IX

MEANWHILE, POUND’S SECOND year of graduate work at Penn continued to go badly. His fellowship was not renewed, and he left at the end of the summer term in 1907. His parents must have been mortified, as no doubt was Pound himself, but there is no sign he was prepared to admit it. He found a summer job as a private tutor in New Jersey, in the town of Trenton, north-east of Philadelphia, and an easy train journey from Jenkintown station, though in quite the opposite direction from Upper Darby. It was here he met the most significant of those ‘others’ of whom Williams spoke. As far as H.D. knew, there was no change in their ‘understanding’, but in Trenton Pound began another relationship. Perhaps Pound found his love affair with H.D. in some ways as overwhelming as she did, and needed some space; in addition, at this particular time, visits to Upper Darby must have been associated with the humiliating end to his Penn career. Here he could cut a fresh dash as a brilliant private teacher. Whether or not Pound was trying to loosen his ties with H.D., he needed admiration and he needed an audience, and he found women much more ready to satisfy such needs than men. He was mocked by most of his male confrères, but with his fine features and fiery curls, he had more success with women.

The young woman who provided the welcome audience in Trenton was Mary Moore, daughter of the well-to-do vice-president of the Trenton Street Railway, a lively, attractive woman, a year or two older than Pound, intelligent but without intellectual pretensions. She was very taken with Pound, but she laughed at him a great deal, which he seemed to enjoy for a change. He did not tell her about his ‘understanding’ with H.D., nor, it appears, H.D. of his new attachment to Mary. According to Mary Moore, things never went further than a peck on her forehead; they were, she said later, just ‘warm, loving friends’.¹⁵⁹ Even if this may have been a little economical with the truth, this love affair appears to have had little of the physical or the poetic intensity of the relationship with H.D., which was surely not all on H.D.’s side. Pound may well himself have felt a certain guilt over that passionate, if unconsummated, relationship. Nicely brought up American young men of his day were often almost as sexually inhibited as the young women – T.S. Eliot and John Gould Fletcher are cases in point. His relationship with Mary Moore was good-natured fun, which he seems to have found quite a relief.

At the end of the summer of 1907 Pound found a job at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in the Midwest. The principal, Dr George Mackintosh, had journeyed to Wyncote to interview him, and promptly offered him a post. Things had clearly been sticky at home since he failed to have the scholarship renewed, and Pound wrote triumphantly to his mother, on holiday in New York: ‘& blessed of most blessed jokes on you dear I did it all without those essentials of all life, a coat, a collar, or a necktie, also my shoes were not shined’. He was to be chairman and entire staff of the new Department of Romance Languages, so would have the ‘whole d——d dept [of] French Spanish & Italian to run as I hang please’.¹⁶⁰ He had been imported to help modernise the curriculum, which up till then had taught no modern languages. Competition for students was fierce, and Wabash had to catch up with what the more established East Coast colleges were offering. Wabash College was Pound’s first experience of the Midwest. If he thought Philadelphia provincial, he now discovered he had hardly realised what the concept meant. He would have shocked Crawfordsville without trying, but his reaction to its almost uniform sobriety was to become more flamboyant than ever. He taught with his feet on the desk; he ostentatiously poured rum into his tea; he smoked because it was forbidden and he strenuously avoided chapel, though not only because it was compulsory. Student opinion was divided: some idolised him; many were disapproving. The faculty was nervous.

Pound tried to make friends, and even had one or two flirtations, but there is no doubt that for the most part he felt intensely lonely. In one of the poems he wrote there, ‘In Durance’, he says,

I am homesick after mine own kind,

Oh I know there are folk about me, friendly faces,

But I am homesick after mine own kind

… that know, and feel

And have some breath for beauty and the arts.¹⁶¹

If congenial friends were not there, Pound at any rate could write to them. Letters poured out from Crawfordsville to Mary Moore, as well as to H.D, and to Viola Baxter, with whom he had corresponded since 1905, and no doubt as well to William Brooke Smith, who was spending the summer with his friends Sheeler and Schamberg, painting in the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, debating whether after all, in the face of family opposition, to continue to study painting. In his exile Pound was writing a good deal of poetry, and beginning to formulate his own poetic theories, still largely in the Paterian mode, but with hints of a new direction. His letters to H.D. and Will are not extant, but the ones to Mary Moore and Viola Baxter include speculations on art – and copies of his poems – and no doubt H.D.’s and Smith’s did too. By now he was emphasising different literary masters from those in the ‘armfuls of books’ he carried to H.D. Yeats’ poetry and essays (themselves much influenced by Pater) had by now become important to him, and Pound’s nascent theories of art were heavily dependent on his Ideas of Good and Evil, published in 1903, particularly the essays on William Blake, in which Yeats presents Blake as the poet-artist who ‘announced the religion of art’, and for whom ‘the world of the imagination’ was the same as ‘the world of eternity’.¹⁶² Following Yeats, even using the same Blake quotations, though often misquoting them, Pound draws on Blake to put forward a view of artistic creation as a mystic path to the divine: ‘Wm Blake,’ he tells Viola Baxter, ‘has given us this dictum: “Noah’s rainbow, the triple bow of music, poetry, painting,” by which we ascend “to meet God in the air”.’ Pound had by 1907 rejected conventional religion as ‘Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art’. Now his imaginative engagement with the visionary was, like Yeats’, translated into aesthetic terms. Swedenborg’s ‘angelic language’, he tells Viola Baxter, ‘I choose to interpret into “artistic utterance”’. ‘I am interested in art and ecstasy,’ he explained, ‘ecstasy which I would define as the action of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and means of transmuting, passing on that ecstasy to others.’¹⁶³

All the poems in Hilda’s Book had been ‘ecstatic’ in one way or another. For the most part they were visionary love poems, singularly, almost innocently free of the pains of disappointed desire and the cruel femmes fatales that mark Rossetti and Swinburne’s poetry. Some recorded a kind of pantheistic mysticism, where the poet ‘draw[s] back into the soul of things’, in a mode which was perhaps influenced again by Yeats. Several critics have pointed out that the poem ‘The Tree’ (‘I stood still and was a tree amid the wood/Knowing the truth of things unseen before’), which Pound was to reprint many times, is indebted to Yeats’ ‘He Thinks of his Past Greatness’: ‘I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young/And weep because I know all things now:/ I have been a hazel-tree …’¹⁶⁴ Others, however, such as Louis Martz, have suggested that on another level Pound is recording or emulating here the very passionate response of H.D., his ‘Dryad’, to the Upper Darby woods. Pound writes elsewhere in Hilda’s Book, that ‘She hath some tree-born spirit of the wood/About her’, and ‘She swayeth as the poplar tree/When the wind bloweth merrily.’¹⁶⁵ Did Pound learn from H.D.? In Her, which is threaded with allusions to this particular poem, there is very much the suggestion that the George Lowndes figure wants to enter Hermione’s feelings about trees but never quite does: ‘he hadn’t known it was a live oak till she told him … he would never love a tree … George smells of morocco bindings …’¹⁶⁶ Perhaps H.D extended Pound’s response to the natural world, or at any rate his sense of the need to respond; he would later write of the importance for the poetic mind of being close to ‘the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive’.¹⁶⁷ For now, however, it remained for him a universe very much mediated through books, and at this stage, at any rate, Pound seems to have valued what precipitated the visionary state, be it girl or tree, more for the ecstasy induced rather than as a being in her or itself. All the same, when Pound’s collected shorter poems appeared in 1926, incidentally when H.D. was beginning work on Her, ‘The Tree’, the only poem preserved from Hilda’s Book, appears first, as what has been described as a programme leader for the entire volume.¹⁶⁸

Pound was later to say dismissively that he spent all those early years in a haze of mysticism, but he was never to lose his belief that one role of art was to keep alive a sense of vision and transcendent beauty. But much of Pound’s poetry, then and later, dealt with states of mind besides ecstasy; he needed other theories as well. Besides Yeats, Pound was attracted by the more terrestrial poetry of Robert Browning, who led him to rather different ways of thinking about the writing of poetry.¹⁶⁹ From 1906 onwards he had begun to draw on Browning’s dramatic monologues, set for the most part in Renaissance Italy, passionate, vivid, psychologically subtle, as a model for his treatment of Provençal figures. He wrote to Viola that ‘Ovid began that particular sort of subjective personality analysis in his “Heroides” & Browning is after 2000 years about the first person to do anything more with it. I follow – humbly of course? doing by far the best job of any of them? not quite.’¹⁷⁰ Like Browning, Pound takes a figure, often historical, often indeed, in Pound’s case, a poet, presenting him (or very, very exceptionally, her) in his or her own words. Pound gives much less circumstantial detail than Browning. As he explained to Williams the next year:

To me the short so called dramatic lyric – at any rate the sort of thing I do, is the poetic part of a drama the rest of which – to me the prose part – is left to the readers immagination or implied or set in a short note – I catch the character I happen to be interested in at the moment he interests me – usualy a moment of song, self-analysis, or sudden understanding, or revelation. & the rest of the play would bore me and presumably the reader. I paint my man as I conceive him.¹⁷¹

Browning’s often lengthy explorations became Paterian moments. For Pater himself, who like the Pre-Raphaelites greatly admired Browning, it was indeed the moment of epiphany at the heart of the Browning poem that was its core. Browning, Pater says, ‘apprehends’ a character in ‘some delicate pause of life’ … ‘we have a single moment of passion thrown into relief after this exquisite fashion’. But to do this, he has to employ ‘the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine thought and passion a thousandfold’. Pound’s aim was to go straight to the heart of the matter.¹⁷² Yet Pound’s glancing, oblique use of personae might be seen, not only as the continuation of Paterian aesthetics, but also as one of the significant proto-modernist aspects of his early poetry in its emphasis on subjectivity. Browning’s personae, embedded as they are in a very specific historical world, have a particularised context like a character in a realist novel. Pound, as he explains to Williams, is interested in a psychological moment. Any historical context for his personae is at most implied, or sometimes provided by a note or the title; what Pound presents is a fleeting insight. His concern is with what Virginia Woolf – and the Bloomsbury group were also very much the heirs of Pater – would describe as ‘moments of being’.

Each of the figures that Pound dramatised, he told Viola, was a persona, or a mask, through which to ‘give you that part of me which is most real, most removed from the transient personality’.¹⁷³ In this he may be thinking to some extent of Blake’s distinction, described by Yeats, between the immortal and the mortal man, but he is also in tune with a very contemporary change in the understanding of the psyche. With his distinction between the real and the transient personality, the underlying and the apparent, he sounds akin to Lawrence in his later desire to get away from the novelistic convention of ‘the old stable ego of character’, which for Lawrence is a psychologically false ascription of essential identity to surface qualities: as Lawrence was to write to Edward Garnett in 1914:

There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond – but I say ‘diamond, what! This is carbon.’ And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.’)¹⁷⁴

Both Lawrence and Pound’s formulations can be seen as variants on Freud’s ego and the unconscious (in Lawrence’s case probably a conscious variation). The public face, ready, as Eliot puts it, ‘to meet the faces that you meet’, the prepared manner, would be for the modernists necessarily a surface only.¹⁷⁵ Pound, as a shameless self-fashioner, was always aware of that. In addition, in the twentieth-century world of movement and change, the possibility of even apparently stable identities was disappearing. Pound already knew he had no secure identity as a Philadelphian, nor as a Presbyterian, nor, with his parents’ uncertain social standing, as a member of a definite social class. In the metropolitan world of London, most of his fellow-poets of the imagist years were drifters and hybrids like himself, déclassé, expatriates, outsiders anywhere. The use of the persona, he wrote later, was part of an endless search:

In the ‘search for oneself’, in the search for ‘sincere self-expression’, one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says ‘I am’ this, that, or the other, and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.

I begin this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self in each poem.¹⁷⁶

As these letters to Viola show, Pound had begun the search even before the 1909 Personae. The self has become something momentary, provisional, changing. Like Yeats and Eliot, he uses these masks as a way of exploring this; for them all the self was elusive, divided, contradictory, only to be understood indirectly and through metaphor. In Crawfordsville he had already discovered what was to be one of his most necessary poetic forms. In the early years these personae were generally Provençal or other medieval figures – Cino, Peire Vidal, Bertrans de Born: in his Cantos, Pound takes on the persona of Odysseus. His 1926 collection of shorter poems he again called Personae, to stress his central poetic method; even his translations, he admitted, were in their way just more elaborate forms of these masks.

The influence of Browning on Pound was not necessarily in opposition to that of Yeats, who himself in The Wind Among the Reeds speaks through a variety of different figures, also identifiable as personae. Yeats was himself developing a theory of the mask, but Pound could not have been aware of that, though he may well have known Wilde’s dictum that ‘man is least himself when he talks in his own person … give him a mask and he will tell you the truth’; one of Wilde’s essays was, after all, called ‘The Truth of Masks’.¹⁷⁷ The majority of Pound’s personae are exiles, itinerant, out of favour with the world, defiant, like, for example, Cino Polnesi, a wandering, unsuccessful poet, in another poem he wrote in Crawfordsville:

Bah! I have sung women in three cities,

But it is all the same;

And I will sing of the sun.¹⁷⁸

This persona has clear links with Pound’s own predicament, the unacknowledged poet in a hostile environment; even the small detail about the women, ‘they mostly had grey eyes’, could well owe something to Mary Moore and H.D.’s grey eyes. Pound wrote to Viola Baxter of his poetry, ‘Some is literature, some mere autobiography’; it was perhaps, at some level, both, but it is not autobiographical in any straightforward sense.¹⁷⁹ The careless insouciant Cino is as much what Pound desires to be as what he is.

Yet if Pound was constructing personae who had no truck with domestic and bourgeois life, his letters to Mary Moore, when not about poetry, were much concerned with plans for creating an agreeable home. He wrote to her almost daily, warmly and affectionately, discussing at length his choice of living accommodation, and apparently taking it for granted that she would join him out there as his wife. Not having her replies one can only guess her response. Whatever she felt about Pound, her upbringing in an elegant and rich home on the East Coast could not have made her eager to join him in a place that he later described as the ‘most God-forsakenest area of the middle west’ and where he eventually admitted the plumbing was beneath one of her upbringing.¹⁸⁰ The Moore family house was on a grand scale, used as alternative accommodation for the New Jersey Legislature when the State House was being repaired. Pound talks enthusiastically about his efforts to make Hell into a home on $3 a week, how he intends to follow William Morris’ advice to have one big room in which one might cook and sleep in different corners, his anxiety that even if they can lead the simple life they will scarcely find enough to eat’.¹⁸¹ In London Brigit Patmore, who was to become a close friend of himself and H.D., was to comment on Pound’s skill in making a place home-like on a shoestring, but at this stage these plans were in vain. The letters read in fact as if he is constructing a fantasy of togetherness to protect himself against his lonely actuality, and he may not have paid much attention to Mary’s prevarications. He even sent her Kitty Heyman’s ring, there being nowhere to buy a ring in the neighbourhood, and told her they were engaged. A few weeks later she wrote to say she was engaged to someone else, one Oscar Macpherson. Mary Moore did not marry Oscar Macpherson; one might wonder if he was invented solely for the purpose of quieting Pound down, but a further letter from Pound indicates that Oscar was an earlier admirer whom Pound had only temporarily succeeded in displacing. Pound blamed himself for writing to her about poetry – it was his ‘Mat Arnoldesque high seriousness’ that he was sure had put her off: ‘You don’t like geniuses’.¹⁸² He went on writing to her, in as affectionate a manner as ever. She must have returned the ring, because by Christmas Pound was formally engaged to H.D. and the ring passed on to her. H.D.’s version of this emerges in another exchange she records with her physician/confidant Erich Heydt:

‘You didn’t say he gave you a ring. Did he give you a ring?’ ‘Of course …’ ‘It was announced, everyone knew it?’ ‘O, how you get hold of the unimportant details. Yes, no. I mean, it was understood but my parents were unhappy about it and I was shy and frightened. I didn’t have the usual conventional party – lunch, dinner or announcement dance, if that is what you mean. But what does it matter?’

‘His parents came to see you?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘They were pleased?’ ‘Very – mine weren’t, as I say. Mrs Pound brought me an exquisite pearl pendant.’¹⁸³

Pound’s parents were indeed delighted. They were very fond of H.D., and she of them, but her own parents remained anxious. Their fears were justified. On 17 February 1908 Pound wrote to his father: ‘Dear Dad, Have had a bust up but came out with enough to take me to Europe. Home Saturday or Sunday. Don’t let mother get excited.’ And he added as a not entirely coherent afterthought, ‘I guess something that one does not see but something very big & white book of the destinies has the turning & the leading of things & this thing & I breathe again … In fact you need say nothing to mother till I come.’¹⁸⁴

What exactly had happened has never been entirely clear. It appears to have been the last in a series of unfortunate events involving Pound that had made the college authorities increasingly twitchy about him. The story he told H.D. is probably as reliable as any of them about the final incident, which involved an actress: ‘I found her in the snow, when I went to post a letter. She was stranded from a travelling variety company. She had nowhere to go. I asked her to my room. She slept in my bed. I slept on the floor.’¹⁸⁵ He was dismissed forthwith, but when he challenged the college to prove immorality they realised they could not and offered payment for the rest of the year if he went quietly; they then rethought and offered him his job back, but he refused it, apparently to the satisfaction of all concerned. Pound was, it was said, ‘a Latin Quarter type’, not suitable for the puritan Midwest.¹⁸⁶ Crawfordsville remained for Pound the epitome of an environment that destroyed artists. In the first version of the second of his Cantos, published in 1917, he tells the story of a painter who had returned there after ten years in Paris, and was now utterly unable to practise his art:

And when I knew him,

Back once again, in middle Indiana,

Acting as usher in the theatre,

Painting the local drug-shop and soda bars.¹⁸⁷

Pound felt that he had had a lucky escape.

When he returned home, Philadelphia was aflame with rumours. ‘There is more to it than that …’ was the general verdict on Pound’s tale. Pound was delighted to escape Wabash and excited by the possibility of an escape to Europe on his Wabash earnings, but whilst he enjoyed shocking pink-and-drab Philadelphia he was simultaneously and contradictorily hurt by the hostility. This was to be a repeated pattern in his life: he relished shock tactics, but was dismayed by the enmity they aroused. H.D. wrote that ‘almost everyone I knew in Philadelphia was against him, after that Wabash college debâcle’.¹⁸⁸ To Williams she said that Pound was ‘torn and lonely’.¹⁸⁹ Professor and Mrs Doolittle felt the engagement was now impossible; ‘it terribly upset [Pound’s] parents,’ H.D. recalled, ‘and at the time, Mr Pound more or less formally asked me not to “drop” Ezra.’¹⁹⁰ She might possibly have stood out against her parents had it not been for a revelation from a friend. ‘“Anyway,” an old school friend confided, as if to cheer me up, “they say he was engaged to Mary Moore, anyhow. Bessie Elliot could have had him for the asking. There was Louise Skidmore, before that” … The engagement, such as it was, was shattered.’¹⁹¹

At the time, H.D. was devastated, but in retrospect she came to realise, not just that ‘Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call “Air and Crystal”’, but that, in spite of the cataclysmic end, she had gained immeasurably from that relationship:

You would have broken my wings,

but the very fact that you knew

I had wings, set some seal

on my bitter heart, my heart

broke and fluttered and sang.¹⁹²

Pound, she thought, ‘broke [the engagement] by subconscious or even conscious intention’.¹⁹³ He feared control, perhaps especially by women. At this point, in his isolation, he probably longed at one level for companionship, but he was also making it impossible. He was seeing Mary Moore as well as begging H.D. to go to Europe with him. It was bound to come out. Who was more important to him, H.D. or Mary Moore? Biographers are divided. He was clearly attached to both, in very different ways. Pound loved flirtations. He loved acting the part of the lover. But whether he ever cathected, as Freud would put it, to an object of desire, whether he ever felt a particular woman was essential to his happiness, as opposed to helpful to his art, is hard to estimate. The women in his love poems were, as H.D. complained, out of books. The erotic charge in his poetry comes from the masculine energy of his poetic lovers. Pound was well aware of each of his women as an individual human being, and he always wanted to remain, and mainly succeeded in remaining, good friends, years after any dalliance might have passed. To his women, he was faithless as a lover, but loyal as a friend. It made some of them, like H.D., deeply unhappy.

Pound remained immensely fond of Mary Moore, but he appears to have been content for their relationship to be that of ‘warm, loving friends’, as she put it. He found it harder to make the break with H.D., who had a more problematic hold over him, as we shall see. Norman Holmes Pearson was to write to H.D. fifty years later: ‘if there is a single person to whom Ezra has been constant (don’t laugh, my dear) it is you’.¹⁹⁴

Pound left for Europe, by himself, on 17 March 1908.