III

SHORTLY BEFORE ALDINGTON first met Pound, Brigit had introduced him to another poet, Harold Monro, who was to play an important part in London literary life for the next few years. Monro had just returned to England from the continent, wanting, like Ford and Hulme, to promote poetry appropriate to the modern age. He had lived abroad for some years, in escape from an unsuccessful marriage and unfulfilling work. He came from a well-to-do family, and had a Cambridge degree, but his inability to fit in with conventional English life showed early, when he was expelled from his public school, Radley, at the age of sixteen; the official reason offered was that he had been found to have a bottle of wine in his study – possibly the case, even if not the cause for expulsion, as from Cambridge onwards drink would be an intermittent problem for him – but the truth was that he was caught, as his biographer puts it, ‘in flagrante with a younger boy’.⁸¹ At Cambridge he had an intense but unhappy friendship with a fellow aspiring poet, Maurice Browne. Monro, who according to the poet and playwright John Drinkwater looked like a ‘dejected Guards Officer’, was a melancholic, and by nature reclusive; he was drawn by ‘advanced’ ideas, and his attempts at regular work – he was a lawyer by training who became a land agent – and his marriage – to Maurice’s sister, a hockey international with a taste for society life – failed abysmally.⁸² Since 1910 he had lived in Florence, where he had become a close friend of Maurice Hewlett, with whom Pound spent Christmas 1911. Monro had undergone analysis with a therapist called Max Bircher-Berger – he also treated Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, as well as inventing muesli – and had come to accept the fact that he was a homosexual, but although he espoused a doctrine of sexual fulfilment (in Italy at the time, homosexual relations were not illegal to men over sixteen), a series of sexual adventures with young men did not dispel his misery. Monro had already published several books of verse, but he felt that in England ‘the best poetry of the time is the poetry of despair, a cry of the lost’; it needed to get back to being what it was when the poet ‘expressed the keen and natural emotions of life’.⁸³ Given Monro’s own tendency to despair, he might well have sat gloomily in Florence lamenting this state of affairs, had Hewlett not intervened. According to Flint, who became a close friend and literary executor, eventually writing the preface for Monro’s collected poems in 1933,

Hewlett, in that forthright way he had on occasion, exclaimed, ‘If you feel like that, for God’s sake go back to England and do something.’ … It was the turning point of his life. Hitherto, Shelley, vegetarianism, romantic idealism, a vague socialism and his own fundamental incapacity to submit to discipline had rendered him ineffective both as a man and a poet. He was to learn about men by the experience of them which money dealings give, and about poetry by the lash of other poets’ tongues.⁸⁴

Monro, who was then thirty-two, brought with him a precocious long-haired eighteen-year-old youth, Arundel del Re, half Italian, half Anglo-Irish, with whom he was in love, probably unrequited. Del Re came to be his assistant in his great project for the revival of poetry, though he was extremely sociable and frequently distracted from the cause. When Aldington met Monro, he was, with del Re’s assistance, in the process of setting up the Poetry Review, in which Pound’s ‘Prologomena’ was to appear. The first issue came out in January 1912; Aldington would feature there in a signed piece in June, though he also contributed some anonymous and some initialled book reviews, his first ventures into literary journalism. Poetry Review would also give John Gould Fletcher, still unknown to his future fellow-imagists, his first experience of literary journalism.

Aldington and Flint saw a good deal of Monro in 1912, as did Hulme, who, even if he were no longer writing poetry himself, was still interested in those who did, and who gave one of the three lectures Monro organised during the summer of 1912, most likely his ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. Monro was a good deal wealthier than any of them – he had £1,000 a year, considerable riches at the time, even though he was giving money for the support of his wife and son – and he was always hospitable and generous. He retained his ‘vague socialism’, as Flint put it, which formed a particular link between the two of them; Dominic Hibberd describes them both as ‘Fabians and reformers’ (if that’s so, Flint’s politics must have moderated since the time he denounced the Fabians to Mrs Eder, at the fortuitous meeting that led to his appointment as literary critic of the New Age). Hibberd comments that Flint was one of the few literary friends with whom Monro never quarrelled.

When Monro returned to England, his intentions, according to Dominic Hibberd, ‘were simple: to help young writers produce the poetry of the future, and to take their work to the people, so that poets might once again become the unacknowledged legislators of the world, bringing new answers to the old question, “How to Live?”’⁸⁵ High ambitions, which to some extent he achieved; under Monro’s editorship, the 1912 Poetry Review and later Poetry and Drama published a wide range of poetry and poetry criticism, and played an important part in giving a platform both for the poets who would later be known as the Georgians, and for the imagists; if his magazines were not read by the ‘people’, they were by most of those interested in literary affairs. Monro, who was as keen in his own way as Pound later became to make English writers more cosmopolitan, published special issues on French, German and American poetry. Pound would later castigate Monro, in what Hibberd describes as ‘one of the most grudging obituaries ever written by one poet about another’ for the catholicity of his taste.⁸⁶ But Monro’s tolerance and encouragement of a wide variety of poetry was his strength. If Ford in the English Review had produced a more purely literary periodical than the traditional generalist ones that were brought out by Victorian and Edwardian presses, Monro took a further step in developing one of the earliest examples of what was to be the prototypical literary outlet of the modernist period, the little magazine. Monro never became a happy man, but in spite of his melancholic, depressive nature, in many ways he would transform the conditions of poetic production in England. Dominic Hibberd, indeed, claims that ‘no-one did more for the development of twentieth-century poetry’.⁸⁷

Pound may well have met Monro first through Hewlett, who would certainly have talked of him during Pound’s Christmas visit, and he was to write regularly for him. As early as January he told his parents that he was taking Monro along to meet Yeats, who was in London only intermittently until March, as if he had taken Monro under his wing. Whether Monro appreciated this or not, one can’t tell; he certainly later developed as many reservations about Pound as Pound about him. Yet Pound always loved to be able to show off his literary contacts, and at this stage he was well disposed to Monro, and possibly flattered by the fact that Monro had included a review of Canzoni in the very first number. This was by none other than Flint, whom Pound, if consulted, would have been keen to recommend, since he had earlier been Pound’s most enthusiastic English critic. Flint’s review had in fact been somewhat mixed; gratifyingly, he claimed that ‘the true note of poetry’ sounded throughout the book, but he questioned whether that note was Pound’s own, or others’, seeing so many of the poems were translations, and even when they were not, read ‘as though [they] were’. ‘If you run your eye over the pages of his books,’ he writes, ‘you meet Latin and Mediaeval Latin, the “langue d’oc” and the “langue d’oil,” Dante’s Italian and modern Italian, Spanish, French, German, quaint (or queynt!) forgotten English; and lastly English. Yes, lastly English … If Mr Pound can find a foreign title to a poem, he will do so. Queer exotic hybridity!’ But he ends by saying ‘those who have the grace to and can spend money on modern poetry should buy this book’, and Pound appears to have been content.⁸⁸ The review was, at any rate, a good deal more positive than some of the other reactions to Canzoni.

Pound was equally ready to act as critic to Flint. In the first communication saved among Flint’s papers from Pound, dated early February 1912, Pound writes: ‘My dear Flint why don’t you write some more poetry’ and in the second, apparently having been sent some, comments that ‘you could with a little decent labour and a little less “Ianthe” [Flint’s young daughter] have done it rather better’. Flint appears not to have published any poetry during 1911, with the combined pressures of a full-time job and a baby – plenty of ‘decent labour’ in fact, if not on poetry.⁸⁹ He had, however, spent time reading, particularly French poetry. Pound appeared delighted to be back in touch with him, and after various lunchtime meetings, largely back in the Vienna Café, suggested Flint and his wife came to dinner with himself and H.D. H.D. described this meeting to Isabel Pound in a letter which makes curious reading; although she was later condemnatory of Philadelphian – and particularly Bryn Mawr – snobbery, her account here suggests she was still herself at this stage quite conventionally class-conscious. H.D. records in Asphodel that George Lowndes mocks Hermione for her adherence to the Philadelphian etiquette book, and for her anxiety to behave correctly; by the 1920s she was clearly aware, and indeed ashamed, of her earlier social preconceptions. Her first year in London was, however, a steep learning curve. In this letter, she tells Isabel that her son had been very good to her, introducing her to ‘celebrities and lesser oddities – he always has some underdog on hand. On Thursday [22 February] it was a derelict poet named Flint who made the fatal mistake of marrying his landlady’s daughter, a hapless little Cockney’. It was clearly an uneasy first meeting. Pound had thought an invitation to dinner ‘might set them up’, but Flint’s wife complained about the food (H.D. decided it was the first time she had ever gone out to dinner) and told H.D. she had ‘a baby whose name was Ianthe!’ Quite what H.D. wanted to convey by that exclamation mark isn’t clear – presumably that it was a very unexpected name for a cockney mother’s baby. After ‘two years silence’, she tells Isabel, Flint burst into song. Yet in spite of this strained and embarrassed first meeting, they soon became good friends. Flint gave her a copy of In the Net of the Stars, and three months later she was writing affectionately to Flint from Paris, asking him to remember her to ‘Madame and Ianthe’.⁹⁰

The next person, she told Isabel, that Pound intended to introduce her to was Harold Monro, though whether he counted as a celebrity or underdog she doesn’t say: ‘Ezra,’ she told his mother, ‘says M. is depressed. Pleasant prospect!’ H.D. almost certainly did not yet know about Pound’s engagement to Dorothy. Giving the dinner party jointly could well have suggested to the Flints that they were in some sense a couple, as H.D. by now had probably been in England long enough to know. Barbara Guest indeed suggests that H.D. in this letter was trying to show Isabel how much more suitable for a poet’s wife she would be than Violet Flint, but H.D. knew that Isabel had thought her a wise choice, so she had no need to prove it. All the same, she would have been unlikely to have written in quite those terms – or to have behaved in quite that way – if she had been aware that Pound had now committed himself elsewhere. She mentioned the Shakespears in passing in the letter, but again there is no hint that she knows the link: ‘Mrs Shakespear,’ she says, ‘has been most kind, and her daughter and I have had some chats together, as well.’⁹¹ H.D. says in End to Torment that she did not know about the engagement until some time after she first met Richard, probably like Pound in early 1912, and that it was Walter Rummel who broke the news, so it seems likely she would not have heard until Walter returned to London in March.⁹²

Now their acquaintance was renewed, Flint began again to attempt to persuade Pound to take more interest in contemporary French poetry. But English poetry was changing too, not perhaps in the way Flint advocated, but significantly all the same. In the first issue of Poetry Review, just before Flint’s review of Canzoni, a review appeared of John Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy, first published the previous November in the English Review and now appearing as a book that was already causing a sensation. The reviewer, young Arundel del Re, wrote enthusiastically: ‘Mr John Masefield is a revolutionary. His latest work is an assault on cherished principles and venerable conventions … Its value lies not so much in sheer audacity – though this indeed has peculiar interest – as in the influence it may have on contemporary poetry.’⁹³ He was undoubtedly right about the influence. The Everlasting Mercy is a poem written in fast-moving, diverting and highly colloquial rhymed verse, about a country ne’er-do-well who makes good in the end. Saul Kane, the protagonist, recounts the sins of his twenties: ‘From ’61 to ’67/I lived in disbelief of heaven./I drunk, I fought, I poached, I whored,/I did despite unto the Lord.’ In this year, however, he gets into a fight with his friend and fellow-poacher, Billy Myers, who accuses him of breaking their agreement to carve up poaching territory. Billy is in the right, according to poachers’ ethics, and there’s a fierce exchange. ‘If you poach here, there’ll be a fight’ he says, and indeed there is. Billy insists:

‘It’s mine.’

‘It ain’t.’

‘You put.’

‘You liar.’

‘You closhy put.’

‘You bloody liar’

‘This is my field.’

‘This is my wire.’

‘I’m ruler here.’

‘You ain’t’

‘I am.’

‘I’ll fight you for it.’

‘Right, by damn.’⁹⁴

The word ‘bloody’ was omitted in the English Review, just a space the length of the missing word appearing, so a reader with an ear for rhythm might have been able to guess. Harold Monro later wrote of this poem: ‘People who thought English poetry had died with Tennyson suddenly recognized their error … the rapid free doggerel of “The Everlasting Mercy”, its modernity, its bald colloquialism, and its narrative interest awakened the curiosity of the public in 1911, and a revival of the dormant interest in poetry was at once assured.’⁹⁵ The Everlasting Mercy, given Saul’s repentance and reformation, is in moral terms essentially entirely orthodox, and, while lively, it is scarcely great poetry, but it helped to make a new kind of everyday language and subject-matter possible in poetry. Like Hewlett, Masefield was capturing the ‘living tongue’, but he was also using more modern – and earthier – subject-matter. This would be the trend of much of the poetry of the next decade, both modernist and Georgian. It would be strange if Pound had not noticed the stir caused by Masefield’s poem. Aldington did, and produced an instant parody.

Pound, H.D., Aldington, Patmore and Flint, in various combinations, saw a good deal of each other for the next few months, and their conversations, as they all confirm, were much about poetry; not necessarily, as yet, with any sense of leading a literary revolution, though they were all in their different ways rebelling against traditional forms. H.D. had published no poetry so far, but she found Aldington a great deal more encouraging about her efforts than Pound had been. Aldington himself was making strides in his literary career. He exaggerated a little when he told Amy Lowell in 1917 that, by the time he was eighteen, he had had ‘quite a number of poems & translations published in papers like the Evening Standard, the Westminster Gazette, the Pall Mall, etc. I got half a guinea for them & was delighted.’ In truth, he was not quite so precocious. According to his painstaking editor, Norman Gates, the only poem that was definitely published when Aldington was eighteen was the truly dreadful ‘Song of Freedom’ that had come out in Justice. During the early months of 1912, however, he succeeded in having at least ten poems published in the London papers, a remarkable achievement for a nineteen-year-old largely supporting himself by sports journalism. His first poem in the Evening Standard, ‘Chanson of Winter’ (with its macaronic title, it could have been named by Pound himself ), appeared shortly after he first met his fellow imagists-to-be, in February 1912. These poems of early 1912 were largely translations, mostly with conventional stanzaic forms, although four of the translations from the Greek do not use rhyme. In his early notebooks, too, Aldington can be seen to be working towards his later free verse, translating from a Greek chorus, line by line in simple rhythmic, but unrhymed phrases. These early translations bear out his claim to Amy Lowell that he had been trying out forms of vers libre since the beginning of 1911, not as the result of any English or French influences, but ‘partly because I was fatigued with rhyme and partly because of the interest I had in poetic experiment. I got the idea from the chorus in the Hippolytus of Euripides.’⁹⁶ Aldington would later argue that these choruses were really free verse in the original Greek, and that scholarly insistence that they had a prescribed form of quantitative verse was irrelevant; good imagist verse, he would insist, was no less rhythmically shaped than the Greek. Aldington’s early unrhymed poems show a keen ear for harmonious tones, but because they use very regular lengths of line and stick closely to the iambic, they lack the tautness, speech rhythms and shaped cadences of his imagist poems later in the year.

At this stage, Aldington was greatly impressed by Pound and perhaps flattered by his friendship. In a letter that year to Monro, who obviously felt Aldington listened to Pound far too much, Aldington says defensively: ‘If I am so feeble-minded as to remain permanently under Pound’s influence, God help me, I’m not worth bothering about. If I am so dull and stertorous-minded as not to be influenced by a man of Pound’s intellect – then also God help me.’⁹⁷ There were, however, other influences. He was reading Walt Whitman, and rather unwillingly coming to like him, and although that interest was not to last long, Whitman was perhaps another pointer towards the potential of free verse. Reading Whitman’s Drumtaps converted him to pacifism, again something that was not to last, though military regimentation was something that Aldington would always loathe. More significantly, he was to be deeply influenced by H.D., and together they fostered their love of the Greeks. Since Aldington was still too young – under twenty-one – to be allowed into the British Museum Reading Room, H.D. during her mornings there would copy out Greek poetry, including some of the newly discovered Sappho texts, for Aldington to translate, or for them to work on together.