THIS OTHER ‘GANG’ with whom Pound became acquainted in the spring of 1909 was a small group of poets, mainly young, who met on Thursday evenings at the Tour Eiffel restaurant, and whose discussions formed the first phase of imagism, or perhaps one should say, proto-imagism. Unlike the Ford/Hunt circle, who carried on the tradition of lavish Edwardian hospitality, the Tour Eiffel poets’ meetings emulated Parisian café life, importing a new style of literary culture. This group was the rebellious offshoot of the Poets’ Club, itself established only a year earlier by a Scottish banker and amateur poet, Henry Simpson, who was joint president along with Henry Newbolt. The Poets’ Club met for dinner in Mayfair once a month at the United Arts Club, which shared No. 10 St James’s with the Junior Army and Navy Club. After dinner there would be one or two speeches or readings from both well-known and aspiring writers. Quite a number of successful writers joined: Edwardian cooking was very good, and taken seriously, and a literary dinner served at a reputable club was guaranteed to get a good attendance from the well-to-do literati. Mathews had offered to take Pound along to the Poets’ Club in February, and Pound wrote home excitedly about the prospect, telling his father that one of the ‘attractions’, as he put it, was to be Hilaire Belloc. Belloc is now better known for his comic than his serious verse, but Pound was probably most interested in him as the translator of the version of the Tristram and Iseult story that he had given to H.D. in Philadelphia.1 The other ‘attraction’ was the writer, wood-engraver, designer and friend of Yeats, Thomas Sturge Moore, whom Pound must have noted as yet another Yeatsian contact, but in the event Sturge Moore didn’t turn up. Shaw spoke instead, a fact that impressed Pound, but overall he found the evening dull, and was not to return for some time. It was his first minor disappointment with literary London. When the breakaway group set up in March, it is not surprising that Pound soon found his way there, and stayed longer.
The Tour Eiffel restaurant at which the rebel group met was in Percy Street, off the Tottenham Court Road, an area then regarded as part of dubious Soho, very different from gentlemanly Mayfair. The Tour Eiffel was near the British Museum, at which Pound was now spending much of his time, and at that time still inexpensive – Douglas Goldring recalled that in 1912 it did ‘an admirable table d’hôte lunch for 1s 6d’ – the Poets’ Club’s dinners were 3s. 6d. in 1908 – and was to be much frequented by artists and writers. In 1915 Wyndham Lewis decorated a room for the owner, Rudolf Stulich, who features, bringing cake, in William Roberts’ picture of the Vorticists at the Tour Eiffel. Goldring said he knew ‘no restaurant in London, or anywhere else, which has quite the same intimate atmosphere as the Eiffel Tower. Many of the most amusing evenings of my life have been spent chez Rudolf. I should like to read his “Reminiscences,” if he ever bestirs himself to write them, for no restaurateur ever has had a more interesting clientèle.’2 Rudolf Stulich (or Stulik, as his name is also given) was from Vienna, and claimed to be a former chef of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the product of a romantic attachment between an aristocrat and a ballerina. However that may have been, Stulich liked writers and artists to come to his restaurant, and was no doubt as generous and kind to these poets as a few years later he was to the Vorticists.3
The Tour Eiffel meetings originally came about as the result of an argument between two young men from very different backgrounds: T.E. Hulme, then twenty-six, son of a well-to-do Staffordshire businessman and landowner, a Cambridge man sent down for a series of what his tutor described as ‘foolish scrapes’, ex-mathematician, self-taught philosopher and, at this time, poet; and F. S. Flint, aged twenty-three, from the London working class, educated at night school, a Post Office clerk, aspiring poet and critic, a gifted linguist, and eventually to be a central member of the imagist group.4 They had first come across each other only two months before, in February 1909. Flint had published an attack in the New Age on the bourgeois stuffiness of the Poets’ Club, of which Hulme was then honorary secretary, deploring an anthology of poems that the club members had recently produced, entitled, somewhat portentously, For Christmas MDCCCCVIII, apparently aimed, like Pound’s Quinzaine, at the Christmas market. The anthology contained Hulme’s ‘A City Sunset’ and ‘Autumn’, the latter probably now his best-known poem, and one of the few poems which Flint singled out in the review for tepid approval. Like Pound, he was impressed with Margaret Sackville, whose ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, also included in the collection, he praised rather more warmly than he did the Hulme poem. As far as the rest were concerned he simply lamented the anthology’s trite conventionality compared to the collection of recent French poetry he reviewed along with it.5 Flint insisted, with youthful doctrinaire conviction, that poetry could only be revolutionised in the kind of bohemian French cafés frequented by Verlaine.6 Whilst Hulme mocked this notion in a letter he wrote to the New Age in response, calling Flint ‘a belated romantic’ – possibly true – with ‘all the sentimentality of an orthodox suburban’ – quite wrong – and citing Mallarmé’s appearances in evening dress, he was clearly attracted by this suggestion of a counter-culture.7 In this letter he invited Flint to come to the next Poets’ Club dinner, on 23 February, the dinner attended by Pound. It seems unlikely that either Hulme or Flint was there, as Pound saw them for the first time at the Tour Eiffel, but Flint and Hulme certainly met up. Hulme would have realised from Flint’s reviews in the New Age that they both wanted to introduce into English poetry something akin to French vers libre, and that they ought to be collaborators rather than opponents. According to Flint’s later ‘History of Imagism’, published in the Egoist in 1915, Hulme had had a ‘violent’ disagreement with the Poets’ Club (Simpson later said he had always been an ‘extremely trying’ secretary) and left, after which he proposed to Flint the weekly meetings ‘with a few congenial spirits’ at the comparatively bohemian Tour Eiffel.8
Hulme and Flint had come to this shared interest in new poetic forms through very different life experiences. Hulme’s upbringing, though much more affluent than Flint’s, was harsh enough in its own way. His father was an irascible, authoritarian man, provincial and narrow in his outlook and concerns. Hulme’s mother was strong-minded, an enthusiastic cyclist and a wit, but not a warm woman; like her husband she believed in discipline, and it was she who would beat both her two sons and her daughter. Neither of Hulme’s parents appears to have had any intellectual or cultural interests. His mother would play draughts with him – perhaps the origin of Hulme’s later passion for Go, a Chinese game perhaps best described as a more sophisticated form of draughts – but she was much more interested in her cycling, and Hulme’s father’s only pastimes were fishing and shooting. He had at one stage been a farmer, and Hulme grew up in the country, having been born at Gratton Hall, near Leek. His father in some ways lived the life of a local squire, but he was not in class terms gentry, perhaps more a successful, abrasive Mr Tulliver, the family fortune having been established by Hulme’s pawnbroker grandfather.
Hulme went to an excellent school, Newcastle under Lyme High School, which he attended as a day boy. He was lazy, but very clever, and a natural leader. The staff found him difficult – he once reduced his housemaster to tears – but he was popular with the other boys. His mathematical talents were striking, as was his ability (and desire) to argue. In spite of his lack of application, Hulme won an Exhibition for Mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge. According to one of his contemporaries, Hulme ‘didn’t seem to work much at College but he did talk’, and he was ‘the first and the chief of the debunkers. He was far too original and radical to be content to be merely unconventional’.9 Hulme never made any attempt to disguise his Midland accent, and prided himself on his country directness – when lecturing to a select London audience he told them, ‘I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way’.10 To have a regional accent, and to come from a trade background, would generally be thought insuperable obstacles to social success in the gentlemanly culture of Oxbridge, but Hulme regarded the refined world of Cambridge as decidedly effete, and his dazed admirers accepted his judgement. Hulme all his life retained the bluff uncompromising truculence of a North Country farmer or unpolished manufacturer: like the other modernist artists associated with Pound, he firmly rejected the model of the cultured, well-bred gentleman. Hulme founded and became first president of a student group appropriately named ‘The Discord Club’; he was always in debate with someone over something, and he was as interested in philosophy and art as in mathematics, though as mathematics was at that time wrestling with deeply philosophic problems, they were not areas as different as might be thought. J. C. Squire, another contemporary, later Sir John Squire and a leading conservative literary critic and editor, who would denounce the imagists, and, later and even more vehemently, The Waste Land, described him as ‘a huge, ham-faced, idle man, but one of great wit and lightning intellect’.11 The phrase, ‘hamfaced’ puts one in mind of ‘the ruddy moon … Like a red-faced farmer’ in Hulme’s poem ‘Autumn’.12 But Hulme was not yet writing poetry at Cambridge, nor indeed anything much at all, it appears, and when not talking was behaving badly. There are a number of different legends about the offence for which he was sent down, from hitting a policeman to continual rowdy parties, but his latest biographer suggests that it was the accumulation of incidents rather than any single one that drove the authorities first to rusticate him and then to send him down.13 Hulme left Cambridge in style, seen off by a long procession of his fellow-students in a mock funeral to mark the death of his academic career. His biographer Robert Ferguson comments that it is a measure of ‘Hulme’s extraordinary ability to arouse interest in his person … that the Cambridge Daily News saw fit to cover it in detail’.14
His family was furious at this failure – especially when Hulme refused to enter his father’s ceramic transfer business, which as elder son he was expected to do – and at first threatened to cut him off. However, through the good offices of a sympathetic ‘aunt’, his mother’s cousin, Alice Pattinson, his father agreed to give him another chance at University College London: not to read Philosophy as he would have liked, but, at his father’s insistence, Biology and Physics. He spent most of the next two years back in Cambridge, unofficially attending philosophy lectures, and never took a degree at UCL, though, according to J.B. Harmer, he entered the examinations for the Indian Civil Service and failed.15 He sailed for Montreal, probably working his passage as a ship’s steward, having told Alice Pattinson he ‘would rather live on bread and cheese than go on with studies he disliked; and he hated the thought of entering the civil service’.16
Once in Canada, he worked his way across the continent and was profoundly moved by the vastness of its spaces. It is from this period that his first surviving account of his intellectual and psychological odyssey dates, a collection of fragmented notes that he entitled ‘Cinders’, recording his experience on the prairies of a personal and searing sense of the limitations and frailty of human knowledge, limitations that he had earlier recognised intellectually, the notes reveal, but now felt existentially. ‘Travel,’ he writes, ‘helps one to discover the undiscovered portions of one’s own mind’.17 ‘Cinders’, mostly it seems drafted during his eight months in Canada, was never published in his lifetime. It is influenced both in form and thought by his reading of Nietzsche, whose radical critique of traditional Western assumptions troubled but compelled him.18 At the time, Nietzsche, at any rate in English-speaking cultures, was generally seen more as a prophet than a philosopher, known primarily for his denunciation of Christianity and its ‘slave morality’. Hulme, who would later point out that the ‘metaphysical part of Nietzsche, generally neglected, is really the root of all his views’, interpreted Nietzsche very much as he is more often read today, when he has come to be seen as the father of modern deconstruction.19 For Hulme, as for present-day deconstructionists, what was central was Nietzsche’s recognition that neither language nor logic can ever represent reality. The order language imposes on the world is illusory: Hulme quotes with approval Nietzsche’s dictum: ‘What can be conceived is necessarily a fiction.’20
In ‘Cinders’ Hulme, following Nietzsche, builds up his ideas through metaphor rather than logic. It reads, curiously enough, more like a modernist prose poem than anything else, discontinuous, threading together images rather than argument, full of sudden and striking juxtapositions. Its style was perhaps a response to his surroundings and the inner turmoil they caused: ‘the first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse,’ he wrote a couple of years later, ‘was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.’21 ‘Cinders’ may have been his first move towards poetry. In contrast with the neat hedges, fences and stone walls that parcelled out the Midlands countryside into bite-size pieces, the undifferentiated, seemingly boundless prairie mirrored for Hulme the dissolution of definite meaning insisted on by Nietzsche and others of the period, who argued that philosophical systems, scientific theories and language itself were simply a misleading and falsifying set of abstractions. ‘The flats of Canada,’ Hulme writes, ‘are incomprehensible on any single theory … The plurality consists in the nature of an ash-heap. In this ash-pit of cinders, certain ordered routes have been made, thus constituting whatever unity there may be – a kind of manufactured chess-board laid on a cinder-heap. Not a real chess-board … but the gossamer world of symbolic communication … The aim of all science and of all thought is to reduce the complex and inevitably disconnected world of grit and cinders to a few ideal counters.’22
These abstractions are simply conventions, though necessary to enable some sort of communication: Hulme suggests that we have evolved what Wittgenstein would later call language games, but that our danger is that we take the conventions of the game, ‘the gossamer world of symbolic communication’, for truth itself. Then, Hulme argues, ‘we get the curious phenomena of men explaining themselves by means of the gossamer web that connects them. Language becomes a disease in the hands of the counter-word mongers. It must be constantly remembered that it is an invention for the convenience of men.’23
What is the cure for diseased language? Is it possible to find a way of using language without the distortions of convention? Hulme’s intuitive answer was that poetic language could achieve this, but what sort of poetry and why? Certainly not conventional poetic language. That too had to go. Being really more a philosopher than a poet Hulme needed a theory, and over the next two years he was to think out his philosophical justification for his position, yet his starting-point remained his need to express the overwhelming experience he had had on the prairies. As he wrote later: ‘I came to the subject of verse from the inside rather than the outside. There were certain impressions which I wanted to fix.’24 Alun Jones sees Hulme’s vision on the prairies as essentially a religious one, but it certainly was not so in any orthodox way: Hulme denounces the word ‘God’ as a counter along with the rest. One critic has compared ‘Cinders’ to Pascal’s Pensées, a work that Hulme greatly admired; what Pascal says there about his response to the open skies is echoed by Hulme: ‘The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.’ One could perhaps read ‘Cinders’ as The Waste Land has been read, as the work of someone agonisingly convinced that the death of God has drained meaning from modern existence. Hulme’s quest from now on would be to find some kind of certitude to which he could hold in defiance of the shifting sands of nihilism. Hulme might, like the postmodernists, recognise Nietzsche’s radical scepticism, but, at the same time, like so many modernists, particularly the male modernists, when faced with the breakdown of his world’s traditional certainties, he wanted to find a new certainty of his own.
There is another story about how Hulme came to poetry, which might be thought to contradict the version he gave himself, but which may throw a different light on his quasi-religious search. Desmond FitzGerald, another of the Tour Eiffel group, in an unpublished note, wrote in 1930 that Hulme was an ‘erotic’:
The first poetic work that appealed to him was the Song of Songs. He had no illusions about himself and quite realised what side of his nature responded to that poetry. But he also realised that it was great poetry, and that to be great poetry was very great. But he did not exalt his eroticism to the sphere of greatness – it was rather a flaw – an element of disorder in himself. If the whole significance of poetry was the appeal it made to that disorderly element in him – then it was less than nothing. But the other side of his nature also affirmed the greatness of great poetry.25
One imagines that Flint had also heard something of the sort, as in his ‘History of Imagism’ he writes that
Somewhere in the gloom of the year 1908, Mr T. E. Hulme … excited then by the propinquity, at a half-crown dance, of the other sex … proposed to a companion that they found a Poets’ Club.26
Of course, in FitzGerald’s account he is speaking of Hulme’s first response to reading poetry, while Hulme’s story of his prairies experience is about first wanting to write poetry for himself, so they could both be true. Hulme was certainly known as an ‘erotic’: there are many accounts of his preoccupation with sexuality. Wyndham Lewis, for example, wrote that Hulme ‘was very fond of the girls. His conversation mostly bore on that subject.’27 Richard Aldington, who was also ‘very fond of the girls’, but, unlike Lewis, a romantic, said that ‘Hulme had a coarse and cynical way of talking about women which repelled me’.28 It is probably an indication of Pound’s own sexual inhibitions that, when asked about Hulme’s preoccupation with women, he would only say, ‘Can’t recall T.E.H. divagating from ideas to personal tosh.’29
Hulme’s writings are sprinkled with references to ‘pretty girls’ and his reactions to them, often used as analogies to make philosophical or poetical points; in his unpublished notes ‘tarts’ are employed in a similar way. In conversation, Hulme was happy to leave the impression of well-exercised sexual prowess, but how much of that was talk one cannot know. David Garnett relates an often repeated tale of Hulme leaving the Café Royal for an appointment, and returning twenty minutes later, complaining that ‘the steel staircase of the emergency exit at Piccadilly Circus Tube Station was the most uncomfortable place in which he had ever copulated’.30 Piccadilly Circus station is, it is true, very close to the Café Royal, but it still sounds a tall story, though whether the tall story was Garnett’s or Hulme’s is harder to say. FitzGerald’s note, however, is illuminating about Hulme’s attitude to sexuality; unlike the others, he stresses Hulme’s sense of guilt: his eroticism was ‘a flaw – an element of disorder within himself’. By 1930 FitzGerald had returned to the fold as a devout Catholic, and in any case he had become very critical of Hulme’s later theories well before Hulme’s death, so some of the disapproval may have been projected; but in general his interpretation fits, if not with Hulme’s public persona, at least with some of the hints in his writings. Hulme was a puritan at heart, who by 1912 would return emphatically to the idea of Original Sin. Already in ‘Cinders’, for example, he writes of ‘the pathetic search for the different … Where shall they find it? Never found in sex. All explored sex is the same.’ There are two moods in life, he says. One is the personal, ‘withdraw-into-oneself mood … ennui and disgust … the sick disgusting moments’. The other is ‘Flying along in the wind (wind in the hair, on a motor bus) … impersonal’.31 The modernist quest for impersonality, which became increasingly important to him, and which he shared with Eliot (and, Maud Ellmann argues, Pound too), had, perhaps, much to do with sexual anxiety, and with the desire to escape all that was associated with the messy emotionality of the feminine; through the idea of impersonality it was possible to construct a hyper-masculine persona for the poet or artist, uncontaminated by contingency of personal feelings.32 Hulme was a radical in many ways, but in his sexuality he reproduced the contradictions of his time: sexual prowess was something a man should boast of; sexual feelings were disgusting and a sign of effeminate weakness. David Trotter has coined the term ‘anti-pathos’ to describe Wyndham Lewis, and it is equally applicable to Hulme.33 This conflicted approach to sexuality can be seen in the theory of poetry that he later developed – along with much else, of course. As he quoted approvingly from Nietzsche, ‘Philosophy is autobiography.’34
After his return from Canada, Hulme went to Brussels, partly to earn money by teaching English in a Berlitz school there, but also to improve his own languages. He was reading widely, probably some French symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, but very definitely French poetic theory, psychology and philosophy. Most importantly, he discovered the work of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson’s ideas would dominate Hulme’s thought, including his approach to poetry, for the next four or five years.35 Hulme has been chastised for being derivative, though as Pound had already realised, ‘complete originality is out of the question’. Many of the ideas Hulme puts forward can be found elsewhere, and indeed Hulme, as his detractors again point out, sometimes appears reductive in his adaptations; certainly his versions of Bergson’s poetically expressed ideas sometimes become profoundly more prosaic. The poetic style of ‘Cinders’ is not a feature of his later prose, which is very workaday, pigs is pigs, as Hulme might have himself put it. But Hulme selected – spotted – the ideas that were to be at the core of modernist thinking. In the 1950s, Pound was to say that Hulme’s greatest achievement was that he gave the sculptor Jacob Epstein a language through which to talk about his art; but he also played his part in giving Pound and the other imagists a language in which to talk about poetry.