I

DURING THE TIME Pound was in England from 1908 to 1910, he had ignored both British politics and English social problems, though he must have heard them discussed at South Lodge, since one of Ford’s good friends was the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, determined, his wife Lucy was to say, to banish ‘at any rate the blackest pits of poverty’ so prevalent then in Britain. Since Ford and Hunt and many of their friends were staunch supporters of Irish Home Rule and the suffragettes, Pound must have known about those too.¹ Did Flint ever attempt to discuss socialism with him? If he did, Pound appears to have taken no notice. When Jessie Chambers visited London, she was appalled at the homeless poor sleeping under Waterloo Bridge, pointed out to her by Lawrence, but Pound made no comment on anyone’s poverty except his own. Just one poem, ‘Piccadilly’, deals with the urban destitute, and even there Pound says that while he could feel pity for those with ‘beautiful, tragical faces’, when it comes to ‘The gross, the coarse, the brazen,/God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,/But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,/Who hath forgotten you?’ This is honest enough, but if only the aesthetic needy are to stir compassion, it would be a bleak world.²

At this stage Pound’s only interest in British politics was in its impact on his literary production. On 5 February 1910, he had written home in some irritation that ‘the election has held up everything for a month’ and at the beginning of March, even more crossly, ‘if they have another be damned “General Election” it will interfere with my next set of reviews. I trust Lloyd George will suffer torments hereafter’.³ The political scene was a troubled one at the time, causing problems beyond Pound’s publishing plans, and many were anxious about the future. When Frazer expressed his fears about the future of civilisation, his sense that ‘the ground beneath our feet is … honeycombed by unseen forces’, he was responding to a widespread sense of menace, from the discontented proletariat, from disruptive women, from the resentful Irish.⁴ The elections that Pound mentions were the consequence of a battle between the Commons and the Lords: Lloyd George had been endeavouring since the previous July to pass what became known as the ‘People’s Budget’, which he described to the public as ‘a war budget … for raising money to wage implacable war against poverty and squalidness’.⁵ The Liberals had recently introduced for the first time a National Insurance scheme and wanted to give more help to the unemployed, measures that they believed were vital to alleviate the extremes of poverty in the country, and to calm the discontent that many feared might lead to violence or even revolution. Money was needed to pay for these rudimentary social services, and Lloyd George wanted income tax increases, including a supertax of sixpence (2½p) in the pound for those with more than £5,000 a year, increases in death duties and in taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and new taxes on the latest toy of the aristocracy, the motor car. Most peers were appalled, and adamant that they would not tolerate such socialist outrages, which they believed were ‘the beginning of the end of the rights of property’.⁶ Asquith, the Prime Minister, was threatening to create 500 new peers to get the budget passed (he had in mind, among others, Thomas Hardy, J.M. Barrie and Bertrand Russell), but the Lords in the end conceded, and Pound was saved from further electoral disturbance to his reviews.

On Pound’s return to England he would gradually become more aware of British politics, but at least in 1910 he was also still free of his later dark obsessions. When Ford was forced to sell the ailing English Review at the beginning of 1910 to the financier Alfred Mond, Pound’s only comment to his parents was a cheery note to the effect that the new proprietors had said they would still welcome his work. In retrospect, he was to see this takeover as an evil Jewish conspiracy. As it happens, John Gould Fletcher, who had spent the summer of 1909 taking his sister Mary, about to start at Vassar, on a grand European tour, was now back in England, and wondering about purchasing the English Review himself. Indecisive as always, he did nothing about it.

Pound was out of England from March 1910 until the end of August 1911 for all but a few days. He had realised for some months that he was not going to make enough money to convince his parents that it was worthwhile for him to stay. He had continued to have regular handouts from Homer; he felt guilty about this, but not guilty enough to take up uncongenial work: ‘no literature,’ he had told his long-suffering father the previous year, ‘is made by people in other professions’.⁷ (Williams, for one, would prove him wrong.) But he could not expect the subsidy to continue for ever. He was still – under a certain amount of parental pressure – toying reluctantly with the idea of an academic post, and making desultory enquiries. Had Exultations been more of a success he might have felt differently, but in spite of being able to report to his parents that he had been praised in the Parisian Mercure de France, he had also to admit that the reviews in London had included some ‘violent’ attacks. Although Ford and Violet Hunt had found him some well-paid private teaching of affluent society ladies, including Olivia Shakespear’s friend, Eva Fowler, his lectures had not picked up. It seemed that returning home was inevitable. All Pound could do was delay the evil hour. It would be much more sensible, he argued, to arrive in the States in June when The Spirit of Romance came out, he hoped to glowing reviews, and jobs would therefore be more readily forthcoming. In the meantime, with the book completed, and payment from the English Review for three more poems, he had enough to get to Italy, always cheaper than England; he asked his father to send his next remittance there, and to continue with a little more modest support for the next few months. On 22 March he had a final day of London hospitality, lunch with Violet Hunt (he had been out with Ford the day before) and tea with the Shakespears, before taking the night boat train to Paris. There he had arranged to visit a musician, Walter Morse Rummel, later one of the foremost exponents of Debussy’s music, and, like Pound, interested in Provençal song settings. They had met briefly in 1908, probably introduced by Kitty Heyman. Rummel, handsome and charming as well as musically gifted, had been born in Berlin of a German father and American mother, and was now settled in Paris. Pound had intended to have breakfast only, but they got on so well he stayed two days. ‘He means to music about what I do to poetry,’ he commented a little later.⁸

Pound went on to Italy, where he first stayed in Verona, which he had visited during his time in Venice; it was always one of his favourite cities, partly for its associations, as the city to which Dante had fled, and where under the protection of Can Grande della Scala, Lord of Verona, he had written much of The Divine Comedy, dedicating the Paradiso to Can Grande himself. Pound admired Verona’s architecture, particularly the tall, elegant and imposing San Zeno, described by the 1906 Baedeker as ‘one of the finest Romanesque churches in North Italy’, with ‘most noble proportions’. Pound, who like most Americans of the period took his Baedeker seriously, did not dissent. He pronounced it ‘ultimate perfection’, and said it had ‘the abiding spirit in it as no other church in Europe’.⁹ Although there had been a church on the site since the fourth century, the present basilica and campanile date from the twelfth century, Pound’s favourite period. In The Spirit of Romance he had written, ‘The twelfth century, or, more exactly, that century whose centre is the year 1200, has left us two perfect gifts: the church of San Zeno at Verona, and the canzoni of Arnaut Daniel; by which I would imply all that is most excellent in the Italian-Romanesque architecture and in Provençal minstrelsy.’¹⁰

Pound could find nowhere to stay cheaply in Verona, so he moved on, very much by chance, to nearby Sirmione, ‘a village that you could hide under a thimble’, as he described it in one letter, on a finger of land that ran out into the lake in a narrow peninsula at the southern end of Lake Garda. It is now a popular day out from the northern Italian cities, and packed on sunny weekends; even then it had half a dozen hotels, which catered mainly in the spring and autumn for German tourists, for many Germans of the period, like Aschenbach in Mann’s 1912 Death in Venice, had a passionate love for Italy and the romantic south. In the summer, the Italians would come to take sulphur baths, but there were, to Pound’s relief, very few Americans. He was able to live at the aptly named Hotel Eden for seven lire a day, even then admirably cheap; his one quarrel was with its writing-paper, on which he would regularly and disapprovingly cross out the address of ‘Gardasee’ and substitute ‘Lago di Garda’. The entrance to the village itself was guarded by a small and picturesque castle built by one of the della Scala family and surmounted by the same swallow-tailed crenellations as the great Castelvecchio built by Dante’s patron in Verona itself. The wild headland north of the village was covered with olive trees and ruins, and across the lake could be seen the beginnings of the Alps, with Mount Riva towards the northern end.

Pound spent a couple of rather lazy months in Sirmione, correcting proofs and sitting in the sun. He had, after all, in the two years since he arrived in Europe, published four books of poetry, and written one book of literary criticism, as well as doing a fair amount of lecturing, reviewing and other journalism. In addition he had had the highly demanding task of performing the role of intense and aesthetic poet for literary London. Even if financially he had not been a success, it would not have been surprising if he felt he were due some relaxation. But there was more to his holiday mood than that. Soon after arriving he wrote to his father: ‘No I dont think you have to pay for my passage & I dont think you have to send me anymore remittances’. He added enigmatically, ‘the financial condition is decidedly comforting’.¹¹ When his parents asked in some bewilderment how he had suddenly at last become – even briefly – self-supporting, he wrote indignantly back:

‘sudden occasion of wealth’ … I’ve jawed all winter at the Polytec. I’ve been writing a book for six months, I’ve given lessons in advanced kindergarten aesthetics. My poesia begins to go in the magazines at about £5. a dip. Jan. Eng. Rev. paid in March. April Eng. Rev. just paid. Fortnightly proofs returned. Eng. Rev. 3 new poems received & presumably to appear. Sudden! – hm – well, we hope we’re on the way.¹²

Pound was not being entirely frank. He had not told his parents that while he was in Paris, Walter Rummel had introduced him to a young American woman, called Margaret Cravens, who had offered – and already begun to supply – financial support. Perhaps it was not only Pound’s admiration for Rummel that had delayed him on that occasion. Margaret Cravens, like other young Americans of the period, had come to Paris to pursue an artistic life, in her case as a musician, a life that would have been impossible in the States for a woman of her class. She came from a wealthy family, having grown up in Madison, the second biggest city in Indiana, where she had been cared for by a formidable maiden aunt, and she had a comfortable, if by no means large, allowance. After Pound’s own tribulations in Indiana he would undoubtedly have sympathised with her flight to Europe. Pound was later to realise Margaret was full of inner anguish, but he probably only learnt of her tragic early life after her death. In the Cantos he refers to her as ‘Margaret of the seven griefs’, referring perhaps to the seven deaths in Margaret’s immediate family, her mother having died when she was four, and Margaret herself being the only one of five children to have survived.¹³ She saw little of her father, and was brought up by grandparents. Her grandfather died when she was eight, and her grandmother when she was thirteen, at which point she was handed over to the intimidating aunt. That childhood surrounded by death had left her with a deep inner melancholy, and also perhaps a need to find a passionate cause to give sense and human connection to her bereft existence.

Pound must have made an intense impact on Margaret; he convinced her of his genius, and she offered to give him a substantial proportion of her income to free him to write. Since his arrival in Sirmione, she had already sent him $100, enough to support him for six weeks, and was putting more in a Paris bank for him to drawn on as he needed it. From his letters to her it appears that she had wanted to settle on him a lump sum, but Pound, rather honourably, dissuaded her from that, suggesting that she ‘send [his] salvation in smaller amounts’.¹⁴ As with his parents, he had some qualms about accepting her generosity, but not so many as to refuse it. It was for his art, he argued, not for him, and he was deeply grateful, not only for the money, but also for her belief in the value of his talent. In his first letter of thanks, which he wrote before he left Paris, he appears almost overwhelmed. ‘Of course it is all out of the Arabian Nights or some book of magic … I haven’t quite realised things yet. I mean you’ve brought me back to a number of things.’ One of those ‘things’ she brought him back to was self-belief. He wrote again a couple of days later after his arrival in Italy: ‘You have given me so much – I dont mean the apparent gift – but restorations of faith. Your “largesse” in all that a forgotten word should mean! – and then the apparent gift comes, as a sort of sign from beyond that my work is accepted. It couldn’t have come unless there was some real reason, behind us all, for the work to go on unfettered.’ His future mission and greatness as a poet was confirmed. Curiously enough, in his letters to her from Italy he mentions Hamilton several times, somewhat to her confusion, as she had no idea what or where Hamilton was. It suggests he was vividly comparing her faith in him with his pariah status there – ‘Life is bitter in an American College,’ he told her. Life was very sweet now for a newly confident poet, without financial worries, living in the warmth by a ‘lavender lake’.¹⁵

Pound soon had some more good news. He heard shortly after his arrival that he was to have a book of his poems published in the United States for the first time. Smith, Maynard & Co. had agreed to bring out later that year a selection of poems from Personae and Exultations, with a few new poems included. Pound settled down to enjoy Italy. He loved Sirmione, unusually so; he was in general much more interested in people than places, and in conversation, or at least an audience, than in scenery. He was fascinated by the town’s literary associations; past the village, in the wilder northern end of the peninsula, the Roman poet Catullus had lived; one of the ruins was thought to have been his house. Sirmione had also been the home of one of Pound’s favourite Renaissance Latinists, Marcus Antonius Flaminius, about whom he had written in The Spirit of Romance. Pound had included one of Flaminius’ poems in Exultations, something of a direct act of plagiarism, or to put it more kindly, l’art trouvé, for it was in essence an only slightly adapted version of a seventeenth-century prose translation that he also quoted in The Spirit of Romance, commending Flaminius for his ‘sensitiveness to nature’ and to the ‘spiritual presences therein’.¹⁶

In addition to his sense of this poetic heritage, the sheer beauty of Sirmione moved him, though perhaps the golden light shed by Margaret Cravens’ ‘largesse’ helped him to appreciate it. He wrote to H.D. (the only early letter to her that survived), ‘I’ve been watching the “Garda” for a month trying to see it in paint … No paint can ever get the intensity, the brilliancy, the transparency, the depth … Sirmione is the peace of God. I’ve been about a little & I know paradise when I see it’.¹⁷ He told Margaret Cravens, ‘I am quite convinced … that the gods have returned to [Mount] Riva or to be more exact they have never left it’.¹⁸ In Sirmione, he could experience for himself the return of the old pagan gods of whom Pater spoke, who had liberated his Provençal poets from the dead hand of the medieval Church. Sirmione, he would continue to maintain, was the original world of the gods.¹⁹

Italy, with so many reminders of the pagan past, must have made it easy for him to imagine himself back into that world, though it may also have been his recent introduction to Frazer that made his mind run so much on the pre-Christian gods. He was working on a series of poems, much concerned with a quasi-pagan, visionary religion of love, most of which would be published the following year in the collection entitled Canzoni, though he would include a few in the Provença, the American selection of his poems that would come out later in the year. His chief focus of interest was moving on from the Provençal poets to the early Italians, as The Spirit of Romance had already signalled, particularly Guido Cavalcanti, the most famous of the thirteenth-century Tuscan dolce stil nuovo poets. Pound had given him only two pages in The Spirit of Romance, though he had praised him warmly: ‘Dante himself,’ he said there, ‘never wrote lines more poignant, or more intensely poetic than did Cavalcanti.’²⁰ In Sirmione, Cavalcanti appears to have taken on a new significance, and he began work on what would be a book of translations, The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, which eventually appeared in 1912. Cavalcanti’s work does not have the bravado and panache of the Provençal troubadours, though influenced by them, but his beautifully wrought poetry incorporates a mystical philosophy that fascinated Pound. When the Provençal poets fled after the brutal crushing of the Albigensian heresy by Simon de Montfort, spreading their love poetry to other parts of Europe, Tuscany was particularly receptive. The Tuscan poets took over much of the Provençal imagery and forms, their conception of love becoming fused with Neoplatonic doctrines of light, possibly Arab in origin. The light that shines in the eyes of the lady is a light that is also the mystical heart of being. Those of ‘cor gentil’ (noble heart), with the sensitivity to respond to this radiance and beauty, are a small, elect group. Both this elitism and the fusion of earthly love and mysticism, brought to consummation in Dante, appealed powerfully to Pound, as it had to the Pre-Raphaelites, especially to Rossetti, on whose Early Italian Poets Pound had relied heavily in his chapter on the Tuscan poets. This fusion of the love of beauty and the love of God could be justified in Christian theology too, at any rate in the writings of Pound’s favourite theologian, Richard of St Victor, who held that in loving any mortal beauty one was in essence loving God. This idea was already present in the Provençal poets but it was developed into a more systematic mysticism in Tuscany.

Pound came to see Cavalcanti as one of the most subtle expositors of the psychology of the lover/mystic, but he found it hard to convey this, and his translations when they appeared in 1912 were not a success. They were castigated for their errors, but beyond that they fail to come to life as poems. They have the awkward leaden stasis of many of the poems in Canzoni, Pound remaining too trapped within their literary conventions to make them living things of his own. By 1915 he would admit to James Joyce that they were not a good translation.²¹ His search, however, to find a mode of expression for this mystic, yet erotic, ‘radiant beauty’ would go on, and for him imagism was in some ways just that. Yet with concerns like these, it is no wonder Pound in 1910 had been unable to find any common ground with the antipathetic Lewis.

Pound was not writing love poetry in Sirmione simply as an exercise. In The Spirit of Romance he had quoted a dismissive attack on a worthless troubadour: ‘And he made canzoni because he had a will to make canzoni and not because love moved him to it; and nobody thought much of him or of his songs either.’²² Love moved Pound. In late April Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear came to stay. Both of them had been researching on Pound’s behalf in his absence; having lectured them at his classes at the polytechnic, Pound considered them trained assistants, and they were sent to check information for queries in the proofs of The Spirit of Romance or to copy Provençal or Italian originals for Pound’s new translations. Dorothy felt ill at ease in the British Museum Reading Room; her upbringing had not prepared her to go alone to public places, but her writing was more legible than Olivia’s, and, Pound thought, she produced a more decipherable and therefore reliable copy. The tasks associated with the proofs were light, but the transcription of a considerable number of Arnaut Daniel and Cavalcanti sonnets demanded more intensive labour. Pound was aware that they might rebel: ‘I write with no confidence that the Griselda type has survived the Ibsen revolt and the last election,’ he said apprehensively when sending yet another request to Olivia.²³ In spite of his indifference to British politics in general, even Pound had noticed the suffragette agitation.

During the past fifteen months in London, although Pound and Dorothy saw each other frequently, there is no indication that they ever met without Olivia’s chaperoning presence, certainly not for more than a few minutes. While at Sirmione, the careful watch Olivia kept over her daughter in London appears to have slipped. Pound and Dorothy managed to escape together a few afternoons to the olive groves, ruins and cliffs of the northern end of the Sirmione peninsula, perhaps leaving Olivia having a siesta in the Hotel Eden. Dorothy wrote in her diary that it was the first time she had been really happy, and the following summer (not having seen Pound since) she was to write: ‘Last night I remembered all S[irmione] so well. I lived those exquisite days again: more clearly than I have for months been able to see anything. The Tower, & the two other afternoons. Truly my life was lived then.’²⁴ She told Noel Stock many years later that it was ‘the first time [she] ever saw colour’.²⁵ Now Pound wrote her a poem that was a much less ambiguous statement of his feelings towards her than ‘The White Poppy’, suggesting the only heaven worth having was being together in the earthly paradise of Sirmione ‘wherein the sun/Lets drift in on us through the olive leaves/ A liquid glory …’²⁶ The couple of weeks they spent there had been decisive.

The ecstatic visionariness revealed in that poem was what Dorothy admired most deeply about Pound, apart, perhaps, from his beauty, the two qualities she comments on most frequently in the extracts from her journal. Pound’s search for visionary states of mind was not something that most of his London acquaintances had noticed. To them, his extraordinary garb and eccentric behaviour implied someone far too noisy and obstreperous for mystical experience. Already, however, Dorothy’s notebook had suggested a very different view of Pound from the general. She wrote of him very shortly after their first meeting: ‘He has conquered the needs of the flesh – He can starve; nay, is willing, to starve that his spirit may bring forth the “highest of arts” – poetry … He has attained to peace in this world, it seems to me. To be working for the great art, to be living in, and for, Truth in her Greatness – He has found the Centre – TRUTH.’²⁷ Dorothy saw Pound with the eye of love, but her insight was not entirely flawed. It is true that Pound wanted fame; he wanted to be recognised; he liked to act the artist-dandy; he was not quite so ready to starve as she thought – he had written indignantly to his father the previous May when his parents had sent him less than he demanded: ‘what am I to eat if you send me $10 instead of $20?’²⁸ Yet visionary, mystical experience remained immensely important to him, seemingly still as central as it had been back in Wabash when he wrote to Viola Baxter about art and ecstasy, or as it had been in Venice, when he wrote of ‘the essences of beauty’ and ‘flashes of cosmic consciousness’ that he associated with art.²⁹ Dorothy’s recognition of this strain in him must have been an important part of her attraction for him. It may also have encouraged him to indulge it, for a while at any rate, not necessarily to the benefit of his poetry.

At some point during this visit Olivia began to realise Pound and Dorothy were attracted to each other. She may earlier have thought that Pound was already tied up with Grace Crawford, as she had met them together at the theatre, and in English decorum – as she would later point out to him – appearing as a couple together in public implied an understanding at the least. She had evidently come with no expectations – or perhaps one should say fears – of an entanglement between Pound and Dorothy. Olivia was not pleased: the Shakespears returned home, and Pound was forbidden to visit or write to Dorothy, although he would continue to write to Olivia at regular intervals while he was in the States. Humphrey Carpenter regards Olivia’s behaviour as distinctly odd, and suggests that what was most galling to Olivia was that she had believed Pound had a tendresse for herself, indeed hoped to become his mistress as she had been Yeats’, but that seems unlikely. Pound certainly admired Olivia, and had made his admiration clear, but only as a younger man to a charming and respected older woman. In his letters he always addresses her as ‘your highness’, which, though a little mocking, suggests he was always aware of the gap between them. According to Grace Crawford, Pound was quite in awe of Olivia. Olivia was a serious and sensitive woman; her marriage was unhappy, but her feelings for Yeats had, and still did, run deep. She had broken off their relationship in the 1890s, when she was traumatised by the discovery that Yeats was still in love with Maud Gonne. Their friendship had gone into abeyance for some time, but it had resumed as an important part of both their lives some time before Pound arrived in London. They may never again have been lovers – though it is possible they were at this very period, and some of Yeats’ biographers state this as a fact – but, whatever the sexual element, it was a close and intimate friendship, and there was a strong emotional bond between them. Olivia’s liking for the ebullient Pound was not in any way comparable.

Whatever her feelings for him, however, as a responsible, upper middle-class mother in the England of 1910, her reaction was entirely predictable. This was not the United States, where a certain amount of pre-marital flirtation could be condoned. Pound may not yet have read much Henry James, but if he had known The Awkward Age he might have understood better. A married woman’s liaison – as long as there were no scandal and no marital separation – could be silently overlooked, but the unmarried young woman’s reputation had to be spotless; there must be no possible hint of dalliance. The penniless Pound was a disastrous proposition as a husband, and there is no doubt that Olivia would know quite how penniless he was. Pound was rather proud of his role as poverty-stricken artist. Lucy Masterman, the wife of Charles Masterman, recalled one lunch when ‘[Pound] assured me that he was living on 10/- a week which dismayed me, as even in those days when £s were £s it was very small’.³⁰ Whilst as an acquaintance Pound’s poverty might promote sympathy, as a prospective son-in-law in 1910 England it could induce only horror. Dorothy had other and more acceptable admirers – for example the well-to-do and well-connected Fairfax, a much better proposition in accepted London terms. Pound – penniless, outré, scandalously short of drawing-room manners, and lacking any economic prospects – was out of the question. Olivia might be ready to tolerate the unconventional in art, but not in life. In June, Dorothy wrote to Pound that she took it he had been forbidden to write to her. ‘As yet, I have had no lecture – and have given no promise not to write to you – we pray I shall not be asked for the promise anyway.’³¹Apparently she was not, as she continued to write, but without letting Olivia know.

Pound left no evidence as to what his feelings were in the time he remained in Sirmione. He had sounded in the best of spirits when he reported the arrival of his amies anglaises in a letter to Margaret Cravens, but made no comment on their departure. A few weeks later he returned to Paris, spending some time with Margaret, who realised Pound was in low spirits. For Pound to let someone else know he was unhappy was uncharacteristic (‘if he ever gets blue nobody knows it,’ as Williams had commented), but Margaret herself was depressed, and his own unhappiness may have emerged as he tried to cheer her. He gave, apparently, no explanation. After a few days he left Paris for London, where a week later, on 18 June, he would catch his boat to New York.

During Pound’s brief stay in London, he saw Dorothy, but only, as she sadly noted, across ‘a roomful of people’.³² While the Shakespears were with him at Sirmione, Edward VII had died on 6 May and was much mourned, George V being generally agreed to be a dull dog in comparison, but the only reference Pound made to the royal death was to lament that it interfered with the concerts Rummel was giving in London at the time. He spent some time with Yeats, and went to spend a last evening with Ford, where among others he caught up with D.H. Lawrence, who gave an illuminating, if unkind description of the returning poet in a letter to Grace Crawford. ‘He was just back from Sermione [sic] – which he announces as the earthly paradise,’ Lawrence reported mockingly, though he was to have a similar response himself when he visited that part of Italy two years later. Pound, he told Grace, had been dressed more affectedly than ever: his ‘David Copperfield curls’ had been cut, and

His great grandfather’s black satin stock, which would throw into relief the contour of his chin four months ago, had given place to a tie of peach-bloom tint and texture. He wore a dark blue cotton shirt, no vest, and a Panama hat. What is the guise? – sort of latest edition of jongleur? Italy had improved his health; I was glad of that. It had not improved his temper: he was irascible. He discussed, with much pursing up of lips and removing of frown-shaken eyeglasses, his projection of writing an account of the mystic cult of love – the dionysian rites, and so on – from the earliest days to the present. The great difficulty was that no damned publisher in London dare publish it. It would have to be published in Paris. Then how about sales.

Lawrence would have his own problems in persuading publishers to print his views on love, but for now he was not sympathetic. His comment is confirmation, however, that Pound in Sirmione had been ruminating on his belief, which would be increasingly important to him, that Cavalcanti et alia were descendants of the Eleusinian mysteries, one of the most ancient of the Greek cults, fertility rites associated with Demeter and the return of her daughter Persephone from the underworld, and with Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, where a sacred marriage was celebrated, for Pound the oldest and exemplary ‘mystic cult of love’.

Was Pound irascible because he was unable to see Dorothy? Or because he was returning to America? Probably both. Of course, if he noticed, at that particular moment he may also have been cross because Lawrence was laughing at him. Lawrence produces one other intriguing piece of information in the same letter. Pound was going back to America, he announced to Lawrence, to make money. ‘Having had all the experiences possible for a poor man, he will now proceed to conquer riches … He will sell boots – there is nothing in that blown egg, literature. I ventured he should run a Cinematograph: a dazzling picture palace; for which valuable suggestion he tendered me a frown.’³³ It seems unlikely that Pound was really thinking of giving up that ‘blown egg, literature’, just when he had found a patron; the sudden enthusiasm for making money must have been a plan to make himself a suitable suitor for Dorothy, for she wrote him a sympathetic letter shortly after saying that she realised it was difficult to find £5,000 a year in a fortnight. The figure Olivia had in mind was £500, but Pound believed in overkill.

Pound appears to have made no promises about the future, except for saying to Dorothy, as she recorded in her notebook, ‘if ever you want me, I will come, at once’.³⁴ His parents, he knew, expected him to find a respectable and well-paid job in the States, a prospect he dreaded. The Spirit of Romance would be out shortly, and Provença by the end of the year. Much might depend on their success. And then there were those ex-fiancées. He would undoubtedly see H.D. as soon as he reached Philadelphia. Pound crossed the Atlantic to an uncertain future.