II

POUND’S FIRST FEW months in London were largely lonely and impecunious, even though he wrote to his father in his usual upbeat way, ‘I’ve a fool idea that I am going to make it good in this blooming village’, and three weeks later was saying, ‘Have a vague idea I am going to be a success. I continue to meet people who seem alive’.²⁶ It was only six months after his arrival, when things were looking up, that he was prepared to admit to Mary Moore, albeit still rather indirectly, that it hadn’t all been ‘fun’ to start with.²⁷ One letter to his mother suggests that being far away and friendless made him reconsider – temporarily – his attitude to her. She had just sent him a photograph of herself – ‘more like a proud presbyterian peacock than ever’ was his filial comment – but the photo seems to have awoken or increased his homesickness and his guilt towards her. The letter goes on to offer what he describes as ‘some sort of apology’:

It dawns for me gently that perhaps the holding of a contrary opinion on your part is not a sin against the eternal order of things, and that however diversely we may regard life, society, etc. we may at least commence a polite acquaintance, or even broach some unexplosive intercourse … The necessity of reforming you does not any longer seem imperative.²⁸

Nothing in his later letters suggests that this moment of open-mindedness lasted. As his spirits recovered, he was soon back to scolding her for not following his judgements.

If Pound’s chief aim in coming to London had been to meet Yeats, or, failing him, his fellow Rhymers of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese days of the 1890s, he first needed to find some way of supporting himself. He had arrived with £3 and as many of the unsold copies of A Lume Spento as he could carry, and while Noel Stock in his Life of Ezra Pound suggests he might have sold a few to bookshops, he was in urgent need of funds. He had two main strategies for earning money – publication and lecturing – but he had only been in London a few days when he wrote back to his father that nothing was doing immediately on either front (‘You’ll have to stand the guns for a month or so’).²⁹ But Pound’s efforts slowly paid off. The Regent Street Polytechnic, which he had approached in the hope of lecturing on medieval poetry, had a lecturer ‘obliging enough to die’, as Pound put it, and at the end of September he was offered teaching for the new year.³⁰ The two publishers whom he contacted, Elkin Mathews and John Lane, were slower to respond, but Mathews, even if he did not, as Pound had hoped, immediately offer to republish A Lume Spento, made kindly noises about possibly publishing ‘San Trovaso’ later in the year. Mathews, doubtless chosen by Pound because he was the publisher of Yeats and many of the other Rhymers, was later to give Pound some useful introductions, but few of these appear to have come before the new year, and most of the autumn must have been bleak. In early October Pound was still telling his father that he would need his continued support for a while, and when the next subsidy took some time to arrive he was put out of his first lodgings along with his bags for non-payment of rent. Yet once funds came, and he was settled in lodgings he could just about afford, Pound renewed his card for the British Museum (sponsored by a friend of Katherine Heyman, a contralto, who also lent him ten shillings in his financial crisis), prepared his lecture course, and wrote a few poems, all preoccupied with his desire to be a poet.

Pound’s parents were obviously edgy – understandably – about his lack of clear prospects, and Pound, always believing attack was the best form of defence, tried to ward off their criticisms by blaming Homer for failing to find an American publisher for A Lume Spento. And he had one small success. In October he had the satisfaction of having a poem appear in the Evening Standard and St James’s Gazette, which, he told his father, had a circulation twice that of any other two London evening papers put together. This poem was a curious piece called ‘Histrion’, another attempt perhaps to explain his use of personae. Here he suggests that the poet gets taken over, or even possessed, by the great poets of the past, by Dante, or ‘one François Villon’ or ‘such holy ones I may not write’. The poet is, as it were, a medium through whom the spirits of the dead speak. At one level this poem is another stage in his exploration of the fluid, ever-changing psyche:

’Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere

Translucent, molten gold, that is the ‘I’

And into this some form projects itself.³¹

As almost the only contacts Pound had in London were through the occultist Kitty Heyman, one might wonder if he had been to a seance and taken the metaphor from that, though it has to be said there seems little evidence that Pound, unlike H.D., ever had a practising as opposed to a poetic interest in spiritualism. But it is more likely in any case to be again a metaphor from books rather than life. As Thomas Jackson has pointed out, the idea is taken very directly from a Yeats story, ‘Rosa Alchemica,’ where the ‘divinities’ under whose power the imagination may fall include such figures as Hamlet, Faust, Lear and Beatrice, created rather than creative figures.³² As Pound has expressed it here, the idea is in fact curiously inappropriate to his own poetic practice. Pound’s personae are not those of the established famous writers like Dante, certainly not prophets or angels or whatever kind of holiness he hints at, but less well known and more maverick figures. For example, one of the other poems Pound wrote at about the same time as ‘Histrion’, ‘Marvoil’, is spoken by a typical Pound persona, a little-known Provençal troubadour, ‘Arnaut the Less’, who is on the road, disconsolately but defiantly tucking his verses away in holes in the wall. ‘Marvoil’ is a much more successful poem than ‘Histrion’, but the latter’s uplifting tone and Browningesque blank verse were less challenging for the Gazette. But ‘Histrion’ (‘Histrion’, Pound explained to his father, was, like ‘histrionic’, describing an actor) indicates all the same how powerful was Pound’s sense of his poems as performances, vivid and alive. F.S. Flint, whom Pound had still to meet, was to comment rather sardonically on this poem that ‘though [Pound] would have it that “the masters of the Soul” speak through him, it seems truer to say that he himself speaks through the glamour which their names cast over him’.³³ Pound was still entranced by his past masters; to him indeed they were not the past, but his own present.

Pound’s poetic personae, such as the resilient Arnaut or the irrepressible Cino, though drawn from the past, exemplify for him what the spirit of the modern poet should be. Like other male writers at the period, he was anxious to banish the still widely circulating image of the effeminate poet. Many of the male modernist artists and writers with whom he would work would be much concerned with the creation of a masculine, not to say macho, persona for the artist, though they were to set about it in different ways; Pound, I suggest, found a very American answer. During the nineteenth century, poets or artists, as people who failed to contribute to the thrusting development of a dynamic capitalist economy or to the acquisition of territory, whether in the American West, or in the case of the British, in the Empire, were always suspiciously unmanly. In the latter part of the century, the aesthetes had, to some extent, simply mocked conventional views of masculinity, with their velvet jackets, soft ties, flowing hair and languid movements, but the trials and disgrace of Oscar Wilde had dealt a blow to that form of defiance of gender norms: ‘effeminacy’ and unspeakable vices had become identified in the public mind. In America, whilst the impact of the Wilde scandal was less, the world of the arts and culture had always been considered even more shamefully effeminate than in Britain. Pound needed to create a persona that escaped this ignominy. In America, as in Britain, there were several competing models of masculinity; David Leverenz has argued that by the mid-nineteenth century the entrepreneur, the self-made man, who suffers knocks, picks himself up and goes on to success, was firmly established and remained as the dominant type of American manhood, taking the place of earlier models of masculinity such as the patrician or the artisan.³⁴ American writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is full of examples of the now emasculated patrician, well-bred but timid men, who lack the courage to act in crucial testing situations; among them Winterbourne in James’ Daisy Miller, Leonard Strethers in Wharton’s The House of Mirth, her Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, and Eliot’s Prufrock. One might contrast them with the entrepreneurial Caspar Goodwood, in The Portrait of a Lady, manufacturer of the small domestic article, who at the end of the novel is still refusing to take no for an answer. Pound’s Provençal poets can also be seen as versions of the entrepreneur, down on their luck, but never giving up. You could link them too with another version of American masculinity, on which Leverenz does not touch, the outlaw; the roads of southern France on which Pound imagines his poets wandering may be very different from the Wild West, but they have equally escaped the feminising domestic space. One last model of artistic manhood Pound might have associated with his troubadours and their anarchic extra-marital passions is what Herbert Sussman describes, in his book Victorian Masculinities, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Bohemian’ masculinity, the rejection of bourgeois monogamy and the celebration of desire and artistic freedom.³⁵ At the time Rossetti was still seen as far too feminised – far too much feeling, dreaming, myth-making – but ‘Bohemian’ masculinity would be an important model for many of the modernists, though they freed it further from those feminised associations.

But as far as his career was concerned, Pound, like his troubadours, was still hopeful his luck would turn. Though his original optimism in August that he was ‘going to make it good in this blooming village’ was not likely to have been based on any knowledge of the London scene, in fact he was right to be sanguine. Literary London was indeed in some ways a village, in which it was not as difficult as might be thought to make one’s way. In 1908 London’s intellectual and creative life was based on a series of interconnecting, loosely constituted groups (Pound would describe them as ‘gangs’) which gathered around certain publishers, editors, writers, literary hostesses and actresses, as well as in societies and informal discussion groups. Once a hopeful writer came to meet one circle, other contacts would surely follow, and most circles – though not all – were ready to include a colourful new arrival. Fresh ideas and personalities were welcomed, often indeed eagerly sought. Human nature may, as Virginia Woolf said, have changed around December 1910 (incidentally while Pound was out of the country) but it did not change overnight. The theatre had been a centre of radical questioning since the 1890s. The novel was in vigorous form: Conrad, James, Bennett and Wells were all publishing, and whilst conventionally the latter two are labelled as Edwardian and the first two proto-modernist, they all in different ways were producing deeply etched critiques of their society. There were several flourishing radical, intellectual journals, perhaps most notably in this context, the New Age, where all manner of new movements could be discussed, and where all manner of newcomers, Pound would thankfully discover, could earn some useful cash. The six years between Pound’s arrival and the First World War were politically tense and volatile; the suffragette movement was under its tempestuous way; social unrest and the fear of revolution loomed; the Irish question grew more urgent. The purely literary magazine only came into existence at the end of these years: most of the journals which were to publish Pound’s poetry were also those that debated Home Rule, votes for women, anarchism, socialism, Fabianism, syndicalism, Nietzsche, Bergson and the fourth dimension; the more advanced added prostitution, birth control and free love. There had of course been a Victorian tradition of highly respectable Men of Letters, of whom Virginia Woolf’s father Sir Leslie Stephen was a celebrated example – though it should be noted his letters never included fiction or poetry. There were writers in Edwardian London who achieved positions within the establishment: Sir Edmund Gosse, for example (also better known for his prose than fiction or poetry, though he had published quite an amount of the latter), had been made librarian of the House of Lords in 1904. But even Gosse was a tireless supporter of the still dubious Ibsen, and a loyal friend to the questionable Swinburne. His masterpiece, his autobiography Father and Son, published in 1907, was a delicate pricking of the bubble of Victorian high-mindedness, and much admired by Pound. In later years Pound was to rewrite history with himself as the bearer of light to Edwardian London’s Stygian gloom, insisting that ‘Gosse’s generation … was contemptible, mingy, they were carrots, not animals. Born under the Victorian fugg, insularity, a meagreness, a dwindling.’³⁶ This was a travesty, and certainly not the way that Pound saw the literary world in 1908. In the pre-war years London cultural life combined Edwardian hospitality with a relish for the new and the young. It was a good period for aspiring writers.

Much of Edwardian society, of course, remained hierarchical, hidebound and oppressive – hence the attacks of socialists, suffragists and reformers of every hue. John Gould Fletcher, in his autobiography Life Is My Song, comments that when he first came to London, he met only the radical side of London life, and it was several years before he realised that what he saw as the norm was in fact exceptional. Pound himself had a not dissimilar experience, although he never analysed it so clearly. In addition, he would find that some of those who were open minded in their approach to literature could turn out to be alarmingly rigid when it came to observing social conventions, as Pound was to find to his cost. But the metropolis in modern times has always been the place where class barriers are most permeable, and the first years of the century were seeing a shift – a slow shift – towards at any rate elements of a meritocracy, though there were many, both snobs and socialists, who complained that it was becoming more of a plutocracy. There was some truth in the latter accusation, though even that had the merit of weakening the old class structure. Douglas Goldring, an aspiring writer whom Pound would shortly meet, and whose sparkling memoir, South Lodge, gives a vivid picture of contemporary cultural life, argues that there was, before the First World War, a community in London which could be called the ‘literary world’, his main home, distinct and very different from ‘Society’, in which he also had a walk-on part, being an impecunious but well-bred ex-public schoolboy, as a partner at débutantes’ balls. To a Society woman, Goldring writes, ‘Every man belonging to any of the Services, [he means, naturally, as an officer] was … automatically “pukka”, while writers and artists – unless, of course they were rich, famous or titled – were … automatically “awful”.’³⁷ This was a situation that distressed some, like Ford Madox Hueffer, who wanted to be thought a gentleman, and who complained that the English regarded writers as socially somewhere between a governess and a butler. Compared with Paris, there were few bohemian enclaves in London, at any rate when Pound arrived, and certainly no absence of class-consciousness among London writers and artists, but class worked more flexibly with them than in many other sections of society. Pound would meet a range of gifted individuals who came from working- or lower middle-class backgrounds, including D. H. Lawrence, F.S. Flint and Desmond FitzGerald, who made their way none the less. The upper and upper middle classes were not in any case as uniformly philistine as Goldring suggests. One perhaps should bear in mind Shaw’s distinction between Heartbreak House and Headlong Hall, between what one would now call the chattering classes and the huntin’ and shootin’ brigade. There were a number of well-to-do hostesses who were delighted to entertain intellectuals and artists regardless of class or nationality – the most famous, of course, being Lady Ottoline Morrell, satirised so cruelly for her pains as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love. Pound himself does not appear to have met Lady Ottoline until the post-war years, but there were others ready to tolerate or indeed welcome a noisy and boisterous American poet. In his early days in London, he helped to keep them entertained, while they helped to keep him adequately fed. During the autumn of 1908, however, Pound had not yet come across such hostesses, nor seen much sign of literary circles. All the same, when not in the British Museum, he hovered hopefully round Elkin Mathews’ premises, surmising, with sound instinct, that something would turn up.