POUND SPENT CHRISTMAS 1911 near Salisbury with the novelist and poet, Maurice Hewlett, whom he had seen several times that autumn. He was deeply and unforgettably moved by the sense of past lives around him on Salisbury Plain, a sense perhaps enforced by the contrast with the novel twentieth-century experience of travelling in a motor-car, which took them to see Henry Newbolt, who, he recalled in The Cantos, looked ‘twice bathed’.41 He told Margaret that he thought Hewlett’s trilogy The Agonists ‘very fine’; these were verse plays, written in an experimental form that Hewlett called ‘stress-metre’.42 They had received some scathing attacks, though Binyon defended them, arguing that the ‘whole point of the stress-metre is the effort to bring verse-writing in closer relation to the rhythms of living speech’.43 No wonder Pound, now returning himself to the ‘living tongue’, was impressed. He too was trying to write a long poem, ‘much more important’, he told Margaret, than anything he had done so far. Presumably this was a first draft of the Cantos, though Pound would not publish anything from it until 1917, when three cantos appeared in consecutive issues of Poetry. Dorothy wrote to him in late December, after he had consulted her about it: ‘I am sure I have no suggestions for your long poem. You might damn the Commonplace – and all the unemployed, (meaning myself ).’44 Such self-deprecation was a feature of her letters, though rarely a characteristic of Pound’s.
Shortly after Pound returned to London in early 1912, Brigit introduced him to another aspiring writer, Richard Aldington. Although he was always known as Richard, Aldington had been christened Edward Godfree, the first name presumably after the then Prince of Wales, as is the case for the hero of one of his novels, and it may have been the youthful Aldington’s fierce opposition to the monarchy that led him to reject it. In spite of his youth – in early 1912, Aldington was only nineteen – he was already almost as full of theories and as combative in his own way as Pound himself. A friend of Brigit’s had asked her to befriend him, explaining he was ‘a clever boy … alone in London because he won’t go into his father’s business. All he wants to do is write.’ He turned out to be ‘a lively humorous boy’, entertaining and engaging. He was, she said, ‘tall and broad-shouldered, with a fine forehead, thick longish hair of the indefinite colour blond hair turns to in adolescence, very bright blue eyes, too small a nose and a determined mouth’.45 He was good-looking, though in a more conventional way than Pound: with regular features, and well-built, he looked like a rugby player, which indeed he had been, though he later generally tried to keep that dark. (Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, the magazine that would be so important to all of them, said he looked like a footballer, not a comment that endeared her to him.) When Pound met him, Richard was very poor and living on a spartan diet, with no need as yet to worry about his later tendency to put on weight. In Asphodel H.D. described the Aldington character, there called Jerrold Darrington, as ‘square-set, a little heavy (when he wasn’t too hungry)’ and Darrington says of himself, ‘I am a bit florid at times. True British roast beef.’46 Aldington’s robust physique led many to underestimate his super-sensitivity and the ease with which he could be wounded, particularly as he had been trained to be too conventionally masculine to admit it. Nowadays he is remembered most as the embittered, ruthless and homophobic biographer of T.E. Lawrence, but in those pre-First World War days, Aldington was full of hope, high spirits, iconoclasm and fun. Even then there was, perhaps, an underlying melancholy that emerges in some of his poems, but it was not at that stage apparent to his friends. Pound, describing the pre-war London scene to Patricia Hutchins in the 1950s, recalled ‘Aldington for japes and larks … Don’t underestimate Richard’s verve in those days. It was a comfort.’47
Aldington was born in Portsmouth, but spent most of his childhood near or in Dover. His father was an unsuccessful solicitor with a passion for Elizabethan literature; he had written a novel (also unsuccessful, not to say tedious) about Elizabethan life. His father’s family was, Aldington explained in some biographical notes he sent to Amy Lowell in 1917, ‘though not noble, “respectable”, as the 18th century people say’, and traceable back to the sixteenth century.48 His father had, as it was put in those days, married beneath him, though Aldington did not mention that to Amy, merely saying euphemistically that his mother was of ‘old Kent stock’. The version of events Darrington gives in Asphodel is more colourful: ‘My governor you know married a country wench. Damn clever of her. She copped the old fellow down hunting. I was born six months after though they say in hushed tones poor Ned was a seven months’ baby. Damn fool the governor. One’s people are one’s damned ruin.’49
Aldington was always ashamed of and deeply hostile to his mother. He thought her sentimental and vulgar: worst of all, she wrote romantic novels, the best known of which, Love-Letters That Caused a Divorce, made a local stir for a while during Aldington’s adolescence. It was published by a Dover newspaper, which festooned its windows with copies, much to Richard’s mortification. Luckily he was a big, powerful lad, so probably he did not suffer as much as he might have done from the mockery of his schoolfellows. Love-Letters That Caused a Divorce was a racy, and indeed very gently risqué read – the adulterous affair is true love and the wronged husband a pain – and no doubt it passed the time on the London train very pleasantly, though a rapid reader would have finished half-way. His father’s novel, The Queen’s Preferment, is a great deal longer and heavier, with wearisomely pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue (‘“Tush, lad,” he said, “thou forgettest that within call, aye within this royal Palace, are many who do my bidding.”’)50 It may be true that, as a later lover of Aldington’s was to say, Jessie May Aldington was ‘a very common woman’, but she was a more successful novelist than her respectable husband was either lawyer or writer, and when his business failed she made a very competent living for many years running the Mermaid Inn at Rye.51 Yet, scornful though he was of his mother’s efforts, with two novelist parents it is not surprising young Aldington had literary aspirations.
In later life, Aldington denounced English snobbery with great vehemence, if not venom, and no doubt he had suffered from it on his mother’s behalf, but there is no indication that his proclaimed contempt for class prejudice made him any more sympathetic to her, or more ready to acknowledge her abilities; his attitude to her, indeed, smacked of the snobbery he condemned in others. He gave a deeply bitter caricature of her in his war novel, Death of a Hero, though ironically her enterprise and energy come through there much more than in his memoir. But in the novel he claims that ‘She had let George [the Aldington figure] down so badly time after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside’.52 Perhaps it was she who first left him with the sense of betrayal he would show so acutely later. There is evidence that Jessie May had a terrible temper, which, according to Aldington’s sister, she enjoyed displaying, and in later years, Aldington alleged, she became increasingly partial to drink. In Death of a Hero, George says to his future wife: ‘I’m glad you hate your parents or at least one of them … I remember I used to watch the young robins exterminating their fathers, and think how right it was. But it ought to be the mothers.’53
Like both Pound and H.D., Aldington had found much of his formal education an unrewarding experience. A collection of recollections of Aldington is prefaced with the information that he was ‘educated’ at Dover College. He would not have agreed, although that was certainly the school he attended. Nor would his headmaster, whom Aldington described many years later as saying to him, after congratulating him on his literary success, ‘And now tell me, my dear Aldington, where on earth did you get your scholarly knowledge?’54 Aldington had enjoyed his first small prep school in a Kentish fishing village, but was deeply unhappy at Dover College, a minor public school, the sort of place, he said, that inculcated all the worst aspects of British snobbery and insularity without any of the talent and flair that might have relieved them. As he writes in Death of a Hero, ‘They set out to produce “a type of thoroughly manly fellow,” a “type” which unhesitatingly accepted the prejudices, the “code” put before it, docilely conformed to a set of rules.’ The other boys accepted this: ‘They wanted to be approved and be healthy barbarians, cultivating a little smut on the sly, and finally dropping into some convenient post in life where the “thoroughly manly fellow” was appreciated – mostly, one must admit, minor and unpleasant and not very remunerative posts in unhealthy colonies. The Empire’s backbone.’55 Probably there were others who resisted the ‘code’, and doubtless there were more inspiring teachers than Aldington admits. All the same, he learnt most of what he knew from his father’s library, which comprised some 2,000 volumes, his ‘home university’, as he later described it to Amy Lowell.
One rather odd feature of Aldington’s memoir, Life for Life’s Sake, is that his brother and sister are never mentioned, and he leaves the impression of a lonely and wistful only child. (In Death of a Hero, George, when asked if he has siblings, replies, ‘Yes, I believe so but I never think about it. Relatives are awful.’)56 Yet as a young boy he loved to explore the chalk downs, and became an avid collector of butterflies and moths. When he later wrote a poem about his childhood in Dover, he used for the child he had been the image of a chrysalis put in a matchbox, unable to beat its wings when they emerge.
I was like a moth –
Like one of those grey Emperor moths
Which flutter through the vines at Capri.
And that damned little town was my match-box,
Against whose sides I beat and beat
Until my wings were torn and faded, and dingy
As that damned little town.57
The poem is a powerful evocation of small-town dullness (Dover in Death of a Hero actually appears as Dullborough), but it is a trace self-pitying, a trait Aldington was never to lose. There is misery, but one feels it needs more than somewhat snobbish and misogynistic complaints about ‘the sordid provincial shops – The grocer’s, and the shops for women’ to justify it.58
Aldington always loved books: ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘it was fortunate that my schools paid no attention to “cultural interests,” so that reading was pure fun.’59 His father had taught him ‘his letters’ at the age of two, and would, he said, get hold of any book that his son wanted as he grew up. As a young boy, Aldington read only adventure stories, but one day, when he was about fourteen, he came by chance across the writing of Oscar Wilde, whose complete works his father had just bought. ‘I had never heard of Mr Wilde until this purchase, but from one or two of the remarks in the discussion about it, I judged there was something mysterious to be learned.’ He started on Intentions, the volume which includes some of Wilde’s most famous essays (‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist’ among them). Intentions sent him on to Keats, only in fact mentioned by Wilde in passing, if with admiration, but Keats’ works were luckily in his father’s bookcase: ‘I despair of finding words to express the effect of these two books without seeming inadequate to myself or exaggerated to other people. It was like a combination of falling in love at first sight and finding Ali Baba’s treasure cave. But lovers have their woes and Ali Baba has his perils; I had neither. There was simply no fly in that ointment. By the merest chance I had stumbled into a world of enchantment.’60 In the next two years, a year of which he was off school altogether because of a hernia operation, he went through all his father’s poetry books, which included all the major British poets from Chaucer to Browning and many minor ones too, and also read his complete collection of Elizabethan dramatists. He read the Pre-Raphaelites with enthusiasm; a notebook he kept at about seventeen is full of references to Morris and Swinburne, and, as with Pound, they, along with Pater and Wilde, had an impact that would never be lost. At Dover College all the boys did by way of literary appreciation was ‘parse, analyse, and (heaven help us!) paraphrase Shakespeare’s King John’.61 In Death of a Hero, Aldington describes George as ‘living a double life – one life for school and home, another for himself’, which comprised his walks over the downs and his explorations in books.62 Aldington confessed to Amy Lowell that the only part of school that he enjoyed was the rugby football.
The family moved to Sandwich, whose ancient walls, tranquillity and ‘air of immemorial languor’ he loved.63 There, at fifteen, he began to write poetry, which at sixteen he started to show to a neighbour, Dudley Grey, a sophisticated man of the world of about fifty, who had been a poet himself in his youth. He was wealthy and cultured, and much disapproved of in the village, because he had once let slip that he had dined with Wilde. In spite of the fact that he lived respectably with a Mrs Grey, it was decided he was a ‘degenerate’; perhaps they thought his friendship with a good-looking, fair-haired sixteen-year-old boy rather odd, but Aldington says nothing about that. Dudley Grey was, he said, ‘a good European’.64 He talked to Richard about London, Paris and Berlin; he said Richard must go to Italy. Grey had not just a passion for Italy but volumes of entrancing photographs of the Italian countryside, architecture and art. He introduced Richard to French and Italian literature, and made him realise that the classics were not just ‘a dreary school task’ but were ‘as much living poetry as Keats and Shakespeare’. Looking back, Aldington commented: ‘No doubt he saw these things through the eyes of Ruskin, Pater, and Addington Symonds, but that is vastly better than not seeing them at all.’65 (When Aldington wrote some articles about Italy for the New Age in 1913, his intimate knowledge of the writings of Ruskin and John Addington Symonds on Italy becomes very clear.) At sixteen, Aldington claims, he had a poem published in a London periodical. In the meantime his mother had sent off a piece of his prose to George Bernard Shaw, who wrote back: ‘Madam, Your son has obviously too much literary talent to earn his living in an honest way. I enclose a guinea which he is to spend in some thoroughly selfish manner.’66 Aldington claimed to be shocked by this cynicism towards the calling of the writer, but even such equivocal praise doubtless gave him confidence.
The first published poem by Aldington that has been traced appeared when he was eighteen, in October 1910, in what he described as a ‘leftish journal’, Justice. Interestingly enough, it was a political poem, in a Swinburnian metre, celebrating the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Aldington was dismissive of his motivations later, writing that it was based on ‘an abstract and unfounded belief that monarchies are corrupt and republics perfect per se’, and it can scarcely be described as a good poem – only its sentiments can have secured it publication:
We are tired of the cry of the hungry, of
the noise of the harlot’s feet –
O, grant we be deft and courageous, and
cunning and wise and fleet!67
It is an indication, however, of the young Aldington’s idealism, something he would dismiss derisively in later life, but which was a vital part of what drove him towards poetry, and what attracted H.D.
‘A sudden change in the family fortunes’, as he puts it in his memoirs, meant a move to west London. Aldington was enrolled at University College London, which, conscious that its social standing would always be overshadowed by Oxford and Cambridge, competed through fierce scholastic rigour, not dissimilar to that introduced by Felix Schelling to Penn.68 ‘In a laudable effort to set a higher standard of learning than the two old universities, London went a bit Teutonic,’ Aldington wrote in 1941, two world wars against Germany having made such a comment not only acceptable but patriotic: ‘I should say it was designed to turn out philologists rather than scholars, and ten thousand pedants for one poet. Somewhere about the place is a plaque recording that Robert Browning spent a year as a student there. I think I know why he only stayed one year.’69 Aldington was only to stay for one year himself. He was taught by some distinguished scholars, including A.E. Housman, ‘who was to be seen occasionally cruising gloomily about the corridors, probably depressed by the sins of German commentators on Manilius’.70 There was also the famous medievalist, W. P. Ker, though the lecturer whose teaching he most enjoyed was called Solomon, a classical don who loved poetry and whose enthusiasm was infectious; he would deliver his lectures, ‘not from the dais, but from the right-hand corner of the room, twisting himself in and out and up and down a rope which hung down from the lofty window. It was a strange spectacle to see him hanging by one arm and leg from the rope like a learned chimpanzee in blue serge, declaiming lines from Catullus or Vergil with unflagging gusto.’71
At University College Aldington met Alec Randall, who remained a lifelong friend. Randall recalled Aldington as a romantic figure, ‘the centre of a group of admiring friends’, known to write poetry, with a velvet jacket and flowing bow-tie, de rigueur for a budding poet in 1910.72 According to Randall, the poems that Aldington was writing at the time were, like his tie, influenced by the younger Yeats, as well as by Rossetti and the French symbolists, though Aldington himself said he did not know the French poets until two years later. Aldington’s closest friend at university was another poet, Arthur Chapman, who drowned in the summer of 1911, at the end of Aldington’s first and only year. It was his first experience of real bereavement and he felt it deeply. A poem by Aldington on Chapman’s death appeared in the University College Union Magazine; still very traditional, a little too wordy, it is a direct and moving poem, the pain of a young agnostic who has none of the conventional religious consolations to protect him against the shock of sudden death. His very first imagist poems a year later are also melancholy and more concerned with death than one would expect of a twenty-year-old; perhaps that was just a hangover from the sub-nineties gloom much in vogue in the early years of the century, so disliked of Pound and Hulme, but it may be in some measure related to Chapman’s death.
Aldington’s university life ended abruptly, when his father’s financial affairs went even more badly wrong than usual. Although he disparaged the college, if not his teachers, he must have been devastated. He had real linguistic flair and certainly would have done well, and, more importantly, he enjoyed the work. His mother, however, had always been opposed to his reading for a degree; she felt he should have gone straight into a safe profession, the law or accountancy, and family and friends pressurised him to remedy that now. Aldington resisted. He wanted to be a writer. His father was sympathetic. Even before he started at University College, he had tried to get his son literary work. He wrote to the editor of the Spectator, one St Loe Strachey, uncle of Lytton:
I have a son between 17 & 18, of whom one of our greatest living writers has declared that ‘he has literary ability enough for anything,’ [is he or his son quoting Shaw most accurately?] & as I am therefore anxious to obtain for him an atmosphere that would be congenial, it has occurred to me that possibly you might be able to find him a position that would be mutually satisfying.
As an old lover of the classics I can vouch for the boy’s ability in that direction. His knowledge of French is good, of art excellent, of English Literature, for his age quite remarkable. His productions, particularly in poetry are equally distinctive, & withal, he is tall, muscular & can do a twenty mile walk any day of the week.73
Such paternal pride and concern is touching, and though evidently this letter did not work, perhaps he was right to present this range of skills, from classical learning to strenuous walking. Edwardian editors wanted well-educated, well-rounded assistants. Aldington recounts a later interview with a Fleet Street newspaper editor who asked him to quote from both Horace and Homer; he doesn’t mention questions about his physical prowess, but one look at Aldington would have answered that. After Aldington left university, his father, in spite of his financial troubles, gave him a small allowance, something Aldington glosses over in Life for Life’s Sake, and omits from the account he gave to Amy Lowell. He supplemented this income with some sports journalism – scarcely a respectable activity at the time, but he was not in that way proud, and he did understand rugby. In addition, he soon found he could sell the occasional poem. He was determined to make his way as a writer. He couldn’t live luxuriously – he gave up smoking and drinking and ate sparsely – but he could survive. Luckily, he soon started to be invited to literary parties and, like Pound, was able to supplement his diet agreeably as well as make contact with other writers.
Writing many years later, Aldington recalled his introduction to Pound in early 1912. By now Pound had given up his outré costumes – perhaps because they caused such consternation to Dorothy’s friends and relations – and though still a dandy, was a more restrained and elegant one. In the days when Aldington first knew him, Pound dressed in imitation of Whistler: ‘the dark suit and rolled double waistcoat, the very neat-waisted grey overcoat of Regency cut, the black cane, the hat jauntily on the side of the head’.74 Richard liked Pound immediately: ‘in 1912,’ he wrote, ‘Ezra was great fun, a small but persistent volcano in the dim levels of London literary society.’75 By this time, if not exactly a celebrity, Pound was at any rate a well-known personality: ‘London was interested and amused by him. The evening papers interviewed him at length and published his portrait; and even Punch had to notice the existence of a certain Mr Ezekial Ton who had achieved a new synthesis of Wardour Street and the wild and woolly West.’76 The nineteen-year-old Aldington showed Pound his vers libre poems ‘over a beef-steak in Kensington’; gratifyingly, Pound’s response was, ‘Well, I don’t think you need any help from me!’ After that they became ‘great friends, very great friends’.77 Yet, as well as their devotion to poetry, Aldington and Pound had in common a brash contempt for social conventions. They both loved to shock, and would have much pleasure in jointly doing so.
In the account that Brigit gives of Aldington’s meeting with H.D., she suggests that he was from the start attracted by her, and was delighted that she accepted him instantly as a poet. What Brigit doesn’t mention, naturally enough for one of her generation, is that she and Richard had already had a brief affair, to which Richard referred in a letter to her many years later, when he and Brigit became lovers once more and had an eight-year relationship. He recalled that it was ‘you who first held my body’; presumably it was she to whom he lost his virginity, though he leaves the impression in his memoir that he was already quite sexually experienced by that age.78 There is no hint in her memoir that Brigit objected to the transference of his affections. Both Caroline Zilboorg, who drew attention to this earlier affair, and H.D.’s biographer, Barbara Guest, suggest that Brigit was attracted by H.D. herself, and Zilboorg suggests she encouraged Aldington’s attentions as ‘a way of loving H.D. vicariously through him’.79 Brigit was very attached to H.D. and admired her greatly, but her letters to H.D. reveal her as someone desperately needing male validation, though constantly being let down by the men with whom she became involved. She clearly liked women as people better than men, but she needed to be loved by a man. Her son Derek, who was gay himself, says he is sure she was heterosexual, though he suggests H.D. was in love with his beautiful mother. In fact the only possible sexual link that has not either emerged or been suggested between two of this foursome is between Aldington and Pound. Whatever the truth of these speculations, they rapidly became close-knit friends. Richard, like Pound, recalled later ‘those magical early days in London’ in the pre-war years.80 They wrote, argued, partied, made each other laugh, more like a group of graduate students than people who had entered the serious world of work – not that literary life in London in the pre-war days often resembled the serious world of work. The war would change all that.