IN APRIL, H.D. had another blow, which may have hit even harder, though in the general maelstrom of her tangled emotions it is hard to weigh up the relative shocks to her system. She received a letter from Frances, telling her that she was getting married and would shortly be arriving in England on her way to her honeymoon in Venice. H.D. was shaken and confused. If, as seems likely, she had only just learnt of Pound’s engagement, here was surely another desertion. According to her son, Frances had prophesied to H.D. that she would return in 1912 with a husband. As H.D. recounts the story in End to Torment, Frances wrote to her that ‘one of the objects of her marriage … in fact the chief object’ was to be with H.D. again.140 Her husband was going to lecture in Belgium and they could all go there together. Yet the fictional version of the letter in Paint it Today is more abrupt – no hint of continued desire for H.D., only a postscript which says ‘Perhaps some day Wee Witches will grow up.’141 H.D. was always sensitive and indignant at the Freudian interpretation of lesbian desire as immature; if Frances then or later said something like this, it would have cut deep. Yet whatever the letter said, when Frances and her husband Louis Wilkinson arrived in London, they immediately asked H.D. to go to Europe with them, to accompany them, in fact, on their honeymoon.
As such an invitation might indicate, it was an unusual marriage, but not in any straightforward way a sham, as some of H.D.’s biographers suggest. Louis Wilkinson, who would later become a novelist, memoir-writer and broadcaster, was British, and had, like Harold Monro, attended Radley School, though he was a little younger and only appears to have got to know him later. Wilkinson was the son of a clergyman, though not one of orthodox views. Even as a schoolboy Louis was a rebel, and had corresponded with Oscar Wilde in prison, at the height of his infamy. He became a close though at times abrasive friend of the three Powys brothers, later famous writers.142 The middle brother of the three, Theodore (born 1875), had also been at Radley but was six years older than Louis so not exactly a friend, though Wikinson always admired him.143 Louis went on to Oxford, where his passions were said to be Swinburne and poker, but was sent down with a group of others for ‘blasphemy’, the word referring to their celebration of Black Masses, as the authorities saw them, or ‘mock masses’ as the agnostic Louis described them. There was also homosexuality involved, Louis at the time being a practising homosexual, according to his son, ‘out of indignation at Wilde’s persecution and prosecution’.144 The university authorities, for their own sake, drew a veil over that. During the following summer (he was by then nineteen) he met the eldest Powys brother, John Cowper (born 1872), an extraordinarily handsome and striking-looking man, as well as a spellbinding speaker. Louis wrote that he was enthralled with him: ‘I had never met anyone at all like him; I could, indeed, hardly believe he was real’.145
Louis managed with some difficulty to get himself accepted for a new start at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he met the youngest Powys, Llewelyn (born 1884), with whom he became close friends. For a while it was a ‘romantic friendship’, as Louis describes it, but he was soon to decide he was really heterosexual, though still indignant at Wilde’s treatment, and at much else. He remained an advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality all his life. Through Llewelyn he once more met John Cowper Powys, who since 1904 had begun to go each winter to Philadelphia to give University Extension Lectures, becoming a particular favourite of the well-to-do ladies who flocked to his courses. Lectures like these paid a good deal better than such work in England, and he suggested that Louis might like to try his hand, which he did with almost as great success. Louis, named the Archangel by the Powys brothers, was also very handsome, with masses of auburn curly hair, rather like Pound, and, like John Cowper, a fine lecturer. Their audiences loved their Britishness (John always lectured in his Cambridge gown) and saw them, according to Louis, as ‘an imported luxury, like English marmalade or Worcester Sauce’.146 Llewelyn also tried his luck, but he was a poor speaker and desperately shy. He soon gave up the attempt, after causing Louis and John agonies of embarrassment on his behalf.
These lectures were among those Frances and H.D. had attended together, and on at least one occasion Pound had gone with them to hear John Cowper Powys during his 1910–11 visit. After her return home Frances started to attend once more, going up to speak to John after one lecture, taking with her a poem that she had written. John fell immediately and besottedly in love with her, and remained so for many years. He was impressed by her poem, which was certainly a striking and curious one, called ‘Perché’, which she published in 1915. Gothic and eerie, it is, perhaps, about her sense of being out of place in Philadelphia, or indeed anywhere: ‘I who possess and am possessed, Am I born and dead?’147 John was entranced. He was, however, already married, though the marriage had not been a success, and he lived separately from his wife Margaret for most of the time. (In Wilkinson’s novel The Buffoon, someone says to the John Cowper Powys figure, there named Jack Welsh, ‘no-one could be less married by marriage than you are’.)148 After getting married John had found himself revolted by the prospect of a sexual relationship with a woman, and although he made passionate love to Frances, it was without penetration, something for which he had no desire. He persuaded Louis that he should marry the ravishing Frances, so at least she should be kept within his sphere.
Louis appears to have fallen in with this plan with little demur. He had gone back to the States in the autumn of 1911 feeling the time had come to get married – a feeling he later blamed on having read too much Hardy in England over the summer (a surprising response to Hardy, to say the least). His sexual behaviour since he had left university gives a curious insight into the social and moral niceties observed by a well-bred Englishman of his day. He accepted without question that he must not tamper with the honour of women of his own class, so, fancying neither prostitutes nor celibacy, he had a series of sexual partners who were shop girls or office workers – not, he stresses, factory girls. If any of them hoped for a more permanent bond, Louis did not notice, though, conveniently for him, they thought it would be below their station to accept money. (Such easygoing young women, known as ‘charity girls’ because they did it for free, or at any rate only for ‘treats’ or presents, were well known to the social purity campaigners of their day, who shook their heads sadly over such laxity.)149 But, Louis says, he had decided ‘this unromantic, disjointed, sensually spasmodic way of life of his could not go on’.150 If the account in The Buffoon can be believed on this point, it appears that John expended all his eloquence in making sure Louis was pretty enamoured even before he was introduced to Frances. They married within three weeks of their first meeting. Louis, whom John later described as having ‘an irresponsible and heathen zest for adventure’, perhaps felt that if he was to marry, doing it in such a whirlwind and dashing manner was the most appropriate fashion.151 It was decided, Frances’ son says, by all ‘interested’ parties, including Frances and her mother, that the marriage should not be consummated for some months, probably because John felt so jealous, though it might have been an insurance in case the marriage proved an immediate disaster, as annulment of an unconsummated marriage would be comparatively easy.152 Whether such an agreement was made, and if made, adhered to, one can only guess. Frances was desperate to get away from Philadelphia, and this was an ideal opportunity. Louis was at this stage in love with Frances, as he confirmed later, even if less deliriously in love than John, and he found Frances both attractive and intriguing. It does not appear, as is sometimes assumed – for example by Raymond (the Pound figure) in Paint it Today – that John wanted Louis to marry Frances in name only while she became his mistress. Even when some years later Frances left Louis for a few months and went to live with John, they did not become lovers.153 Louis perhaps did have reservations or apprehensions about the match. He claimed later he went into it looking for ‘romance’, ‘poetic passion’ and constancy, but according to Richard Graves, the biographer of the Powys brothers, he had made Frances agree to let him have his sexual freedom after marriage. Oliver says Frances was happy with this arrangement, though she told Louis she herself would be faithful and that her main aim was to have children. Yet the anger that Louis felt when the marriage failed (Frances divorced him in 1923) suggests he had no thought of that outcome. It was, he wrote, ‘the most defeating experience of [his] life’.154
None of the complex background of this marriage was known to H.D., who met Frances, Louis, John Cowper Powys, Louis’ mother and others at Victoria Station Hotel. Ezra, Richard and Brigit came too. (‘I had talked much of her,’ she explains in her autobiographical notes.)155 H.D. readily agreed to go with Frances. It was now clear that her relationship with Pound was going nowhere, and although she was seeing a good deal of Aldington, she was still quite uncertain how she felt about him. Pound, however, discovered the plan. Frances had also arranged a rendezvous with him, in which he was told about the arrangement, and possibly more. As H.D. came out of her lodgings to go to Victoria to meet them, she found a furious Pound on the pavement. ‘He began, “I as your nearest male relation …” and hailed a taxi. He pushed me in, he banged his stick, pounding (Pounding) … “You are not going with them … There is a vague chance the Egg … may be happy. You will spoil everything.”’156 At Victoria station, to everyone’s embarrassment, especially her own, H.D. explained that she would not after all accompany the newly-weds. They made their farewells. ‘Glowering and savage, Ezra waited till the train pulled out.’157 John Cowper Powys and another of Louis’ friends were, she said, ‘very curt with me, “a boy wouldn’t have done that”, that is, let F. down at the last’.158
What were Pound’s motives? Genuine concern for Frances? Perhaps. Genuine concern for H.D.? She was after all meant to be staying with respectable acquaintances of the Doolittles in London, not wandering the continent with her ‘unwholesome’ friend, as she is described by her family in Paint it Today. In that novel, Raymond has had a whiff of the Powys connection, and decides H.D. had been invited as a ‘bon bouche’ (sic) for the husband, and that he was entirely justified in saving her from this moral danger.159 Perhaps that was what Pound came to believe. But there was surely an element in this of a power struggle over H.D. He wasn’t after all going to marry her, but he wasn’t going to surrender her to Frances either. The sense of complete humiliation with which H.D. was left suggests that was how she felt about it. Her family – in this case the self-appointed substitute family – had defeated her again.
What about Frances’ motivations? Why did she marry Louis? He was charismatic and entertaining, though perhaps she had fallen in love with the distinguished, spellbinding John and just wanted to be near him. Like Louis, of course, Frances had ‘an irresponsible and heathen zest for adventure’. Life at home with her mother could scarcely compete, though such was the complicated nature of their relationship that she spent much of the voyage to England in floods of tears because she missed her so acutely, and would rarely be parted from her again. It has been suggested that she was really in love with Llewelyn, who was the same age as her; John was twelve years older. She had heard Llewelyn give one of his disastrous lectures in 1909, when he had last been in the States, and, it was said, had kept a picture of him in a poetry anthology next to a poem by Shelley that he had read. Perhaps she felt sorry for him. But it hardly adds up to a reason for marrying his friend without even trying to see him again first. Llewelyn himself was, as a matter of fact, greatly flattered when he learnt about the photograph. John had written to him from the States about his own passion for Frances, and, having crossed with Frances and Louis, he visited Llewelyn in the country and rounded him up for the honeymoon trip. Llewelyn was suffering from consumption, not really well enough to travel, but John swept him off to Venice, where he had arranged to rejoin Frances and Louis. Llewelyn was equally entranced by Frances: the four of them went round Venice together, and, as John later wrote,
[their] heads were completely turned. She insisted on dressing up as a boy; and we would accompany her in her gondola in this attire to the remotest possible spots where gondolas could be propelled … The feelings that this beautiful girl in boy’s clothes excited in me rose like flames … [T]hrilled … with the ambiguous beauty of this boy-girl … I was without any doubt as completely enslaved … as far as my peculiar type of heart, the heart of a cerebral idolator, could be enslaved by a human woman.
His enslavement, and ‘desire not to break one link of this enchanted spell’, was made all the more profound by ‘our white-admiral’s flutterings, now in the direction of Llewelyn, now in that of Louis’.160
As far as Frances is concerned, all this suggests that she was a little in love with all of them, and very much in love with being the idol of these ecstatic lovers. H.D. was to have been invited, one guesses, as another adorer, part of Frances’ court, not to be courted by anyone else. Llewelyn paid for the Venetian visit with a serious relapse, much to John’s remorse, but neither of them regretted it; it was, John said, ‘a unique experience in both our lives’.161 Louis’ tolerance of the Powys brothers’ interest in his wife might be taken to indicate indifference on his part, but Louis was never indifferent to Frances. He seemed delighted that the three of them shared this bond. Frances was clearly a captivating woman, but it is hard not to infer that at one level of this folie à trois this boy-girl was a token of a deep if now unacknowledged homosexual attachment between the three men. In a fictional depiction of Frances, John Cowper Powys describes her ‘slender equivocal figure’, and her androgynous looks were obviously part of her attraction. Louis many years later mentions this Venice visit, almost excising Frances from the narrative – perhaps not surprisingly as by then he hated her – but more tellingly emphasising how totally absorbed by John’s company he and Llewelyn had been there.162
But to return to the disconsolate H.D. After Frances had left, she decided to escape to Paris, too bruised and cast down to face anyone in London. She left England at the beginning of May. Pound, as it happened, headed for France at almost the same time. He had gone up to Cambridge to give a lecture for Hulme on 27 April, Hulme having now been readmitted to Cambridge with a glowing reference from none other than Henri Bergson himself. Pound set out for Paris as soon as he returned.