IN LONDON, POUND was expecting them. Much had happened to him during the two months they had spent sightseeing. If H.D. was resolving to pursue a writing career, Pound was reappraising his. If H.D. was still pulled emotionally in different directions, mesmerised by Frances, fascinated by Pound, attracted to Walter, Pound’s relationship with Dorothy had moved into a new phase. His visit to Giessen had proved memorable, even if it was not at the time a pleasure. He had arrived in Giessen in early August, after a gruelling train journey, only to find that the cheery friendship he had enjoyed with Ford in 1909–10 had, at any rate for the time being, degenerated into mutual impatience. Ford’s private life was growing increasingly messy, and his spirits were low. Since Pound had left London in March 1910, the complications surrounding Ford’s relationship with Violet Hunt had taken a heavy emotional toll. In 1908, at the time when Hunt had snatched the poison from his Rosssetti jacket pocket, Ford had been unwilling to give his wife the divorce for which she was asking; within a few months he was, with Violet’s encouragement, anxious to do so. As soon as he changed his mind, Elsie changed hers, and announced that divorce was anathema to her. In 1910 a case was brought against him for restitution of conjugal rights, which was not enforced, but Ford was put in prison for a fortnight. Pound, according to Hunt, had written with much merriment to Ford at the time (it was during his first visit to Sirmione), calling Ford an ‘Apostle in Bonds’ and ‘perpetrat[ing] shocking parodies on the comic event in the style of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’.27 Ford’s continued residence as a lodger in Hunt’s house provoked much gossip among their acquaintances, even though they now had several chaperones in place to keep up a façade of respectability; as well as Violet’s near-senile mother and his sister-in-law, Mary Martindale, who had joined in the tennis foursomes with Grace Crawford in 1909, they had added Ford’s mother. In the autumn of 1910, when Pound was in New York, Ford and Violet had visited Ford’s relatives in Germany, on that occasion rather oddly taking with them as chaperone the widow of Violet’s first grande passion, Oswald Crawfurd. While they were there, someone made the suggestion that if Ford were to take up German nationality again, he could divorce Elsie under German law without her consent, and marry Violet in Germany. Such a marriage would not be valid in England, but Ford and Violet don’t seem to have let that concern them. Although Violet had to go home, partly because of ill health, for the complications from her syphilis were causing her great pain, Ford remained in lodgings in Giessen, in his view a town of stultifying boredom, but one where there was a good lawyer, recommended warmly to them by Ford’s German relatives. Ford and Hunt believed they could rely on him to solve their problems.
Ford had nothing to do but write. He described himself in a letter as
well, prosperous and occupied. With my right hand I am writing a history of cholera in Ireland; with my left an historical novel dealing with the divorce of Anne Boleyn, using it as a peg on which to hang many disquisitions on Divorce in general. My feet are dealing with the treadles of a type-writing machine that pours out the history of literature in England during the last two years, whilst my eyes are engaged in perusing the material for my gigantic life of Sejanus.28
But in spite of his frenetic activity, Ford missed his friends. He was, after all, a great talker, and needed an audience. In late May or early June Ford wrote to Pound, whom he had last seen in early March on a brief visit home, begging him to come and join him in Hunt’s absence. At first Pound was reluctant to undertake the 24-hour rail trip north from his beloved Sirmione, so Ford returned to England again for six weeks, in the first instance to see George V’s coronation. The candidate for German nationality briefly turned back into a loyal British Tory and wrote a piece for the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, full of emotional yet sonorous reverence. By August he was back in Giessen, with Pound as secretary.
According to Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, who edited the Pound/Ford letters, the role of secretary cannot have been entirely notional, for Pound wrote at least one letter for Ford (in which he managed to misspell Ford’s name), but one suspects Ford really wanted his companionship, even if in the event he was too full of anxiety to enjoy it as he had expected. He and Hunt had been having terrible rows, particularly about money; she was finding the strain of widespread social disapproval painful, and he was growing ever more unsure of his feelings for her, though believing miserably that it was impossible to withdraw at this stage. It is unlikely that any of this was told to Pound; Ford and Pound did not discuss personal pain, and Pound was probably only given a wittily edited version of Ford’s recent life. All the same, the mood of unease communicated itself. It was, moreover, according to Douglas Goldring, the hottest summer in Germany since 1453, and the heat may have increased the friction. Pound did not write to his parents at all while in Germany, perhaps too disgruntled to do so, but, when he finally reached England at the end of August, he sent a letter oozing with ill humour: ‘I had very little time to myself while with Hueffer, not that there was much work done, but we disagree diametrically on art, religion, politics and all therein implied … I was dragged about to a number of castles, etc, which were interesting and about which I persistently refused to enthuse.’29
The climax came when Ford poured scorn on Pound’s poetry. Pound had brought with him a copy of Canzoni, which, since Ford had published the first few poems in the English Review, he must have hoped would earn him some praise. He would soon realise his mistake. Ford already had reservations about Pound’s poetry, which he felt was vigorous but weighed down by its archaisms and affectations, and Canzoni certainly paraded all the qualities in Pound’s verse that he disliked most. Ford’s general lowness of spirits may, however, have been responsible for the sharpness of his criticism, which was clearly the main irritant behind Pound’s jaundiced complaints home. Yet, although at the time Pound insisted he and Ford ‘disagree[d] diametrically on art’, he was later to turn this visit into a legendary moment in his life, a road to Damascus experience. In the obituary that Pound wrote for Ford in 1939, he recalled Ford’s reaction to the book:
he felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling … on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume [it was actually his sixth] displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn, mehercule, the stilted language that then passed for ‘good English’ in the arthritic milieu that held control of the respected British critical circles … And that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely towards using the living tongue.30
In the immediate aftermath of the roll, Pound was not at all grateful. His defensive note on the Canzoni proofs had shown that he was already feeling uneasy about the direction his work was taking, and criticisms that strike home are always the most painful. His 1939 account of that Giessen event is strikingly misleading in several ways. Firstly, it suggests Ford made him change direction from that point, while actually he was to resist and argue with Ford’s views well into the next year. Secondly, it was wholly unfair to suggest Canzoni was a typical example of 1911 style, and to blame its archaic and artificial language on the literary establishment’s idea of good English. If Pound had expected it to be taken as such, he must have been swiftly disillusioned when he saw the generally unfavourable reviews, which were beginning to appear while he was still in Giessen. Such rewriting of history to shift the blame from himself to the establishment is typical of Pound. And finally, the ‘milieu’ of London literary and intellectual life, as Pound put it, was very far from ‘arthritic’, although for decades many literary historians meekly accepted Pound’s judgement on the case. Yet it is true, as he said in 1939, that Ford was influential not so much in making him do something new as in sending him back to the ‘living tongue’ of his persona poems. Reviewers had again and again criticised him for his affectations, but he had ignored them. Ford’s roll stung him to the quick, and certainly played its part in the changes he would come to make during the next year.
Yet Pound’s poetry was already changing, at any rate in his own terms, if not yet in Ford’s. Another indication that Pound at one level knew he was on the wrong track in his elaborately wrought visions in the Canzoni, was that in Sirmione, even before Ford’s attack, he had already returned to his persona poetry and had written one of his most successful poems to date, and indeed of his career.31 This was ‘The Seafarer,’ a translation from an early Anglo-Saxon text, and an evocation of lonely, stoical endurance. Pound himself argued, and he may well have been right, that the verbal inventiveness and technical mastery that he learnt through the Canzoni experiment, even though at the time it failed to produce living poems, was an invaluable discipline that strengthened his later work. Certainly Pound’s imaginative and verbal skill in creating an English that echoes the sound and movement of the Anglo-Saxon might owe something to those labours. Pound’s method of translation in ‘The Seafarer’, as always in his best translations, can perhaps be compared (though he might have thought the comparison lèse-majesté ) to that of British films circa 1950 about the Second World War, in which, on German battleships and in officers’ messes, the German-speaking Germans are represented by actors speaking English with a German accent. Pound translates into the appropriate accent, brilliantly so. He had perhaps learnt from Campbell’s Hiberno-English, even more than from working with Shepard on the Provençal, to shape a translation that conveyed the forms and movement of the original. Here he takes the basic form of Anglo-Saxon verse, which uses not rhyme and metre but alliteration and stress, each Anglo-Saxon line having a caesura in the middle, with two heavy stresses before the caesura, and one after, each stressed syllable beginning with the same letter. Pound does not use this pattern for every line, but overall that is the effect, and he also imitates the highly conventionalised compound words that Anglo-Saxon poetry uses with great frequency. So for example:
Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea.32
Pound had two methods of translation, he had told Floyd Dell, one of which was translating the words fairly literally, as in the translations in The Spirit of Romance (and, it appears, in the Cavalcanti poems), and another which was a ‘freer mode for translation of spirit plus expression of oneself’, as for example, he says, in ‘Sestina Altaforte’.33 ‘The Seafarer’ is one of the latter, Pound taking on the persona once more of the isolato, the exile, the outcast, a figure like those who appeared earlier as Cino, Marvoil or Piere Vidal. For all the deliberate archaising, he has gone back already to something much closer to the ‘living tongue’. Rhythm and sound are all important, and by freeing himself from the constraints of rhyme he is able to explore a different kind of verse movement. Pound never bothered overmuch about the accuracy of his translations, and this poem was no exception, as scholars have been pointing out ever since, though Anglo-Saxon scholars took a rather more tolerant line than the Latinists when he came to produce Homage to Sextus Propertius some years later. (In September, when he was back in England, Pound asked his mother to send over his Anglo-Saxon Grammar, so he presumably made some attempt at checking it before publication.) In his interpretation of the poem, Pound decided to go with a particular scholarly argument about the extant Anglo-Saxon text, which suggested that the body of the poem was pre-Christian, but that a monk had later inserted Christian references and added a Christian coda, to make it acceptable in Christian times. Pound ignored the coda, and removed any Christian references in the body of the poem, so it becomes totally pagan. Death is the end, and all that can be claimed is that ‘Tomb hideth trouble’.34 Pound’s dislike of institutional Christianity had continued to grow.
The nub of the poem, however, and the reason perhaps why it appealed to Pound, is the seafarer’s passionate dedication to his sea-voyaging; the journey may be painful and hazardous, but it is his life. The harsh quest is ultimately self-chosen. The seafarer has no wish to linger among the ‘wealthy and wine-flushed’ ‘burghers’. (Peter Brooker suggests that Pound uses the anachronistic word ‘burghers’ precisely to turn it into an anti-bourgeois poem.) If he is at home, the seafarer says, ‘Moaneth alway my mind’s lust/That I fare forth, that I afar hence/Seek out a foreign fastness’. Any ‘mood-lofty man’ will find ‘longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water … Burgher knows not – /He the prosperous man – what some perform/When wandering them widest draweth’.35 The seafarer had become for Pound a symbol of the artist devoted to his mission to perfect his art. Earlier in the year, when he was making his painful farewells to his family, he had written to his father, ‘I am sorry for the desolation in my wake, it has not been particularly easy for me to go’, for there is ‘more than comfort left behind’. He told him that ‘Whatever I may seem to have done or left undone, my time is still a time of preparation not a time of accomplishment’. He had to leave America on his travels again because ‘here there is nothing so new or so different to build into the work’.36 So many of Pound’s earlier poet/wanderers had been on the road. Now he used the image of the sea voyage, an image that would become central to the Cantos, which begin with Odysseus and his men setting sail: ‘And then went down to the ship,/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea’.37 At Sirmione, making his decision to stay in Europe, aware of his parents’ disappointment, unsure about his future, ‘The Seafarer’ becomes his latest ‘mask of the self’ through which to find a voice.
‘The Seafarer’ would be published in November 1911, in the New Age, and even if Pound was still not using the contemporary language and contemporary subject-matter that Ford called for, the translation was much praised. Canzoni, however, was not; Ford was not the only one of Pound’s earlier advocates who felt his latest collection was, if not a failure, at any rate a mistake. In an article she wrote in 1920, May Sinclair, who had been such an enthusiastic admirer of Pound’s early work, recorded the disappointment felt by those who had been impressed by his earlier poems’ ‘strange, foreign beauty’. Canzoni was ‘a set-back to extravagant expectations. The elaborate form, the artificial sweetness, the dextrous technique, the sheer convention of the thing, were felt to be incompatible with unfettered, unpremeditative genius’.38 In most reviews of Canzoni, the volume was much criticised, denounced as a ‘lamentable failure’ and ‘a medley of pretension’ which exhibited ‘affectation combined with pedantry’. Some months after Pound’s return to England, J.C. Squire wrote in the New Age, where he had taken over as poetry reviewer from Flint, that ‘the plupart of the poemata in this opus (one falls insensibly into polyglottery after reading Mr Pound) are essays in Early Italian and kindred forms … [whose] rigid elaborateness … induces, or at any rate favours, at worst a frigidity, and at best a trivially and sentimentally titillating content’. Yet Squire, like most of the reviewers, was in the end quite kind to Pound, pointing out ‘how excellent is Pound’s artistry within the limits he has imposed on himself’.39 One has the impression that London literati were really quite pleased to have their favourite bohemian back with them. Even before Pound’s return, an affectionate burlesque had appeared in Punch announcing a new publication from ‘Boaz Bobb, a son of the Arkansas soil, who has long been resident in London studying Icelandic literature for the purposes of a new saga of the Wild West’.40 Pound was delighted with the attention, and wrote home to his father to give him the news with deep satisfaction. He said nothing about the adverse reviews.
Immensely relieved to have escaped from Giessen, Pound returned to England near the end of August, to a London even emptier of its better-off inhabitants than it usually was during the summer months. As in Germany, it had been immensely hot, a factor, it was widely believed, behind a crippling strike that month of London transport workers, which had paralysed the docks and had left tons of food rotting on the docksides. Those who had fled did not, however, include the Shakespears, who were still in town. Pound, in contrast to his wariness on the March visit, now lost no time in making contact with Dorothy. He wrote to Margaret two days after his arrival with cheerful lover-like concern over his discovery that Dorothy had a bad cough, and adding, ‘you two are going to love each other which is something to be thankful for’.41 In the same letter he mentioned H.D., suggesting there was no point in Margaret meeting her, as they would, he implied, have nothing in common. When H.D. and Margaret eventually met next year, they took to each other very much indeed, as Pound must surely have known they would. He clearly did not want his story of devotion to Dorothy to be compromised by revelations of possible other engagements.
A few days later Dorothy was in Dorset, on the first of a series of visits to friends, for the most part with her parents, and would be out of London until early October. Visits to friends with country houses were a regular feature of the Shakespear lifestyle, and there is no reason to think she was sent off because of Pound’s arrival. Dorothy wrote on 26 August to say she was reading the Cavalcanti translations, delivered as promised in July, and she comments that Ezra is probably at that moment interviewing ‘Madame ma mère’. It may have been in connection with this interview that Olivia wrote to Pound about Dorothy just about that time; only the latter half of the letter has survived, so one can merely speculate on whether the beginning may have queried Pound’s suitability as a husband. The extant section is, however, concerned with Dorothy’s failings:
What distresses me is that I see her becoming always more fundamentally selfish and self-absorbed. Of course this does not show on the surface, as her manners are too good – but I don’t really believe she would stir a finger to help her dearest friend if it cost her a moment’s trouble or inconvenience – she seems to have a perfect horror of being of any use to anybody.42
How fair this was to Dorothy is hard to say, but it failed to convince Pound. To Pound Dorothy was undoubtedly of use, in her unwavering admiration and constant engagement with his work. One of the things that Olivia complains about is that Dorothy does not go to the studio, presumably to practise her painting more professionally. Yet had she been someone dedicated to her own art rather than to his, Pound would probably have lost interest. Olivia also complains that Dorothy ‘has modelled her social life quietly[?] on mine – but she has not the sense to see that what is suitable for a worn out woman of my age, & a girl of hers, is very different’.43 Olivia was here, though she did not recognise it, fighting a battle against history that she would surely lose. Dorothy’s generation no longer accepted the circumscribed and restricted lives with which well-bred young women were still expected to be content. Dorothy must have resented the fact that Olivia had freedoms she was expected to eschew. She and Olivia carried on a perfectly civilised relationship outwardly, but she told her mother nothing about her feelings. In this way, she acquired a certain limited independence, which she pragmatically accepted as the most she could have, at any rate for the present.
While separated again for these five or six weeks, Pound and Dorothy now kept in touch regularly by letter. There had been a declaration, received with much happiness, and Pound had been given permission to write. In the meantime, he was welcomed back by his London acquaintances, or as many as were around. It was still early for the well-to-do to return to London, but he immediately received invitations to visit Manning in Lincolnshire, to spend weekends at Eva Fowler’s cottage in Kent and to visit Olivia’s friend, Lady Low, another of those whose hospitality had been so important in keeping Pound alive during his first London visit, and who was one of the small group of wealthy ladies who had attended his private classes in the winter of 1909–10. Lady Low’s place was also in Dorset, though not the part that Dorothy had visited. Pound was deeply and unusually moved by the wild Dorset coast he saw, perhaps sensitised to its beauty by the power of his reawoken feelings for Dorothy. Dorothy’s own letters to him were full of her delight in landscape, and she had already told him that he would see ‘some queer Dorset country – very, very beautiful’.44 He wrote to her on 10 September:
Yesterday ‘we’ went down to the ‘edge’ (front? – whatever it properly is – at least in ‘Darset’) it was proper bleak & gray – & ‘very odd’ = very unpleasant, very poetic, & strong beyond anything. There is no place for senses in this scheme of things – only for feelings that last life out – deeper, more intense than all Italy, and silent. There are several of my family names about here – but that apart it is like getting back to the roots of things.
It is a place that would be very strong on one.45
The harsh poetry of this countryside, captured so powerfully by Thomas Hardy (as Dorothy knew, though Pound apparently did not), offered a new image for his feelings for Dorothy, deeper than the visionary paradisal depiction of Mount Riva in his poetry of the Sirmione visit. This Dorset scene appears in a poem that Pound would publish the next February, and which would remain one of his most admired. Entitled ‘Δρια’ (Doria), probably a reference to both Dorothy and Dorset, it goes:
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are –
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.46
It is very different from his earlier love poetry. From ethereal, the imagery has become chthonic; from visionary, it has become elemental. There is still a sense of the sacred there, of something that gives pause, a moment of stillness and recognition, but it is simpler, more direct, not reliant on conventions of love from a very different period. There is still the hint of a reference to the Demeter and Kore myth in ‘the shadowy flowers of Orcus’, for Orcus was another name for the god of the underworld. Yet this strong, spare poem is a new step. In retrospect, it has been identified as free verse, but that is not how Pound saw it at that stage. At the time he claimed to be experimenting in ‘sapphics’ and was developing a new interest in trying to use ‘quantity’, the Latin and Greek metres that depend on short and long syllables, rather than stress, which modern European poetry uses. There was a revived interest at the time in quantitative verse, pursued by among others, Robert Bridges, whom Pound would soon meet; in addition there was, great excitement in literary circles about the newly discovered Sappho manuscripts, found in excavations in Egypt, some of which were first published in England in 1909, and more in the next few years. Pound was moving away from rhyme – not present in quantitative verse – but he was still intently aware, as he would remain, of form and technique. In spite of his insistence to Margaret Cravens that ‘I must make a perfect Sapphic ode before I pass on’, in general Pound appears to use ‘sapphics’ as an imprecise term, not, as it should strictly be used, for just one of the forms of verse employed by Sappho, a form incidentally very difficult to use well in English.47 Though Pound did send one strained stanza to Dorothy in this form in September, his somewhat stilted poem ‘Apparuit’ was the only true sapphic verse that he published. He was criticised at the time for his loose application of the term, but for Pound the term refers more broadly to Sappho’s melic poetry, written to be sung. He wrote to Dorothy: ‘My one comfort is this sapphic affair. Surely all systems of metric since have been a vulgarity & a barbarism, and their beautiful results have been due to genius & accident & not to any virtue inherent in the “system”.’ Plato, he reminded her, had written that ‘melos … “is compounded out of 3 things, speech, music & rhythm” … And unless you write in quantity (by intent or accident) those three things mean mess.’48 Pound is using quantity, not as an alternative regular metric, but as a way of achieving a rhythm free, as he would put it, ‘of a metronome’, another way of drawing poetry and music together.49 ‘Δρια’ is a poem that emphasises long, strong syllables, though not in any formal pattern. Sappho was a new and important influence at this stage, as her fragmented, passionate yet spare poetry gave him a model that allowed him to escape from the over-intricate and often wordy poems he had produced for Canzoni. Her influence was making his poetry sound more modern, even if he would not have acknowledged that; at the time he saw himself as returning once more to the past to learn from the masters of earlier years. The language of ‘Δ
ρια’ after all may be direct, and its imagery may spring from Pound’s contemporary experience, yet he still calls the poem after a region of Greece, ‘Doria’ (the region around Sparta, appropriately austere), and gives the name in the Greek alphabet.
Pound’s thoughts on poetry found an appreciative and unfailingly supportive listener in Dorothy. All the same, their renewed relationship had clearly made him wonder, yet again, if really he should be thinking about a proper job. When asked about ‘economy’ Dorothy replied: ‘I have always designed (not the same thing as making) my own clothes, & often trimmed hats. And I should like £1,000 a year for my clothes, & I shall never have it – oh! dear.’50 Yet she assured him, no doubt to his relief, that she wanted him to be a poet, and would only accept the £1,000 if earned by verse alone; so, as Pound reported to Margaret, ‘there wont be much need of an extension for purposes of wardrobe, or staff to keep it in order – at least not for some time’.51 Dorothy considerably underestimated the horror with which her father would respond to the prospect of so insufficiently financed a son-in-law, though, to do her justice, even when she discovered, she never suggested that Pound should do other than follow his vocation. So far, however, her father remained oblivious to the growing entanglement. That was something to await her return to London. In the event, Dorothy came back to London almost the same day as H.D arrived for the first time. Pound had told Dorothy something about H.D., quite how much one cannot be sure, though Dorothy did ask some uneasy questions about a poem Pound had written about H.D. when back in Philadelphia, in which he describes how ‘she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery’.52 As far as H.D. was concerned, it is possible that Walter had mentioned Dorothy to her, but she certainly had no idea of the part she played in Pound’s life, and it would be some weeks, possibly some months before she did so.