THE FIRST OF the Tour Eiffel meetings took place on 25 March 1909, less than six weeks after Flint’s attack in the New Age: Hulme and Flint had already become allies. Hulme initiated that first meeting, writing to Flint: ‘Can you come to the Tour Eiffel Thursday at 7.30pm. Only poets this time, Ernest Radford, Rhys, Seosamh MacCathmoil [the Gaelic name of the Irish poet Joseph Campbell, as it happens misspelt], the man Storer, whose poems you reviewed in the new Age and 4 or 5 other “versers”.’81 The latter would include Flint’s friend, T.D. FitzGerald, the actress and close friend of Yeats, Florence Farr, and a poet called Francis Willoughby Tancred, forgotten today, but already with two published volumes of poetry to his credit. Ernest Radford had been a member of the Rhymers’ Club, and he and his wife Dolly, a short-story writer, were later to be good friends to D.H. Lawrence and Frieda, but if he and Ernest Rhys turned up that Thursday, it was probably the only time, because they are never mentioned again: this was a new generation.
The Tour Eiffel poets were a curiously disparate group, English, Irish, American, from very different class and social backgrounds, the sort of group unlikely to be found dining together anywhere else in the early twentieth century than in a great metropolis like London. Pound had spent six years at university; Storer had trained as a solicitor; Tancred was a stockbroker, then as now a lucrative occupation, though looked down on for its association with trade by the best society; Farr was the daughter of a distinguished doctor, a friend of Florence Nightingale, whose namesake she was. Flint and FitzGerald were Civil Service clerks; Campbell did some teaching; all the last three were hard-up, and none of them had any higher education. They had largely educated themselves, though in the case of Flint and Campbell – and FitzGerald perhaps to a lesser extent – the role of night school was crucial. So many lives at that period were transformed by night school education (the Workers’ Educational Association was founded in 1904), which made it possible for the able children of poor parents to learn skills and knowledge that could change their future. Perhaps equally important, though in less quantifiable ways, were the new ideologies – whether Nietzscheanism, socialism, Irish nationalism, feminism, or frequently a fusion of two or more of these – that gave a new sense of self-worth to those low in the pecking order of a highly hierachical society. Social mobility of course at that period often ended in grateful conformity to the newly acquired station, but some emergent figures, déclassé and marginal, like those at the Tour Eiffel, used their new-found knowledge and growing confidence to challenge the assumptions of the system that had earlier consigned them to a lowly role.
Hulme was clearly impressed by Storer, whose radical ideas about poetry had much in common with his own. Mirrors of Illusion was Storer’s second book of verse; his first, entitled Inclinations, had been published in 1907, also largely in free verse and at times strikingly experimental, in some poems language and syntax breaking down completely, in a way that foreshadows Eliot’s technique at the end of The Waste Land. Storer had given up work as a solicitor the year before; he clearly had independent means, as even when he had no steady job, a year or so later, Desmond FitzGerald would describe him as, after an abortive romance, ‘being bored in a large and expensive way’.82 When he told FitzGerald in the early 1920s that he was now earning his living, FitzGerald was amazed and half incredulous, which suggests that the persona of urbane flâneur in Mirrors of Illusion was one he cultivated in his life as well as in his poetry. Yet he must in his own way have been hard-working, because he was to produce books steadily for most of his life. He wrote, in addition to several volumes of poetry, a biography, literary criticism and numerous translations, many, after he settled in Italy at the end of the First World War, from Italian, including works by Pirandello. He also edited at least one literary magazine in Italy, soliciting contributions from his earlier poetic companions. The poems in Mirrors of Illusion suggest he had spent much of the year before the Tour Eiffel meetings in Paris, which might explain why he had never joined the Poets’ Club. Perhaps, of course, he already shared Flint’s low opinion of it.
Joseph Campbell, who, like many Irish nationalists at the period, preferred to use the Gaelic form of his name (actually Seosamh MacCathmhaoil), was the most established poet of the group, just about to bring out his fifth book of poems. His life was ultimately to be a tragic one, but he was a fine poet, whose work deserves to be better known than it is. Of the poets in the Tour Eiffel, it was his poetry to which Pound first responded, and he would continue to promote it for a number of years. At this time Campbell was the honorary secretary of the Irish Literary Society, supporting himself by teaching in a London County Council school. Campbell’s background was very different from any of the other members of the group. He had been born in Belfast in 1879 into an artisan Catholic Nationalist family, in which he was the seventh of ten children; his grandfather was a farmer and stonemason in County Armagh, but his father had moved to the city to become a road contractor. Campbell’s early years were coloured by Irish nationalism, both political and cultural. In a broadcast about his early years, he tellingly points out that he was born in the year when Parnell took over leadership in the struggle for Home Rule, and that the first public event he remembered was the assassination of the newly appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland and his deputy in 1882 in Dublin’s Phoenix Park: ‘I was less than three years old at the time,’ he said, ‘but what had occurred burned itself into my precocious mind, and gave a trend to it which has remained ever since.’83 His father’s father, to whom young Joseph was deeply attached, described to him how he had been beaten at school for speaking Irish, and made to wear a wooden mouth-gag. His mother, the child of a mixed marriage, Catholic mother and Presbyterian father, was, Campbell said, the first to arouse his interest in Irish folklore, as well as in the richness of the Antrim dialect, the county from which her mother came. Gaelic he began to learn on his paternal grandfather’s farm, where he would often spend his holidays, it still being spoken in that part of Armagh.
As well as a precocious observer of the political scene, Joseph was a precocious reader, and at the age of seven, when he had read all the books available in the house, his father bought a four-volume Cabinet of Irish Literature, which gave him an early introduction to the idea of an Irish literary tradition. He was learning about other Irish traditions as well: that same year, there were stormy troubles in Belfast over the Nationalists’ support for Parnell’s campaign for Home Rule. Earlier in the century, Belfast had been a predominantly Protestant town, but after the famine of the 1840s, and with the growth of the city’s industrial wealth, Catholics had poured into Belfast in the hope of work. In Joseph’s youth, they still made up only 25 per cent of the population, excluded from many jobs, and they were regarded with deep suspicion by the Protestants; violence flared frequently. Joseph’s father was an ardent believer in Home Rule and a staunch supporter of Parnell. He and his family remained loyal to Parnell, as James Joyce’s father did, even after the scandal of Kitty O’Shea’s divorce ended Parnell’s career when Joseph was eleven years old. One cousin, family tradition proudly related, actually walked out of mass when the priest began to denounce Parnell. When the news of Parnell’s death came a year later, they felt, Campbell recalled, that ‘the Uncrowned King [had been] thrown to the wolves by his own people’.84
Yet in spite of the setback to hopes of Home Rule – and hope by no means died – a vigorous cultural and literary nationalist movement was growing up, though Campbell learnt little about this until he left school. Not, as it happens, that this was so long ahead. He was doing well at school, winning an Exhibition in 1892, and a composition prize in 1893, but his father decided that Joseph must abandon his schooling at the age of sixteen, as he wanted to apprentice him as a road-maker. Joseph’s only older brother had already become a priest; Joseph was expected to help his father in his work. In actual fact, he was to do little formal work of any sort for the next three years. The year that he left school, while he was staying on the Armagh farm, his grandfather was suddenly taken ill and died, leaving Campbell traumatised: ‘The experience unnerved me,’ he said in his broadcast, ‘and I was ill for quite a long time after; afraid of day, afraid of night, distrustful of my own shadow.’85 Campbell was to remain prey to melancholy all his life, but one wonders how much the depression and inability to work may have owed to his being forced into an uncongenial career. For the next three years he stayed at home, reading everything he could lay his hands on, and he began to write. He made friends with Francis Joseph Bigger, whose house was the centre for the Celtic revival that was taking root in the Belfast region. One of Campbell’s cousins, Anne MacManus, who published as Ethna Carbery, with another young woman, Alice Milligan, started a magazine, Shan Van Vocht (‘The Poor Old Woman’, i.e. Ireland), dedicated to publishing writing that drew on Irish cultural traditions. In 1899, Campbell had his own first poem published in the Belfast News-Letter, but he was still, he later said, living in a ‘penumbra’:
I was vaguely aware of the celebration of the centenary of 1798 [the Irish rebellion led by Wolfe Tone] … and there were rumours of green branches and black-helmeted police clashing on the Hannahstown Road. Kruger and Cronje and De Wet were names, too, that floated across sea from the South African veldt. And somebody called Victoria died … and Oscar Wilde was being waked with guttering candles and the prayers of nuns in a shabby room in Montmartre … and then my father, William Henry Campbell, caught cold, and despite my mother’s assiduous nursing, did not rally out of it.
It was the end of an epoch. Too dazed by my introspections, I could not realise it was the beginning of another.86
For the next two years Joseph and his brother John had to run the family road-making business. His father had had a two-year contract for a drainage scheme they could not break. He and his brother got up at dawn, and worked all day in the open with navvies recruited from the nationalist Falls Road. In a strange way it brought him back to life. He never forgot those labourers. ‘I gained, from intimate daily contact with them,’ he said in his broadcast, ‘experience that proved of more value to me than if I had spent this preclusive time in libraries, or in aimless mooning about.’87 Like the majority of the Catholics in Belfast, they were only first- or second-generation town-dwellers, not far from their peasant roots, and Campbell felt that through them he was meeting the real people of Ireland. From then can be dated what one of his sisters described as his ‘socialist tendencies’.
Along with his brother John and the navvies, he succeeded in fulfilling the contract, and the family benefited from a handsome profit of £700. But it had to last them some time; there was no more work. Recession hit Belfast after the end of the Boer War, and in times of recession it was even harder for a Catholic to find employment. At least, however, there was a chance for Joseph’s literary interests to develop. In 1904 he helped to organise the first big Feis na nGleann – Festival of the Glens of Antrim – and there he made two significant new acquaintances. One was the consul Roger Casement, the humanitarian and nationalist, just back from a harrowing time in the Congo and fighting to get his report of the scandalous abuse of African workers there accepted by the international community. The other new contact was the poet Padraic Colum, then working as a railway clerk in Dublin, and like Campbell a Catholic. Colum, only twenty-one, two years younger than Campbell, had already published stories and poems in the United Irishman, edited by Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein and later the first President of the Irish Free State; one of these poems, ‘The Drover’, was to remain among his best-known and was later a favourite of Pound’s. Campbell had read and admired Colum’s work, and he and Colum became immediate friends.
Soon, like Colum, Campbell was having his work published in the Dublin-based United Irishman, as well as in places like the All Ireland Review and the Gael, journals whose titles make their sympathies clear. The aim of the Irish literary revival can be summed up in the title of a famous address given by Douglas Hyde in 1892, the year after Parnell’s death: ‘The Necessity for Deanglicizing Ireland’. If liberating Ireland politically was proving slow work, she could find cultural liberation through reviving and celebrating her language and traditions. Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League – which Campbell had joined – a year later in 1893, to promote the Gaelic language and its literature. But he did more than revive Gaelic; he Irished English. That same year he published a collection of traditional Gaelic lyrics, The Love Songs of Connacht, both in the original Gaelic, and in translation. Earlier in the century translations of Irish ballads had been into standard Victorian English verse, but this was different. On the left-hand page was the Gaelic, on the right Hyde’s translation into what became known as Hiberno-English, a language which aims to capture the rhythms and idioms of English as spoken by the Irish peasantry, incorporating Gaelic place-names and Gaelic idioms and usages. Hyde’s Hiberno-English was an early and tentative version, still more English than Hiberno, though he had already taken the significant step of attempting to reproduce Gaelic poetic forms and characteristic devices like assonance and the use of internal rhyme. One can see the adoption of Hiberno-English as very much the equivalent of the move that came about in Caribbean writing much more recently, as it shed its allegiance to standard English and began to use what Edward Braithwaite (who, in a gesture similar to the Irish adoption of Gaelic names, now prefers to be known as Kamau Braithwaite) named significantly ‘nation-language’. As in the Caribbean, this ‘vernacular’ Irish was rarely the vernacular of the writer, certainly not as an adult, though for Colum and Campbell it was not as distant as it was for others. The apotheosis of this movement was perhaps Synge’s wonderfully evocative creation of the speech of western Ireland, though once again for all Yeats’ celebration of him as a peasant-poet, it was not his own speech; but he had listened well.
Campbell’s first book-length publication was, not surprisingly, a book of folk songs. His brother John – probably not long before the Feis na Gleann, although the precise date is uncertain – travelled with the composer Herbert Hughes to Donegal, a county that was then part, as it had always historically been, of Ulster. (It was only when partition came that it was to be split away from the rest, on account of its predominantly Catholic population.) There they took photographs, and collected traditional airs; John was a gifted artist, so presumably the former task was allocated to him, and the latter to Hughes. On their return, Hughes asked Joseph Campbell to supply words. The original Gaelic verses had been lost, but Campbell was already by then knowledgeable in Gaelic culture, and he wrote lyrics as close as possible to the spirit of Gaelic folk verse. He first learnt through this exercise, according to the poet Austin Clarke, who edited Campbell’s collected works in 1963, the ‘directness’ and ‘concentrated simplicity’ later characteristic of his own poetry.88 Hughes would come to his house; ‘seated at the piano,’ Campbell recalled, ‘he would play over the airs, improvising an accompaniment as he proceeded – first in their natural tempo, and then more slowly, so that I could catch and absorb the peculiar quality in each.’89 The words and music were published in 1904 as Songs of Uladh (i.e. Ulster), and illustrated by his brother John, under the name Seaghan MacCathmhaoil. Many of these songs have passed into general circulation and are regarded as anonymous and authentic folk songs, some of them, like ‘The Blue Hills of Antrim’, being made famous worldwide by James Joyce’s tenor friend, John McCormack. It is a curious fact that some of Campbell’s poems are so much better known than his name; it is certainly a story that illustrates the very fine line between the discovery and invention of folklore at this period.
The year 1904 was an important one for the Ulster literary movement. Campbell and others started a periodical in Belfast, called simply Uladh, to which Casement among others contributed, and the Ulster Literary Theatre was founded, also in Belfast. Campbell published in the journal, acted in the theatre, and the next year put on a none too successful play. He also brought out a book of poems, The Garden of the Bees, also far from successful; even his friend Padraic Colum said it showed ‘little reverence for form’.90 Campbell at that point was trying to incorporate several different influences, most notably Whitman and Blake in addition to Gaelic literature, and at this stage they pulled against each other. Colum on their first meeting had lent him Leaves of Grass, which he had read with passion, finishing it by the next morning. Whitman, as a poet who celebrated the nationhood of a country trying like Ireland to escape from the yoke of traditional English culture, was an important influence on the Irish literary revival, though Campbell was unusual among Irish poets in being attracted by Whitman’s use of free verse, which drew both on biblical language and Blake’s Prophetic Books. For Campbell, Whitman had a further significance: he was not only a national poet, he was the poet of democracy, the poet of the people, the poet of liberty. Whitman’s bid for freedom from traditional verse forms clearly struck him as an essential part of this. Unlike Flint, Storer and Hulme, Campbell first learnt free verse not from the French post-symbolistes but from the American poet – a more direct route, one might say, as Whitman had been a key influence on the development of vers libre in France. Campbell was, according to Austin Clarke, the first poet in Ireland to use free verse.
Trying to yoke together Whitman’s long, loose paratactic lines and Gaelic folk poetry, whose simplicity, restraint and brevity Campbell so admired, was not easy, and his first collection showed it. The lukewarm reception that the uneven poems of The Garden of the Bees received was a blow. He was also still unemployed, and decided to try to find work in Dublin, where the well-connected Roger Casement, now a famous figure since the painful truth of his report had been established, could give him help. With Casement’s support, Campbell was admitted on a probationary training course as a civil servant, and did some acting for the Abbey Theatre, which had just been opened the previous December as the home of the Irish National Theatre Society, in which Yeats and Lady Gregory were prime movers. Ronald Schuchard reports that Campbell trained as a chanter there, and as Campbell had a remarkable speaking voice, deep and musical (Austin Clarke described it as ‘strong, vibrant … rich and warm’), he would certainly have been an asset to the theatre.91 At the Abbey, 1905 was a stormy year. Synge’s The Well of the Saints did not do well, while Padraic Colum’s play, The Land, was a great success. Yeats’ response to what he regarded as poor judgement on the part of the public caused friction, and by early 1906 Colum and others had split away. Campbell would have discovered by then, if he did not already know, that Irish nationalism was increasingly factional. The name of the United Irishman bore little relation to the disunited Irish and their feuds.
When Campbell finished his Civil Service training course, he was still unable to find work. In Belfast he might be ostracised as a Catholic; in Dublin he was ostracised as an Ulsterman. He decided to move to London. Before he did so, his third book of poetry, The Rushlight, was published, and this time he was highly praised. The majority of the poems there were written in traditional ballad forms, drawing on Irish folk traditions. Campbell had a quasi-mystical sense of the relation of the poet, the people and the land in Ireland. In The Rushlight he identified himself as ‘the Mountainy Singer’, later using that as the title of his 1909 book: a poet who speaks for the peasant and the living spirit of the Irish countryside:
I am the mountainy singer –
The voice of the peasant’s dream,
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,
The leap of the trout in the stream …
Beauty and peace I sing –
The fire on the open hearth,
The cailleach spinning at her wheel,
The plough in the broken earth.
Travail and pain I sing –
The bride on the childing-bed,
The dark man labouring at his rhymes,
The ewe in the lambing shed.92
‘The dark man labouring at his rhymes’ is of course Campbell himself – ‘the darrk man frum th’ narth’, as Pound learnt to call him, doubtless a description Campbell acquired in Dublin.93 For Campbell, the poet is an integral part of Ireland and its travail, a bringer to birth, he hoped, of freedom as well as beauty. Whitman is less in evidence in The Rushlight, Blake perhaps more so at this stage, and the simplicity and apparent childlike directness of Campbell’s lyrics is often reminiscent of the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
In London Campbell made contact with the Irish Literary Society, which had been set up in 1892, with Yeats as one of the moving spirits in its creation. The Society, based at 20 Hanover Square, was the leading centre for Irish writing in London, as well as being closely involved in debates about Home Rule and Irish independence. Significantly, in terms of the importance of expatriate Irish to the Irish literary revival, it was founded even before the National Literary Society in Dublin, for whose first presidential address Hyde had delivered the lecture on deanglicisation, and had been in existence for some five or six years before the Irish literary revival reached Ulster. The Irish Literary Society was one of the most lively arts venues in London, and both expatriate Irish and sympathetic non-Irish had always flocked to its events. Campbell was quickly asked to become secretary, and appears to have been a great success. He was a distinguished and romantic figure, tall, powerfully built, with dark handsome features, a man, according to Austin Clarke, who ‘looked like a maker of sagas rather than a lyric poet with a singularly delicate touch’.94 He took to wearing a kilt, seen then as a badge of Celtic identity, apparently with no historical justification but considered very dashing by English sympathisers. At the Society he gave lectures, directed musical evenings, acted and gave poetry recitals, which were enthusiastically received.
In 1907, Campbell published two more small collections. The Gilly of Christ, the title poem of which had also appeared in The Rushlight, was a series of poems drawn from folk religious beliefs: delicate and evocative pastiche folk poetry, it consisted mainly of lyrics, but with some free verse. The Man Child was more experimental, but less successful. Meanwhile, Campbell was reading widely in European literature, learning Russian, French and German at night school. Yeats had argued back in 1893, in a lecture entitled ‘Nationality and Literature’, that Irish writers should not rely solely on Irish traditions, but search throughout the world for the best models available. Although he stressed ‘we must not imitate the writers of any other country’, he was convinced that ‘we must study them constantly and learn from them the secret of their greatness. Only by study of great models can we acquire style.’95 The Irish, Yeats said, too often believed they could rely on inspiration but that ‘comes only to him who labours at rhythm and cadence, at form and style, until they have no secret hidden from him. This art we must learn from the old literatures of the world. We have hitherto been slovens.’96 Like Yeats, Campbell believed that Irish poets should be citizens of the world, and should labour at their art. Indeed, had he not, he would not have come to the Tour Eiffel. The Mountainy Singer, published a few months after the Tour Eiffel meetings began, shows Campbell experimenting with a variety of verse forms. Austin Clarke, who first met Campbell in 1917, commented that, for all his deep knowledge of Gaelic traditions, he ‘was not merely a traditionalist. Paradoxically enough, he was immensely interested in every phase of modern poetry in England and elsewhere.’97
Pound had already visited the Irish Literary Society before he joined the Tour Eiffel. He may have first gone primarily in search of Yeatsian contacts once again, but he had not yet lost the general enthusiasm for the Celtic imagination that Fiona Macleod had inspired in him. Dorothy Shakespear had noticed with surprise that Pound affected an Irish accent when declaiming Yeats’ poetry, and indeed much of the time. It was not surprising that Pound had moved on in 1906 seamlessly from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Celts. That was entirely what the Irish literary revival itself had quite consciously done, carrying on Morris’ and Ruskin’s campaign against utilitarianism and greed and their search for creativity and beauty but moving these categories into national terms. When Yeats visited the United States in his tour of 1903–4, he had presented the American public with, in R.F. Foster’s words, ‘high claims for Irish culture over English materialism’.98 That there was a nationalist as well as a literary dimension to such claims did not matter to Pound: for him, Celticism, like Pre-Raphaelitism, celebrated the imagination and art, unlike American business, which celebrated profits and possessions.
The part the Irish played in the Tour Eiffel group was a significant one. Hulme, like Pound, was attracted to the creative energy of the Celtic movement, though he was actually against Home Rule, yet his use of Campbell’s Irish name in his letter to Flint indicates that he liked its defiant signal, and that he saw Campbell as a fellow opponent of the status quo. He recognised that Campbell and he shared a common cause in trying to find new forms that escaped the received traditions of Victorian English poetry. Celticism served as a model of how to break the dominant mode. Anglo-American modernist poetry, and especially imagism, owed a bigger debt to the Celtic revival than is often realised.