VI

ON HIS RETURN to Europe, Pound had just three days back in London before moving on to Paris, during which time he saw Yeats, Victor Plarr, May Sinclair and Ford, but not, apparently, the Shakespears. He explained to his mother that his rapid passage through the city was on grounds of health, as he was not yet up to ‘the eight hour conversation day’.¹⁶⁷ The Shakespears might have been out of London at the time, but Pound gave no sign of being anxious to see Dorothy, not even, as in the previous June, across a crowded room. He had sent the Shakespears a copy of Provença, in which the final group of canzoni was dedicated to Olivia and Dorothy, but perhaps he felt, honourably enough, that while he was uncertain about H.D., and unsure how long he would stay in Europe, it was better to keep away. In Paris, he stayed first in a pension in the rue de l’Odéon, which runs south from the Boulevard Saint-Germain on the Left Bank, but in less than three weeks he had moved into Rummel’s flat on the more affluent Right Bank, near the Trocadéro, attending concerts with him, and working with him on his study of troubadour music. Rummel, unlike Pound, appears to have been quite comfortably placed financially; he came from a well-to-do family and must have earned well as a concert performer and piano teacher. Presumably paying no rent, and with money from his patron, Pound could convalesce without financial worries. He was regularly in touch with Margaret, as she lived not far from Rummel off the Champs-Elysées, and he took advantage of her knowledge of literary Italian as he continued to polish his Cavalcanti translations for publication. The introduction to the translations, though dated 15 November 1910, was, he said later, finished in her apartment some time that spring.¹⁶⁸

This introduction, in which Pound always refers to Cavalcanti as Guido, as if he were a personal friend, appeared with the translations in 1912, and is much concerned with the links between poetry and music. While this was a continuation of the preoccupations he shared with Yeats and Florence Farr, by now it drew too on his conversations with Rummel, first back in Swarthmore and then on this Paris visit. Pound and Rummel were co-operating closely now, working more in partnership than Pound had done with Grace Crawford, but on a similar quest to find the musical equivalent of his verse. By the age of twenty-four, Rummel had achieved a remarkable reputation. He was acclaimed as a pianist, and his compositions, mainly settings or arrangements of songs, were greatly admired in America, Paris and London.¹⁶⁹ The great Paderewski had heard Rummel play when he was only twenty-one, and was so impressed by his talent he had offered to tutor him himself for a year. Rummel had refused: Paderewski saw his future as a performer, he wanted to be a composer. He went to Paris to work by himself on his ideas about the nature of music, particularly the relation between text and music, for like Pound, Rummel had been concerned with the translation from word to music for some time. He studied medieval French music, including Provençal songs and their settings, though he was also interested in baroque music, and loved chamber music, quite unfashionable in the days of ever-expanding orchestras. Like Pound he turned to these early sources not as a historian but to learn techniques for his own compositions. In this, he was following Debussy, whom he had come to know well in Paris and who was described, in the context of his influence on Rummel, as ‘the most pronounced exponent of the old French beauty reclothed in modern garments’.¹⁷⁰

Debussy was fascinated by the relation of poetry and music. He had been close to the symboliste poets, a regular attender at Mallarmé’s Tuesdays, and had set many of their poems to music, perhaps most famously Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune; his opera Pelléas et Mélisande had used Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama as its libretto. The symbolists believed, like Pater, that all art, in their case poetry, should aspire to the condition of music, and Debussy took on the task, as Rummel did, of transforming that music-like poetry into poetic music. Debussy’s approach to music was close to the symbolistes’ view of poetry. They believed poetry should evoke rather than describe; it should not represent external reality, but the world of dreams, of the interior, the subconscious. Many symbolistes were, like both Debussy and Rummel, attracted by the occult and saw their poetry as a bridge to a higher world, though the desire to record this shadowy world can also be seen as part of the pre-Freudian fascination with the unconscious mind, which was how Flint would interpret symbolism to the London public in 1912.

For Debussy – and Rummel followed him – music was to be discovered rather than written. For Debussy it came predominantly through the natural world, but Rummel was trying to hear not so much the music of nature as of the past. He said of some Fiona Macleod settings he had made that they were ‘the transmission of a very old beauty lying latent in the great memory-book of Celtic Beauty of old forgotten days’.¹⁷¹ During that spring, Rummel set three of Pound’s poems to music, ‘Au Bal Masqué’, ‘Aria’ and ‘Madrigale’, the last two of which Pound had dedicated to Margaret Cravens, writing, in terms which suggest he shared Rummel’s view that the aim of art was to recapture a lost beauty, ‘To the Weaver of Beauty, the comfort of these forgotten strains redreamt’.¹⁷² An interview with Rummel said that his aim was ‘to expose the relationship between the inner rhythm of words to that of music … It is this inner rhythm (distinct from the outer, scholastic scanning) that seems to be the characteristic of modern poetry – as, in fact, of all modern art’.¹⁷³ Pound, shortly after that significant fortnight spent in Swarthmore with Rummel, had spoken of something similar to ‘inner rhythm’ to Floyd Dell, whom he had told of his belief in ‘absolute rhythm, – an exact correspondence between the cadence-form of the line & some highly specialized or particular emotion … There is in every line a real form or inner form & an apparent.’ Since he was fifteen, he told Dell, he had believed ‘unconsciously’ in this idea of ‘sincere rhythm. – I mean the thing that isn’t the beat of the metronome.’¹⁷⁴

Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, who edited Pound’s letters to Margaret Cravens, say that, during the spring of 1911, ‘Ezra’s friendship with Margaret grew, and he visited her often now at her new apartment.’¹⁷⁵ Quite what that ‘friendship’ consisted in has been a matter of speculation. H.D., like quite a few others, thought there had been ‘kissing’. But there is no evidence, though the two poems Pound dedicated to Margaret were both love poems, and she must have wondered how to read them. It is hard not to believe that she was in love with Pound. As well as her generosity in both economic and emotional support, that spring she commissioned an American artist living in Paris, Eugene Paul Ullman, to paint portraits of each of them. Yet by that August, when Pound had returned to England, it is clear he had taken Margaret into his confidence about Dorothy, so he was not at any rate deceiving her about his intentions. In late April, a tragedy struck Margaret, to add to the many tragedies of her early life. She heard that her father had shot himself. She had never, it seems, spent much time with him, so they had no intimate relationship, but the fact that she was now the only living member of her family, her parents and all four siblings dead, must have affected someone so prey to depression and melancholy. She may have returned to America for a while, for Pound does not mention seeing her in the next few weeks. Possibly she went out of Paris to somewhere quieter in France; later in the summer she certainly spent some time in a resort on the south-west coast, Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

In May, to Pound’s delight, Yeats and Lady Gregory arrived in Paris. They were working, as Yeats told his father, on ‘the big book on Fairy Belief that we have been doing for years. My part is to show that what we call Fairy Belief is exactly the same thing as English and American spiritism except that fairy belief is very much more charming’.¹⁷⁶ While Yeats was there, Pound saw him daily. Yeats read portions of ‘the big book’ to Pound, who was much flattered by his role as critical adviser, though there were still many more years to go before it eventually appeared, in 1920, when it was published as Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. Yeats was becoming deeply interested in the Society for Psychical Research, which aimed to investigate spiritualism and psychic phenomena through scientific means, and Pound was immediately intrigued. The article he had published in Book News Monthly the previous December was a withering review of a book by Hudson Maxim on The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language. Maxim’s day job was as a manufacturer of gunpowder, and his brother, with whom Pound would later confuse him, was the inventor of the notorious Maxim gun, one of the great tools of colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Whilst Pound undoubtedly felt that Maxim would have done better to stick to gunpowder, he concluded that his book was right in asserting that poetry ‘admits new and profounder explanations in the light of modern science’, but scientific truth was not for Pound, any more than for Yeats, separable from his mystical beliefs.¹⁷⁷ It is probably his conversations with Yeats about psychic research that lay behind some of the ideas he puts forward in his introduction to the Cavalcanti, where he speaks of radium, with its ‘noble virtue of energy’, as akin to the ‘magnetism’ of Cavalcanti’s Lady, and he describes Cavalcanti’s concept of virtù, the ‘potency, the efficient property of a substance or person’, as a ‘spiritual chemistry’, something that ‘modern science and modern mysticism are both set to confirm’.¹⁷⁸ Nowadays science and mysticism may appear to have very different grounds for their truth claims, but there were many intellectuals in 1911 ready to believe that there could be a scientific basis for the occult, the paranormal or the mystic. Pound would later develop a series of scientific analogies for the power of poetry, such as light, electricity, radioactivity or magnetism, which has been interpreted as a sign of his ‘modernity’, but he is not ‘modern’ in the sense of ‘secular’. Pound does not use science like the nineteenth-century positivist thinkers, for many of whom it was a liberation from religious authority, though for others a painful emptying from the universe of the presence of God. Pound belonged to a later generation who, in one way or another, found scientific materialism as wanting as orthodox religion; unorthodox religion and a spiritualised science were quite another thing.

Yeats, R.F. Foster notes, was at this time moving towards the decision to end his involvement with the Abbey Theatre, and he suggests that his revived acquaintanceship with Pound reinforced his desire to return more fully to his poetry. Pound, for his part, was enjoying Yeats’ visit immensely, and told his father he had decided that Yeats was a ‘very great man and improves on acquaintance’.¹⁷⁹ During his first few months in Paris, Pound saw little of Paris apart from Margaret and Walter’s apartments. He had made scarcely any attempt, possibly due to his state of health, to find out more about the ‘New Art in Paris’ of which he had spoken so eagerly to his mother; when Yeats appeared, however, Pound began to venture further afield. He saw some Cézannes, and went to the Salon Indépendant, where he saw some Matisse paintings, of which he only liked one. Floyd Dell’s comparison of his own poetry with post-Impressionist art may have piqued his interest, but he did not immediately respond with any enthusiasm.¹⁸⁰ Yeats introduced Pound to some figures in the Paris literary world, including Henri Davray, editor of the leading French literary journal, the Mercure de France and author of the warm review of The Spirit of Romance that had appeared there. But the admiration that Pound was to develop for French poetry a year later had not yet been born. He wrote home that the French poets he met were ‘a rather gutless bunch, given over to description’.¹⁸¹ As Noel Stock points out, Pound had earlier missed another opportunity to find out about French literature, when, about a fortnight after he arrived in Paris, he dined with Arnold Bennett, who was then living there and engaged in writing a series of well-informed pieces for the New Age on French writers, including several who would later become important to Pound, such as Stendhal, Rémy de Gourmont and Tristan Corbière. No friendship developed between Bennett and Pound, though Pound acknowledged that he might have enjoyed the workaholic Bennett’s company more if he had been feeling more ‘vigorous’. Pound’s main interest in Paris continued to be music, and he raved in a letter home about a performance he attended of Debussy’s St Sébastien. For the next couple of years Pound would use Debussy as the touchstone for what was finest in music, although he would later turn entirely against his music, in 1921 condemning Pélleas et Mélisande as a ‘mush of hysteria’.¹⁸²

In mid-May, the proofs of Canzoni arrived, and Pound applied himself to them, though with some anxiety. He wrote in July to Dorothy, when the book was out (addressing her ambiguously as ‘Dearest Coz’), explaining to her that ‘Artistically speaking its supposed to be a sort of chronological table of emotions: Provence; Tuscany, the Renaissance, the XVIII, the XIX, centuries, external modernity … subjective modernity, finis’; in the term he had used to Floyd Dell, ‘emotional translations’ of a range of periods.¹⁸³ At the last minute he had cut out the three poems that formed the ‘external modernity’ group, because he felt they were too ‘rough’ and unfinished, but now he feared that no one would recognise his trajectory. The pages cut included the Robert Burns parody addressed to FitzGerald and Hulme, and a poem called ‘Redondillas’, very directly concerned with contemporary life (‘I sing the gaudy today and cosmopolite civilization’), a lively and entertaining piece but worlds away from the more rarefied love poetry of the opening pages.¹⁸⁴ Had Pound included this section, all rather comic poems, his readers might have realised that here was a poet who, although he had not yet found a voice, or, as he would later put it, a language, might develop in any direction; as it was, many rather assumed that his work was now an unremitting retreat into archaisms and the past. Perhaps part of his problem was that both Margaret and Dorothy saw him as an elevated and visionary poet, and might have been taken aback by this lighter vein. He did retain a long and uneven poem in eleven parts, called ‘Und Drang’ (after the German Romantic Sturm und Drang or ‘Storm and Stress’ movement), presumably filling the role of ‘subjective modernity’, and containing much mention of ‘modernity/Nerve-wrecked, and broken’, ‘confusion, clamour’, and ‘the flurry of Fifth Avenue’.¹⁸⁵ It is hard to tell if this is a parody of modern angst, or an attempt to convey it. But the balance of the collection remained with the elaborately wrought poems of the earlier period.

One other pointer to Pound’s uncertainty about this collection was that he added at proof stage a defensive note: ‘The canzoni have already been assailed and on this account [I] feel I may be permitted to venture toward that dangerous thing, an explanation.’ The canzone form, he said, celebrated a ‘love of Beauty’ which belonged to ‘the permanent part of oneself’, not to a ‘sudden emotion or perception’: ‘the canzone is to me rather a ritual, the high mass, if you will, of poetry, than its prayer in secret’, quite the opposite of the dramatic and psychological moment he tried to capture in his persona poems.¹⁸⁶ Yet he must have decided this defence would not help, because he then cancelled this note as well. Both Margaret and Dorothy had been shown several of the poems before, including of course those published in Provença, and they admired them deeply, though Dorothy was to admit she could not judge them impartially; they were, she said, too close to her. For now, however, Pound allowed their admiration to reassure him.

By the beginning of June 1911 Yeats had returned home. Walter had gone to London, presumably on another concert tour; Olivia and Dorothy met him and heard him play, and both took to him very much. He gave Dorothy news of Pound, to whom she wrote saying that she thought Walter must have helped him a good deal. Pound continued work on the Arnaut Daniel translations, making use of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and, remarkably, given his struggles with The Spirit of Romance, toying with the idea of writing another prose book, covering the same period but dealing with philosophy, beginning, he told his parents, with Richard of St Victor and ending with the Renaissance Neoplatonist, Pico della Mirandola. This, unsurprisingly, never materialised. His future was still in complete doubt. Would he go home or would he stay? What would he do about H.D.? By now he must have heard that she would be leaving for France in July. What about Dorothy? He was still avoiding London, and when Dorothy wrote to him in July, she sounded very uncertain of his intentions, saying anxiously that if he came to London, she hoped he would come to see her. Canzoni had been dedicated to her and Olivia jointly, and Pound had told her that she had inspired many of the poems, but she apparently had little hope for the future, sadly saying she would probably never see Sirmione again, because ‘being a woman one cannot wander alone’.¹⁸⁷ Evidently she had no thought of seeing it with him. They would in time visit it again together, but not until after the war.

In May, Isabel’s letters had been so mournful that Pound even suggested briefly that he would return home in June. Then he heard – somewhat, one suspects, to his relief – that he had been turned down for a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He would not return for now, he decided, but promised to look for a job in Europe. There was something, he said mysteriously, that he would know about in September. By mid-July he appeared to have decided that, whatever the outcome of the September mystery, he would stay in Europe until the next spring at least, but would let his parents know in September whether he would return in 1912 or not. Pound’s primary motivation for remaining in Europe was almost certainly his desire to re-enter the congenial world of the London literati rather than go back to what he saw as the barren and philistine wastes of America. But if affairs of the heart, now that both H.D. and Dorothy would be in Europe, played any part in his decision, he may have been influenced by the fact that Olivia seemed to be relenting slightly: Dorothy was told she might write to Pound to thank him for her copy of Canzoni – she forbore to mention to Olivia that she had already done so – and Pound was allowed to reply. In his letter he assured her he would soon bring her the Cavalcanti proofs to read; he had at last, it seemed, decided to return to England.

But not yet; for now, he retreated once more to Sirmione. Williams’ brother Edgar, the architect, came to stay with him, and they travelled together round some of the cities of northern Italy, including Verona. They went together to Pound’s beloved San Zeno, and Edgar pointed out to Pound the signature of the mason on one of the columns, saying, ‘how the hell do you expect us to get any buildings when we have to order our columns by the gross’, a comment quoted twice by Pound in the Cantos to illustrate the falling away of the modern world from the artistic integrity of the past.¹⁸⁸ Architecture was still the only one of the visual arts in which Pound was as yet seriously interested, and he thoroughly enjoyed Edgar’s company. He went on to Milan, apparently now by himself, to look up an Arnaut Daniel manuscript that had music included. He wrote excitedly to his father that he had ‘had a delightful morning in the Ambrosiana, found a mss of Arnaut with musical notation that accords exactly with my theories of how his music should be written, which same very comforting’. In a letter a few days earlier, Pound had responded rather stiffly to an enquiry from his parents about H.D.: ‘Hilda is I believe spending the summer some where in Tourraine’.¹⁸⁹ His parents, and possibly H.D. herself, had apparently thought that Pound would be anxious to see her once she arrived. Pound makes no comment. He was now planning to leave Italy, but still not in the first instance for London, where he could see Dorothy, or for Paris, where he could have seen H.D. He was off, somewhat reluctantly, to Giessen, a small town a little north of Frankfurt, on a tributary of the Rhine, to join Ford as his secretary. Whether he went out of friendship for Ford, perhaps flattered by his insistent desire for his company, or because he was prevaricating one last month, one can only guess. A few days after Pound had left Sirmione, H.D. arrived in France.