IN HIS ‘HISTORY of Imagism’, Flint says that Pound joined the Tour Eiffel group on 22 April 1908, ‘introduced, I believe, by Miss Farr and my friend T. D. FitzGerald’. It is possible that Pound had met Florence Farr at the Poets’ Club, to which she belonged, and which she had entertained earlier the previous year to her own arrangement of dramatised readings from Thus Spake Zarathustra. Alternatively, he might have met her at Olivia Shakespear’s, for the two women were good friends. It is most likely, however, since he was introduced by Farr and FitzGerald in tandem, that he first met them together at the Irish Literary Society, which they both frequented. While Farr and FitzGerald would both already have known Joseph Campbell, it was probably Flint who had invited FitzGerald, whom he had known for a couple of years. Florence Farr, a letter to Flint confirms, was first invited to the Tour Eiffel by Hulme, who had met her soon after he first came to London.
Pound was delighted to meet Florence Farr: as he reminded his father, Yeats had written with ecstatic admiration about her method of reciting poems to a musical accompaniment in ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, one of the essays included in Ideas of Good and Evil. (The psaltery was a kind of harp, made specially for her by Arnold Dolmetsch, on which she would pluck notes while speaking the lines.) He was impressed by her part in the radical theatre productions of which he had heard from Brooke Smith; she had played Rebecca West in the first English production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, and had been the lead in Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses. Shaw had written Arms and the Man especially for her, which was produced as a double act with Land of Heart’s Desire, written for her by Yeats. More recently, in 1905, Farr had produced the first London performance of Wilde’s Salomé, and acted herself in many of Yeats’ plays in London and Dublin. She was older than the other Tour Eiffel poets, though she was still a very attractive woman; in 1912, when she left England for Ceylon at the age of fifty-two, the young Clifford Bax, then nineteen, recalled that ‘she was still beautiful, and no one who saw her could forget her starry eyes’.99 Pictures of her in the 1890s show her as slenderer than was generally fashionable at the time, with a piquant, Burne-Jones face and finely but firmly chiselled features that suggest a certain underlying toughness and determination. Perhaps significantly enough, in his poster for her appearance in a John Todhunter play in 1894, Aubrey Beardsley depicts her as a powerful and sultry femme fatale. Shaw, who had an affair with her for a while in the early 1890s, described Farr as ‘in violent reaction against Victorian morals, especially sexual and domestic morals; and when the impact of Ibsen was felt in this country, and I wrote somewhere that “home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse” I became persona grata with her’.100
Farr was the New Woman par excellence, turning her back on her highly respectable education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and later Queen’s College, the first college for women in London, and going on the stage in her early twenties. Her father died when she was twenty-three, leaving her a small income (£50 a year), which she always successfully supplemented. She was briefly married to an unsatisfactory actor, Edward Emery; she insisted on his emigration to the United States after three disagreeable years, eventually divorced him and never married again, though she had many lovers. There are numerous reports of her beautiful voice, and much criticism of her acting. She thought spontaneity mattered much more than training, and would only put as much effort into a play as the whim took her. Although she had some successes she was unwilling to take direction or advice, and could drive playwrights, even when they were admirers, to distraction.
Yeats met Farr in 1890, when he first began to think about the possibilities of a non-realist theatre, and decided that she was ‘an almost perfect poetic actress’.101 From the beginning he consulted her regularly about his writing, that first year reading her The Countess Cathleen, on which he was then working: he introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, delighted that her fascination with the occult matched his own. (The Order of the Golden Dawn was an esoteric Rosicrucian society, founded in 1888; Yeats had joined in early 1890, after becoming exasperated by Madame Blavatsky’s autocratic rule in the Theosophical Society.) Yeats was fascinated by Farr from the start, and very jealous of Shaw. Farr to a certain extent played the two of them off against each other, but her interests in the occult and in the chanting of verse coincided much more with Yeats’ than with those of the more down to earth Shaw. Farr firmly believed one should not form exclusive attachments, and, unlike some who espoused that view, she never appears to have found her heart acting against her head. She never lost her regard for Shaw, and they remained excellent friends. With Yeats too she remained close, before and after a brief affair in 1903. Farr was not of course in any way a rival to Yeats’ devotion to Maud Gonne, but she was of great importance to him. He wrote to her in 1906: ‘You cannot think what a pleasure it is to be fond of somebody to whom I can talk – as a rule any sort of affection annihilates conversation, strikes one with a silence like that of Adam before he had named the beasts. To be … one’s own self … because one has found an equal, this is the best of life.’102 Yeats said of her to his wife, whom he married in the year of Farr’s death, ‘She was the only person to whom I could tell everything’.103 Shaw had said, in a rather similar vein, that with Farr he had discovered the ‘full intellectual and emotional companionship of love’.104 She was clearly a remarkable woman. Yet Shaw’s letters to her are often full of incandescent outrage at her refusal to follow his bidding as an actress. ‘Miserable wretch!’ he would address her, ‘You want someone with a whip to keep you up to the collar … Murray asks whether you have not a mother with a large stick to keep you awake’ – not, one would think, the best way to gain co-operation from Florence Farr.105 So much for full companionship. Yeats was also to say that he ‘formed with her an enduring friendship that was an enduring exasperation’, and later told Sturge Moore that she had been a ‘china egg’ that he ‘had been sitting on for years’.106 One wonders what he had hoped she would hatch into.
Farr was also a writer, and it was presumably in that capacity she had been asked along. Hulme obviously took her presence seriously, because he wrote to Flint delaying the second meeting of the group until she could make it and telling him reassuringly that Farr had much admired a poem of his. The poem in question was ‘The Mask of Gold’, not yet published, as far as I can ascertain, so it suggests that Hulme and Flint were already swapping manuscripts. Farr would have known of Flint even if they hadn’t met, for she too had been a regular contributor to the New Age, having recently written a series of articles on Ibsen’s women. She had had a brief and racily written ‘New Woman novel’, The Dancing Faun, published by Mathews and Lane in 1894, whose heroine, Lady Geraldine, has no truck with conventional mores, apart, that is, from having made what Farr regarded as the common and foolish mistake of falling in love. Lady Geraldine is ready to forgive the cad she adores for having cheated at cards, even for having a wife already, but when he refuses to run away with her because her yearly income is only £800, she shoots him dead – and gets away with it.
Since then Farr had published a book on ancient Egyptian beliefs, which Pound mentioned admiringly to his parents; incidentally, it had infuriated Shaw, who thought her occult interests a waste of time. No doubt Shaw was equally outraged when she wrote two plays with Olivia Shakespear on occult Egyptian themes. And the very month that the Tour Eiffel meetings began, Elkin Mathews published a book by her entitled The Music of Speech, a book that Yeats had been urging her to bring out for years, and which she dedicated to Yeats and Dolmetsch. The greater part of The Music of Speech consisted of the re-publication of admiring reviews of Farr’s performances with the psaltery, followed by a rather briefer section explaining the technique and principles of what she called ‘cantilating’, and giving examples of musical accompaniments for poetry. Pound’s eye must have been caught by a review which said: ‘A new Troubadour has come chanting through Provence … Florence Farr has re-found the Troubadour’s secret and some other, older and more precious secrets as well.’107 Farr’s insistence on the link between music and poetry undoubtedly made a considerable impact on Pound, for it was only after meeting her that he began to research seriously the musical accompaniment to Provençal poetry, and to emphasise the musicality of verse. Flint too, who once said that he had never heard poetry spoken as beautifully as by Farr, was always to stress the role of cadence. Farr’s views must, however, have led to arguments with Hulme, who had asserted in his lecture of the previous November that in future poetry would be silently read, and its typographical appearance on the page would come to matter more than its sound. As far as the increasing importance of typography in modernist poetry goes, Hulme was quite right – one thinks of e. e. cummings, or Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, his poem/drawings that look like their subject-matter – falling rain, carnations or lutes. But those developments were not necessarily at the expense of the musicality, as the imagists would insist. One of the characteristics of modernist poetry was that it paid close attention to the materiality of words, whether as auditory sound or visual shape. Farr and Hulme had as it happened other differences as well to argue over: Hulme believed strongly in women’s domestic role, and had in theory no truck with New Women. Yet he clearly thought highly of the strong-minded and spirited Farr.
Desmond FitzGerald, the second Irish member of the group, and along with Farr responsible for introducing Pound to the group, has always been a shadowy figure in accounts of the imagist movement, though far from shadowy elsewhere. He later became something of an Irish nationalist hero, taking part in the Easter Rising, being imprisoned, and then elected as a Sinn Fein MP while still in jail. When the Irish Free State government came into being, he became Minister for External Affairs, and was eventually, like Yeats, to be a Senator, though, unlike his son Garret, never Taoiseach. FitzGerald was to be something of an icon to Pound – he fulfilled his idea of the poet/man of action – the more so as the two of them moved steadily to the right. FitzGerald never became a vociferous supporter of Fascism like Pound, though Pound was keen to remonstrate with him (fruitlessly) in the area where he felt FitzGerald went too far, his support of Irish censorship. Pound was to say later that he preferred FitzGerald’s poetry to that of either Flint or Storer ‘for its insides, but they didn’t get a bullet-proof cover on it any of ’em’, and he remained proud of his association with him, always striving hard to have his presence acknowledged in accounts of the Tour Eiffel group, such as those he gave to René Taupin in 1928, and to Patricia Hutchins in the 1950s.108 He would have been very disgruntled by FitzGerald’s invisibility in more recent accounts. In an unpublished memoir, written in middle age, FitzGerald recalled rather regretfully how as a young man ‘my two interests were philosophy and poetry, and so I should have thought that at my present age I should be talking about philosophers I had known, and the writers I had known, and the works they had written’.109 Historical events changed all that. In 1909 he was involved in the cause of the Irish cultural revival, but for him, as for many of his nationalist compatriots, this cause would be transformed a few years later into a violent and bloody political struggle.
FitzGerald was only twenty-one in 1909, the youngest of the group. Born in England of Irish emigrant parents, he came to identify strongly with the Irish cause. His father Patrick had earlier been a stonemason but became a builder, and the family lived in West Ham. He was the youngest of six children, though there was a considerable gap between the first two and the last four, his mother having left his father at one stage and returned to Ireland for almost six years. He had been christened Thomas Joseph, but adopted the name of Desmond. As his son Garret explains, ‘Desmond, from the Irish for “South Munster”, was one of the two earldoms that the FitzGeralds had held in Ireland in the Middle Ages’, and the young FitzGerald clearly felt it was more romantic and more celebratory of his Irish ancestry than the workaday Thomas.110 His mother continued to call him Tommy, so he could not repudiate it altogether, and during the Tour Eiffel days he was always known as T.D. FitzGerald. Desmond had loved poetry since he was very young. His son reports a family story ‘presumably exaggerated, at least in relation to his age! – that when he was seven he walked from his home in West Ham six or seven miles into the West End in the hope of seeing W.B. Yeats going into the Café Royal’.111 When he left school, one of his brothers, William, who was fifteen years older than Desmond and a successful magazine editor, offered to fund him through university, but he turned the offer down and became a civil service clerk, an unhappy choice. How long he was in the civil service is not clear: by the time he was married in the summer of 1911, he was, according to his marriage certificate, a ‘commercial clerk’, though just about to escape to a freer existence abroad. Why he refused to go to university is unknown. It certainly was not lack of ability. Desmond became a fine linguist, knowing several languages, if not quite so many as the prodigious Flint – though FitzGerald was delighted, in 1914, to be able to point out to Flint that he knew and could speak one language of which Flint was entirely ignorant: Irish.112
What family history does relate is that as a young man Desmond was determined to be a poet; perhaps he turned down university because his brother was offering to fund him through an uncongenially practical degree. His mother and some at least of his siblings appear to have taken his ambitions seriously, for one of his nieces records – rather disapprovingly – visiting the family home, then in Upton Avenue, Forest Gate, and seeing Desmond with his long artistic curls languidly lying on the settee, his mother and a brother and sister waiting on his every need.113 No wonder he found the life of a civil service clerk dismaying. Where he met Flint, another would-be poet imprisoned in the role of civil service clerk, is not known. As the only other friend of his own age of whom there is any record before 1909 was a left-wing journalist, Langton Everard, also a friend of Flint’s, it seems most likely that FitzGerald had socialist as well as poetic sympathies himself at that stage and that they met at a gathering akin to the Fabian Art Group, or some sort of left-wing literary group. (I have to say that when I suggested this to his son he was deeply sceptical, because of his father’s later right-wing political views, but there are many examples of such a switch, and certainly a letter from Everard to him is on the writing paper of the Labour Leader.) FitzGerald certainly admired William Morris’ literary works, but he may have had only a vague interest in his politics; yet the left was where a bohemian, as he thought of himself, would head for congenial culture in Edwardian London. In 1911, Hulme was still lamenting ‘the landslides amongst the intellectuals to the Socialist side’.114
Desmond’s interest in Gaelic culture had begun early. He had been taken to Ireland by his father; though probably only once or twice, but he was deeply attached to it. When he left school, he began to write for publications devoted to encouraging the Irish Literary Revival, as early as 1907 publishing a short play in the magazine, the Shanachie (‘The Storyteller’).115 In 1919 he was eventually to have a play put on at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, but it is hard to imagine that the earlier effort, which was entitled The Passing, would have tempted a director. It is set in Ireland, and the Irish language – that is, the Hiberno-English – is quite melodiously done: shades of Synge perhaps, whose work appeared regularly in the Shanachie. But The Passing is deeply gloomy. There are only four characters, two of whom are ghosts of the just departed; the other two – an old woman and a widow – are dead by the end of the play. Perhaps the story symbolised for FitzGerald the feared death of Irish culture. Looking back at his youth, FitzGerald wrote: ‘When my generation woke to consciousness we found that our country did not exist as a nation … Some at least of us, felt wounded and bruised by the condition we inherited.’116 The play comes, perhaps, from the pain of that wound. The Irish had been one of the groups most despised by the English in the nineteenth century; as the flood of Irish emigration took place into England’s industrial cities at the time of the famine, the Irish became characterised as ‘white negroes’ or subhuman apes: the ‘Irish Yahoo’ was in some quarters the obvious candidate for the Missing Link.117 Deanglicising Ireland included a refusal to accept the English definition of Irishness, fighting back against such racist valuations as well as challenging English aesthetic and cultural norms. The Irish Literary Revival gave the younger generation at the turn of the century – people like FitzGerald, Campbell and Colum – a much more positive sense of their inheritance; it aimed to bring Irish culture and the nation back to life. By 1908, FitzGerald was taking part in that endeavour, studying Gaelic at a class run by the Central Gaelic League.
The year 1908 was also the year that FitzGerald’s father died, aged about seventy; his loss may have intensified young Desmond’s desire to know more of his roots. His sister described their father as ‘very Irish, but quiet’ whilst their mother, on the other hand, was ‘not very Irish’; his mother was reported by the family to have had nineteen very happy years after her husband’s death, which suggests her married life had not been particularly felicitous.118 There was a family rumour that the father drank – which by some certainly might have been considered ‘very Irish’, but often not ‘quiet’ – but whatever criticisms his family had of Patrick FitzGerald, his death, it appears, hit his youngest son hard. His father died on 1 August and on the blank half-page at the end of a letter sent to him by Everard on 11 August Desmond wrote some intriguing fragmentary sentences. They are in the third person, and read like the first attempt at a story, for FitzGerald would also try his hand at fiction, but the emotions the passage attempts to deal with are, one suspects, in many ways his own. ‘It was the most bitter hour of his life,’ he begins, and then goes on: ‘How he had longed for success & before success came his father died his father whom he had loved and wronged … All the time he had been living with Phoebe [his religious faith] had added gall to his every joy and now it whispered to him that he tasted the sorrow of sin. Ah what an epiphany of despair to know that he was weary of her year in and year out, he must go on living with her for he knew he had not strength enough to send her …’119 The fragment ends there. Though by his thirties FitzGerald was a deeply devout Catholic, the faith in which he had been reared, there is little indication that he was much concerned with religious practice in the Tour Eiffel days; nevertheless, this passage suggests how strong the underlying pull of his belief was, as if his father’s death had precipitated a wave of guilty horror at his apostasy, or at any rate slackness, followed by a short-lived – for now – return of religious fervour. Desmond lived at home until he married in 1911 – he certainly had no literal live-in lover named Phoebe – but he may well have felt he was sowing his wild oats in some form or other. The few poems that date from his Upton Avenue days are preoccupied for the most part with very Catholic sexual guilt and with the need for renunciation of the beloved in favour of heavenly reward, and though conventional in form are quite Donne-like in the complexity of their imagery, an indication perhaps of his philosophical bent. Whether FitzGerald practised the renunciation his early poems advocate is another matter. His letters from 1910 and 1911, written to his future wife, Mabel McConnell, suggest that he was a great deal more occupied with her and social life generally than with either religious observance or self-denial. Yet what is also striking in the fragment on his father’s death is his ambition, which at this stage was firmly set on literary fame; had his father lived, he would have seen his son achieve success, but not in that way.
Although FitzGerald and Flint both worked as civil service clerks, FitzGerald was apparently the better off of the two, as in a letter he refers to his pleasure in finding someone who may be able to be of use to the impecunious Flint.120 FitzGerald came, of course, from a more comfortable if not actually affluent background, and it may well have been that one or other of his older brothers gave him some sort of an allowance, because in another letter he talks of a row with a brother which will leave him financially poorer, though spiritually healthier – not that there appears to have been any great change in his circumstances, so presumably reconciliation took place quite quickly. Pound suggests in a parody he wrote of Burns’ ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ that both Hulme and FitzGerald were considerably better off than himself. He compares his own penniless position with their apparent comfort:
Is there for feckless poverty
That grins at ye for a’ that!
A hired slave to none am I,
But underfed for a’ that …
The tails I shun and a’ that,
My name but mocks the guinea stamp
And Pound’s dead broke for a’ that …121
This was probably written in 1910, though not published until the first imagist anthology came out, where it was entitled ‘To Hulme (T.E.) and FitzGerald’, with a note explaining that it was ‘written for the cénacle of 1909’. But Pound’s justification of what he describes here as his ‘time to loaf and will to write’ sounds as if the real spur for this poem may well have been one of his recurrent fits of guilt at his own lack of a steady job, rather than his friends’ affluence. Hulme was certainly no more a ‘hired slave’ than Pound was, and neither Hulme nor FitzGerald would have felt that any subsidies they had from relatives promoted them into the category of what another verse describes as ‘the man of independent means’.
According to Ronald Schuchard, FitzGerald was assistant secretary to the Irish Texts Society at this period, an organisation that undertook the publication of Gaelic texts and was closely linked to the Irish Literary Society. Like Campbell’s position, this would have been purely honorary. FitzGerald’s Gaelic interests were, one would guess, cultural rather than strongly political at this stage. When he began courting his future wife Mabel in 1910 – a determined nationalist in reaction against her Ulster Unionist background – it is clear from his letters that she thinks he spends far too much time in literary circles with those who do not, as he puts it, ‘shout’ for the cause. When Pound spoke of FitzGerald to his father, he described him as ‘journalising and poetizing somewhat’. If one could discover where he ‘journalised’, one might have a more precise understanding of his attitudes at that stage; given his friendship with Flint and with Everard, who had left London in 1908 to work on the Manchester-based Labour Leader, it might have been in the radical press, possibly on the question of Irish Home Rule. (Incidentally, ‘English journalist’ was the cover that FitzGerald – with his English accent – was to use with some success when evading capture by the British Army in Ireland a few years later.)
FitzGerald’s poetry is not much easier to locate than his journalism, one reason why he has figured as no more than a name in most accounts of the Tour Eiffel. Though their imagery can be striking, the poems surviving from his days at Upton Avenue do not attempt vers libre; FitzGerald appears to have had a more cautious approach to experimentation than someone like Campbell. Even in 1914, when he was living in Ireland, he was to write to Flint, having read some of his imagist poetry in the Egoist: ‘I liked your poems … Mind you, I don’t commit myself to acknowledging that as the highest poetical form. I don’t even say that it isn’t prose. But what I liked was that you had something to say and said it gracefully and straightforwardly. The matter of where one line ends and another begins did not bother me. You arranged your lines in a way consonant with the rhythm of the words which made the reading very pleasant.’122 Yet the early discussions perhaps took root, and bore fruit in his later poems, though none were, as far as I can find, published before 1917.
Even though Hulme spent so much time at the Irish Literary Society, given his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, he would have been no more in tune politically with FitzGerald and Campbell than he was with Farr. Yet two other Irishmen appear to have come along intermittently, Campbell’s friend, Padraic Colum, and Dermot Fryer, with whom Hulme had become friendly at Cambridge, but whose writing, as far as I have found, never featured in the magazines in which the later imagists published, although he eventually published a volume of short stories. Of the ‘4 or 5 versers’ mentioned by Hulme, the only other one that can be identified is the stockbroker Tancred; according to J.B. Harmer he was somewhat older than the others, apart from Florence Farr, probably in his mid-thirties, and a great admirer of Hulme. Tancred had also been a member of the Poets’ Club, and had brought out a small book of poems in 1907, and another in 1908 under the aegis of the club. (Flint reviewed the latter unenthusiastically in the New Age.) Tancred’s pre-Tour Eiffel poetry is unusual for the period, but certainly not because he is experimenting with free verse. He somewhat defiantly wrote poetry in imitation of Herrick and his contemporaries, whom he described as ‘the conspicuous poets who have jewelled the auspices of the House of Stuart’.123 Herrick was, incidentally, a poet whom Campbell also admired, but was not generally in high esteem at the time. Yet if one looks a few years on to Eliot’s celebration of Herrick’s contemporaries, one might think of Tancred as being slightly ahead of the game. One poem in the 1907 collection is written to Selwyn Image (the poet, designer and stained-glass maker whom Pound had met earlier in 1909), rebuking him for not having returned some of Tancred’s poems, and is more ironic pastiche than imitation (‘Doubtless, my Selwyn, they are used/As shaving papers, or diffused/As pipe-lights, or they tautly curl/The neat fringe of your servant girl’).124
Like Flint, Tancred had become interested in Far Eastern poetry before he joined the Tour Eiffel group; Robert Ferguson points out that in the first Poets’ Club collection, the title of his poem, ‘On finding Selwyn Image not at home when calling upon him at lunch’ (Image was obviously an important person in his life), is a reference to a poem by Li Po, whom Pound would later translate, ‘On visiting a Taoist master in Tai-T’ien and not finding him at home’. According to Alun Jones, Tancred was a descendant of the bestselling nineteenth-century poet, Felicia Hemans, whose poem ‘Casabianca’ – ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ – Flint recalled with such distaste in his unfinished novel. The British Library copy of Tancred’s poems has a letter attached to one of the opening pages, explaining that the poems are ‘published to endow a cot in the memory of Felicia Hemans’; one hopes they sold well enough to do so. Neither Pound nor Flint ever mentions Tancred’s connection with Hemans, so perhaps Tancred felt in these circles it was best not to acknowledge such ancestry. Harmer points out that Hulme took Tancred’s critical judgements quite seriously, so he was apparently not regarded as a negligible member of the group at the time. Pound was rather irritated by him, as he tended to be by other people’s disciples, though he forgave Tancred when he praised his own poems.
Tancred published very little, so how his poetry developed after he joined the group is hard to discover. After the war, he developed a mental illness, and died in an institution. Flint described him as ‘a poet too little known, perhaps because his production is precious and small, [who] used to spend hours each day in the search for the right phrase’.125 One wonders how his stocks and shares fared as he searched.