POUND REMAINED FRIENDLY with Frances Gregg for some years, possibly more than friendly: John Cowper Powys would suffer torments of jealousy when he knew she was seeing Pound. Pound always referred to her as the ‘Egg’ (egg-head? egoist? – it could be either), and later would help her get her work published. Yet the strength of feeling that Frances had for him may be related to his somewhat casual attitude to her. H.D.’s and Powys’ infatuation with her she appears to have responded to with some ambivalence. How soon H.D. discovered what was happening between Frances and Pound one can only guess, because she only mentions that particular wound in her fiction. She may have found it too painful to speak of in End to Torment, where she records those earlier betrayals, and marks out betrayal as the canker which destroyed her relation with Pound from within more disastrously than the outside forces. That discovery may be what precipitated her move away from Philadelphia and Frances to New York in October, to share a flat with a Philadelphian acquaintance, Julia Wells, in the hope of finding work as a writer. What she clung on to was her resolute need to write. But she must have known that Pound would be in New York too, and that she would inevitably see him there. Once there, reconciliation – for now – appears to have been swift. In Noel Stock’s account she arrived in New York in late October, and almost immediately went with Pound on the visit to Williams, where she met Williams’ future wife Flossie; Williams, in his curmudgeonly way, asserts that Flossie didn’t much care for either Pound or H.D.
H.D. remained for probably a couple of months that autumn in New York, living on the edge of Greenwich Village, whose bohemian life was just beginning. She stayed in Patchin Place, later one of the famous Greenwich Village addresses, home to Djuna Barnes and e.e. cummings, among others.133 It has been suggested that Pound cold-shouldered H.D. while in New York, but there really is not much evidence one way or the other, and they did see a certain amount of each other. Julia Wells in later life referred to this period more than once as if both H.D. and Pound had stayed with her. Pound in fact lived elsewhere in New York, but the implication is surely that he spent quite some time at her flat. Julia Wells recalled that he wrote the Heine translations that appeared in Canzoni in Patchin Place, perhaps drawing on H.D.’s knowledge of German.
H.D. was unhappy in New York. She must still have been bruised by the Pound/Frances affair, but if she had been hoping to make a new life for herself, she was disappointed. In her ‘Autobiographical Notes’ she says enigmatically of that visit, ‘it does not synchronize’. Perhaps she means it was not the right place for that time in her life. She found Julia ‘discouraging’, and the conditions in Patchin Place ‘sordid’.134 John Cowper Powys, who met Julia Wells in the 1920s, still in Patchin Place, described her as ‘a quaint little old-fashioned Dickens character’, which hardly sounds like a soul-mate for H.D. He comments that she lived ‘in extreme poverty’, which is perhaps what H.D. means by ‘sordid’.135 Presumably Julia had no servants, and H.D. was completely undomesticated. In 1910, though America was ahead in labour-saving gadgets, keeping one’s living space civilised required constant manual effort. In London, until she married Richard Aldington, H.D. always lived with landladies, professionals in keeping sordidity at bay. She had none of Pound’s skill at surviving in garrets, metaphorical or literal. Yet in 1911 Pound himself told Margaret Cravens that Julia Wells’ life for the last ten or fifteen years had been ‘rather sordid’, so even he had been shocked by the degree of poverty in which she lived.136 Julia Wells came from a well-to-do Philadelphian family, who, Powys surmised, had cut her off, presumably on account of her bohemian lifestyle. H.D. must have felt that Julia was a warning against women who rejected family life. And in New York she also suffered from the snow and cold, undoubtedly unalleviated by adequate heating, and, worst of all, could get no work published. One bright spot was that she met Viola Baxter, presumably through Pound, with whom she became good friends. Viola took H.D. to see her office. A woman working in an office: it was becoming increasingly common, but H.D. was impressed.
One letter survives that H.D. wrote to Isabel Pound from New York. She puts a brave face on things, and though she doesn’t mention Ezra, she does say that Homer has been to see her, possibly when in New York on Presbyterian affairs, which seem to have been his main leisure activity. She fears that Homer’s report on the place ‘hasn’t made things attractive’, but insists all is really fine: ‘There are stories to write and shredded wheat biscuits to buy, and stoves to build fires in – and people – numerous ones – to talk to!’ The atmosphere was entirely European – everyone came from the ‘old country’ – and she was flattered that she and Julia were mistaken for ‘English ladies’.137 All this suggests H.D. was, like Pound, feeling deeply alienated from America, and longing to be in Europe. New York had appeared the next-best thing, but on closer acquaintance H.D. found it an inimical place. For someone who had spent her first years in Bethlehem and later youth in the countryside of Upper Darby it was too violent a shock. She wrote in Paint it Today of the sounds of New York, ‘Have you heard New York shriek real terror, real emotion, reality, Europe and Asia in one voice, swift, penetrating, intimate and unrepentant?’138 H.D. was not exaggerating: the sounds that one heard in Patchin Place were in truth often those of ‘real terror’. Alyse Gregory, later managing editor of the Dial and later still wife of Llewelyn Powys, moved to Patchin Place shortly after H.D.’s time there, and found its sounds heart-rending. ‘Patchin Place,’ she points out, ‘lies under the shadow of the old Jefferson Court, with its sham Gothic tower, where a great clock points out the hours to damned and saved at once.’ On the upper floors of this grim prison were cells where prisoners would be detained, and Gregory heard desperate women calling and crying through the night: ‘On one occasion a woman howled half through the night. I could hear her as I lay stiff in my bed, this howl of a trapped animal, rising to a shriek of frenzy and subsiding to a low wail of unutterable terror and despair.’139 This was where rebellious women ended, H.D. might have noted. She gave up her first attempt at independence, and returned home to Philadelphia.
Whether or not Pound neglected H.D. in New York, it is true, of course, that his eye was chiefly on his career. During these months he was engaged in discovering New York’s literary life and trying to establish himself in it. He began with a certain amount of enthusiasm. Pound had a warmth of feeling for New York that he had never had for Philadelphia, which may have been born of his earlier visits to Aunt Frank. He was, perhaps surprisingly, very taken with the New York skyscrapers, as he told Margaret Cravens, repeating his praise in a series of articles about his homeland that he would publish two years later, with the typically Poundian title of ‘Patria Mia’. American architecture, he suggests there, ‘is our first sign of the “alba”’ of America, that is, its artistic dawn.140 In New York, ‘electricity has for [the new metropolitan] made the seeing of visions superfluous’; it is, he claims, not far from being the most beautiful city in the world, at any rate by night: ‘Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.’141 Pound’s excitement at the skyline of New York would be echoed by a range of modernist artists, including Francis Picabia, John Marin and Max Weber, in the coming decade.142
Pound wrote a first draft of these articles that winter of 1910–11, and the resulting ‘Patria Mia’ reveals a good deal about why he decided to return to Europe in early 1911. In spite of his praise of those New York buildings, architecture, he concluded, was the only flicker of American artistic life there was. In all other ways America was still a cultural desert: ‘I have declared my belief in the imminence of an American Risorgimento. I have no desire to flatter the country by pretending that we are at present enduring anything except the Dark Ages.’143 There is, he says sweepingly, ‘no man living now in America whose work is of the slightest interest to any serious artist’.144 America produces artists, certainly, but they all leave for Europe: his two great examples are Whistler and Henry James, but doubtless he was also thinking of himself. In America, he claims, literature is destroyed by ‘dry rot, magazitis’, conventionality and provincialism.145
Pound told Margaret in late November that, while in New York, he devoted all his time when not writing ‘to a wild & desperate search for people’, but so far he had only met one who qualified for that status, an ‘intelligent editor’ named William Shepard Walsh.146 He met several aspiring poets, including Orrick Johns, whom he would later publish in his Catholic Anthology of 1915, but appears to have developed no friendships. Why was Pound so unlucky in his time in New York, which shortly would be alive with experimental and innovative poets? He was possibly just a little early. The poetry revival in the States is generally dated to 1912; Julia Wells, writing to the New York Times in 1928, saw the visits of H.D. and Ezra Pound as marking the very beginning of that period of artistic flowering.147 David Frail suggests that although writers and artists had lived in Greenwich Village since Edgar Allan Poe’s day, and the number had grown in the first decade of the century, it was only ‘in late 1912 or 1913, most participants’ accounts agree, some critical mass was reached that made it a “self-conscious” community aware of its own distinctive values and style’.148 Pound certainly was not aware of an artistic community there. His friend Williams would later be deeply involved with the New York scene, but at this stage, in spite of his years as what we would call a house-doctor in the French hospital in New York, he knew no Greenwich Village artists or intellectuals. He had not had the time available to make such contacts, and had no introductions to offer. But Pound was perhaps looking for the wrong things in New York. There were no established figures to whom he could look up, no sense of a tradition in the way he experienced it in London. As Edith Wharton shows in her novels and memoir, the upper classes of New York shrank from writers and artists; there was no hospitable network of the literary and cultured well-to-do. Mabel Dodge Luhan’s famous salon, where everyone of any consequence in the artistic or intellectual world met, was not established until 1913, when she returned to America from Italy. There was a younger generation that was soon to make its mark, but as with the younger generation in England, Pound at the moment took little notice.
Pound too was predominantly looking for literary contacts, while the centre of artistic life in New York at the time, which he appears to have missed, was Alfred Stieglitz’ 291 Gallery in Fifth Avenue, which had opened in 1905. Although the moment when modernist art erupted in New York’s general cultural consciousness was the Armory Show in 1913, with its 1,300 paintings, Stieglitz had already introduced many modernist artists in his own smaller exhibitions. His beautifully produced magazine, Camera Work, which first came out in 1903, gave coverage to the latest movements in continental art, as well as promoting photography as an art form; if Brooke Smith had lived, Pound would have known of it by 1910. Stieglitz had already initiated what was to be the favourite New York form of social gatherings of artists, a meal at a large hotel table, the most famous of which was to be at the Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s. He had set up what became known as his Round Tables: the participants – artists, writers, poets – would gather at noon, at a round table in the dining-room of the Prince George Hotel, and put the world to rights; Pound, however, never found his way there. He mentioned in 1920, in a letter to Williams, the memory of visits to Mouquin, a French restaurant later used by the group who planned the Armory Show, but he did not appear to meet any of the avant-garde there in 1910.149
There is perhaps one other reason why Pound failed to make links with the young intellectuals who were in New York in 1910. By and large they were politically both more radical and activist than he was; they would have been impatient with his aestheticism, and he with their politics. Pound himself was already increasingly in favour of elites, order and hierarchy. In the first instalment of ‘Patria Mia’ in the New Age, he was to write: ‘America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation, for no nation can be considered historically as such until it has achieved within itself a city to which all roads lead, and from which there goes out an authority.’150 This notion of centralised power, even though for now Pound is really only concerned with its cultural rather than its political impact, could not have been more different from the position of the young New York intellectuals, who supported not the official American Socialist Party but the more romantic syndicalists who formed the International Workers of the World (generally known as the IWW or the Wobblies). Max Eastman wrote in his autobiography that the journal The Masses, which he edited from 1912 to 1918, ‘provided for the first time in America, a meeting ground for revolutionary labor and the radical intelligentsia’, a forerunner of the hopes of 1968.151 Eastman, later a poet and critic, as well as editor of Marx and the author of a widely read book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, published by Elkin Mathews in 1913, was in 1910 a lecturer in philosophy at Columbia, in Washington Heights, considerably north of where Pound lived, perhaps one reason why their paths did not cross. That November Eastman had launched the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in the City Club, not an event that appears to have attracted Pound. Women’s suffrage was another cause warmly supported by the ‘radical intelligentsia’ of Greenwich Village, but though Pound did not oppose it, he never thought it important. Like a certain brand of Marxist to this day, he saw women’s rights as a distraction.
Yeats’ father made an intriguing comment on Pound’s relationship with other writers in New York. He wrote to his son that he himself liked Pound very much, though surprisingly thought him rather quiet, but that ‘the Americans, young literary men whom I know found him surly, supercilious and grumpy’.152 The English literati had thought Pound could be bumptious, and certainly his scorn for American culture may have come across as superciliousness. But in London no one suggested that Pound was either ‘surly’ or ‘grumpy’. Perhaps the final reason for Pound’s failure to find ‘people’ in New York was that while he could admire its skyscrapers, his early years in the States had been too bruising for him to be other than on the defensive with the young Americans he met. He may never have given them a chance. Yet by the time he published ‘Patria Mia’ two years later, the American Risorgimento that he believed was still distant had already begun.
For the meantime, Pound occupied himself with his translations, though he only succeeded in getting a few publications on this visit: the Forum published one of his canzoni in October, and accepted what he described as a ‘vitriolic’ article a little later, though they were not to get round to publishing it for over a year; eventually it appeared as ‘The Wisdom of Poetry’ in April 1912, though by then revised, moderated and embodying some of the ideas he began to evolve when he returned to London in 1911.153 For now Pound had to be content with placing a version of it in his Philadelphian standby, the Book News Monthly.
If Pound was to make few new friends in New York, he was at least able to see some old ones. His Aunt Frank no longer lived in New York, though he did see her on that visit to the States, but Kitty Heyman was back visiting, and not apparently holding his break with her protégée Grace Crawford against him. He also saw Viola Baxter, and made occasional visits to New Jersey to see William Carlos Williams and his family. Williams had returned to the States at much the same time as Pound, having completed a course of postgraduate medical study in Leipzig, and had already started work as a doctor back in Rutherford, New Jersey. Williams felt as ambivalent as ever towards Pound, an ambivalence that in recollection could verge on hostility. Pound had obviously much enjoyed Williams’ visit to London earlier in the year, reporting home that, by the time he left, ‘Bill seemed to feel educated’.154 Williams’ version of events was rather different; he had felt not so much educated as patronised, and had been much irritated by Pound’s pretentiousness. Williams had little patience with Pound’s exaltation of art to a visionary plane. Although Williams was not to develop his modernist style for another three years, he had already come to believe that art should deal with the quotidian world. He had written to his brother Edgar in 1909 that ‘Art … is an everyday affair and does not need a museum for its exposition,’ adding, ‘it should breathe in the common places’.155
These occasional meetings with friends were scarcely enough for the generally convivial Pound. By January he was back in Philadelphia with his parents, then living in another rented house near the Mint. He confessed to Margaret Cravens that he had had a miserable December. ‘I had given up the fight more or less & was deciding that the country wasn’t worth saving.’156 Some of the misery may have been increased by the early stages of jaundice, to say nothing of the cold, of which he complained to Olivia, but what must have especially blighted his spirits were the generally hostile reviews of Provença, which had been published in late November. Provença, a selection of previously published poems plus a small final section with some of the new canzoni, contained many of the best of his early poems, highly praised in England, and Pound was stung to the quick by his home country’s indifference. William Stanley Braithwaite (an unusual figure in that he had made his way into the cultural mainstream in spite of being African-American, but conservative in his tastes none the less dismissed the collection in the Boston Evening Transcript on 7 December: ‘We began … this book of poems with great expectations and we lay it down with considerable contempt for the bulk of English criticism that has pretended to discover in these erratic utterances the voice of a poet.’157 This snub may have been partly inspired by a Bostonian distaste for being told by England what to think, but it was hurtful none the less. Pound, who had returned home with high hopes of poetic triumph, was, at any rate briefly, crushed.
In January one enthusiastic review finally appeared, written by Floyd Dell, at that time though only twenty-two already an associate editor of the Friday Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post, and soon to be editor of The Masses, a poet and later a significant figure in New York intellectual life. It was a remarkable review: Floyd Dell realised the joint problem of unfamiliarity and difficulty that modernist art and writing gave its audience. Though Pound had been admired in England, Dell noted, his work had also caused some ‘bewilderment’, an emotion with which he believed many readers in America would have some sympathy. ‘For Mr Pound,’ he continues, ‘is a very new kind of poet. Thinking of the art exhibition just held in London, one might, for want of a better figure, call him a Neo-Impressionist poet’. (He is referring, of course, to the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition recently organised by Roger Fry.) Like these painters, and like the Impressionists earlier, ‘Mr Pound is open to misunderstanding’, but, he goes on, ‘though these poems have often an unconventional form, bizarre phraseology, catalectic or involved sentence structure and recondite meanings, yet it is always apparent that the poet knows what he is doing. This sense – the sense that effects which are beyond one’s immediate power of comprehension have been exquisitely designed and exactly carried out – is at the base of the pleasure afforded by all art of a high order.’ Ezra Pound, he concludes, is a ‘true poet’.158 This was the warmest review that Pound had so far received and he wrote to Floyd Dell expressing his happy appreciation. Looking back, Floyd Dell’s comparison between Pound’s poetry and Post-Impressionist painting may not appear surprising, but at the time it had not even occurred to Pound himself. Pound told Floyd Dell in his letter that he was glad he ‘felt the contemporaryness of the work’, and agreed that poets should be engaged in making ‘emotional translations of their time’. This was a new idea for Pound and possibly the product of his discussions with Williams. Pound told Dell that he did not expect to be liked in America, ‘for I dont think many people have had “the ninetys”’, adding by way of explanation in his next letter: ‘The whole set of “The Rhymers” did valuable work in knocking bombast, & rhetoric & victorian syrup out of our verse.’ American readers, he implies, still expected Victorian syrup. Yet he is not advocating simple imitation of the Rhymers. ‘They are not us. They are not america, but they ring true.’159
Pound was to receive one other sympathetic American review, though it did not appear until April, after he had left the States, and he apparently never saw it, though its praise for his poetry’s virile qualities would have delighted him. It was by H.L. Mencken, who became a well-known and influential critic, and later editor of the Smart Set, in which this review appeared, and for which Pound would become an English agent. Mencken was an enthusiastic admirer of Nietzsche, and his review echoes Nietzsche’s railings against an effeminate culture. Pound, he says, is in revolt against ‘the puerile kittenishness’ of contemporary poetry. ‘Nine-tenths of our living makers and singers it would seem are women, and fully two-thirds of these women are ladies. The result is a boudoir tinkle in the tumult of the lyre.’ Pound’s poems on the other hand have often ‘an arresting and amazing vigor. The pale thing we commonly call beauty is seldom in them. They are rough, uncouth, hairy, barbarous, wild. But once the galloping swing of them is mastered, a sort of stark, heathenish music emerges from the noise. One hears the thumping of a tom-tom. Dionysos and his rogues are at their profane prancing. It is once more the springtime of the world.’160 It sounds as if written in anticipation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
Meanwhile, back in January, Pound had no strength for profane prancing, and was reproaching himself for his wild hopes. ‘I’m always so ludicrous with my toys, my ambitions, imagine anything thinking it could turn America into a paradise of the arts,’ he wrote to Margaret. His illness appears to have been quite severe, and worried his mother considerably. Pound was thin enough at the best of times. A month later, on 4 February, he was having his first full day up, feeling ‘a bit too light for a weather vane’, still in a state of indecision and ambivalence. He had hoped to leave the States the next day, he told Margaret Cravens, heading for Paris to recuperate, but the doctors insisted that he wouldn’t be fit to travel for some time. He had resigned himself to this as a ‘sign from heaven’ that he should ‘continue the battle’ in America after all. He had been talking over the possibility of a fellowship in the Romance Department at the University of Pennsylvania with his old professor, Hugo Rennert. Having finished the Cavalcanti, he mentioned that he was now working on translations of Arnaut Daniel, ‘a quite impossible job, but … I must have some occupation which will prevent me from becoming contaminated with american methods of thought.’ Later in the same day he added a note to the effect that he had discovered the fellowship could not be taken up until the autumn, so he might be ‘blown anywhere in the interim’, implying Paris was back on the cards.161 His sign from Heaven to continue his American mission seems forgotten.
Pound returned briefly to New York, paying a visit to the Poetry Society of America, where Amy Lowell would later have one of her greatest triumphs. The Poetry Society had been formed the previous year, and had had its first meeting in October in the National Arts Club. At least one person noticed his presence, perhaps significantly a woman. This was Jessie Rittenhouse, secretary to the Society, who wrote in her memoirs, ‘Surely no-one could have been more charming, more boyish, more provocative than Ezra that night. Young and handsome, with his mass of golden-brown hair, his keen merry eyes, his careless ease of dress.’162 Yet, though he joined in the discussion, no one else seems to have been impressed. He had already written to his mother urging her to read an article in the February issue of the Forum on ‘The New Art in Paris’, in which she would find ‘an answer to a number of things that ought to prove my instinct for where I can breathe. It’s mostly news to me but the right sort.’163 The article discusses what it describes as libreversistes as well as painters, and stresses the way they both return to a primitive past, but Pound was probably most attracted by its celebration of Paris as a place where the ‘thinking genius’ has full freedom of expression, and the arts are taken seriously by ‘the intellectual, contemplative Parisian people … This is not a town, but a soul. This is not a people but an intelligence.’164 That was where he should head. The day after he visited the Poetry Society, 22 February 1911, he left the States, sooner than his doctors advised, but he had had enough. He would not return until 1939.
What had happened with H.D.? Pound has one ambiguous comment in his February letter to Margaret which might explain a little: ‘I feel better than I did before my illness, and by it & by the determination to go abroad I’ve managed to cut loose from all the threads that seemed to be winding themselves around me so that I feel freer, free almost as if I were in Paris’.165 Some of those winding threads must have come from his parents, who were loath to part with him again. But some were probably from H.D. Was Pound trying to detach himself in preparation for a return to Dorothy? Yet Pound’s attitude to H.D. appears never really to change, though how conscious he was of his feelings at any given time is hard to tell: he was strongly attracted to her, deeply fond of her, but he did not want to settle down and marry her. H.D.’s attitude was much the same towards him, though that didn’t prevent her from being hurt when she felt he was rejecting her. He required a selfless disciple; she had no intention of being one. But at this stage it was not a clean break by any means. H.D.’s ‘Autobiographical Notes’ suggest their relationship went better when Pound returned to Philadelphia, as ‘I am more “myself” in nice house and surroundings’.166 When Pound left, his parents expected him to return, and presumably so did H.D. When she later followed him to Europe, she was unsure of whether or not their engagement still stood. Things had been left vague. Yet, she always maintained, if it had not been for Pound she would never have gone to Europe. He may or may not have persuaded her to follow on, but he certainly made her want to be there.