliefs and dislike of the British Empire would come together, as will become apparent, in their support of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Madame Blavatsky may have been in some ways a charlatan (and a bully, Yeats thought) but the loss of faith in Western superiority to which her work spoke was very real. As the painter Wassily Kandinsky said in a book which was later to influence Pound powerfully, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, theosophy, like the modernist interest in the primitive, was a reassessment of those ‘nations whom we, from the height of our knowledge, have been accustomed to regard with pity and scorn’.61
The occult mysticism to which Heyman introduced Pound, or at least the version of it which he evolved for himself (and its au choix, pick-and-mix quality was an essential part of its appeal) was to fuse with the aesthetic faith he had learnt from Smith. It was one more stage in escaping American Presbyterianism without betraying the religious sensibility which his upbringing had so deeply implanted, one more move away from the American belief in progress, and it would eventually play a central part in his development into a modernist. Heyman herself was later to write a book that would bring together occultism and modernist music, The Relation of Archaic to Ultramodern Music, which she published in 1921, and in which, incidentally, she also discusses the poetry of both Pound and H.D. with some insight.62 Perhaps partly through her influence, music always remained important to Pound, though Williams, H.D. and Yeats were all dismissive of Pound’s musical talents. According to Williams, himself an accomplished violinist,
[Pound] could never learn to play the piano, though his mother tried to teach him. But he ‘played’ for all that. At home, I remember my mother’s astonishment when he sat down at the keyboard and let fly for us – seriously. Everything, you might say, resulted except music. He took mastership at one leap; played Liszt, Chopin – or anyone else you could name – up and down the scales, coherently to his own mind, any old sequence. It was part of his confidence in himself.63
Yet Pound was later to be a music critic, composer (though admittedly not widely performed), tireless promoter of new experimental music and supporter of the revival of Vivaldi and the baroque. Most of all, though, there was the musicality of his verse, perhaps his single most striking lyric gift, and his understanding of the part music played in poetry. Pound’s mother was an able pianist herself, and loved going to concerts. Kitty may have been a musical connection of hers; she was already known to Pound’s parents when he met her, for in an early letter Pound sends her remembrances to his father. His parents were, however, as H.D. later recalled in a letter to Bryher – from 1919 her companion, sometime lover and always friend – alarmed by this friendship with an ‘“older woman” (Homer Pound speaking) “whose influence on Son was not for the best, but (apologetically) once you heard her music, you could understand Son’s feelings”’.64 Whether they feared that she was tampering with his virtue or his faith isn’t clear.
Notwithstanding meeting these sympathetic spirits, whom he regrettably referred to as ‘the few white folks … up here’, Pound wrote home that autumn that he still felt in ‘absolute isolation from all humanity’.65 But the next semester, in early 1905, he found a way to socialise, discovering for the first time that whilst he might be a failure in acquiring the companionship of equals, as the charismatic leader of a band of eager disciples he was a success. A number of admiring freshmen came to his rooms every Tuesday. Perhaps he had already heard of the London writers’ penchant for this kind of weekly gathering. Pound’s meetings started by chance when he found a group of students struggling with Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’ as an assignment, and launched into a spontaneous tutorial. Whatever his strictures on Emerson to his mother, it is hard not to see ‘Self-Reliance’ as a very Poundian piece, and no doubt he applied himself to expounding its upbeat exhortations with verve. But he was still cold-shouldered by his peers. He managed to find a room-mate in the second year, but only by sharing with one of the freshmen. Those in his own year avoided him. In the 1930s, one of the professors, John Brown, recollected that:
[Pound] was always walking about the campus, and of the hundreds of times I have seen him passing my house, he was always walking alone … He lacked companionship, understanding, appreciation. He was lonely and out of his element … And there were tales of a more than quiet dislike of this brilliant boy, proud and conscious of his own superiority, tales of his being hazed and his room torn up by college mates in search of sport.66
No wonder Pound was later to describe his time at Hamilton as ‘hell’.67
Pound spent much of his enforced isolation working and reading, but he was also writing poetry, a considerable amount of it translations. He would wake up his room-mate, Claudius Hands, at all hours of the night, and insist on reading his latest effusion to him – and then melodramatically tear it up.68 In his second year there, he had a poem included in the Hamilton Literary Magazine. This was not his first poem to be published: his local paper, the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, had in 1896 published a truly terrible limerick he had written, on the presidential elections, an early indication of his interest in politics, with the author given as ‘Aged 11 years. E. L. Pound, Wyncote’. Before this poem was found, Noel Stock suggested that he was the author of a dialect poem (equally dire) entitled ‘Ezra on the Strike’, published anonymously in the same newspaper in 1902. Stock had been told by Carl Gatter, who bought the family house when Pound’s parents finally left it, that Pound had said to him that he was first published in the Times-Chronicle. Stock was at that stage unable to find any verses signed by Pound (possibly he didn’t think of looking as early as 1896), but hopefully alighted on this. ‘Ezra on the Strike’, which praised Theodore Roosevelt for putting down a big coal-miners’ strike, certainly fits with Pound’s political views as they emerge from his exchanges with Williams a year or two later. David Frail has argued that both Williams and Pound shared some of the attitudes of Roosevelt’s supporters in the early years of the century; opposed both to union power and business monopolies, their philosophy was individualist and they believed change was best brought about by strenuous exhortation. Essentially these assumptions – that big organisations were bad, that individuals (at least the right individuals) were good, and that hectoring repetition was the best political tool – were to remain fundamental to Pound’s political outlook. But does that mean he wrote ‘Ezra on the Strike’? It would have been an extraordinary beginning to a poetic career in which he scarcely ever spoke as himself to have put his own name in the title of a poem. It could, Stock admits, have been written by the Reverend William Barnes Lower, who published a number of such dialect poems in the Times-Chronicle, sometimes signed and sometimes not.69 Lower was none other than the new and hearty minister who had arrived at Pound’s church in 1901, and for whom Pound later expressed such distaste. Since Pound dutifully continued going to church when at home, Lower would have known him well. It seems more likely that this poem is Lower’s mocking of the young Ezra’s views, doubtless freely and frequently given, presenting him as a hillbilly farmer, not so unlike the pose Pound was to take himself, at any rate in his letters, from the 1920s onwards. Pound’s dislike of Lower may have been aroused by more than his approach to religion.
The poem published at Hamilton was very different, and rather more characteristic of Pound’s early verse. It was, he wrote to his father, a translation of the earliest Provençal poem, from the tenth century, a poem of the dawn. Pound was always attracted by the Provençal genre of dawn poems, which perhaps exemplified most quintessentially to him the quality of freshness, of opening possibilities that he found in Provençal poetry. Pound’s translation is a somewhat stiff little piece, but already his inventive ear is at work, with two iambic pentameters followed by a much freer-moving line:
Phoebus shineth ere his splendour flieth
Aurora drives faint light athwart the land
And the drowsy watcher crieth,
‘ARISE’70
The watchman is warning a pair of lovers (who are not directly mentioned in the poem) that they must prepare to part for ‘the white dawn’ is coming. When Pound used a variation on this poem as the introduction to his 1918 poem ‘Langue d’Oc’, Harriet Monroe, of whom more later, would not publish it, because the poem, more accomplished but also more explicit than the earlier version, was clearly celebrating the pleasures of adulterous love. Luckily Hamilton read the original poem quite innocently. If Pound felt a certain glee, he does not report it.
Pound was also writing poems influenced by more recent writers. Although he had probably not yet come across Yeats he was already attracted by what he knew of the Celtic movement (he would say disparagingly in 1915 that in ‘America ten or twelve years ago, one … was drunk with “Celticism”’), and especially admired Fiona Macleod, about whom, he told his mother in the autumn of 1904, he had found an excellent article in the Fortnightly Review.71 One of the earliest of Pound’s poems, ‘Motif’, later published in A Lume Spento, written just before or as he was starting Hamilton, has touches of this now largely forgotten poet.72 (‘Fiona Macleod’, alias William Sharp, was not exactly a pseudonym, more an invention: Sharp claimed she existed and he was simply passing on her verses and tales to the world.) ‘Motif’ is a poem about a ‘wee wind’ searching for the speaker and searched for by him ‘thru still forests’ and ‘o’er silent waters’ – not an exciting poem in itself, but interesting in what it shows of Pound’s early desire to be a poet, for in Fiona Macleod’s work the wind represents poetic inspiration. Hugh Witemeyer has argued that ‘“her” [i.e. Fiona Macleod’s] imagery of wind, dreams and roses greatly resembles the dominant imagery’ of Pound’s first two books, but by then Yeats’ own influence played its part.73 Pound did not embrace Celtic imagery as an alternative poetic world to his Provençal poets: what interested him were the likenesses he found between them. One of the discoveries he made while at Hamilton was of the poetry of Ossian, James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century reinvention of the early Celtic poet, whose fame had spread like wildfire across Europe. Even in Goethe’s bestselling novel of sensibility, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the hero, just before he dies, quotes the words that Ossian spoke just before he died. Pound, perhaps appropriately enough, read Ossian first in German, with great excitement. He was in 1915 to date the ‘romantic awakening’, as he described the beginnings of Romanticism, back to Ossian, without betraying any indication that he was aware the work was generally considered a fake.74 Even if he knew, James Macpherson’s inspired pastiche was so close to his own poetic method that he could hardly have been unsympathetic.
Pound finished at Hamilton in June 1906, collecting good marks in his BA. Shortly before he left, he met the Baxter family through the local church, and, he told Williams, fell briefly in love with their pretty daughter Viola. He took her out driving a few times, and was invited to supper by her family, but that was about as far as that romance developed, though, as so often, he kept in touch with her all his life. (Williams, whom Pound later introduced to Viola, was to have a complicated love affair with her, and later she and H.D. were to become friends. Many years later, when Pound was in St Elizabeths mental hospital, Viola sent him regular supplies of her home-cooked fudge brownies; he complained when she forgot that he liked walnuts in them.) This friendship with Viola seems to have been his first real move towards a heterosexual relation with someone from his own age group. The previous summer he had had a holiday with a Philadelphian family, the Skidmores, and spent some time playing tennis and sailing with, among others, one of their daughters, Louise. Louise Skidmore was later to be named as one of Pound’s other girlfriends to H.D., but she does not appear to have had at this early stage the impact, even if short lived, of Viola.
Pound had arranged to return to the University of Pennsylvania to take an MA in Romance Languages. During his final year at Hamilton, when there was tension, as there frequently was, about money, Pound would make soothing noises to his parents about taking a teaching job instead. Nothing came of it. He had kept in touch with William Carlos Williams, still in Philadelphia on his lengthy medical course, and their friendship resumed. He had also remained in touch with H.D. It was during this coming year that their love affair was to develop.