THE ROUTE BY which Frank Stock Flint reached the Tour Eiffel on Thursday evenings was very different from that of either Hulme or Pound, although he had discovered some of the same writers and thinkers on the way. Already by 1909, at the age of twenty-three, Flint, who had left school at thirteen and was working full-time in the Post Office, was the regular poetry reviewer for the left-wing intellectual weekly, the New Age, a remarkable achievement in itself. A photograph of him in 1914, the earliest I know of extant, shows him as a tall, slim, good-looking young man, with a sensitive and vulnerable face. Flint, like Pound, was born in 1885, but unlike him, in poverty that was to become destitution by the time he reached the age of three. In the London of the late nineteenth century, poverty, as in Philadelphia, could be absolute. Flint’s childhood had more in common with that of the children in the missions visited by Pound’s parents than with Pound’s own; even Flint’s adult face suggests ‘the wistful stars/With white faces like town children’ that Hulme recalls in his poem ‘Autumn’.36 He had been the kind of child Hulme and Pound had known about rather than understood, and neither of them could empathise with the legacy of that childhood. The robust, self-confident Hulme would at times simply bully Flint, whose diffidence he saw as weakness. Pound was kind, but often patronising. He would particularly bemoan Flint’s lack of energy compared with his own, without apparently pausing to consider the fact that Flint had done half a day’s work by the time he had got out of bed – Pound believed in lying in – but in fact Flint’s energy was prodigious: he worked at his demanding and dispiriting job all day, and read, wrote or translated all evening. Dominic Hibberd writes that ‘he reminded people of a volcano, with his restless green eyes, fiery red hair on end as though overcharged with electricity, tall frame always in movement, and sudden bursts of emotion’.37 Pound and Hulme were ready enough, they thought, to accept Flint as one of themselves, but they could not understand that he was deeply wounded by the experiences of his early life. He never recovered from the sense of deep betrayal that had seared him then. Like Dickens, though his experience was more extreme in some ways, he could never forget, as he put it, ‘the child for whose wounds I bear the scars’.38
Flint was born in Wood Green, not then part of London, though he grew up largely within London itself. Of all the imagists his poetry was most often concerned with urban life, and was the most directly personal. No one has verified the facts of his life with the painstaking zeal that has been applied to Pound’s, and so far the best source of information about his youth is the unpublished manuscript of an unfinished autobiographical novel, or perhaps, as it reads, an autobiography under an assumed name. Some of the events appear again in poems, and some of the information was repeated in an interview with Glenn Hughes in 1929. One can’t guarantee the literal truth of all the details; in fact he warns the reader that ‘truth and lie are to jostle each other; for no man tells the truth about himself, and autobiography is metaphysics’ – possibly an intended reversal of Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy is autobiography’, for he was a keen Nietzschean too. Yet the narrative undoubtedly represents how Flint felt about his youth. It is told very differently from H.D.’s fragmentary, elusive accounts, or from the leisurely and polished memoirs of upper-class Edwardian life. It perhaps has more in common with late nineteenth-century French realism, detailed and thoughtful, often understated and frequently painful. It is entitled, poignantly, Failure, and begins: ‘My name is John Graham Giltrow, and I am a failure.’ His father was a commercial traveller, of peasant stock, he says, ‘clever, much too clever’. His mother, who had ‘a strong strain of illegitimate gentility’, had been brought up in a flat in ‘a West London house that had seen better days’, one of those ‘dismal habitations still haunted with the broken spirit of bygone slaveys’. In Wood Green, though their house was only ‘one of a row of similar small and ill-conceived sublimated rabbit-huts’ which spread over much of the district, ‘you might at any moment come upon a lane leading into unspoiled meadows, where daisies and great stretches of golden buttercups and huge and gorgeous dandelions grew’. For his first three years, all was happiness; then, as with Pound, though for very different reasons, the serpent entered the garden early. ‘My father’s incurable cleverness involved us in financial disaster which was to drag us out of our maisonette into the byways and purlieus of London’s poverty’.
For two years they lived in terrible hardship, sometimes without food in the house or the prospect of money to buy it: ‘London ground our faces.’ When he was about five and a half, everything changed again: ‘I was taken away from my sister and a newly arrived brother to live with my grandfather. My mother’s spirit was broken’. He moved to Islington, then a very poor part of London (as Pound discovered in a brief sojourn there in the autumn of 1908), to his father’s parents, ‘thoughtful working people. Their philosophy of life was formed from their battling with it; their wisdom was the wisdom of working folk, gained with hard knocks and mental and moral abrasions’. The grandparents were, unlike their son, the respectable, industrious, cautious and deserving poor. The grandmother’s parlour, used once a week when ‘the awfulness of Sunday held sway with impregnable rigour’, contained a piano, and books – a large bible, a history of England, a life of Dickens, a book entitled Old and New London, an encyclopaedia in three volumes, one-volume editions of Longfellow, Byron and Shakespeare, and ‘volumes of pious stories, Sunday school prizes these’, devotional books, and even one or two of Scott’s novels. The young Giltrow/ Flint was taught to read by his aunt, who was a schoolteacher. He began ‘to develop a taste for words – words that have since intoxicated, and thrilled me, when strung in the “right order” as Coleridge says, and that I now use as a burial ground for my fallen self’. But, one day, his father came to retrieve him, and he was taken off, both fearful of leaving the calm if stolid safety of his grandparents’ home, and overjoyed to be reunited with his mother. But his happiness was short lived. His parents were no longer destitute but they lived on the edge. His father worked a twelve-hour day of ‘heavy drudgery’ in a mineral water factory. The house was always untidy, and rows were constant. According to the story he tells here, two incidents in particular, tiny in themselves, shattered the small boy’s faith in his parents, the world and his own worth. He had brought back from his grandparents a money box, probably not with much in it to start with, but one morning he found it empty. He was told the money must have been stolen, but later he overheard his parents talking, and realised it had been taken by his father. He had also brought back from his grandparents a much-prized sailor suit, which also soon vanished – he learnt, eventually, to the pawnbrokers. ‘I had been wounded and the depth of the wound was not then, nor is it even now, calculable.’
His parents were now living in Camberwell, in a house with two other families, and he was sent to a ‘school complying with the English demand that everything free shall be unattractive, for an Englishman would rather lose his soul, or the souls of his children, which is the same thing – than spend money on comeliness’. It was strict, punitive and narrow.
All our attitudes were regulated according to some pre-arranged plan and the restless young animal in us curbed and restricted by the cruel inventions of the pedantic pedagogue … [W]e might have had our eyes opened to beauty, and rhythm and colour, and in our squalor carried with us dreams of better things; but in place of all this, we went through a dreary drill which was called our curriculum, invented for us by men without imagination or sympathy, who dealt with us in the forbidding spirit that men assume when they have to control the conduct and lives of other people.
Outside school, he loved reading, and escaped from the harshness of his surroundings into a different world, generally in adventure stories, which he would get from the public library: ‘The world of today is not so real to me as the world that was conjured up in my perfervid boyish imagination by those books’. At this stage he had been put off poetry – the example he gives of what they were offered is Felicia Hemans’ ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled’). He says indignantly that such stuff is not poetry, but he does not mention his feelings about the subject-matter, which he must surely have found disturbing – the blindly conventional child commended for choosing death rather than disobedience, or, no doubt in the young Flint’s opinion, death rather than independent thought. All the children he knew, including himself, were similarly trained to be blindly obedient martyrs, to accept their half-lives and their meagre existences while being instructed in the belief that the sacrifice of their happiness for the good of the country was just and right and not to be challenged.
His mother, he says, did her best for them, trying to keep them ‘respectable’, mainly by keeping them indoors. As for his father, ‘all the impulses of his better nature were stifled by poverty’. It was not that he was without feelings, but they were ‘buried beneath an ever-increasing thickness of the scoriae of a poor man’s life, which hardened and hardened as he grew older, and welded into a solid mass. Beneath that mass it still lurks, and awaits the emotional upheaval, which, if it ever come, will make my father articulate’. Ultimately, he says, he does not blame his parents. Whatever their weaknesses or shortcomings, they were themselves the victims of circumstances: ‘society can, and does not, see to it that children shall not suffer … and children do suffer, and the crime lies against society’.
Even while at school, Flint had to work in the evenings and weekends as a barber’s lather-boy.39 At thirteen and a half he left school: it should have been fourteen, but he had passed all the examinations and they let him go. He did various odd jobs, including working in a warehouse. Then at seventeen, he told Glenn Hughes, his life changed. He bought a copy of Keats from a street stall, fell in love with poetry, and began to write. He enrolled at night school, learning among other things Latin and French and discovering that he was a gifted linguist. At nineteen, in about 1904, he managed to get a civil service job as a typist. By 1906 he was living in Islington once more, apparently in lodgings, not with his family, and beginning his first literary venture, a home-produced magazine.
Two issues of this magazine (possibly the only two produced), dated that year and edited by Flint, are among his papers. Called the Agora (‘Agora’ is Greek for marketplace, perhaps a reference to the marketplace at the beginning of Thus Spake Zarathustra), it is subtitled A Journal for All and None, price twopence. Pieces are generally signed by initials – including, of course, F.S.F – and occasionally by names. Some of these may simply be the editor writing under other names; the only one that can be recognised as one of Flint’s later acquaintances is T.D.F-G., his fellow Tour Eiffel poet, Desmond FitzGerald, whose comments on Hulme I quoted earlier. Possibly Flint put the magazine together with some other young people, like him interested both in socialist politics and in literature, the twin themes of the publication. The magazine makes clear that by 1906 Flint had given himself a thorough education in modernity; he is much more immersed in current philosophical and intellectual debates than Pound at the same date. The Agora is iconoclastic, irreverent, anti-capitalist and outspoken. The principal influences appear to be Nietzsche, Wilde and Shaw, though the last is at one point taken to task for his approbation in The Quintessence of Ibsenism of the ‘higher love’: the magazine advocates ‘the love in which both mind and body participate’. Both issues contain poems (mainly rather bad, it has to be said), reviews (including one of a Manet exhibition, criticised for only including his earlier, more realist works), dialogues, brief articles and epigrams. The editorials are trenchantly polemic, the first attacking a new department store as a ‘monument … to plutocratic vulgarity’. In the second issue there is a series of ‘Open Questions’, which are clearly Flint’s own. These include a Blakean piece – perhaps in this case Blake read through Wilde and Nietzsche – on Milton:
Paradise Lost is great art, and in so far, un-Christian; for Christianity … means the denial of life in favour of the Beyond; whereas art affirms life, and by the fact of its existence, tacitly denies the Beyond. It is a commonplace of criticism to point out that Milton’s Devil is intellectually superior to his God; and here we have evidence of the superiority of [Milton’s] art over his theology.
Several of the other ‘open questions’ are pure Nietzsche. There is full-frontal attack on Christianity, under whose mask, Flint writes, ‘has been rampant man’s true, cruel nature, made worse by its enforced subjection … [to] an emasculating creed’. He describes the present as a ‘period of disintegration’, not just, as for Hulme, the loss of all certainty, but moral and social breakdown, a corrupt and decaying society. Elsewhere in his unpublished papers is a copy of a letter to the editor of the Daily Express opposing their campaign against socialism, in which he argues fiercely that
Socialism is a scheme for the welfare of the human race … the Capitalist can only live one life; but he can and does spoil thousands … As money hogs the capitalists stand for themselves, and leave labour rotting in the gutter, where he is fool enough to lie, while men like you squirt mud at him. That is the position as it stands today: money hogs on the one hand showing all the evil effects of gluttony, fat, unwieldy, apoplectic, on the point of bursting; and on the other, the starving proletarian rotting in the gutter: both rotting.
Like many at this period, Flint found socialism entirely compatible with admiration for Nietzsche. That Nietzsche’s work should come to be used as support for a totalitarian Fascism would have seemed inconceivable. Both socialists and Nietzscheans were appalled that the mass of humankind lived degraded, impoverished and hopeless lives. Both insisted that humankind must be aroused and realise its true strength. Nietzsche was mistaken in one way, Flint suggests, in that his broad attack on Christian meekness ignores the fact that it was preached from the pulpits to dupe and control the people: those in power never espoused the humble subservience they advocated. Pieties about Christian self-sacrifice were ‘but a mask for the fierce hell of jungle anarchy’ by which power is maintained. Although some left-wing critics of Nietzsche complained that he was only for individual rather than collective change, in a society where there seemed little hope of collective reform, the promise that the individual could change him or herself was liberating, as the spectacular success of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help had earlier shown. Flint in his early twenties still knew the enervating and corrosive effects of poverty at first hand; he wrote in a despairing note dated 12 June 1906 that his desire to write anything original was defeated by the sordidness of his circumstances: ‘this room, this hideous room, with its horrible surroundings, its poverty of suggestion, its proximity to the wailing and screaming of dirty children, and the raucous voices of coarse men and women, stifles and suffocates me. Life is a universal dungheap on which a few cocks crow.’ Only revolution will change this, he continues, for ‘such tinkering as is the work of Parliament is useless, a mere ineffectual screen drawn over the filth’. Yet he has little hope of a better world: ‘The dungheap is content. It seeks only to be left alone for the sun to shine upon it; or that it may revel in its own reekings. It recks not of the few, like me, who shrink from its malodourousness, like me, who am deafened by its clamour, crushed by its idiocy, and forced to level myself to its filth.’ Flint ends by declaiming, ‘All hail to thee, O Nietzsche, thou one bright fervid critical star!’
Flint was in fact achieving remarkable things in spite of his dire circumstances. In his notebooks and jottings of this period are references to a wide range of writers such as Ibsen, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Pierre Loüys, Thackeray, Shelley, Dowson, Symons and Yeats.40 If like Hulme he read Nietzsche, like Pound he read Pater, and he had worked out for himself a synthesis of the two. As he points out in his notes there are important shared ideas. They were, he comments, contemporaries, often writing the same thing at almost the same time. Both of them are writing after what Nietzsche called the death of God, and both are asking what is the significance of life in the wake of that; for both the answer is to live with intensity. Flint copied out into a notebook nearly the whole of the conclusion to The Renaissance, transcribing the version that uses the contentious phrase ‘art for art’s sake’, which Pater later modified as it was thought so scandalous.41 He puts one further quotation at the end: ‘the aim of our culture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life as possible’, adding in brackets, ‘this might have been written by Nietzsche’.42
Flint’s first significant contact with those who could help him towards publication and contact with the literary world came in 1907. Among his papers is a copy of a letter, dated 30 July that year to Mrs Eder, whose husband, David Eder, was closely connected with the New Age. Flint had met her at a political meeting the previous night, and she had invited him to call. He is replying to say he will be delighted, though he also explains that this will be the first time he has ever been asked ‘to call’ at anyone’s house. ‘I am not in the least a calling person. My private life so far has been Bohemian of a kind, that mean, poverty stricken, envious Bohemianism.’ He is delighted to know ‘there is a house where [he] may find educated people to talk to for half an hour or so’. But this comes only at the end of a long letter, which up till then has been carrying on the arguments of the previous evening with a passion which suggests why she had been so taken with this penniless twenty-two-year-old. They had clashed over the Fabians, whom he had described as ‘shilly shally’ in contrast to the new and fiery Socialist Independent MP Victor Grayson, who had just had an unexpected by-election victory in the Colne Valley, in Lancashire. The Labour Party had in 1906 increased its parliamentary representation from two in 1900 to fifty-three, thanks to an electoral pact with the Liberals not to split the anti-Conservative vote, but it was generally still regarded as politically insignificant; Grayson clearly gave Flint fresh hope. In the letter he slightly withdraws his comment on the Fabians, but still insists there is something ‘stodgy and unlifelike’ about them. He recounts a story told him by an architect friend, about a woman he has seen that day, dying in utter poverty in an East End tenement, with sewer fumes seeping into her room, and a landlord attempting to evade spending any money on repairs. Flint adds:
And the yellow press talks of the responsibility of the parent and state interference with the individual, all damnable lies and hollow cant … A few more Graysons, say I, with passion and argument and ridicule and fun to stir up and dispel the dead mass of inertia which weighs like an incubus of poisoned air on the people of London. I look at these people, at their dull eyes and ask myself whether the poets and artists are not wasting their time while these exist, whether it is not a crime against humanity for a man to write anything except warsongs, or for an artist to paint anything except cartoons. And the utter despair of the whole thing makes us wish for some star ‘beyond Sirius’ to leave its course and smash the world into blinding, beautiful, pure incandescence, washing it pure of its putrescence in the white stream of fire.
Mrs Eder must have been impressed, not surprisingly, because soon her husband was helping Flint (who, in spite of his doubts, wrote poems other than war songs) to get published.
David Eder was a remarkable man, then forty-one, a little later to become the first British psychoanalyst: as Freud himself put it, he was ‘the first, and for a while the only doctor to practise the new therapy in England’.43 He had trained as a medical doctor, and practised in South Africa and Latin America, before returning to work in the East End. He was a member of the Fabian Society, though rather to the left of many there. One of the political issues for which he campaigned, and wrote about in the New Age, was a family allowance to be paid to mothers, a benefit which he rightly believed could have a profound impact on the health of the London poor. In 1911 he read a paper to the British Medical Association on a case of hysteria and obsession; the chairman and entire audience walked out. Eder wrote about Freud in the New Age, and produced the first authorised, public translation of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1914. (The 1913 translation had been available only to ‘Members of the Medical, Scholastic, Legal and Clerical Professions’.)44 During the war he became a Zionist, though apparently without giving up his belief in international socialism. He died in 1936, three years before Freud, who wrote a moving foreword to a book of memoirs about him, in which Freud shows both affection and respect. When he heard of his death, Freud wrote sadly to Eder’s sister-in-law, identifying with him as a fellow-Jew in the dark days of the late thirties: ‘The world,’ he said, ‘has become so sad that it is destined to speedy destruction – this is the only palliative for me. I can easily imagine how he, too, must have suffered under the bitterness of these times. We were both Jews and knew of each other that we carried in us that miraculous thing in common which – inaccessible to any analysis so far – makes the Jew.’45
Perhaps it was Eder’s own experience as a Jew that made him particularly sympathetic to outsiders of all sorts. He had always had a keen interest in literary matters; as a young man his closest friend and flat-mate was his cousin, the novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill. Flint was not the only working-class writer helped by Eder; he was also a good friend to Isaac Rosenberg and D.H. Lawrence. Flint’s first publication was a poem that appeared in the New Age towards the end of the year, quite traditional, but straight from his experience. Flint has been described as a confessional poet, and certainly many of his poems directly deal with his own life. Here he is in his cheap rented London room, dreaming of the country:
I was thinking this evening, surrounded by my books
In a dull, drab room, in a drab, noisy street,
That the woods are still there, with their intimate nooks,
And the bloom on the bramble and wild rose is sweet:
Epping and Hainault, Saint Cloud on the hill,
And all their green silence, unreal though it seem,
Are there in the darkness – indefinite – still;
But to me in my drab room they seem but a dream.46
‘Drab’, of course, was the word Henry James chose to characterise Philadelphia, though for very different reasons from those that led to Flint’s use of it for the mean backstreets of working-class London. Yet Pound and he were both to be in revolt against their backgrounds, different though they were, for more similar reasons than one might have thought, not least their indifference to aesthetic pleasure.
Three more of Flint’s poems appeared in the New Age in the first half of 1908, and when in July the weekly needed a new poetry reviewer, Eder recommended Flint. His literary career had begun.