IN A LETTER to his father in late September 1911, Pound, now back in London after his Dorset visit, had mentioned that H.D., Frances and Walter were all expected to arrive in about a week. H.D. had written to him saying she was coming to London for a rest, and was taken aback, as she told his mother, by Pound’s scorn at her ill-informed assumption that a quiet life could be lived in literary London. He had also heard from Frances, who sent him some poems, which he told his father he thought rather good; he sent them on to the New York Forum, which published them in December. H.D. recalled many years later that on this visit ‘Ezra had hurt me … by picking on some rather Celtic conventional poems of F and ignoring mine’.75 Frances later wrote some striking poems, but H.D.’s judgement of these seems pretty fair. Was this a deliberate snub by Pound? They weren’t poems he would have commended even a year later, and though his comments to his father suggest that his admiration, as far as it went, was genuine, Pound’s promotion of Frances’ verse at this period could have been an attempt to damp down H.D.’s affections, if they were in danger of revival. Yet one suspects that Pound was equally worried about the danger of his own feelings for H.D. getting the better of him. Perhaps, just as in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer hurries forward his marriage to his fiancée May when he realises that he is falling in love with Ellen Olenska, Pound, now he had both Dorothy and H.D. in close proximity, took precipitate action to make his commitment to Dorothy official. On 11 October, nine days after Dorothy’s return to London, he asked Dorothy’s father Hope for permission to marry her.
The results of this bold step savoured more of farce than romance. Dorothy was rather naïvely sanguine about the outcome of the proposal, telling Pound her father was ‘much more likely to be perfectly sensible than not; possibly he will ask us to take breath until the New Year?’76 Unfortunately her father had quite different ideas from Dorothy about what was perfectly sensible. He was startled by Pound’s request; that Pound had any interest in his daughter had evidently not occurred to him, and he was astounded that anyone in Pound’s precarious financial position should have the temerity to suggest marriage at all. Olivia had apparently told him nothing of her own anxieties about the relationship, but, like her, his first thought was money. During the interview Pound mentioned his £200 a year, but gave no hint as to its source. Nothing was resolved on the spot, Hope being too much in shock to press for clarification, but he wrote to Pound the next day, asking for more information, including detailed financial accounts for the last twelve months: ‘I confess,’ he wrote, with a cautious man’s suspicion of the artistic life, ‘I am wholly ignorant of the sources from which a man in your position derives an income.’ He was surprised and relieved when Pound was able to provide him with bank counterfoils which proved he at least had a balance, but what Hope was most anxious to know was if the £200 was, as he put it, ‘secured’.77 Pound’s response was to write to his father, without giving him the vestige of an explanation, saying that ‘if one Shakespear, H.H.’ wrote to him he was to reply ‘even after this wise, altering no jot nor tittle upon pain of my wrath’. The prescribed letter was to begin:
Naturally my son has not mentioned this matter to me, but if he wants anything he is very likely to get it. Any items he may have given you about his finances are presumably correct. He is no longer in bonds of necessity. My home is at his disposal and I only wish he would make more use of it than he does.
He seemed rather preoccupied when he was last with us but that might have been Guido Cavalcanti.78
In his letter home Pound made no mention of Dorothy, but he did add by way of explanation of the financial guarantee that he now had $1,000 a year apart from his literary earnings and might soon have another $750. (This latter sum – in the event it was £100, i.e. $500 – was to be paid to him by Swift & Co., who were offering him, if he would agree to their being sole publisher of his work, that sum for ten years as an advance against future royalties.) By the next day, Pound clearly felt he had overdone the high-handness for once, and wrote again, with more explanations: ‘I am, as you may have surmised from my epistle of yesterday, attempting to marry the gentleman’s daughter. I shall do that in any case but do not want to disturb the sepulchral calm of that english household more than need be.’ He reminded his parents that they had been shown a ‘poor photograph’ of Dorothy when he was at home, but if they wanted to know more they should consult his published works, though one cannot imagine that they could have deduced much that was definite from one of Pound’s visionary love poems. Homer and Isabel, who still had had hopes that Pound and H.D. would get together, and had been told nothing about their son’s patron, wrote back in astonishment, but Pound gave no further explanations, except to say about the money that ‘the source is anonymous and the donation voluntary’.79
It was mid-November by the time the loyal and long-suffering Homer had written to Hope in his son’s support, receiving a courteous if stiff reply from Hope, written in his beautiful copperplate, so different from Pound’s frenetic scrawl, assuring Homer that he had never doubted his son’s word in the matter of his income, but what he needed to know was where the money came from, and most importantly, if it was ‘of a permanent nature’. ‘Literary work,’ he continued, ‘of the kind for which he is, no doubt, eminently suited is not likely for some years to furnish him with the means of supporting a Wife.’80 One might have thought such a rebuff would be galling to an ardent young lover, and certainly the kindly Homer was worried, but Pound wrote that he need remonstrate no more with Hope as ‘the status quo is very pleasant and I see no reason to disturb it with argument’.81 To Margaret he had written in late November, when she too was expressing anxiety about him: ‘the Shakespears are being quite amenable and I see D. twice a week except when the minx has the bad grace to go off to the country for a week, as she is went at present’.82 Such easy contentment with a twice-weekly meeting and no definite prospects is surprising, and suggests Pound had decided the compensating pleasures of a bachelor existence would suffice him for a bit longer. Pound’s life was in general going well. He was working productively, and besides, he was after all spending a good deal of time with H.D.
H.D. was delighted with London. She and the Greggs had moved into the Duchess Street boarding-house that Pound had used when he had first arrived, and which he had doubtless recommended. They had both Pound and Rummel to show them round, as well as introductions to friends of the Doolittles. Only two postcards are extant from H.D. to her mother from London at that period, and though she mentions on one that Walter has taken her to a couple of concerts, she says nothing about Pound, possibly because she felt her mother would rather not hear. Writing to Isabel Pound in December, however, H.D. was warm in praise of Pound’s kindness in introducing her to literary London. May Sinclair had had them to tea at Pound’s request – he had written to ask her to invite them even before they had arrived. H.D. had read Sinclair’s 1904 novel, The Divine Fire, which had been a bestseller in both the States and Britain, but as she recalled almost half a century later, ‘I had never expected to meet any of these famous people’.83 Frances, she told Isabel Pound, ‘was properly introduced as the rising American poetess, and I as – well, just a friend of great people’.84 Frances was not particularly grateful, being upset that May Sinclair did not express more admiration for her poems, and recording in her diary, and her memoir, that Sinclair was ‘little and mean-souled and repellent, but she could write, and I envied her’.85 Frances might well have judged her by appearances to be old-fashioned and unbearably proper, but no one was less mean-souled than the always generous Sinclair. What H.D. thought at that first meeting she does not reveal, but she certainly came to love and appreciate May Sinclair, and was to spend her first London Christmas with her. They met the poet Alice Meynell, now in her sixties, whom H.D. describes to Isabel as the ‘protectress, you remember, of the once thread-bare … starving Francis Thompson’. Ernest Rhys and his wife entertained them, and, H.D. wrote, were ‘most interested in Frances’ too.86 She particularly liked Lilian Sauter, John Galsworthy’s elder sister, and it was she who led her off to the exciting suffragette meeting. Lilian was married to a Bavarian painter, Georg Sauter, according to Noel Stock earlier a friend of Whistler’s.87 Although Pound knew the couple – they also lived in Kensington, and were friends of Ford – for once H.D. met them as acquaintances of Philadelphian friends, rather than through Pound. Lilian Sauter was almost fifty at the time, a remarkably well read and independent-minded woman, who had been an important influence on her brother’s development. She had led the family rebellion against their narrow-minded and deeply conformist mother, and married Sauter, who was not only a foreigner and an artist but of peasant stock, against considerable family opposition; this act of defiance in support of the arts, Sauter himself always thought, gave Galsworthy the courage to become, in spite of family disapproval, a novelist and writer.88
As in Paris, H.D. visited museums and galleries, and she loved exploring the city, telling Isabel that she spent her time
browsing in picture gallerys, hour after hour, – ‘The National’ is my favourite haunt!. Exploring old churches and church-yards – odd corners in Lincoln Inn Fields, remote byways and bridges by Hammersmith; feeding the many ducks who quack gratefully in St James’ park; and sea-gulls, who look on and soar disdainfully aloft; – more ambitious adventures into Hampstead Heath and Golders’ Green.
Her special delight, she said, was ‘climbing up the swaying stair-cases of the horse and auto-busses, and ensconsed in state on a front seat, [to] behold all the world, panorama-wise, rolling onward for my own and special delectation’. In addition, there had been ‘concerts a few and more tea-parties – a dinner once in a while, and kindness everywhere’.89
But this was not all. If it was in France, as she suggests in Asphodel, that the realisation came to her that ‘Hermione must write’, it seems that from very early on in her time in London she began to train herself seriously as a writer. She spent her mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, as she told her mother on one of the postcards home. On 13 October, about a week after her arrival in London, and two days after Pound had solicited Dorothy’s hand in marriage, he had written to the British Museum recommending H.D. for a reader’s ticket, which she obtained by 17 October. There is no suggestion that this would be temporary, so it is likely that by then she had already heard the good news that her visit was to be extended. Her mother had written to say that she and H.D.’s father were planning to visit Europe, and H.D. could await their arrival. Mrs Gregg and Frances were going back at the end of the month, and though H.D. urged Frances to remain, Frances was adamant that her mother needed her. H.D. saw this as rejection, since she herself had been ready, however regretfully, to wound her mother by coming to Europe with Frances. Such a reaction was not entirely fair; H.D.’s mother may have been hurt and saddened, though perhaps not as much as H.D. feared – H.D. certainly appears to be the more active correspondent: ‘I look forward to mail,’ she wrote a little disconsolately to her mother from France, the kind of plaint more often uttered by parents. But in any case H.D.’s mother was surrounded by family and lived in comfortable affluence. Frances’ mother had only her daughter, and she needed her both for companionship and extra economic support. And Frances had her pride; she had no money and felt if she stayed it would have been as H.D.’s ‘satellite and protégée’.90 H.D.’s spell over her, she says, was broken. When sufficiently tempted, only a few months later, Frances would agree to leave her mother, if only for a while; H.D. had reason to feel rebuffed.
H.D. travelled up to Liverpool to see them off, seeing Stratford-upon-Avon en route, and sending her mother a postcard of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, which she had visited on her honeymoon. Barbara Guest in her biography suggests H.D. was quite relieved by the difficult Frances’ departure, and it’s likely that at any rate her feelings were mixed, as they usually were when it came to Frances. In the version of events she gives in Asphodel, Hermione begs Fayne to stay, to share a flat with her in Chelsea, so that they could become writers together: ‘I am burning away that’s all. The clear gem-like flame. I don’t want you to miss it. I’m going to write, work … We are the children of the Rossettis, of Burne Jones, of Swinburne. We were in the thoughts of Wilde when he spoke late at night of carts rumbling past the windows, fresh with farm produce on the way to Covent Garden. He was talking to a young man called Gilbert. They talked of Greeks and flowers.’91 H.D. here places herself firmly in the tradition of the Pre-Raphaelites, aesthetes and decadents, the writers whom she met through Pound and passed on to Frances, love and writing being as so often for her inseparable. Yet of the two, writing remained the imperative: H.D. never contemplated returning with Frances. As Hermione says to Fayne: ‘I couldn’t go back. Not go back. I have to stay. I have to stay in England’.92
Whatever H.D. had felt about Frances’ departure, Pound certainly appeared relieved. Frances had lost none of her passion for Pound, and there are hints that he found her fierceness of feeling wearing, writing to Margaret Cravens on her departure of his relief that the worst of his ‘psychological patients’ was to leave for the US.93 Shortly after the arrival of H.D. and Frances, he had described his life as ‘juggling volcanos’; having three women in London who all felt a claim on him clearly imposed a strain.94 Pound always took his role as host to visiting Americans very seriously; while entertaining H.D. and the Greggs, he had been organising at second hand a visit to Paris by Julia Wells, the impoverished inhabitant of Patchin Place, and he would soon be masterminding a visit for Mary Moore. Frances’ response to his thoughtfully arranged visit to May Sinclair suggests she was not an easy guest to please, and although Pound’s friends were ready to entertain her as another of his literary protégés, her presence may have been an uneasy one. According to the fictional version in Paint it Today, she fitted in no better in London society than in Philadelphia. Josepha, as the Frances figure is called there, regards people in general with deep suspicion and disdain; as the narrator puts it, she ‘through prenatal accident and the shocks attending a precarious childhood, had learned early to distrust [other people]. She was in turn, more or less avoided by them. Her eyes discountenanced them … Josepha knew all about it. She said quite clearly, “So and so hates me; so and so sees that I see.”’95 H.D. always admired, indeed was fascinated by this independence of spirit, feeling herself much more meekly conformist: the H.D. figure here is described as ‘outwardly standardised by early environment’.96 H.D. felt uneasily that the politeness and social tact she had learnt from her mother and continued to practise were sadly inappropriate to a true modernist artist, but they did make her a much more agreeable and comfortable addition to the social scene. How aware of this Pound would have been, with his own minimal diplomatic skills, it is hard to say. But he seemed delighted to have H.D. left by herself to be shown round London, and happily reported to his parents that ‘she seems to get on very well with a number of people’.97
H.D. never explained, or perhaps never could explain, quite what her own feelings were for Pound at this time; all that is clear is her emotional confusion. In retrospect she repeatedly described her early days in London as ‘drifting’. As far as her emotional life was concerned, that appears to have been true. If Frances had stayed she might well have drifted into a flat with her; if Pound had wanted it, she could well have drifted back into an engagement with him, as indeed she sometimes wondered if she had. She could have drifted into a love affair with the Byronic Rummel. As it was, she would drift into marriage with Richard Aldington. Yet as far as her desire to be a writer was concerned, she did not drift at all. That was her rudder, and it was to steer her through all the turmoil and emotional disasters of the war years. Her routine of working in the British Museum Reading Room every morning had been established by the time she had been in London a fortnight; mainly, it seems, she worked on translations, very much the way Pound had trained himself as a writer. The letter of application had said that she wanted to work on the Latin poets of the Renaissance, as she had done earlier at Pound’s instigation. But she was soon to move on to the Greeks. Indeed, ‘Greeks and flowers’, of which she says Wilde talked to Gilbert, are the main themes of her early poetry. It may well have been Pound, with his newfound enthusiasm for Sappho, who, knowing her already powerful passion for all things Greek, drew her attention to Sappho as a model, but she was also attracted by the brevity and honed clarity of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology.98 In her afternoons she would sightsee and attend literary parties, which also occupied her evenings and to which she would often be accompanied by Pound.
Pound told H.D. nothing of his feelings about Dorothy at this stage. He started making love to her again, more kisses, though still not consummation, and hinting at another ambiguous engagement, in which she only half, or less, believed. As she wrote in End to Torment, ‘I remember how he said to me in London … Let’s be engaged – don’t tell …’99 She was wary after her previous experience, but the shock she felt when she eventually heard of his engagement to Dorothy suggests she had let down her emotional guard once more. The account of her response to this renewed lovemaking given in Asphodel sounds convincing enough. There we are told that Hermione feels a mixture of guilt and gratitude; kissing now without the sanction of an official engagement worries her, and she is confused about whether the engagement is on again or not. She is fearful lest people know how she’s behaving and think she isn’t a ‘nice girl’.100 Yet George’s lovemaking leaves her with feelings of warmth, contentment and reassurance. This mixture of emotions, guilt and gratitude, certainly fits with what one knows from elsewhere. H.D.’s relationship with Pound, perhaps because it was her first sexual relationship, beginning in her parental home under sternly disapproving eyes, appears to have filled her with guilt in a way neither her affair with Frances nor her later pre-marital lovemaking with Aldington would do. The shame of the moments of exposure back in Philadelphia that she talks of in End to Torment, both in front of her father and when seen by the schoolgirls, are presented as deeply traumatic. But H.D. was always sensitive about keeping up appearances; perhaps Pound exposed her to disapproval and gossip in a way that neither Frances nor Aldington did. Yet in spite of that, Pound’s affection and emotional protection were very welcome. For all her excitement and pleasure in London, she was at another level anxious, vulnerable, sad to be away from her family and Frances. She wrote to her mother that she was ‘very gay and almost overrushed’, and to Isabel Pound, that she was ‘happy but a bit too gay’, as if she were in some ways quite frightened by this new world of freedom.101 In Asphodel, George’s kisses were less fiery in London than they had been in Philadelphia, tempered, Hermione speculates, by the London mists, but they were also more comforting: ‘Her mouth lifted and kisses bent and flowered upon it … After all, George’s hibiscus red did make a warm coal glow somewhere in her heart.’102
Where this was leading she had no idea. Her visit to England, even if extended, was still officially a temporary one. She had no notion what the future held, apart from her determination to write. In London, she was intrigued to discover, Pound was a figure of some consequence, rather than, as in Philadelphia, of notoriety: as she writes of the fictional George Lowndes: ‘Here people did not laugh at George. People asked his opinion a little reverently. It was funny watching people reverencing George … His odd clothes not so odd, his little brush of a beard and his velvet coat and his cravats like flowers in mosaic of maroon and green and gilt and odd vermilion. George didn’t look odd though he looked more odd than ever.’103 She wrote to Isabel Pound: ‘It would delight you to see how many and what devoted friends he has here.’104 Pound, this important figure in the London literary scene, was keen to introduce her everywhere. Having a ready-made community of acquaintances, some of whom would become friends, was perhaps one reason why she was happy in London whereas she had been disconsolate in New York, where both she and Pound felt largely isolated. Yet there was also the sense of freedom, at times alarming, but also exhilarating, that she felt in moving to Europe away from the constraints of her Philadelphian upbringing. She had taken a momentous step in her struggle to become a poet.