IN JANUARY 1909 Pound began his lectures at the Regent Street Polytechnic, with a fluctuating audience whose vagaries he put down, perhaps rightly, to weather and transport; if he didn’t always have the 55 with which he began (he observed gleefully to his father that Shakespeare’s Comedies only had 19) he still had a good turnout. Pound was not just concerned about his popularity; payment depended on the numbers who attended. Then, to his delight, Mathews agreed to publish a collection, in his ‘best series’, that would bring together some of A Lume Spento poems, some of A Quinzaine, as well as some other earlier and more recent poems. Mathews even said that he would again pay for the publication, a fact of which Pound made a great deal, since unknowns generally had to pay their way as he had done in Venice and with the first edition of A Quinzaine. Pound put this largesse down to his own exceptional talent, but in fact the generous-hearted Mathews appears to have done this quite often.
Things were looking up in other ways as well. Pound was at last beginning to make friends. Mathews introduced him to a young poet his own age, James Griffyth Fairfax, of Australian origins, though he came from the class that governed Australia, and had been given a thoroughly British upper-class education, which the higher echelons of British colonials always insisted on for their sons. Jim Fairfax, as he was generally known, had been to Winchester College and New College, Oxford, as had the late Lionel Johnson, one of several of the Rhymers to die young. Fairfax’s first book of poems, The Gates of Sleep, which Mathews had published in 1906, when Fairfax was still an undergraduate, is clearly the work of an avid disciple of Johnson’s work and is dedicated ‘To Lionel Johnson. From one who stands at the foot of the heights to one who has ascended them, from a Wykehamist to a Wykehamist, greeting.’50 (With a dedication like that, it is not surprising that he eventually gave up poetry and became a Conservative MP.) Fairfax, who was only Pound’s age, had brought out a much-admired second book of poems in 1908, and Pound told his father that Fairfax was quite possibly to be the Tennyson or Swinburne of the next generation; his letters to his parents for the next few months are full of such extravagant comparisons. He needed to impress them with the high potential, if not actual achievements, of those he met.
Taken under the wing of the well-connected Fairfax, whose parents had now returned permanently to England, Pound began to make contacts. At the home of Mrs Eva Fowler, an American married to a Leeds businessman, who hosted a salon as well as organising seances, he met Yeats’ friend and, though Pound would not then have known this, former lover, Olivia Shakespear. Pound wrote back excitedly to his parents that she was ‘undoubtedly the most charming woman in London’.51 Many would probably have concurred, though as Pound up to that time appears to have met very few women in London, apart from several landladies, one of whom had thrown him out, he had scarcely the authority to make such a pronouncement. But Pound never regarded factual evidence as necessary for authoritative dicta. Olivia, then in her forties, was still a remarkably beautiful woman, highly intelligent and well read, a novelist and playwright, and, like most of Yeats’ friends, interested in the occult. Lionel Johnson had been her cousin, and it was through him that she had originally met Yeats. Yeats, though spending much of his time in Ireland, still kept the flat in Woburn Walk where Olivia had helped him lose his virginity, and she assured Pound that she would soon effect an introduction. In the meantime, her drawing-room was a constant meeting place for writers and artists. Olivia had a twenty-two-year-old daughter, Dorothy, also very beautiful, though in a somewhat reserved and proper way; Yeats described her as looking like porcelain. Olivia had brought up her daughter with very English care. Both Olivia and her husband Hope came from Anglo-Indian families, often, as E. M. Forster was to point out, more fiercely English than their compatriots at home, and she took no chances. (Olivia Shakespear’s father had been in the Indian Army; Hope’s grandfather, Sir Hope Shakespear, had taken part in the relief of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny, while his father had been in the Indian Civil Service.) Dorothy was sent to a select girls’ boarding-school, spent a year in Geneva perfecting her French, and then remained at home, an unusual home in so far as it was frequented by literary and artistic figures, many of whom led far from conventional lives, but Dorothy herself was watched over with utmost propriety. She read, painted, sewed, went out to concerts and lectures, but always with her mother. Dorothy was a gifted artist, but she never seems to have felt she deserved a career as an artist in her own right. Until this time, she appears to have accepted this life, content to remain a cool observer rather than a participant. There is nothing to indicate that Pound particularly noticed Dorothy at first, but she was very taken with him, and found him deeply romantic. She wrote in her diary, after his second visit: ‘He has a wonderful, beautiful face … Some people have complained of untidy boots … how could they look at his boots, when there is his moving, beautiful face to watch? … Oh Ezra! how beautiful you are! With your pale face and fair hair! I wonder – are you a genius? or are you only an artist in Life? … I think he has passed most of his life in tracts of barren waste – and suffered that which is untellable.’52
Pound had been invited to tea at Olivia Shakespear’s along with another of Fairfax’ friends, Frederic Manning, four years older than Fairfax and also from the Australian governing class. As a child and youth Manning had suffered from asthma, and though academically gifted, had been educated almost entirely at home. In his teenage years his tutor had been an Englishman, Arthur Galton, an accomplished classical scholar, who had gone to Australia as a private secretary to the Governor. When Galton, a close friend of Lionel Johnson, decided to come back to England in the later 1890s, he brought Frederic with him to complete his education, introducing him to his many aesthete friends and taking him on European visits. In the wake of the Wilde scandal, however, Galton became increasingly conservative; he had converted to Catholicism in his twenties, but now became an Anglican vicar, writing anti-Catholic theological tomes rather than the literary criticism that he had earlier published. By 1909 he had been settled for some years in a parish in Lincolnshire, and his vicarage in Edenham remained Manning’s main home, though he regularly visited London. To aficionados of Bleak House, Lincolnshire scarcely seems a good choice for an asthmatic, but Dickens was perhaps guilty of meteorological slander, and Manning in any case needed the quiet. Under Galton’s tuition, he had become formidably erudite, and hoped for a literary career himself, but although he enjoyed meeting Galton’s cultured London acquaintances, his physical strength was never great, and the long periods back in Edenham were essential to him.
Galton was a friend of Olivia Shakespear, whom, like Yeats, he had met through her cousin Lionel Johnson, whose somewhat inefficient literary executor he now was. Pound was impressed to discover that Manning, as an adolescent, had met Johnson himself. Manning is now best known for his powerful novel about the First World War, The Middle Parts of Fortune, brought out anonymously in 1929, and not generally available unexpurgated until 1943, but at the time Pound met him, Manning had just published a long and melodramatic, though racily told verse narrative, The Vigil of Brunhild, about the passionate life and hideous death of a seventh-century Merovingian queen. Pound reviewed it enthusiastically that April for the Philadelphian Book News Monthly. (Other reviews were not so positive; significantly The Vigil’s only other admiring reviewer was Sir Henry Newbolt.) Manning’s poetry at this stage was derivative (shades of Morris sagas, with a touch of nineties decadence) and most of it was rather more static than the vigorous Vigil, but it had its own individual stamp. It is not surprising that during the next few years Pound was to be a great deal more friendly with Manning, even though they had intermittent rows, than with the more conventional Fairfax. Like Pound, Manning loved the past: later that year, he published a prose work entitled Scenes and Portraits, imaginary conversations between figures, some historical and some fictional, a form Pound would later imitate. The conversations were witty, subtle and ironic yet also melancholy, a Pater-inflected probing into some kind of spirituality on the other side of organised religion, a theme that deeply appealed to Pound, and clearly to others of the day, for the book was a critical success. In addition, Manning, like Fairfax, had excellent contacts, and he was ready to put them at Pound’s disposal.
Manning promised to send a copy of Pound’s poems to Sir Henry Newbolt and to introduce Pound to Laurence Binyon, the ‘Wordsworth-Matthew Arnold of today’ as Pound described him in his letter home.53 Binyon had not been a member of the Rhymers’ Club – he was still an undergraduate at Oxford when that was formed – but he had published several volumes of poetry with Mathews, as well as editing the Shilling Garland series for him. As far as subject-matter was concerned, the poems of his first and second book of London Visions (1897 and 1898) were considerably more modern than anything Pound had written so far, focusing on the urban everyday scene: those who have ‘visions’ are the poor and the ordinary, not the rich or the cultivated. The poems, compassionate and moving, have titles such as ‘The Convict’, ‘Whitechapel Road’, ‘The Road Menders, ‘To a Derelict’ and ‘The Rag-Picker’. Their language is a curious mixture of the direct and the contrived, natural speech rhythms cut across by poetic inversions, but if Binyon was an uneven poet, he was a man of deep sympathy, which gives his work a most attractive humanity and serves as a reminder that many of the nineties poets, contrary to their image as dreamy aesthetes, had socialist sympathies of one sort or another. Yeats and Ernest Rhys, the founders of the Rhymers, originally met at a socialist gathering at William Morris’ house, though that was, on Yeats’ part at any rate, a short-lived enthusiasm.
Binyon, like Pound in these years, and so many of the poets of the 1890s, loved experimenting in old and new metrical forms, but with the turn of the century he came, like others at the time, increasingly to value the rhythms of speech. In 1901 he joined another group of writers and artists associated with Yeats, mainly based in Bedford Park, who were later known as ‘the Masquers’, aiming to promote Yeats’ ideas about a ‘Theatre of Beauty’, in particular his emphasis on musical speech in drama. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Binyon’s best-known lines, from his war poem ‘For the Fallen’, are more ‘musical speech’ than conventional poetry:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.54
Binyon’s own poetry always remained to some extent wedded to metre and rhyme (and indeed inversions – when Pound reviewed Binyon’s translation of the Inferno in 1934, which in general he admired, he thought the inversions its chief blemish), but he is an example of the zeal for new directions in poetry, particularly for speech rhythms, already present in London when Pound arrived. Binyon was another possible route to Yeats, though Pound liked him very much for his own sake, finding time spent with him ‘delightful’, and writing to his father: ‘[Binyon] seems to be one of the best loved men in London, a sort of pervading slow charm in him & his work’.55 Binyon’s ‘slow charm’ was obviously memorable; much later Pound was to write of him in Canto 87, ‘BinBin “is beauty”./”Slowness is beauty”’.56
Binyon’s most important influence on Pound was, however, in alerting him to the wealth of Far Eastern art. Binyon earned his living as an Assistant Keeper in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum. He spent most of his working day researching and writing as he pleased – Pound was envious of the lightness of his duties, writing to his father that ‘Binyon gets paid for doing pretty much what I do in the museum’.57 Binyon was already an authority on Chinese and Japanese art, of which the British Museum had some wonderful examples, not all of them obtained by the most ethical of means. Binyon’s first book about this art, Painting in the Far East, had been published in 1908, and in March 1909 Pound went to some lectures that Binyon gave on Oriental and European art, which he found of great interest. Though it was some time before that interest would bear fruit, Binyon played a significant role in leading Pound to appreciate the Far Eastern aesthetic. Binyon was another friend of Olivia Shakespear, and later helped to arrange for Dorothy to make copies of Japanese woodcuts and other Chinese and Japanese painting in the British Museum, something she began to do as a way of training herself as an artist well before Pound had come to feel that the Chinese ideogram was vital for his conception of poetry. Two of the delicate line-drawings she copied from Chinese prints in the British Museum have been reproduced, with her son Omar’s permission, in Zhaoming Qian’s Orientalism and Modernism.58 Half a century after she first discovered this art, in her rather sad old age, Dorothy wrote to Patricia Hutchins that at least the mountains around her in Italy were a continual delight; they reminded her of Japanese and Chinese drawings.
Pound, to his great joy, also began to meet some of the original members of the Rhymers’ Club. He was introduced to Ernest Rhys, now more preoccupied with setting up the Everyman’s Library for Dent than with poetry, but kindly and hospitable. He invited Pound to his home in Hampstead, as he had started up there a weekly gathering of literary people, to which later in the year he would invite D. H. Lawrence, ‘resuming’, as he puts it in his autobiography, ‘the evenings at the Olde Cheshire Cheese’, though instead of ‘old ale and other time-honoured liquors’, after supper they had a ‘claret-cup with a little tarragon and pomegranate juice interfused’.59 These meetings worried Pound’s parents, who knew enough to connect Rhymers with decadence; quite unfairly so as far as the domestically inclined, uxorious Rhys was concerned. Pound wrote back emphatically that ‘Rhys’s crowd has the wholesomest to perhaps most delightful atmosphere I have found in London’.60 He also met Selwyn Image, who had written some poetry but was principally a designer and stained-glass maker, one of the founders in 1882 of the Century Guild, an arts and crafts guild whose exquisitely produced journal, the Hobby Horse, had been published by the Bodley Head. Image had designed many of Mathews’ books, including the Shilling Garland series, and although ten years older, was a close friend of Binyon’s and the Shakespears. Not long after Pound met him, he was appointed the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Pound was greatly taken by his charm (Rhys described him as ‘the most naturally urbane man you could meet’), and Pound was most excited by his stories of meeting Verlaine and others.61 When he met another of the Rhymers, John Todhunter, he reported home, clearly impressed, that he had known Browning and Morris.
Pound was now in the best of spirits: ‘Everyone seems to treat me rather decently and I don’t mind at all,’ he told his parents. He had a good word for everyone, especially the Shakespears, ‘the nicest people in London’.62 Not only was London welcoming, but it liked his poetry. Sir Henry Newbolt himself had sent a note praising A Quinzaine. The Shakespears asked him to read his unpublished work in their drawing-room. Fairfax saw to it that his poems were praised in the Oxford magazines. Maurice Hewlett, the well-known novelist, had agreed to write a preface for the new collection, now entitled Personae, though in the event he was ill and couldn’t do so. Particularly kind was another new acquaintance, who was to remain a staunch supporter and loyal friend, the novelist May Sinclair, whom he met at Ernest Rhys’ house. She sent a warm letter of congratulations on reading A Quinzaine, saying some of the poems were perfect, that his voice was excitingly new and that he had things to say. All of this Pound relayed to his parents, who were getting bothered again at his lack of settled income. In a low moment in the autumn he had agreed to return to America after his lectures finished in late February 1909. Now he was insisting it was far too soon. Quite apart from anything else, Yeats was arriving in the near future: ‘I don’t think such chances of acquaintance should be lost … This being in the gang & being known by the right people ought to mean a lot better introduction of “Personae”, reviewing etc.’63 Pound’s instincts as self-promoter were at work again. There can be no doubt he wanted to meet Yeats because of his immense admiration for him, but he was also very clear-eyed about the advantages that might be drawn from that contact.
If Londoners were ready to praise Pound’s poetry, he was ready to return the compliment. He wrote to his father that Mathews had given him a free run of his shelves, and that he had found that ‘the contemporary people seem to be making as good stuff as the theoretical giants of the past’.64 He repeated his praises to Williams; already by early 1909 he was writing that ‘London, deah old lundon, is the place for poesy’.65 For now Pound was not to dispute the judgements of London. His usual opposition to all received opinions was in abeyance. He was so relieved to have escaped from the soulless bigotry of Crawfordsville that he accepted literary London without quibble as the antidote to American provincialism. In May he was still full of admiration. Williams had sent him a copy of his first book of poems (printed at his own, or rather his father’s expense for $50; four copies sold at 25 cents each). Pound was not complimentary, but then, Williams had been pretty lukewarm about A Lume Spento. The poems were on the whole derivative, but even so Williams at times makes subtle moves with unusual enjambment from one stanza to the next, presaging his later experiments. There is one poem on a street market in New York that suggests the route he would eventually take, in which, significantly, he writes about noticing this urban world for the first time: ‘For many a year gone by/I’ve looked and nothing seen/But ever been/Blind to a patent wide reality.’66 Pound, although conceding Williams had ‘poetic instincts’, was fairly damning. Williams’ trouble, he said condescendingly, was that he was ‘out of touch’:
if you were in London & saw the stream of current poetry, I wonder how much of it you would have printed … If you’ll read Yeats, & Browning, & Francis Thompson, & Swinburne & Rosetti you’ll learn something about the progress of Eng. poetry in the last century.
And if you’ll read Margaret Sackville, Rosamund Watson, Ernest Rhys, Jim G. Fairfax, you’ll learn what people of second rank can do & what dam good work it is.67
For those who think of Pound as an apostle of the avant-garde, those last four are an odd choice. Fairfax was a competent versifier, though scarcely more; perhaps in his case Pound’s judgement was influenced by his new friend’s kindness to him. Rhys was a cheery and charming lyricist, as well as a generous host, but now remembered for the Everyman Library rather than his poetry. Rosamund Marriott Watson, who lived an excitingly scandalous life, has recently, having been forgotten for many years, received some notice from feminist critics for her powerful and arresting use of myth. No one has yet attempted to rescue Lady Margaret Sackville’s reputation. This may just be because of the vagaries of critical fashion, for she could also write arrestingly, but whilst feminist literary critics have applied themselves to rediscovering, on the one hand, Victorian and, on the other, modernist women writers, they have so far shown little interest in Edwardians (Lady Margaret’s first collection was 1901) who continued to write in traditional forms. Margaret Sackville was regarded as a much more respectable figure than Watson, though in fact she had affairs with no fewer than two figures who might be thought unlikely lovers for the daughter of an earl, the anti-imperialist Wilfried Scawen Blunt and the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. She wrote fluent, musical verse-tales and lyrics, evocative and full of energy, much influenced by the early Yeats, whom she greatly admired.68 Pound still recalled some of her poetry with affection in the 1950s. What these four had in common was that they were all writing melodious and technically accomplished verse in the mode of the nineties. Pound still had lessons to learn from the nineties, particularly in terms of the Rhymers’ opposition to rhetoric and embellishment, but it is striking that there is no sign at all at this stage that he felt the need for any kind of change in poetic language. One of the most recalcitrant myths recycled in accounts of the period is that Pound set about modernising English writing as soon as he arrived; quite the reverse, for four years after he arrived, as will become apparent, various writers tried earnestly but ineffectively to modernise him. In 1909 Pound the moderniser was still in the future.