POUND ARRIVED IN New York in late June 1910, after a terrible crossing. He was always a bad sailor, and on this occasion, he said, ‘the Lusitania had delirium Tremens in the end of it I used’.99 Once safely back on dry land, he spent a couple of nights in New York, then headed home. In August he would return to further his fortune-making plans, but for now he took things easy. His parents were not in Wyncote at that point, but were living temporarily in the suburb of Swarthmore, having rented out the Wyncote house, something they did regularly. H.D. later surmised this was in order to finance Pound’s London life, but Pound never commented. The Swarthmore house, which was large and spacious, belonged to a journalist, at whose ‘huge desk’ Pound was able to work. Although he complained about the ‘absurdly’ hygienic quality of American suburban life, after the friendly squalor of London, he was happier to be home than he had thought he would be.100 As he later put it, ‘To return to America is like going through some very invigorating, very cleansing sort of bath.’101 He wrote to Margaret Cravens from Swarthmore on 30 June, a few days after his arrival, ‘The country seems strange to my eyes that have grown more European than I knew – strange but not so unpleasant as I expected.’102
In spite of being separated from Dorothy, Pound had cheered up. He told Margaret that she would be ‘relieved’ to know that he was feeling much more optimistic, and was sorry for worrying her in Paris. Now, he told her, he had a new sense of purpose:
with the new fight before me (mad enough tho’ it seems), there has come a curious renewal of that kind of energy that I had before the first battaglia … I have come to another starting point, and I am neither weary – nor am I any longer filled with that virus that makes one ask ‘to what end the attempting?’
What does he mean by the ‘new fight’? The first battaglia, he explains, was his attempt, on arrival from Gibraltar, to take London – to echo his military metaphor – by storm. Now once more he has ‘the same absolutely unfettered puerile sort of feeling for the attack as I had when I first went up against London with a sheaf of verse’.103 When in March he had first met Margaret in Paris, he had begun seriously to doubt that he would ever make his way as a poet, just as after his expulsion from Wabash he had been through a period of similar near-despair. He was generally loath to admit to despondency; in his 1912 lecture ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’, one of the things for which he praises his troubadours is that in their love religion, ‘though the servants of Amor went pale and wept and suffered heat and cold, they came on nothing so apparently morbid as the “dark night”.’104 But Pound himself clearly did have ‘dark nights of the soul’, and though remarkable in the way that he would pick himself up again after a setback, perhaps his best poetry came, as in the Pisan Cantos, when he allowed himself to acknowledge them.
For now, however, Pound was full of hope once more. For one thing, as he told Margaret, his brief reunion with Yeats in London had cheered him:
Yeats has been doing some new lyrics – he has come out of the shadows & declared for life. Of course there is in that a tremendous uplift for me – for he and I are now as it were in one movement, with aims very nearly identical. That is to say that the movement of the 90’ies for drugs and shadows has worn itself out. There has been no ‘influence’. Yeats has found within himself spirit of the new air which I by accident had touched before him.105
These ‘new lyrics’ were the poems that Yeats was to publish later in the year in The Green Helmet and Other Poems. Pound does not in any way yet identify this ‘spirit of the new air’ as a modernising project in terms of style, in the way Hulme or Flint would have advocated; that was to come. It is true that Yeats’ poetry in that volume has, as R. F. Foster puts it, a ‘sharp new edge’, and the change in Yeats’ writing, even more pronounced in later volumes, has sometimes been retrospectively attributed to Pound’s influence. But Pound had as yet no interest in sharp edges, and Yeats, Foster points out, had been ‘hon[ing]’ his writing for some time.106 What had delighted Pound in these poems was more a question of mood than style, the fact that Yeats was moving away from nineties melancholy. Pound’s ‘revolt against the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry’, as he had phrased it in the title of one of his Personae poems, was the one criticism he had so far made of that earlier generation, writing in his introduction to The Spirit of Romance that ‘Art is a joyous thing’.107
Pound was right that the ‘spirit of the new age’ refused defeat and resignation. Pre-war modernism would be combative and often aggressive, but it had energy and drive. Hulme, Flint and Lawrence would all have agreed that art should be vital and vigorous. All three, like Yeats, had been deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s insistence on the affirmation of life, and his belief that ‘Art is the great stimulus to life’.108 Pound had perhaps got there through Swinburne, though when he met Nietzsche he recognised their points of agreement. The First World War and its physical and spiritual death-dealing would bring this vitalist view of art to a crisis, but that was in the future. Yet, at this moment, for all his talk of ‘the spirit of the new age’, Pound was really only interested in himself and Yeats. He had written to his mother at the beginning of the year, when Yeats went back to Dublin, ‘He is the only living man whose work has anything more than a most temporary interest.’ And from Sirmione he had reported with some excitement to his father that ‘News comes from London that Yeats has been saying nice things about me – not so valuable in private as they would have been on the platform but as gratifying personally to the effect that “there is no younger generation (of poets). E.P. is a solitary volcano”.’109 Pound had no intention at this stage of having a poetic pantheon of more than two.
Pound arrived home with hopes of a new beginning in America. He expected to be treated very differently now he had achieved a succès d’estime in Europe. Yet perhaps the fact that there exists no adequate Anglo-Saxon version of that phrase hints at why he was to be disappointed. He had acquired status in Philadelphia, particularly within his own circle, but for all the press coverage during the previous year of his London success, Pound was to find America, by and large, as unappreciative of him and his work as ever. The Spirit of Romance was published in June in England and in July in America, his first book to be published there. Though in Her we are told, ‘everyone was taking George so to speak “up” because of that volume on Dante’, the truth was more mixed.110 Locally it did perhaps give him a certain cachet, but nation-wide the verdict was less kind. In 1968 Pound was to write of this book, ‘As far as I remember it elicited no comment from the press’.111 Repression perhaps was at work; though it certainly was not widely reviewed, he might have preferred to forget what comments there were. The Spirit of Romance, the book that Pound had suggested to his parents would guarantee his academic employment in the States, originally sprang out of his loathing for American university literature teaching, so its lack of success within the academic world there was not entirely surprising, particularly as Pound’s introduction had started with an attack on the ‘slough of philology’, in itself likely to inflame many.112 There are good moments and some memorable turns of phrase in The Spirit of Romance; the introduction especially has an engaging youthful exuberance and is an intriguing early manifesto of his poetic beliefs. Yet Pound’s haste and boredom in its writing at times show through. The first review, which appeared in the American Nation, said unkindly that ‘the few bits of really good comment are too rare to be worth hunting for’.113 Another American review praised Pound for his insight but condemned his hunger for publicity, which was perhaps, in this instance, for once unfair; Pound’s views on literature were deeply felt and not simply meant to shock. Presumably the reviewer has in mind, besides the attack on the philological method, comments like, ‘Milton’s god is a fussy old man with a hobby’; or ‘[Arnold’s] definition of literature as “criticism of life” is the one notable blasphemy that was born of his mind’s frigidity … Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.’114 In Pound’s view, this was simply fair comment.
H.D. herself admired The Spirit of Romance, perhaps partly as a record of the eclectic enthusiasms that Pound had brought to her during their relationship.115 In Paint it Today, she uses as a repeated motif the refrain of the anonymous hymn to Venus, from about the second century AD, the Pervigilium Veneris, which Pound praises and translates in his first chapter, to which he had undoubtedly earlier introduced her. This hymn was to be sung on the eve of the feast that, Pound says, has survived as May Day, and the refrain goes, ‘Cras amet qui numquam amavit/Quique amavit cras amet’ (‘Let whoever never loved, love tomorrow/Let whoever has loved, love tomorrow’).116 Pound sees this hymn as an early anticipation of the Provençal love lyric, pointing out that its metre uses stress, rather than quantity like traditional Latin verse, a shift which, he says, ‘probably indicated as great a change of sensibility in its day as the change from Viennese waltzes to jazz may indicate in our own’.117 In H.D.’s novel the refrain becomes the centre of her reflections on the nature of her different love affairs, and on the nature of love itself. H.D was to read The Spirit of Romance again in 1948, and found it returned her to the early Pound, at a period when she was appalled by the raving anti-Semite so prominent in the newspapers.
Pound’s chapter on Villon, one of the most successful, perhaps indicated what was going wrong with his own poetry at the time. Villon was, he says, ‘poet and gaol-bird, with no care whatever for the flowery traditions of medieval art, and no anxiety to revive the massive rhetoric of the Romans’. In his work were the ‘seeds and signs of a far more modern outbreak’ even than Dante’s. ‘From Provence,’ he argues, ‘the Tuscans have learned pattern; the Elizabethans a certain lyric quality; Villon carries on another Provençal tradition, that of unvarnished, intimate speech’.118 In Pound’s early poetry, much of what was most successful was the poetry that like Villon’s took from troubadours the direct, speaking voice, and the defiant, iconoclastic personae. Now in his elaborate canzoni, in his painstaking translations of Cavalcanti’s exquisitely fashioned sonnets and ballads, he was imprisoning himself in an alien formal pattern. No longer uttering defiance at a world in which he did not fit, he was weaving an elegantly wrought barrier behind which to hide, locking himself in more effectively than keeping the world out.
Pound may never have seen that first dismissive review of the book that he had produced with such pain, and for the first couple of months back home his letters to Margaret remain cheerful. She wrote that she liked the ‘S.of R.’, as he put it, and was able to tell him of an encouraging review of the book in the Mercure de France.119 Pound’s letters to Margaret are very different in tone from the lectures he delivered to Viola Baxter, or even the condescension that is often present in his letters to Williams. Pound treats her much more as an equal. Perhaps her generosity and belief in his gifts made it possible for him to find a saner way of relating to the world than hitherto. It was not to last, but perhaps it might have done if events had turned out differently.
Pound had said nothing to Margaret about Dorothy, who had figured in the letters from Sirmione simply as one of les amies anglaises: Margaret and Dorothy were in separate compartments of his life. This is not to suggest that they were rivals; there is no hint in Pound’s letters to Margaret of any romantic involvement, though that is not to say her feelings for him were not already more than disinterested admiration for his art. But back in Philadelphia there was a rival. Although Pound said nothing to Margaret about H.D., in his first letter from Swarthmore he tells her he is reading Swinburne for the first time in three years, possibly an indication he was in touch again with H.D. They had been corresponding regularly, and he had written to her from Italy (at any rate according to her fictionalised account) that he was coming back to ‘Gawd’s own god-damn country’.120 H.D. had kept in touch with Pound’s parents, to whom of course Pound had said nothing about his involvement with Dorothy, and who clearly still hoped for a marriage between her and their son. But Pound could resist his parents. It was perhaps his own feelings for H.D. that he trusted less. While in the States, he would also see Mary Moore and Viola Baxter, but they had both settled – it appears, though one cannot be quite certain – into the role of good friend.
As with Pound’s first courtship of H.D., the evidence for their relationship over the next few months is patchy. William Carlos Williams recalled being visited by the two of them later in the year, but whether their engagement had been renewed isn’t clear. It appears to have been back to the status of an ‘understanding’. Perhaps, like Olivia, H.D.’s parents felt nothing more formal could be finalised until Pound had a visible income. After all, at the time of the original engagement, when Pound gave H.D. Kitty Heyman’s ring and his mother gave her the pearl pendant, he was still employed by Wabash College. As Eugenia, Hermione’s mother, says in Her: ‘You can’t live on nothing. Your father won’t permit it. Do you think your father and I would have such inhumanity as to let you – to let you marry a man of George Lowndes’ reputation and marry a man of George Lowndes’ reputation on simply nothing?’121
Her’s fictional account of the ambivalence with which Hermione hears of George’s return from Italy, and of how she eventually succumbs to his renewed lovemaking, may be close to what in fact occurred. Certainly the way in which, in the novel, in spite of Pound/George’s new-found fame, Philadelphia still murmured about the scandal which had sent him to Europe, rings very true. In Her, George and Fayne, to Hermione’s intense distress, have some kind of affair, and Gregg’s memoirs confirm that this was true of Pound and Frances. When H.D. discovered, she was distraught. If Pound had become so instantly jealous when Grace Crawford, who was far less important to him than H.D., offered Lawrence Italian lessons, one can imagine that he was outraged on his return to find H.D passionately involved with another woman, though he may have taken some time to appreciate the situation. Once he did, he was very ready to take a moral high line on the scandalous bond between them. In the fictional account, George says that they are witches and should have been burnt at the stake, an extreme response for an aficionado of Swinburne, who might have been expected to show greater tolerance. In Her, Hermione is under the impression that he disapproves of Fayne as much as her mother does, one reason why the betrayal is so unexpected. But Pound appears to have been more shocked by finding a rival than anything else. One element in his advances to Frances may have been the desire to revenge himself on H.D. for daring to have another love, as well as his childish hatred of being left out. When Pound first met Bryher, she says in her autobiography, he tried to make a pass at her, doubtless for the same complex reasons, but she froze him out very effectively. Yet Pound in his relationship with H.D. would repeatedly make advances to her, and then retreat in one way or another, and this betrayal, like the earlier ones, may have also been a means of escape. In Frances Gregg’s short story, ‘Male and Female’, she has a perceptive analysis of what was going on. She sets up the triangle of ‘Kiah’ (based on Pound, short for Hezekiah), in her version an acclaimed young painter who intended, he said, to ‘become the greatest artist since Leonardo’, ‘Sheila’ (based on H.D.), his fiancée, and ‘Jennie’ (based on herself ). Kiah has already made a name for himself: ‘It was before the days of “publicity”, but Kiah had invented a technique of personal publicity that was working like a dream.’ Having acquired fame since his engagement to Sheila, he is now ‘launched with a number of new loves. His only anxiety was just how to be off with the old. Sheila had a strong will, but more tricky to handle was the tie of his own affection and an old fealty to Sheila. That was where Jennie came in.’122 Once again, as in the weeks immediately before he left for Europe in 1908, Pound may have attempted to resolve his ambivalent attitude to H.D. by driving her away through his infidelity.
When precisely this happened isn’t certain, but it was probably in September, when Walter Rummel came to stay in Swarthmore. A tentative reconstruction of the timetable might be this: on his return Pound laid siege to H.D.’s affections once more. She was still in love with him, though angry as well, and in spite of her feelings for Frances, found him hard to resist. But Pound had his own divided loyalties. He was still busy translating Guido Cavalcanti, and in the introduction, which he wrote later in the year, he raises the question of whether Guido’s lady was ‘one’ or ‘several’. Pound’s ladies were definitely in the plural. In August he returned to New York, clearly guilty about Dorothy, whose tender, admiring letters he was receiving, even if he was not allowed to write to her. He threw himself into attempts to make money, as he had promised her he would. Pound’s idea, according to Williams, was to make a great deal of money very fast, so he could quickly settle back into the literary life Nothing came of this excursion into the business world, not even of Pound’s suggestion that he and William Carlos Williams should go into partnership selling a recently developed antisyphilis drug to North African ‘nabobs’, which Pound was convinced would make their fortune in a year. He had no luck. Most projects he attempted demanded capital, to which Pound had no access. Finding himself an income to placate Olivia was going to be harder than he thought. What is surprising is that Pound thought he had a chance of making a fortune in business, but he found it hard to accept that there were skills that he did not possess. Margaret probably had quite good business contacts, and had he asked her for them he might have done better.
While in New York, Pound went to call on Yeats’ father, the painter John Butler Yeats, now living in the city. They took to each other greatly; Yeats père (as Pound described him) appreciated Pound’s enthusiasm for his son’s work, and Pound, ready in any case to admire any relation of Yeats, appears genuinely to have liked John Butler. Yeats’ father introduced him to John Quinn, an Irish-American lawyer with strong artistic interests, particularly at this stage in the Celtic Revival. Quinn had bought paintings by John Butler Yeats and his son Jack, and had organised Yeats’ lecture tour in the States, and also one by Florence Farr. (He was one of her many lovers.) Quinn, Yeats père and Pound all went together to the amusement fair on Coney Island, which greatly diverted Pound. He claimed later to scorn ‘its sham fairy-land’, but at the time he enjoyed it immensely, and was especially delighted by the sight of the father of the man he thought the greatest living poet riding an elephant.123 It was the highlight of the August visit. John Quinn later became a generous patron of modernist art, supporting Pound’s friends on Pound’s advice, so that August visit was not in the end without its financial benefits, even if Pound would not realise that until 1915.
When Rummel joined him at the beginning of September, after a concert tour in the States, in the course of which he had given the American première of Debussy’s Preludes, Pound took him back to Swarthmore. There, Pound was to tell Dorothy later, he and Walter Rummel had a fornight ‘that mattered’: Pound gave her no explanation of why.124 It was, undoubtedly, partly to do with the Provençal settings in which Pound was so keenly interested, and on which he would work with Rummel the following year in Paris. Yet more important, perhaps, was the musical philosophy that Rummel had absorbed from Debussy, which was to be crucial to the next stage in the development of Pound’s poetic theories. Many of the ideas that Pound absorbed from Rummel, or worked out together with him, were to remain fundamental to his poetic practice. It may well be that Rummel was the person referred to in a letter Pound wrote the following January, in which he said that in his seven months in the States, he had only found one man to whom he could talk, or, he added with some self-knowledge, at whom he could talk. Pound always took his male friends more seriously than his female, and during his time in America, although he made a few brief visits to see Williams, he appears to have lacked any close male literary or artistic companionship, so perhaps that fortnight stood out. Pound believed, as Brigit Patmore recalled, that women expected to be instructed, amused or made love to. He didn’t expect them to be intellectual or artistic equals. He had said to his mother earlier that year that he had no objection to intelligence in a woman, and the women to whom he made love were certainly all intelligent and gifted. But when it came to ‘licherary’ or any kind of artistic ‘ComPanionship’ he turned to men. This was precisely the bone of contention between himself and H.D., though neither may have been able to put it into words at this stage. She wanted to be a literary as well as erotic companion; he wanted a woman who would be muse and acolyte simultaneously.
In Swarthmore, Walter Rummel gave at least one informal concert in the Pounds’ rented house, to which H.D. and Frances came. For H.D., with her intense love of music, it was, she recalled many years later, ‘sheer bliss’.125 She was very taken with this charming, handsome musician, and was intrigued by the fact that his grandfather had been Samuel Morse, who invented the Morse code, so that like her he was an artist who sprang from scientific stock. (As she puts it in Asphodel, ‘It’s the Gart formula and the Morse Code between us.’)126 In Frances’ fictional account of events, Kiah begins to flirt with Jennie while Sheila is engrossed in talking to his aesthetic friend, not at all an unlikely scenario. Frances had, it appears, been immediately attracted to Pound; she had heard enough about this scandalous poet to make her in love with him before he arrived. Although she was bisexual – later apparently predominantly heterosexual – she had had no kind of a relationship with a man up till then, in spite of her age – she was twenty-six that September – notwithstanding her striking looks. In her story ‘Male and Female’, she says of her persona Jennie, ‘Believing that no one would ever choose her as a wife, a belief which her mother had nurtured in her, she loudly acclaimed that she disliked all men and never intended to marry.’127 H.D. in Paint it Today also says of Fayne Rabb, ‘she had always repudiated all talk or thought of marriage’.128 It is not unlikely that Frances’ mother wanted to hold on to her only daughter, but she may also have felt Frances’ comparative poverty meant that she would not land a husband of the social standing she deserved. Better not to marry than to marry beneath her. Pound was the first man to kiss Frances, and, she said, in the dramatic terms of the day, it awoke her as a woman.129
‘Male and Female’ is very entertaining, though like all Gregg’s fiction astringent and disturbing; it is bitter in its depiction of all the figures involved, including Jennie herself, who outwits the others ruthlessly and cynically, including the aesthetic friend, Aloysius, who evolves into a caricature of Gregg’s husband Louis Wilkinson, whom she was to marry two years later. When Kiah kisses her, it is ‘suddenly, roughly, with hard, vehement greed’, followed by an outburst of rage and hatred for women.130 In this fictional account, Jennie is aware that she is hopelessly in love with Kiah and simultaneously that he is quite unworthy of such passion. His words, she records, were a ‘blather of vanity and nonsense’. He describes to her ‘the wonders of his personality, genius and beauty, as ascribed to by his friends, family, the public, and, of course, himself’, and tells her that ‘Nothing would induce me to boast, or blow my own horn – trust pater for doing that – but I should just like you to know that I am the greatest painter of my generation.’131 In real life, Frances certainly was very much in love with Pound, and remained so for some time, but whether she so clear-sightedly saw his faults from the start is another matter. In 1914, she was still saying he was one of the two fixed points of her affections, and recalled her passionate response to him in her late memoir. (The other, incidentally, also mentioned in the memoir, was a woman called Amy Hoyt, presumably related to, or possibly even identical to, the maligned Nan Hoyt.) Even though Pound was much mocked in the 1916 novel that Frances co-wrote with her husband, The Buffoon, in the end the heroine, the ambiguous H.D./Frances figure, marries him, perhaps a piece of fictional wish-fulfilment.
Sheila disappears from Jennie’s life in the fictional version, but Frances’ feelings for Pound don’t appear to have changed hers for H.D., at any rate in the short run. She wrote in her diary: ‘Two girls in love with each other, and each in love with the same man. Hilda, Ezra, Frances’.132 Her son, in the introduction to a collection of John Cowper Powys and Frances’ letters to each other, says that Pound and H.D. were the loves of her life. Perhaps that is true, and there were surely many complex emotions at work on her side too, including jealousy and competitiveness, behind her liaison with her lover’s lover, something that ‘Male and Female’ makes very clear. Frances and H.D.’s relationship was never simple. When H.D. was writing Her, she had recently met up with Frances Gregg again, and on this occasion, Gregg’s then lover, the twenty-four-year-old Kenneth Macpherson, fell in love with H.D. and deserted Frances. In her ‘Autobiographical Notes’, H.D. suggests Frances sent him to her, as if he were a gift. But Frances was bitterly hurt; perhaps there was an element of unadmitted revenge there on H.D.’s part for Frances’ earlier betrayal.