WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS and H.D. had first met in 1905. Writing to his brother that April, he mentioned that Pound, ‘a fellow who used to be at Penn but now goes to a little college way up in New York State’, was back visiting, presumably for Easter, as he didn’t leave Hamilton until later in the summer: ‘We were good friends,’ Williams wrote, ‘and he certainly treats me great whenever he is at home’. On this occasion Pound had organised a supper party, ‘five fellows’ and ‘five girls’, presumably hosted if not actually cooked by the long-suffering Isabel. Williams was very taken with the
ladies … a deuced of an intellectual bunch, daughters of professors, doctors, etc. but they are fine. Not one is good looking, I mean pretty, but they are all pleasant to look upon because they are so nice. One in particular struck me. She is tall, about as tall as I am, about eighteen and, well, not round and willowy, but rather bony, no, that doesn’t express it, just a little clumsy but all to the mustard. She is a girl that is full of fun, bright, but never telling you all she knows, doesn’t care if her hair is a little mussed, and wears good solid shoes. She is frank and loves music and flowers and I got along with her pretty well.
She was, he goes on, the daughter of the Professor of Astronomy, and she invited Williams and Pound to her house the following Saturday. There was another party, this time of ‘eight girls and eight fellows all in their old clothes; these fellows never dress up, which is slick’. They set off for a walk: ‘Away we went, despising road and paths, right across fields on the run just like a game of hare & hounds. It was great. We went over fields, through woods, climbed fences, jumped streams, and laughed and talked till everyone simply had to get into the game.’ During the course of the afternoon, Williams and H.D. managed to fall behind the others and ‘had a great two hours walk by [them] selves’, during which time they had ‘gotten pretty well acquainted’. ‘We talked of the finest things,’ Williams told his brother, ‘of Shakespeare, of flowers, trees, books & pictures…. She said I was Rosalind in As You Like It and she was Celia, so I called her that, although her real name was Hilda’.106
Bearing in mind what a macho image Williams later wanted to present, it is intriguing that at this stage he didn’t mind this gender-bending nomenclature: Williams’ good looks were thought to be somewhat feminine by the Penn students – he was described in one student publication as ‘a dark Spanish beauty’.107 H.D. was always attracted by androgynous looks, but if that were the implication Williams did not take offence. Of course both Celia and Rosalind would originally have been played by male actors, so the gender bending could go either way. It is clear from this letter that on this occasion Williams was much more interested in H.D. than Pound was. Who was Pound talking to on that walk? Perhaps Williams’ unmistakable attraction to H.D. aroused the ever competitive Pound’s attention, though between this April and his return to Penn, Pound’s brief falling ‘in love’ with Viola Baxter was to occur. Williams himself would always downplay H.D.’s striking looks, later asserting that Pound ‘exaggerated her beauty ridiculously’.108 Even in that first letter, it is clear that it is not her beauty that first attracted him. His statement, ‘not one is good looking’, seems surprising, given the evidence of most contemporary photographs of H.D., though she could look awkward and gauche, but generally when she is clearly having to wear clothes she dislikes. But in any case her looks – being so tall and ‘bony’ – were possibly too unlike the norm for Williams to appreciate straight away. ‘She fascinated me,’ he said, ‘not for her beauty, which was unquestioned if bizarre to my sense, but for a provocative indifference to rule and order which I liked.’109 But as Emily Wallace has shrewdly pointed out, although Williams always claims to be uncertain about H.D’s beauty, he always mentions it.110 Once, when again dismissing her as ‘not beautiful enough’, he would admit that ‘her smile could be maddening when she allowed herself to play with it’.111 H.D., for her part, was certainly fond of him: he would be her confidant when her relationship with Pound was in crisis, and she admired him for the ‘interest and love for humanity’ that led to his dedication as a doctor.112 She and Williams continued to be good friends, though no more, in those Philadelphia years, and to talk about poetry.
Williams’ account in his autobiography suggests that by the time they met again, H.D. had become ‘Pound’s girl’. ‘Ezra was in love with the girl – or thought he was,’ he wrote later.113 Williams’ letters make clear that Pound had kept in touch with H.D. after that first meeting at the Hallowe’en party, but it was not until Pound met up with her again on his return to Penn in the autumn of 1905 that their relationship began. They were drawn together, among other things, by their shared sense of discomfort in Philadelphia and their passion for poetry, and Pound brought H.D. all his enthusiasms:
He read me William Morris in an orchard under blossoming – yes, they must have been blossoming – apple trees … It was Ezra who really introduced me to William Morris. He literally shouted ‘The Gilliflower of Gold’ in the orchard. How did it go? Hah! hah! La belle jaune giroflée. And there was ‘Two Red Roses across the Moon’ and ‘The Defence of Guenevere’. It was at this time that he brought me the Séraphita and a volume of Swedenborg – Heaven and Hell? Or is that Blake? He brought me volumes of Ibsen and of Bernard Shaw … He read me ‘The Haystack in the Flood’ [also by William Morris] with passionate emotion … There were a series of Yogi books, too.114
This selection owes, one can see, some elements to Brooke Smith’s influence – the Pre-Raphaelites (Morris, and H.D. elsewhere mentions that Pound brought Rossetti and Swinburne), as well as the infamous playwrights (Ibsen and Shaw) so disturbing to Philadelphian calm. The rest, H.D. surmised later, Pound had met through Kitty Heyman’s penchant for the mystical and the occult – Swedenborg and the Swedenborgian mystical novella, Séraphita, by Balzac, and the ‘Yogi’ books. Pound came to see her, she recalled, with ‘(literally) armfuls of books,’ passing on a different set of values and desires from those approved by Philadelphia.115 Pound and H.D. were only two of the many young people – and the not so young – of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who found entry into a new and more satisfying world through ‘advanced’ books; books which often aroused horror, and even panic, among those anxious to preserve the status quo. A pile of books – sometimes just a single book – becomes in many texts of the period, both fictional and autobiographical, the symbol of emancipation. Mrs Alving, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, scandalises Pastor Manders when he catches sight of certain books on her table, but she defends them stoutly – to paraphrase Jane Austen, a welcome case of the heroine of one scandalous text patronising those of others. In Stephen Hero, the early version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus is similarly inspired by his reading of Ibsen, and equally condemned by his college president, who, in a neat intertextual twist, has not actually read Ibsen any more than Pastor Manders in Ghosts has read the books that he is so outraged to see in Mrs Alving’s house. What Ibsen has Mrs Alving say of her books (we are never given any specific title) is revealing. They only say, she tells Pastor Manders, what many people really think, even if they don’t talk about it. They only tell her, in fact, what she has come to feel for herself: their importance is that they make her more confident of her own judgement. The same is, I think, true of Pound and H.D’s generation. There was already an undercurrent of dissent that these radical, questioning writers met as much as they created. Such books gave a language to what those like Pound and H.D., perhaps in a muddled and incoherent way, already felt, or were coming to feel. Pound and H.D. both fretted under the restrictions of respectable bourgeois life. Progress, so called, only seemed to produce an uglier and crueller world. Modern education, they complained, filled them with facts from which the life was drained away. Now, however, from the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes they had support for their sense that the beautiful was more important than the commercial, and art than examination success. After Ibsen and Shaw, they had a language with which to argue against Philadelphia’s combination of complacency and corruption. As for the occult and mystical texts they read, these confirmed their sense that the world of visions and the imagination was more significant than the practical demands that middle-class life made on them, that there were alternatives to the Philadelphian view of things, that truth might reside elsewhere than in the American way of life. Of course, many of the really advanced, much more explosively scandalous texts read by young intellectuals in Europe (and even in Boston), they had yet to hear of – in Pound’s armfuls of books there were no French realists, no Yellow Books, no Baudelaire, no Nietzsche, no Marx, not even William Morris’ political writings. Yet even with this limited access to new ideas, they were moving away from the assumptions of their upbringing towards new hopes and the scent of new possibilities.
One other work that Pound had urged on H.D. was Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’, an artistic manifesto, as it would later have been called, that Whistler had delivered in 1885, and which became one of the most famous statements of the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. Of the aesthetes, the flamboyant and outrageous Whistler – after all, a fellow American – was the one on whom Pound would most directly and ostentatiously model himself. When Pound sent H.D. poems, he signed them with a gadfly, in imitation of Whistler, who famously signed with a butterfly. Many of Whistler’s provocative statements were foundational truths for the young Pound. Whistler believed in the artist as solitary genius, whom neither the vulgar public nor the scarcely less vulgar critic can appreciate, and who scorns the amateurs and dilettantes who merely mimic him. (Whistler had Wilde in mind, or so Wilde thought.) Art, Whistler wrote, is ‘selfishly occupied with her own perfection only – having no desire to teach – seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times’.116 For H.D., however, enthralled though she was with the quest for beauty, Whistler’s version of the artist – public, pugnacious and assertive – could not provide any kind of role model. In her London years, what she loved was being part of a close-knit group of poets; flashy individualism in the Whistler/Pound mode was not for her.
Pound also brought H.D. exquisite reprints from a firm in Portland, Maine, owned by Thomas Bird Mosher, who published what were essentially pirated copies of books that had legitimately appeared in London, brought out by the aesthetically inclined presses such as the Bodley Head. Mosher’s books were cheap enough to tempt students, yet beautifully produced with elegant art nouveau designs. In 1915 Pound would recall that back in America in those years ‘one was guided by Mr Thomas Mosher’.117 H.D. mentions in particular the Mosher Romance of Tristram and Iseult that Pound gave her, and which provided one of the models for his courtship: ‘He called me Is-hilda and wrote a sonnet a day; he bound them in a parchment folder.’118 This was Hilda’s Book, lost for many years, but now rediscovered, a collection of Pound’s love poems to her. The poems are derivative, as one might expect (William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, Chaucer, Yeats, Fiona Macleod are all there), but never merely so. (Few of them incidentally were sonnets – poetic licence on H.D.’s part.) One is a reply to Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’, who looks out from the bar of Heaven longingly to her earthly lover. Pound (his passion for foreign titles already established – his books would later include A Lume Spento, Personae, Lustra, Des Imagistes, Quia Pauper Amavi and Canzoni) called his version, ‘La Donzella Beata’
Soul
Caught in the rose hued mesh
Of o’er fair earthly flesh
Stooped you again to bear
This thing for me
And be rare light
For me, gold white
In the shadowy path I tread?
Surely a bolder maid art thou
Than one in tearful fearful longing
That would wait Lily-cinctured
Star-diademed at the gate
Of high heaven crying that I should come
To thee.119
One of the intriguing things about this poem is that it looks as it stands on the page as if it is a piece of free verse, although Pound did not consciously attempt to write free verse for some time. Pound’s poem is much briefer than Rossetti’s, though it picks up many of its images and words (white, light, gold, lilies, stars). The relation between the two has something in common with Pound’s later cuttings and slashings at his own and his friends’ poems. The 1890s had already seen a move away from the long poem to the lyric: fragmented form, so central to early modernism, was something poets were feeling their way towards even before they developed a conscious sense of its aptness for their time. Of course, such archaic, poeticised diction would be denounced (though often still used) by the later Pound, but all the same Pound’s mocking reversal of Rossetti’s story is indicative of his later development. Whilst Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel longs for her beloved to join her in Heaven, Pound’s donzella beata comes down to meet her living lover, ‘declar[ing]’ as Pound would later advocate, ‘for life’.120 When Pound published a version of this poem in A Lume Spento, he separated it into stanzas and evened up the lines, and it looks a much more conventional poem. Perhaps he was worried about his readers, or possibly he himself wasn’t yet ready for his own experiments
As with Paolo and Francesca, Dante’s doomed reader-lovers, a pair often evoked by Pound, it had not taken long, as these poems show, before the shared pleasure in reading had developed into shared pleasure in each other. As with Paolo and Francesca, the move brought both joy and devastation, at any rate to H.D. Their love affair began, according to H.D., in winter, which must have been that of 1905–6, in the woods that surrounded the Upper Darby house. In Winter Love, the poem she wrote for Pound in 1959, the wintry trees appear again:
… a drift of snow
slides from a branch
then, silence more intense.121
Besides Is-hilda, Pound would call her Dryad – the name he continued to use for her till the end of her life – associating her with the trees that screened their meetings. End to Torment, the late memoir of H.D.’s relationship with Pound, gives, in its elusive, fragmentary elision of past and present, a sense both of the passion and the pain the relationship brought. ‘First kisses? In the woods, in the winter – what did one expect? Not this. Electric, magnetic, they do not so much warm, they magnetize, vitalize.’122 It was intoxicating, overwhelming. They would spend hours in a ‘crow’s nest’, a tree house that her younger brother had built, ‘hidden [from the house] by the great branches … He must not miss the last “car” … “There is another trolley in a half hour,” I say, preparing to slide out of the crow’s nest. “No, Dryad,” he says. He snatches me back. We sway with the wind. There is no wind. We sway with the stars. They are not far.’123
H.D.’s parents were never happy about the relationship. H.D. dreaded their disapproval.
‘He was late again.’ My father was winding the clock. My mother said, ‘Where were you? I was calling. Didn’t you hear me? Where is Ezra Pound?’ I said ‘O – he’s gone.’ ‘Books? Hat?’ ‘He’ll get them next time.’ Why had I ever come down out of that tree?124
Pound had not lost his dubious reputation in the University of Pennsylvania, even though in that first year back he was working well. He had returned to Penn full of enthusiasm about his forays into medieval Romance literature, signing up for an MA in the Department of Romance Languages, and taking every course offered bar one: Old Spanish, Spanish drama, Spanish literature, Old French, Provençal, Italian and more. He was writing poetry apace, but was not inclined to take H.D.’s own efforts seriously. ‘“You are a poem, though your poem’s naught,” quoted Ezra. From what? I did not ask him.’125 At the time H.D. appears to have accepted his judgement. But she went on writing poetry.
Meanwhile the three-way friendship between Pound, H.D. and Williams continued. Whether or not Williams and H.D. were comforted by the fact that Pound was equally dismissive of both their poetic efforts, neither of them say, though possibly one of the important things they gave each other was the realisation that one could be a poet in a different mould from Pound: posturing and histrionics were not necessary adjuncts. H.D. and Williams were, of course, to be in two very different modernist traditions: she, like Pound, belonged to the internationalist, he to a specifically and committedly American modernism. In the wrong mood, Williams could later be damning about H.D.’s Hellenism, which he once described as ‘too staid, too chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world’.126 Did this charge of metaphorical sexual inadequacy betray a buried rancour, some resentment that sexually she had responded to Pound and not to him? Williams later wrote of those Philadelphia years: ‘before she began to write poetry or at least to show it to anyone [H.D] would say, “You’re not satisfied with me, are you Billy? There’s something lacking, isn’t there?” When I was with her my feet always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be walking on the tips of the grass stems.’127 In the practical organisation of her life, H.D.’s head certainly remained in the clouds, but in some ways she was as aware of the ground beneath her feet as he was. As Williams acknowledged, one thing he and H.D. shared was a passionate love of the Pennsylvanian countryside, especially its wild flowers. While Pound’s roses and lilies grew in poetry books, Williams and H.D. saw the dark blue grape hyacinths and violets that they found in the Upper Darby fields, and what they saw found its way into their poetry. Both wrote poetry ‘close to the thing’, as Pound would one day put it.128 They were both to develop a direct, stripped poetic mode, though H.D. would achieve it, or at any rate use it publicly, before Williams: it is possible he learnt from her early poetry, for which he was eventually to admit deep admiration. Even in those student days, however, Williams later claimed, he was secretly composing Whitmanesque free verse, which he certainly never showed to Pound, nor, as far as one knows, to H.D. His earliest poem was in free verse, he says, and ‘came out of the blue, with no past:
A black, black cloud
Flew over the sun
Driven by fierce flying rain.
The thrill, the discovery. At once, at the same instant, I said to myself, ‘Ridiculous, the rain can’t drive the clouds’. So the critical thing was born at the same instant.129
That prosaic, though entirely logical, afterthought marks his sensibility as very different from H.D.’s, who, though also a great invoker of weather in her poetry, would more likely be pondering the psychic charge of the black, black cloud rather than worrying about meteorological precision. Perhaps that difference in sensibility was one reason why they remained friends rather than lovers.
In his account of his poetic life, Williams writes that ‘Together with Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”) I discovered in those days, the wonders of Aucassin and Nicolette, the prose and the verse alternating’.130 Aucassin and Nicolette, a thirteenth-century love story, had become in Andrew Lang’s translation something of a cult book of the period, having been popularised by Pater’s enthusiastic endorsement in The Renaissance, where he praised the story as a folk version of Provençal love poetry, ‘reaching, by lightness of form and comparative homeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics left untouched’.131 In a footnote to the 1893 edition, he recommended Lang’s ‘poet’s translation’, which soon became a bestseller: in the USA, Andrew Lang’s Aucassin and Nicolette had been duly pirated by Thomas Mosher, and in turn duly bought by Pound, who wrote in The Spirit of Romance in 1910 that the story ‘owes its immortal youth purely to the grace of its telling … Andrew Lang was born in order that he might translate it perfectly, and he has fulfilled his destiny, bringing into his English all the gay, sunlit charm of the original.’132 What, however, had seized Williams’ interest, significantly enough, was not the story’s romance but its experimental form, the way it blurred the categories of poetry and prose as he was to do so much himself. Williams may not have known what Pater said about its form, though H.D. and Pound undoubtedly did, but intriguingly in Pater’s interpretation Aucassin and Nicolette uncannily echoes the tentative moves towards new possibilities in poetry that the three young poets were making. Aucassin and Nicolette, Pater points out, is a cantefable, a prose tale, with songs inserted here and there. The prose, he suggests, was only added to give a framework for ‘so moving and attractive’ a series of songs. ‘Yet,’ he continues,
here, as elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A novel art is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and Nicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme, but which halt somehow, and can never take flight, you see people just growing aware of a new music in their possession, and anticipating how pleasant such music might become.133
Pound, H.D. and Williams were to spend the next few years discovering how to capture their new music, in their case, however, moving away from the rhymed poetry that the folk poets behind Aucassin and Nicolette were feeling their way towards, but like them engaged in the ‘formation of a new artistic sense’.