I

EVEN THOUGH HULME had given up writing poetry himself, the influence of his poetics on Pound would continue during 1912. Pound republished Hulme’s ‘Complete Poetical Works’ at the end of his next book of poetry, Ripostes, which he sent into the publishers that March, a collection which suggested that quite apart from the theories, the practice of Hulme’s pared, sparse poetry was also having its impact. Yet Hulme’s importance to on Pound in the autumn of 1911 may have owed something to the fact that until the end of the year Pound had few other people with whom to argue over poetry. At this stage, he was not yet acknowledging H.D. as a poet, so, while he may have talked to her, it seems unlikely he would have listened to her replies. Yeats did not return to London until November from another and more controversial tour of the United States, this time along with the Abbey Company, who travelled with him performing Irish drama, including Playboy of the Western World, which went down almost as badly with the New York Irish as it had in Dublin; Yeats meanwhile gave lectures on the need for experimental staging and Irish Home Rule. Even after his return, Yeats was soon off to Dublin again, and so Pound can have seen little of him until the new year. H.D. was not to meet Yeats until then, and even when she did was not, as she put it, ‘hyper-impressed’, though perhaps less critical of him than of the fawning ‘bevy of admirers’ who hung on his every word.¹ H.D. was ambivalent about the Celtic revival, and was not to become a real admirer of Yeats until she read the extended version of Responsibilities, published in 1916.² In November Ford finally returned from Giessen, claiming to be married to Violet Hunt. He had failed to get either his naturalisation or his German divorce, so the marriage would not have been legal even in Germany, but they may have gone through a notional ceremony, although no record has ever been found. Violet was later to tell Rebecca West that there was a mock ceremony in Rheims performed by a defrocked priest, but Ford himself told the Daily Mirror in October that they had been married in Germany.³ When Elsie read the story there, she instantly took out an action for libel; the paper paid up, so there was no public scandal at this stage. That would not erupt until early in 1913.

Pound, who had recovered from his irritation with Ford, was delighted to hear that he would be around again and expressed no suspicions about the legality of the marriage. Lawrence, still a teacher in Croydon, had been corresponding with both Ford and Hunt, and had the news of the marriage direct, but was soon alerted to its problematic nature by Edward Garnett.⁴ Lawrence, like Pound, was looking forward to Ford and Hunt’s return, even though he had more reason than Pound to be irritated by Ford, who had mislaid two of his play manuscripts and had been extremely critical of his second novel, eventually published as The Trespasser, saying of it, according to Lawrence: ‘The book … is a rotten work of genius. It has no construction or form – it is execrably bad art, being all variations on a theme. Also it is erotic – not that I personally mind that, but an erotic work must be good art, which this is not.’⁵ Lawrence had been so cast down that he decided not to publish it, even though Heinemann was willing to do so, and he had started work on what was to become Sons and Lovers. Late in 1911, however, he showed The Trespasser, or as it was called at the time, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, to Edward Garnett, who thought much more highly of it than Ford had done, made suggestions for revisions, and persuaded Lawrence to let it be published after all.

The Trespasser came out the next year, and provided Lawrence with some much-needed income, for in November 1911 he succumbed to the double pneumonia which ended his teaching career. After convalescence in Bournemouth, he returned home to Eastwood, but before doing so rapidly and rather cruelly broke off his engagement to Louie Burrows, a college friend, now a teacher, to whom he had proposed marriage, very much on impulse, shortly after his mother’s death the previous year. John Worthen suggests that Louie, warm-heartened and capable, and a favourite with Lawrence’s mother, had helped him cope with his grief, and that need had now passed. In the past few months he had been greatly influenced by Garnett’s own unorthodox views on marriage, saying of him admiringly that he ‘is most beautifully free of the world’s conventions’, and Garnett may well have communicated alarm at the idea of his gifted protégé being trapped in a provincial marriage.⁶

En route home, Lawrence saw Ford and Violet Hunt, and went with Ford to a matinée at the Royal Court to see plays by Yeats and Lady Gregory, a meeting he reported in a somewhat barbed letter to Garnett, in terms that showed how immensely he had grown in self-confidence since he first met Ford: ‘I found Hueffer very fat – “be not puffed up” came into my mind. But he’s rather nicer than he was.’ Violet ‘looked old, yet she was gay – she was gay, she laughed, she bent and fluttered in the wind of joy. She coquetted and played beautifully with Hueffer: she loves him distractedly – she was charming, and I loved her. But my God, she looks old.’ Poor Violet – her underlying fear was showing through. But so was Ford’s: ‘I think,’ Lawrence continues, ‘Fordy liked it – but was rather scared. He feels, poor fish, the hooks are through his gills this time – and they are.’⁷ The comments highlight dramatically the differences between Lawrence and Pound – Lawrence with such sharp if cruel insight into the relationship, Pound in all his references to Ford commenting only on his literary views and ignoring what he would call ‘personal tosh’. Possibly Lawrence’s own recent realisation that he didn’t want ‘hooks … through his gills’ made him aware of the dangers of half-hearted alliances. He was shortly to throw himself into a most wholehearted if tempestuous partnership, this time with Garnett’s blessing: in May 1912 he eloped to Germany with the wife of the Professor of German at Nottingham University, Frieda Weekley, née von Richthofen, whom he had met some three weeks after his return to Eastwood. Lawrence was not to come back to England until 1914, when he would be drawn by the unstoppable Amy Lowell into the imagist project.

Lawrence didn’t see Pound again that autumn, though he told Grace Crawford in December, in what was the last letter he wrote her, that he had heard from R.A. Scott-James, literary editor of the Daily News, whom he had recently met, that Pound ‘was in London, and considerably down at the mouth’. Scott-James must have seen Pound during the period when he was ‘juggling volcanos’, for by late November and December he appears to have been in good spirits, writing cheerfully home about the success of his writings in the New Age, which he described as publishing ‘advanced’ and ‘usually unsound’ views, though he thought the weekly most enlightened in agreeing to publish his translations.⁸ The Daily News had liked a review he did for them, though Scott-James had told him he had ‘a fantastic mind which unfits [him] for journalism’, which he took as a compliment.⁹ He received welcome payment for translating some songs of the French folk singer Yvette Guilbert for the music publishers Augeners, and in a splash of generosity took Dorothy out to lunch, sent his father some money with which to buy his mother a Christmas present, and his mother some for a present for his father.¹⁰

In spite of the pleasure Pound had expressed to his mother at Ford’s imminent return, he did not see much of him that autumn, as Ford was commissioned to go to Rome to cover the story of the Investiture of the American Cardinals for the American magazine Collier’s, an odd assignment, one might have thought, for a bigamist English Catholic, but incidentally one on which Ford became, much to his delight, the first person to send a Marconi message from the Mediterranean to New York. By mid-December he was back in London, and South Lodge life, now under the auspices of Mr and Mrs Hueffer, recommenced. Violet on her return had immediately changed her name in the telephone directory and in Who’s Who to Mrs Ford Madox Hueffer, and referred, even in print, to ‘my husband’.

Yet warm though his friendship with Ford and Violet would continue to be, Pound’s close circle for 1912 revolved around a friend of Violet’s, Brigit Patmore; it was she who introduced him to Richard Aldington, who with H.D., and to a lesser extent Flint, would form the centre of his social as well as poetic life for the immediate future. Many years later Pound wrote in a letter to H.D. that it had been the happiest period of his life. Violet Hunt had introduced Pound to Brigit Patmore, who in 1911 was twenty-nine, three years older than Pound. She was very lovely, a delicate Pre-Raphaelite beauty with red-gold hair, enormous eyes and white skin, full of zest for life, highly intelligent and, though unhappily married, with a great sense of fun. Although at that stage her health was not good, her letters and memoir are full of spark and energy. The art critic and writer John Cournos, who will appear later in this story, described her as one of the two most attractive women in London, while Pound said she was one of the rare ‘charming people on the planet.’¹¹ Ford, by 1913, had fallen desperately in love with her. Douglas Goldring, indeed, suggests that ‘oddly enough’, Violet shared Ford’s ‘romantic admiration’ for Brigit.¹² Violet wrote of her in The Flurried Years, ‘My friend was very beautiful, with a queer, large, tortured mouth that said the wittiest things, eyes that tore your soul out of your body for pity and yet danced … She had … as no woman would ever admit except me – charm enough to damn a regiment.’¹³

Brigit came from a family of Ulster landowners, though she hated to be reminded of this background, stressing instead that she had, as it happened, been born in Dublin; like Ford, she was a fierce supporter of Home Rule, as well as of the suffragettes, one of the causes that drew her to Violet, with whom she would sally out to sell Votes for Women. Violet, rather unkindly and most unfairly, later wrote that Brigit was ‘no real suffragette, though she collected with me and rattled a box at stations. Nothing but her eyes protested. Delicately cynical, she accepted things as they are.’¹⁴ ‘Delicately cynical’ is a masterly summing up of Patmore’s wry and shrewd analysis of her contemporary society, but she was acutely aware of the injustices endured by women. (Fascinatingly, in 1956 she wrote to Pound expressing outrage at the sexism of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; she must have been one of the few people to notice it at the time.) Hunt was perhaps referring to Brigit’s attempts to maintain the appearance of a conventional wife, but in some ways Hunt made just the same effort, even less successfully. Brigit herself said it was because she felt ‘so stifled and impatient with the late Victorian code of behaviour’ that she was so delighted to meet Hunt, this ‘representative of the modern times’; but Violet was going to have her own trouble with those repressive codes.¹⁵

Brigit was born Ethel Elizabeth Morrison-Scott; her adoption of the name Brigit must have been part of her identification with the Irish cause. Her childhood, she suggests in her memoirs, was not happy. Her father, who drank, was cruel to her mother, by repute as beautiful as Brigit herself. She died ‘tragically young’, having, Brigit writes, ‘grieved her wild heart to death’.¹⁶ He married again, and Brigit ran away from home at one stage, for how long, she does not say. All the same, she had had a wide education, learnt to play the piano, which she studied for a while in Dresden, and spoke excellent French and German. According to Violet Hunt, she also painted. In 1907, she married a grandson of Coventry Patmore, author, as she points out somewhat ruefully in her memoirs, for already by 1911 the marriage was not going well, of the bestselling ‘Angel in the House, the famous poem … celebrating the joys of married love’.¹⁷ (According to her son, ‘Edwardian gallants’, on being introduced to her, would say, ‘I suppose you are the “Angel in the House”’.)¹⁸ John Deighton Patmore, who had a well-paid post in the insurance world, had, unlike Brigit, scant interest in literature, and while he appeared to have little tenderness for Brigit, had a weakness, according to his son, for ‘pretty young secretaries’, and expected Brigit to put up with it.¹⁹ Brigit tried to take an interest in the sporting world, which was where he wanted to spend his leisure when not with the pretty young secretaries, but increasingly she spent time with her friends rather than his. They had two sons, to whom Brigit was devoted, as they were to her. Their son Derek writes in his autobiography that he hardly ever saw his father when he was young; he was not, he said, ‘a family man’.²⁰ His ‘dominant memory of those early days [wa]s that of [his] mother, a lovely young woman … [whose] eyes, which were a soft grey, but sometimes tinged with green, had a melancholy expression as if loaded with a secret sadness’. What he recalls about his father is his saying of his sons whenever they annoyed him, ‘It’s their Irish blood’; this was clearly calculated to upset Brigit, who, Derek says, ‘would always flare up in defence of Ireland if the Irish were attacked’.²¹ In many ways Brigit had much in common with Olivia Shakespear; like her, she was a literary hostess, and later she too become a writer of novels and translations; like Olivia, she was beautiful, charming, cultured, unhappily married and not entirely faithful to her husband. But Olivia was of a different generation, twenty years older, politically conservative, and she managed to retain a veneer of respectability all her life; even H.D. did not realise she was the Diana Vernon of Yeats’ memoirs until after her death. Brigit, however, caused a good deal more scandal. She was, her son recorded, ‘impetuous, overgenerous, extravagant with money’, qualities he always found charming, but possibly not so likely as Olivia’s worldly caution to keep rumour at bay.²² Yet, according to H.D., she organised her love affairs with great discretion.

In 1911 and 1912, although intensely interested in literature, Brigit had not yet enough confidence to attempt to write herself, or certainly not to attempt publication; when she began to write later, it was with the encouragement, indeed active persuasion, of both Pound and H.D. Most of her own friends, however, as opposed to her husband’s, were writers; in her memoir, My Friends When Young, virtually all the acquaintances mentioned are in the literary world, bar the odd Irish revolutionary. Doubtless her husband’s literary name had been part of his attraction for her, even if it proved so misleading. As it happened, Yeats had developed a great enthusiasm for Coventry Patmore in 1909, particularly for his ‘Essay on English Metrical Law’, about which he wrote rapturously to Florence Farr, and it is likely that either Yeats or Farr conveyed this enthusiasm to Pound. Perhaps Pound was also taken with the Patmore name when he met Brigit, but she had charms enough of her own not to need her grandfather-in-law’s recommendation. Humphrey Carpenter speculates on whether Ezra and she had an affair; Pound undoubtedly, like Ford and Violet, had a ‘romantic admiration’ for her, and she a tendresse for him. Her memoir contains a warm and admiring description of him on their first meeting in Violet Hunt’s drawing-room at South Lodge, where Pound spent many hours, and the picture she paints there vividly suggests what attracted artistically inclined young women of the period to Pound, as well as what might have put off the respectable, upstanding members of the male establishment:

I saw a long slim young man leaning back in a low armchair, withdrawn as an animal from creatures it does not know. His head was unavoidably noticeable, not only because of the reddish spring hair, but for the Florentine delicacy of the pale face. His eyes were a little crinkled in closure, whether in humour or observation, I didn’t know. His mouth, sensitive and undoubtedly sweet, covered small, very white teeth, but he revealed them seldom, neither speaking nor smiling often. Not that he was confused or shy, no, he was as self-possessed as Violet’s superb grey Persian cat sitting on the window-sill, though fortunately he did not give out the cold feline resentment of that beautiful animal … Violet … whispered to me, ‘The young man like a Renaissance portrait is Ezra Pound. A poet, very good’ … Ezra never seemed conscious of the fact that his unusual looks were beautiful, not just the handsomeness permissible to a man in England. Perhaps in the Mediterranean countries he had grown accustomed, like Byron, to the outspoken ‘Oh, troppo bello’.²³

Brigit Patmore compared Pound with the flamboyant Polish pianist, Paderewski, who embodied the figure of the romantic artist par excellence for the pre-war generation. H.D. made the same comparison, but more warily: ‘a hint of a young, more robust Ignace Paderewski … But this young (already) inconoclast is rougher, tougher’.²⁴ Pound, Brigit writes in her memoir, gave her a troubadour name, Vail de Lencour, which he used when he dedicated his book of 1916, Lustra, to her.²⁵ He also gave her the page proofs of Canzoni (now in the University of Texas), including the rejected poems, hence our knowledge of that defensive note appended and then rejected for the collection. According to her memoir, after their first meeting, Pound often called in for tea, ‘probably’, she says, ‘because I was somewhat ailing and had to rest a good deal and, instinctively, he would think I must need distraction’.²⁶ That comment is not necessarily entirely disingenuous – Pound was very kind in that way – but doubtless he found it a pleasanter proposition to be kind to a beautiful and witty invalid, than to a plain and dull one. All one can say with any certainty is that Brigit and Pound were always very fond of each other. She writes about him with amused affection, and remained a faithful correspondent during his years of incarceration in St Elizabeth’s mental hospital.

Brigit places her first meeting with Pound at South Lodge in late spring, when he was living in Church Walk; Pound did not in fact spend a late spring in Church Walk until 1912, and other evidence suggests they must have met earlier. Brigit’s account of her meeting with Violet Hunt is also rather misleading, as she suggests that it was just before Hunt’s relationship with Ford developed, which would have been in early 1909, when Ford was editing the English Review. Her son, Derek, however, says firmly on more than one occasion that Brigit did not meet Ford until he, Derek, was four years old, which was in 1912, the context for this statement being Ford’s later penchant for hinting that Derek was actually his son. She probably in fact met Hunt when the Patmores moved to Kensington, most likely in 1911, the year Ford spent largely in Germany. Through Hunt she acquired a rich range of new literary acquaintances, including Pound, whom she met probably soon after his arrival back in London in 1911; by early 1912 they were good friends.

Brigit knew nothing of Pound’s involvement with Dorothy for some time after they first met. She makes no mention of Dorothy in her account of the pre-war years, though they must have known each other, because Pound mentions Brigit occasionally in his letters to Dorothy in terms that imply acquaintanceship, but there appears to have been little sympathy between the two women. There are few references to Dorothy even in the memoir’s account of the post-war years, and those are scarcely kind. For example, Brigit describes going dancing with Ezra and Dorothy in Italy in the early 1930s. It is clear that Pound’s dancing was no better than it had been back in Philadelphia: ‘Ezra danced according to no rules that I understood. New steps one may invent, but surely the music sets time and rhythm. But for Ezra, no; with extremely odd steps he moved, to unearthly beats. One couldn’t face it … Sweet faithful Dorothy said innocently: “Ezra has a wonderful sense of rhythm”. Yes indeed.’²⁷ According to Noel Stock, Dorothy in later life would always refer to Brigit scathingly as ‘Patmore’.²⁸ She presumably took the same view of her as H.D.’s mother, who in the early 1920s decided Brigit was distinctly ‘fast’.²⁹

Dorothy and H.D., on the other hand, although never close, always appear to have had a perfectly amicable relationship; Dorothy gives the impression that she would have liked them to become better friends, but it never happened. H.D. probably first met the Shakespears in late November or early December, but she found Brigit’s company much more congenial. Pound had arranged their meeting, asking Brigit to invite H.D. to tea, another stage in his plan to extend H.D.’s social world. ‘His manner,’ Brigit recalled, ‘always nonchalant, was now exaggerated, and I knew he felt very diplomatic and Machiavellian.’³⁰ He explained that H.D. was a friend and contemporary from Philadelphia, and warned her that H.D. was very sensitive about her surname. When they met, however, it was actually H.D. who commented less than tactfully on the subject of names. She asked if her hostess’ name were really Brigit, as in America only cooks were called that. Brigit says that she replied, ‘How very democratic of you. Here we give it to saints’, and H.D. laughed.³¹ Of course, H.D. was quite right: it wasn’t Brigit’s real name; on both sides of the Atlantic it was a name usually found among working-class Irish Catholics. In spite of this possibly awkward start they took to each other immediately. Brigit commented on H.D.’s ‘extraordinarily appealing charm … One had a feeling that here was a delicate work of beauty which must not be destroyed, an intellect which might blaze out into a fine clarity.’ When she first saw her she was struck by the ‘extreme vulnerability in her face’. Brigit was, she says, ‘from that time … under the spell of [H.D.’s] capacity for suffering and for years was tormented by a vain endeavour to keep unhappiness from her’. Yet she also comments that for all her appearance of sensitivity and fragility, H.D. had ‘a magnificent line of jaw and chin [that] gave reassuring strength’.³² Brigit was right; simultaneously fragile and tough, vulnerable and resilient, was how H.D. was throughout her life. When they met, Brigit says that H.D. immediately asked her if she would learn Greek with her, something which in principle she agreed to do, but she was, she says, ‘a lazy student’.³³ The person who would work with H.D. on her Greek was Richard Aldington, to whom Brigit soon introduced her.

It appears not to have been until December that Pound caught up again with Flint, the only other poet besides himself to belong to both the Tour Eiffel group and the later imagists. Flint was no longer writing for the New Age; a draft of a letter to Orage among Flint’s papers suggests they had a falling out when Orage failed to publish an article he had written on Verlaine. Flint may already have proved himself too avant-garde. Orage loved to publish controversial work, but on the whole he liked the weekly’s regular arts reviewers to share his views; Flint’s place was taken by the more conservative J.C. Squire. Yet Flint, in spite of his demanding work, his marriage and his small daughter, Ianthe, was still writing poetry and had published several poems in the magazine that Douglas Goldring started the previous year. This was The Tramp: an Open-Air Magazine, so called, Goldring says, because ‘the intention was to combine literary merit with the cult for what is now called hiking’.³⁴ The commercial success of Country Life, where he had his first job, had convinced him, wrongly, that this would be a winner.³⁵ The Tramp was launched in March 1910, the month when Pound left England, publishing articles about travel and walking expeditions, stories, poems and reviews. When Ford had lost his job as editor of the English Review, Goldring simultaneously lost his position as secretary, and starting the magazine was his first independent venture. The Tramp’s contributors were an eclectic bunch, established Edwardians as well as those who would soon become known as Georgians or modernists. The first issue included James Ellroy Flecker, for whom Goldring had a particular admiration, W. H. Davies (of ‘no time to stand and stare’ fame), Arthur Ransome, Arnold Bennett, Violet Hunt and Lady Margaret Sackville, and later issues published work by Flint, Wyndham Lewis and Ford, as well as translations of Chekhov and Maupassant stories, and Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto mentioned earlier. The places described in the travel articles were generally either within England, in that way looking forward to the Georgian love of the English countryside, or in Brittany, the terrain of the proto-modernist painters. The Tramp only lasted twelve issues; Goldring, like Ford at the English Review, had insufficient backing, the reason that he himself gives for the magazine’s failure, but he might also have been somewhat ahead of his time; in the inter-war years travel writing would become immensely popular, and Goldring’s own travel books – he wrote at least ten – brought him much more success than ever his poetry did.

The first of the poems by Flint published in the Tramp was entitled ‘March’, though it rather inappropriately appeared in the September issue of 1910. (Perhaps this was a sign of Goldring’s lack of editorial expertise; among Flint’s papers is a letter from T.S. Eliot, written from the Criterion in 1925 about a poem that Flint had sent him then; in it he comments wryly that if Flint were an editor, he would know that the readers wouldn’t tolerate spring odes in autumn.)³⁶ ‘March’ has as its subject-matter one of the themes that had appeared in In the Net of the Stars, the unhappy London worker thinking of the countryside beyond. It is quite traditional in form, but very simple, conversational in tone – Ford would undoubtedly have liked it, in spite of its rejection of London:

Soon will the plane trees make a shade of leaves

Along the quiet streets – alas! too few –

And in the garden where the lilac weaves

Its mantle of sweet scent and purple hue.

But I would rather be among the woods

Where the heart holds a silence dumbly stirred

By the soft mournful cuckoo call, and broods

On music which the ears have never heard.³⁷

This tone, thoughtful, calm, a little melancholic, very close to everyday speech, would be characteristic of Flint’s imagist free verse. In some of the other poems in the Tramp he is more experimental, especially in a four-part poem called ‘Moods’, published in the November and December issues, where he is putting into practice his belief that the subject-matter of the poem should determine the form. Here the first two parts, both love poems, are in pure free verse, and the second in particular, again very simple, looks forward to the brevity of the imagist verse-form:

You were among the apple branches.

The sun shone, and it was November.

Sun and apples and laughter

And love

We gathered, you and I.

And the birds were singing.³⁸

Peter Jones includes this in his Penguin anthology of Imagist Poetry, in a section of poetry from the period of the anthologies, 1914–17, using the republished version from Flint’s 1915 collection, Cadences.³⁹. He may not have realised how early it had been written; it must be the earliest poem by any of the poets included, suggesting Flint was well on the way to finding an imagist style before Pound himself did, although Jones’ selection also includes several of Pound’s poems which were written before the word imagism was even a glimmer in Pound’s eye.

Whether Pound saw these poems in the Tramp he does not say: probably not at the time, but when they met up again it is likely Flint showed them to him, as their discussions about poetry and poetic form began again immediately. Pound makes one reference in ‘Prologomena’ to these conversations with Flint, when, after lamenting the conditions of the modern poet who can no longer lie in ‘a green field with his head against a tree’, and play ‘a ha’penny whistle’ but instead has to ‘holloa his verses down a speaking tube to the editors of cheap magazines’, he writes that one now meets ‘unkempt Amyclas in a Soho restaurant and chant together of dead and forgotten things – it is a manner of speech among poets to chant of dead and forgotten things, there seems no special harm in it; it has always been done – and it’s rather better to be a clerk in the Post Office than to look after a lot of stinking, verminous sheep’.⁴⁰ Flint was the only clerk in the Post Office Pound knew, and indeed referred to himself as unkempt Amyclas in a letter to Pound many years later, but if they only talked about dead, forgotten things, it must have been because Pound would not let Flint get a word in.