DURING OCTOBER 1911, Pound and Walter Rummel had shared a flat, or rather, as Pound put it in a letter home, ‘part of an infinitesimal house’, in Addison Road, more Holland Park than Kensington, though not far away.105 When Pound had returned in August he discovered to his chagrin that his old room with the Langleys at 10 Church Walk had been taken, and he was forced to find lodgings elsewhere. Addison Road had many literary associations: Elkin Mathews had lived there for a while before he moved out of London; John Galsworthy and his wife lived there for many years; Jules Laforgue, the French poet so influential in T.S. Eliot’s development, had been married in St Barnabas’ Church in that road; and coincidentally, T.S. Eliot would marry his second wife in the same church in 1957. Pound had told his parents he and Walter would share until Christmas, but in early November he was able to move back to Church Walk, happy to return, he told Margaret, to ‘my own proper corner of St Mary Abbots church yard, where it is more cheap & comfortable than any place else in London – musical accompaniment not withstanding’.106 His former room, on the warmer, south side of the house, was not available, but he was quite content for now with one at the back, though he reported with pleasure to his mother the following August that he was back in the original one.
Yet if he was restored to Church Walk, there were still gaps in his London life. He had mentioned in a letter home in mid-September that Ernest Rhys was back in town, and that he had met up again with Laurence Binyon and Victor Plarr, the half-Alsatian former Rhymer whose Sunday evenings he had attended on his first visit, and who would later appear in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as Monsieur Verog.107 Neither Yeats nor Ford, however, was to return to London until mid-November, and Yeats only briefly, though during 1912 Woburn Walk and South Lodge would figure as importantly in Pound’s cultural geography as ever. One landmark missing from Pound’s literary map for rather longer was the Tour Eiffel. The group that Pound had met there, already fragmenting the previous year, had dispersed, though when the restaurant became a favourite haunt of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, Pound would begin to visit it again. Although Pound might not yet have consciously recognised it, his time with those poets had had a deep impact on him. His sense of the need to draw music and poetry together, on which he had worked obsessively ever since those meetings, had come, it is true, partly from Yeats, reinforced by Rummel, but it had also come from his time with the Tour Eiffel poets, particularly Campbell and Florence Farr.108 The way he had set about making that link had been, until recently, something of a dead end, in the elaborations of the Canzoni. But with his new realisation that ‘melos’ involved moving away from the rhythmic regularity that had dominated English verse since the Renaissance, he was now more ready to appreciate the other qualities that the group had emphasised, such as simplicity and spareness, whose value he was beginning to discover. Over the next year, his verse and his poetic theories would be profoundly influenced by two other Tour Eiffel poets, Flint and Hulme – rather ironically in the case of the latter, as Hulme had given up writing poetry, but Pound belatedly came to understand what Hulme had been trying to do in his verse. Flint would persuade him eventually to look at contemporary French verse, though Pound did not, it appears, meet Flint again until almost Christmas, and it would be some months after that before Flint’s arguments weighed with him.
In the winter of 1909–10, during the months before Pound’s departure for Italy and the States, as the regular meetings at the Tour Eiffel became less frequent, the poets had as often met at the Irish Literary Society in Belgrave Square as in Soho. On Pound’s return he found that both the Irish members of the group, Campbell and FitzGerald, had left the country. Both had married, and both to Protestants, with strenuous opposition from the families involved; in each case their move away from England was caught up with the increasingly bitter divisions that were opening up in the struggle for Home Rule. Joseph Campbell, the road-maker’s son, had married Dorothy Shakespear’s closest school friend Nancy Maude, much to the consternation of Nancy’s parents. Nancy had met Pound at dinner at the Shakespears’ in February 1909 – possibly the first time he had dinner there – and commented on him as ‘a most original person’.109 It may well have been Pound who introduced her to Campbell later that year at the Irish Literary Society, when she was very taken with hearing ‘Mr Campbell reading beautifully’. In December she dined at the Poets’ Club with the Shakespears and Pound, and ‘sat next to Mr Campbell’, and must have had the pleasure on that occasion of hearing Campbell read ‘The Ballad of the Goodly Fere’ in his bardic robes.110 Like Dorothy, Nancy came from an Anglo-Indian family; her grandfather had been for thirty-five years Court Equerry to Queen Victoria, in charge of her thoroughbred horses. Yet coming from the heart of the English establishment had not trammelled her views. She was, as Campbell’s biographer suggests, something of a New Woman; she supported the suffragettes, was in favour of Irish Home Rule, attended Bernard Shaw’s lectures, was an avid theatre-goer, and took a keen interest in contemporary culture and politics. She wrote some poetry herself, and in 1910 published privately a booklet of verse, dedicated to ‘J.C.’ and illustrated by Joseph’s artist brother John; its title, The Little People, indicates her fascination by then with all things Irish.
When Campbell went, on 4 May 1910, to ask Colonel Maude for Nancy’s hand in marriage, her parents were even more horrified than Dorothy’s would be at Pound’s proposal the next year. ‘Mr Campbell,’ her mother commented stiffly, ‘is not quite in our position of life, and is a Roman Catholic.’111 Campbell himself must have had a difficult few days. Two days later, Edward VII died, and the delicate and explosive question of how the Irish Literary Society should handle this was thrust upon him. In the end, Campbell agreed with his co-honorary secretary, Mrs Malcolm Cotter Seton, a Unionist, to postpone the evening’s programme as a mark of respect. As Campbell explained later: ‘My argument was this: I was an Irishman living and earning my bread in the capital of a foreign country, the King of which was dead. To Edward VII, as an Irishman, I owed no allegiance … Although he was nothing to me, I could not be so utterly barbarous as to dance on the dead gentleman’s coffin-lid.’ Other nationalists, however, took a very different view, especially Barry O’Brien, the president of the Society, who was furious with Joseph. ‘The incident,’ Campbell recorded, ‘split the society from top to bottom.’112 There was equal trouble in Dublin, where the Abbey Theatre had failed to close for the evening, so there was probably no way Campbell could have avoided angry dissension, but it must have added to his unhappiness. He continued as secretary, but his position had become awkward, and he must for a while have felt the world was against him. In June, on a visit back home, where he found his own family equally opposed to the match with Nancy, he wrote her a long letter, full of melancholy and self-reproach, putting forward the case against himself as a husband: he had only £100 a year, and that not assured. In addition, ‘he’s a weak heart, and may go “pop” at any time! He has no good looks; he is not clever; is not likely to get on in the world as he has no influential friends; is a Roman Catholic (oh, horror of horrors!)’.113
Nancy, a woman of courage and resource, was not convinced by either her parents’ or Joseph’s arguments. Her mother, she told a friend, ‘has been rubbing it in to poor Joseph, the iniquity of imagining I can do without servants and luxuries, and how frail and delicate I am!’ In the end she won her way with her parents, unhappy though they continued to be, for she and Joseph were quietly married at St Patrick’s, Soho, on 23 May 1911, though without, it seems, family from either side present. Joseph went off to his class at seven o’clock that night as usual, but luckily friends brought champagne and flowers. The Catholic wedding must have been a further blow to Nancy’s parents, but the marriage is another striking example of how class and cultural barriers were being broken down in London’s pre-war artistic and intellectual world. Earlier Nancy’s mother had exclaimed with irritation that her daughter was convinced she could live on her £60 dress allowance, but in the event her parents made Nancy a reasonable settlement, and when the young couple moved to Ireland shortly after the wedding they had an income of £400, of which at least £300 was Nancy’s – probably more, because the £100 of which Campbell had spoken was probably his salary for the teaching work that he had done for London County Council. Pound must have heard the story from Dorothy on his return, though the first time Dorothy saw Nancy again was in early December, when she wrote to Pound to say: ‘My friend Nancy … came to lunch – looking so handsome & full of so many things – married life has agreed with her well.’114 Dorothy may have felt Nancy’s final success in her battle with her parents augured well for her, but it was to take much longer for Dorothy and Pound to get agreement to their marriage. Perhaps they did not try so hard.
In March, before the wedding, Campbell had brought out another book, this time in prose, entitled The Mearing Stones. It consisted of a series of impressionistic sketches of his ‘tramps’, as he called them, in Donegal, brief vignettes, little prose poems, recalling the peasant folk he met there, from whom he was collecting legends and songs. Like his poetry, it fuses folk and modernist characteristics. Pound later described The Mearing Stones as a ‘charming’ book: ‘It interests me largely because Mr Campbell has been content to present a series of brief pictures in prose. He has cast over the attempt at continuous narrative which has spoiled so many books of walking since Heine.’115 Pound began to plan his own travel book in early 1912; using a form analogous to Campbell’s account of the countryside that had nurtured Celtic poetry, he intended to write about the places where his troubadours had lived and composed their songs. In the summer of 1912 he would undertake his own extensive tramp through southern France, and although he would never finish that travel book, what there is has the episodic, fractured form of The Mearing Stones; he was following Campbell’s lead once more. Both Nancy and Joseph returned to England regularly for the next few years. Their marriage ultimately foundered, but it was politics not poverty that wrecked it.
Desmond FitzGerald was also gone. He had married an equally courageous and determined woman, Mabel McConnell, and it is perhaps not altogether surprising that Mabel and Nancy, who first met in Ireland at the beginning of the First World War, later became lifelong friends. Mabel was the daughter of a well-to-do Ulster businessman, John McConnell, a friend of the arch-Unionist Sir Edward Carson. One of five children, she grew up in Belfast and attended what was then Queen’s College, now University, and graduated with a degree from the Royal University, Dublin. She had by then, like her elder sister, developed ardent nationalist sympathies and independent views, as she became a committee member of the Gaelic Society. After graduating, she took a secretarial course, which stood her in good stead when she moved to London in 1908, at the age of twenty-four, to study for a postgraduate diploma in teaching. In London she joined the central branch of the Gaelic League, adopting the Irish form of her name, Méadhbh Ní Chonaill, and it may have been through contacts there that she found work as a secretary with such prominent Anglo-Irish figures as Bernard Shaw and George Moore. While teaching in Upminster, she got to know Desmond’s sister, who was a headmistress there, and through her, Desmond. (In his autobiography Garret FitzGerald suggested that Desmond and Mabel probably met at the Gaelic League, but letters have come to light which have led him to think they met before.) When her father realised the situation, Mabel was summoned back home for family remonstrations but she ran away back to London, climbing out of a window at night and fleeing the family home. She and Desmond married in London, and the two left for Brittany. They joined an artists’ colony, and FitzGerald pursued his writing, with no thought of any other career, until in 1913 they returned to Ireland, and historical events began to push him in a very different direction.116
If Pound did not learn immediately where FitzGerald had gone, he would have heard it from Campbell on one of his visits, or possibly from Flint, when he finally caught up with him. Desmond said in a letter to Flint in 1914 that he returned to London as often as he could, in order to see his mother, and he certainly saw Flint, if not the others. Pound would have been aware of FitzGerald’s poetry when it was published in the New Age in 1917, and of the romantic circumstances surrounding its publication, as FitzGerald was then in prison, a hero of the Easter Rising; by then Nancy and Mabel had become close friends, so Dorothy would have had regular news. But it was when FitzGerald obtained political office that Pound’s admiration was really stirred.
Of the other figures from the Tour Eiffel, Tancred and Storer were both around on the London scene, but Pound had never been particularly friendly with either of them. He saw something of Tancred, whom he refers to casually in a letter to Dorothy the next year, saying ‘The inimitable Tancred aroused me to meet the beau soleil’ – Pound always got up late – ‘& lunched with me’.117 He doesn’t mention seeing Edward Storer again, though they would have been at some of the same social events; Storer was writing prolifically, at this period in prose, making in 1912, in the introduction to a book of selections from William Cowper, much the same onslaught on Romanticism that Hulme more famously launched around the same time. J.B. Harmer says that Storer kept in touch with Hulme, as Tancred did, though this does not of course mean that Storer took his ideas from Hulme; he had, after all, developed his earlier theories on poetry quite independently. Certainly the comments he makes in his Cowper book on ‘the decadent and lifeless romanticism of our own time’ predate the savage criticisms that Pound himself, rather later, came to make.118
Pound saw Florence Farr from time to time, as she knew the Shakespears well, but Dorothy rather disapproved of her, and she does not often feature in their letters. Farr had brought out two books in his absence, A Calendar of Philosophy, a beautifully produced book with woodcut illustrations for each month and a quotation for each day, drawn from a wide and eclectic variety of sources, with messages more often wry than righteous, such as ‘We contract marriages as we contract fevers, partly through pure misfortune, but largely through negligence.’119 She had also published a feminist polemic, Modern Woman: What Does She Want?, but that was not a question Pound would ever ask or seek to answer. The only one of the Tour Eiffel group that Pound saw much of that autumn was Hulme, who returned to London in late September. Pound was delighted to renew his acquaintance; since his return to England in August, he had spent most of his time in polite Kensington drawing-rooms or country houses, and the bluff and energetic Hulme was a welcome change. Hulme was now writing regularly for the New Age, and continuing to promote Bergson, though his enthusiasm would soon wane. In Paris that spring, on his way to an International Philosophical Congress in Bologna, he had met Pierre Lasserre, one of the founders of Action Française, a radical right-wing movement, Catholic, royalist and reactionary. Hulme was deeply impressed by Lasserre, but discovered they differed over Bergson, whom Lasserre considered an outdated Romantic; in particular, he was appalled by the way Bergson’s philosophy was deployed by socialists and anarchists to suggest change was part of the nature of the universe. Hulme was not convinced immediately, but his confidence was shaken. He was, in addition, deeply disturbed by the fact that, partly owing to his own efforts, Bergson had become immensely fashionable in England. When Bergson lectured in October 1911 at University College, London, he drew an audience of hundreds; Hulme felt distinctly uncomfortable about now being one of a crowd of admirers. He described the first of those lectures in an article in the New Age, writing under the name of Thomas Gratton, which he sometimes used as a pseudonym for his more right-wing political articles, possibly, since it was drawn from his childhood home, Gratton Hall, as a tribute to his parents’ political views. There he argued indignantly, in yet another of his sexually charged analogies, that presenting the subtleties of Bergsonian philosophy to this uninitiated audience was like undressing a woman in public: ‘The difficulty of getting into this hall,’ he maintained, ‘should have been comparable to the difficulty of getting into a harem, not only in appearance, but in fact.’120 Whilst admitting it would be childish to turn against Bergson on grounds of his general popularity alone, Hulme’s unease increased. All the same, that November and December, he would give some lectures on Bergson that significantly impressed Pound at the time, though in retrospect he complained about Hulme ‘fussing about Bergson and Sorel’, as if he had taken no interest whatsoever.121
In the meantime, in October, while Ford was still in Germany, there appeared a collection of his editorials from the English Review, The Critical Attitude, whose contents undoubtedly reflect the attack Ford had launched on Pound’s poetry in Giessen. The final essay in the book, on ‘Modern Poetry’, is to a large extent an attack on Pound himself, though with a glancing blow at Yeats and the Celtic school. It reiterates Ford’s conviction that a contemporary poet should be writing about modern life, which is restless, urban, cosmopolitan, experienced as a constant stream of momentary impressions: ‘We know no one very well, but we come into contact with an infinite number of people: we stay nowhere very long, but we see many, many places. We have hardly ever time to think long thoughts, but an infinite number of small things are presented for our cursory gaze. And in all of it … there is a note of mournfulness, of resignation, of poetry.’ This quality of modern life, he asserts, hardly ever makes its way into contemporary verse: young poets need ‘to come out of their book closets … It does not much matter where the poet goes or what he does, so long as he turns inquiring, sincere and humble eyes upon the life that is around him.’122 Pound had addressed this argument in ‘Redondillas’, one of the poems he cut out of Canzoni:
They tell me to ‘Mirror my age’
God pity the age if I do do it,
Perhaps I myself would prefer
to sing of the dead and the buried …
We ever live in the here and now
it is better to live in than sing of.123
This refusal of any direct presentation of the present goes back to the arguments that he had had, and would return to, with Hulme, Flint, Williams and Ford himself. Pound would come to take Ford’s insistence on writing about the contemporary world more seriously, though never quite in the terms that Ford advocated. The Cantos are both deeply political and autobiographical, and in that way are always related to Pound’s contemporary world, however far away he may appear to range; Pound continued to believe that one had to turn to the past to understand the present, and that all ages feed into the contemporary moment. And he never entirely left his book-closet: the future author of An ABC of Reading, How to Read and the Guide to Kultur would not lose his belief in the virtues of a small, very specialised group of books. Advice to aspiring writers was always on what to read, not on paying attention to life. He also continued to view sceptically Ford’s recommendations in that same article on using everyday language that expressed the poet’s ‘real self’. Pound did not have one voice that was the ‘real’ Pound; he drew on many different voices, different languages indeed, though over the next few years he would use contemporary language much more often, and with considerable skill; Ford’s influence might be detected there. But for now he paid more attention to Hulme.