POUND AND H.D.’S near simultaneous departures in early May 1912 from London to Paris were, it seems, entirely coincidental. Pound was on his way to the walking tour in troubadour country that he had planned, which he intended to write up as a travel book on the lines of Campbell’s Mearing Stones; he would not, he told his mother, be back until October. Dorothy was sad, but the rest of her family were greatly relieved. Dorothy told Pound after he had left that ‘H.H.S’s [Mr Shakespear’s] only comment on your early visit on Wedy. was “I thought he was going abroad”. I believe he had been under the impression, for a week at least, that you were safely awa’.’163 Pound was intending to spend a few weeks in Paris, thereafter moving south to the areas of France where the Provençal poets had lived – not simply the region we know as Provence today, and in fact only touching its western borders, but a great swathe of south-western France. The written account of his travels was to be the next book for Swift & Co.; he rather perplexingly gave it the working title of ‘Gironde’, after the vast estuary at Bordeaux formed by the confluence of the Dordogne and the Garonne rivers, in spite of the fact that he never actually went there. Perhaps the word worked for him as a shorthand for the whole region; apart from a brief visit to the Rhône valley and the Mediterranean coast, his journey was mainly in the water basin which empties into the sea through the Gironde.
H.D. was apparently unaware that Pound was to be in Paris, though she found out soon after she arrived. Ironically, one reason for her flight was to disprove the Powyses’ implied (or possibly imagined) accusation that she was rejecting Frances for Pound. After the humiliation of the showdown over Frances, she had been anxious to bury herself in the comparative anonymity of a city in which she belonged to no social network. She was shocked and directionless, cross with Pound, wounded by Frances, maligned by Frances’ new friends. Both Pound and Frances had rejected her, and if perhaps she might have felt her relationship with Aldington had held the promise of a new beginning, she was for now re-engulfed by the sense of failure that she had felt so strongly back in Philadelphia. A diary survives from that visit to Paris, the only one for her pre-war years. It is written in intense, disjointed, poetic phrases. It uses trees, wind, sea imagery, weather of all sorts, to convey her psychological state – in other words, it is very much like her early poetry. The first dozen or so pages have been cut out, but it is clear from the first remaining entry, which is for 15 May, that those earlier entries were recording the unhappiness of her first few days there, when she had felt ‘despair so many morning [sic] as I woke, and saw the gold-gold of sun and was not of it’.164
She was not entirely solitary of course. She saw Rummel, who, having told her of Pound’s secret engagement, now turned out, she discovered, to have a secret engagement of his own. The announcement of his impending marriage to the pianist Thérèse Chaigneau was made a few weeks after her arrival. Through Rummel, she met Margaret Cravens, to whom she felt drawn; although she was only to know her for a month, Margaret’s memory haunted her for the rest of her life. In her own state of confused pain, she understood something of the emotional stress that Margaret was experiencing. Unlike Pound, who, sympathetic as he might be to Margaret’s depressions, never appears to have thought about Margaret as an artist, H.D. recognised immediately both Margaret’s desire to succeed in her art, her reason, after all, for being in Paris, and her anxieties about her progress as a pianist. H.D. herself only saw Pound a couple of times during the first fortnight of May; he was deliberately avoiding her, she thought – quite possible, of course; Pound may have wished to show that he had not snatched her from Frances to bind her to himself. H.D. suspected that he was seeing a good deal of Margaret, and wondered whether he was dallying with Margaret’s affections as he had with her own. She never discovered that Margaret had known about Dorothy since the previous year, though that in itself doesn’t preclude the possibility that Pound was, as she feared, exploiting Margaret’s affection for him rather cruelly, or at any rate thoughtlessly, even if not in the way H.D. thought. Margaret, as a young American woman who, like H.D. herself, had escaped to Europe in the quest for an artistic career, uncertain and unconfident of her future, came to represent poignantly to H.D. the pains and difficulties of women artists at that time, the struggle for self-belief, the damage so easily inflicted by the insensitivity, bullying or exploitation of the male artists that they met. In Asphodel, the Margaret character, there called Shirley Thornton, described as ‘very kind’ as well as ‘clever’, is on one occasion deeply hurt when George Lowndes dismisses her piano-playing, just as he so brutally dismisses Hermione’s ‘pomes’. Hermione had asked Shirley to play, and George says, ‘Gawd, don’t ask her.’
Shirley looked up an odd twist to her fine straight eye-brows. A white flame of pain crossed her eyes, dark eyes, wide apart staring like a crystal gazer’s. Why had George said that? Was he being rude simply? But now his rudeness seemed insanity, seemed blatant cruelty. His rudeness, his casual approach to both of them, for she was sure he had kissed, had been long kissing Shirley. Don’t marry him or her – just go on kissing them … Wide flame of pain in the almond eyes of Shirley flashed, went, and the almond eyes of Shirley were just odd almond eyes with a little glow of passion. ‘O George is like that. He thinks I play so badly.’165
The situation is saved by Darrington, the Aldington figure, saying something kind and encouraging to Shirley, as he had to Hermione about her writing.
Aldington had arrived in Paris in mid-May, and, as her diary records, everything changed for H.D. The entry quoted earlier for 15 May goes on:
As if after great turmoil – confusion – weariness … Richard has come! … last night all the city was a new thing – revisited as one falls first upon ones first old city – to me for the first time.
Aldington had never been to Paris before, his continental visits having been limited largely to day trips from Dover. He was taking a certain financial risk in coming, as it meant giving up his sports reporting, which helped his income considerably. But ever since his friendship with Mr Grey he had wanted to visit this artistic mecca. And he wanted to see H.D. When H.D. had first arrived in Paris, she had stayed in lodgings which she had shared with the Greggs in the rue Jacob (where, incidentally, the flamboyant Natalie Barney lived, in whose salon Pound would in 1922 meet Olga Rudge, the future mother of his daughter). Now H.D. was staying more centrally, in the rue de la Chaumière, and, with Aldington, she visited the Louvre day after day, sketching, making notes and writing poems. Some of these were in sonnet form, but by June her diary also contains attempts to break her fragmented, stream-of-consciousness entries into very brief lines, so that they look something like her later poems. She, like Pound, had been reading French vers libre, in particular Henri de Régnier, and in later life recalled her pleasure at reading him there with Aldington. When Norman Holmes Pearson, the young scholar who became such a friend and support in her later years, asked her in the 1930s how she wrote her early poetry, she told him that ‘I let my pencil run riot, in those early days of my apprenticeship, in a school copy-book … Then I would select from many lines of automatic or pseudo-automatic writing, the few lines that satisfied me.’ She talked then about doing this in ‘a dark London, autumn 1912’, but the diary suggests that she had already begun that ‘pseudo-automatic writing’ in the Parisian summer, even though she may at that stage have found no lines at all to satisfy her.166 She mentions in the diary that she has Flint’s poems with her, suggesting that she now treated him with some respect as a poet, and it seems his recommended reading as well. De Régnier’s poetry may have paved the way for both her and Aldington to move further from formal metre. Although Aldington always claimed he came to imagism purely through the Greeks, the abandonment of regular line length, and the subtler use of cadence and repetition present in his poetry by the autumn of 1912, could well have come from the French poet.
One other object H.D. mentions that she had in her room in Paris, on the same table as Flint’s poems, is a ‘little Venus di Milo R. brought from London’. Whether this was a small replica or just a postcard isn’t clear. The Venus di Milo was one of the statues H.D. most admired, and she studied its graceful form for many hours in the Louvre, how ‘the curve of the white belly and short space before the breasts brought the curve to a sudden shadow’, as it is put in Paint it Today.167 She had seen it earlier with Frances; she had told Aldington about their love affair, which he accepted quite non-judgementally, and the present of the Venus di Milo may relate to that. Aldington’s tolerance of her bisexuality must have been very comforting at the time; it wasn’t something that she had from Pound, though Aldington’s reasons for tolerance were perhaps rather dubious; he was deeply homophobic when it came to gay male relationships, but found the idea of lesbianism quite erotic. Aldington would continue, long after they separated, to send H.D. postcards of female nudes, classical and otherwise. But in 1912, H.D. was his Venus; he sent his father, who thought he was on a purely cultural visit, a postcard dated 23 May, which clearly carried more than one level of meaning: ‘I spend many hours with the Venus.’168
There is no doubt that by this time he and H.D. were very much in love. Gratitude for his belief in her poetry, as well as for his supporting warmth after her emotional traumas of the spring, played an important part in her feelings for him, but there was also their shared delight on the one hand in the Greek past, on the other in the natural world, as well as a passionate commitment to their artistic goals. In her later fiction, written after the painful end of their relationship, H.D. tends to downplay the strength of their early attachment. In Paint it Today, in which Aldington appears as Basil, she writes: ‘She knew that she did not feel as he wanted her to feel, with warmth and depth and warm intensity … But the comradeship was perfect … Basil’s friendship was like the warmth of a setting sun thrown over the ruins of an ancient city … The heat of mature passion would have shrivelled her.’169 Aldington was of course very young, though in terms of relationships he could be said never to have entirely grown up. He idealised the women he fell in love with, idealised the business of being in love, and behaved with reckless emotional irresponsibility; his were never exactly ‘mature passions’. Yet comradeship was certainly a key element in their early relationship; it is probably true that H.D. at this stage did not feel so painfully intensely about Aldington as she had about Pound and Frances: there was a carefree cheerfulness about the early years of their relationship, but there was also a deep bond between them. Yet again, however, H.D.’s deepest passion remained her writing, as her diary bears out; on 20 May she refers to ‘the mad desire always for creation’, and later, in July, writes, ‘From the many, many desires, let these ones win free – the wedding of word to word as silver upon gold’; she wants to draw from ‘the Greek silver verse of clarity, of tense, terse music, of drifting loveliness like Gods’. ‘Tense, terse music’: it is an apt description of the poetry she would soon be producing.
Now Richard had arrived Pound was seeing quite a bit of them both. Some time in May he suggested to H.D. that she and Aldington should get married, though from what he wrote to his mother, he was unsure whether she would take his advice: ‘Hilda’s last Englishman is also very charming,’ he told her. ‘He has crossed the channel and taken to drawing and velvet jacket, and they seem to share a talent for leisure. But they are probably too much alike for a “life-interest”.’170 Pound enjoyed having them there, however. He had hoped that Mary Moore would turn up as well ‘to add to the general festivity’, as he put it to his father.171 She had visited Paris in the spring, and met Margaret, a meeting naturally arranged by Pound, and Mary and Margaret had taken to each other very much; in April Mary had been in London, where Dorothy was instructed to entertain her – she was rather unwilling at first, but they too liked each other. In May, however, Mary returned to the States from Holland without making a further visit to Paris, and was married later that summer. Pound would not see her again for twenty years.
During these May weeks, Pound was probably not seeing as much of Margaret as H.D. thought; he spent quite a bit of time in the Bibliothèque Nationale, studying the background of his Provençal poets. Although the two texts on which he would rely chiefly on his journey were the 1907 Baedeker for southern France and Justin Smith’s The Troubadours at Home, written in 1898, also the record of a walking tour, Pound in addition took assiduous notes from the original manuscripts of the medieval lives of the troubadours known as vidas or razos. The scholar Gaston Paris had demonstrated in 1893 that these were largely works of fiction, but Pound accepted them as historical truth.172 He also, he told his father, spent time wandering along the Left Bank, looking for old books in the quayside bookstalls. Oddly enough this was not how Pound had intended to pass his time in Paris. At the beginning of May he had told his parents that he would be spending three weeks there inspecting ‘the state of Art’, by which he probably meant literary art, but by the time he left in late May he reported that he hadn’t found much contemporary work of value, apart from what he knew already, such as the work of Anatole France.173 Following on from the admiration that he had reported in February for Rémy de Gourmont and Henri de Régnier, he had been, it seems, inclined to accept Flint’s advice and look at more modern French poetry, but he rapidly appears to have lost interest, for now at any rate. He mentions that he had visited the office of the Mercure de France, perhaps at Flint’s prompting, as H.D. reported his visit on a postcard to Flint, but though he saw the editor, Henri Davray, to whom Yeats had introduced him, he shows no interest in what the journal might be publishing; all he tells his father is that the Irish writer George Moore called in while he was there. How hard, in the event, Pound had tried to find out about current French poetry one can only guess, but vidas in the Bibliothèque Nationale attracted him more. The only poetry he wrote himself that May was a translation of some Provençal fragments that Rummel had discovered. He was still preoccupied with the past.
Pound set out for his travels on 26 or 27 May 1912, and went to see Margaret for the last time just before he left. It must have been a difficult visit, because on the 29th she wrote to him at Poitiers, saying that she was sorry to have been so cross, but she ‘could not help it’.174 On the night of 1 June she wrote letters to Pound and Rummel, sat at her piano, played one of the songs set by Rummel that Pound had dedicated to her as ‘the Weaver of Beauty’, and then shot herself. Margaret had invited H.D. and Aldington to tea the next day. H.D. learnt the news from Margaret’s distraught maid when she reached the door of the apartment shortly before Richard, and her newfound sense of reassurance and safety was rudely and ominously shattered. When Richard arrived, they went together to Thérèse Chaigneau’s house. While they were there a letter arrived from Margaret for Walter; H.D. remembered it as having said that Margaret had been in love with him; Walter read it the same way, and was very shaken, saying he had been sure that it was Ezra she had cared for. When he wrote to Pound breaking the news, he said that her letter had upset him and his mind was ‘not quiet’. Margaret had called on him, he said, a few hours before her death, and ‘seemed so quiet and kind, that I don’t understand a thing’.175 Pound heard the news of the suicide en route and came straight back to Paris. There was a letter for him too. In her letter to Walter, Margaret had written that she wanted ‘to say what it has meant to me to have met you, to have loved you as I have – to have seen someone the true symbol of all I have believed and held to in spirit always’.176 Yet to love is not necessarily the same as to be in love; the letter is not unambiguous. To Pound, Margaret makes no such declaration, in fact says much less about the time they had spent together than one might expect, but there remains the possibility that Pound knew already of her feelings for him; perhaps she did not need to tell him. Both letters suggest she is in some heightened, euphoric state, and she insists that what she is doing is an act of courage, not cowardice. In each case, she refers to their fiancées and their future happiness, and, as she puts it to Pound, their ‘final attainment’.177
Two years earlier, on his way through Paris before returning to America, Pound had gone with Margaret to see a production of a play, La Vierge folle, which culminates with one of the female characters committing suicide with a revolver; in retrospect it must have seemed a grim presage of Margaret’s fate. Her death was to be a painfully memorable event for both H.D. and Pound. In Asphodel, Hermione sees in Shirley’s fate a frightening warning to herself; Shirley had been, like her, a young woman who had strayed beyond the accepted boundaries and who had attempted to be an artist in a male-dominated society. Margaret’s fate had been destruction; so might hers be. Earlier in the novel, Hermione had thought of Joan of Arc, when she had come across her monument in Rouen, as a similar warning, a ‘girl who was a boy’ who had seen visions, and been burned to death because of them.178 The American press certainly saw Margaret Cravens’ death as the inevitable penalty for nonconformity. The New York Sun published the news of her suicide under the heading ‘Paris Full of Peril for American Girls’, piously lamenting: ‘Margaret Cravens, had she remained in America, might have been a happy wife and mother. In Paris she was one of many young women who have striven for artistic success and failed’.179 Margaret’s battleaxe aunt, Drusilla Cravens, who came to Paris after the death, also saw things that way. On her return she wrote to Pound (whom at first she had suspected deeply, presumably of having tampered with her niece’s honour, but soon came to trust), telling him that Margaret’s fate was due to the fact that she had ‘overreached’ herself. Things had gone wrong, Drusilla believed, when she had rejected life in the States: she ‘grew dissatisfied and felt that her own people, however devoted and indulgent – failed to grasp her – her intellect and aspirations: in short she came to wander “in diverse ways” – and to the end which she precipitated.’180 Pound, not surprisingly, does not appear to have agreed that Margaret’s death was the necessary consequence of the rejection of American provincial life, or of devotion to artistic matters; neither would H.D., but to H.D. the emotional perils of a life such as Margaret’s, like the one on which she herself had embarked, were very clear.
No certain reason for Margaret’s suicide has ever been established. She had been subject to deep depression all the time Pound had known her; one other theory put forward in the American press, in light of her father’s suicide one year before, was that it was the manifestation of a ‘hereditary mental affliction’.181 In a novel that Margaret’s close friend Alice Woods Ullman (wife of the painter who had painted the portraits of Margaret and Pound) wrote ten years later, a Margaret-like figure commits suicide because she realises she lacks the talent of those who surround her in Paris. Drusilla Cravens made a comment in a later letter to Pound that is relevant to this: ‘I … know now,’ she wrote, ‘that association with people of high order of talent if not of genius, and the sometimes cruel criticisms of these, had a very harmful influence upon the child’s sensitive nature – particularly when she was in declining health and meeting with one disappointment after another. As I said at first I also say and I feel now – a human touch might have recalled her.’182 It’s undeniably a rebuke to Pound and Rummel, and possibly one that they to some extent deserved; both of them pursued their art fairly single-mindedly, often unaware of and uninterested in the feelings of those around them. Yet Pound had wanted to help Margaret – Rummel wrote to Dorothy that ‘[Ezra] tried more than the rest to help her and to develop her’ – though one suspects Pound never understood that she could not be content simply in her role as patron and confidante to an artist.183 In Asphodel, Hermione also blames herself for her failure to offer enough of a ‘human touch’, in her case because when she arrived in Paris she had been too absorbed in the pain of the Fayne Rabb débâcle to help Shirley: ‘If I hadn’t been so immersed in myself, so shattered with the web of myself, I would have seen her. Myself had wound round myself so that I was like a white spider shut in by my own hideous selfishness … Intuition and fine feeling had not been fine enough to sense this. The very proximity of this other spirit. The very nearness of this authentic sister, tangled in a worse web than she was.’184
H.D.’s reaction to Margaret Cravens’ death is well documented. Even if one were to discount the evidence of the fictional Asphodel, it was an event to which she frequently returned in memoirs and letters. Pound left far less explicit evidence of his feelings, though there is some. He heard the news in Limoges, probably from Margaret’s friend, Louise Morgan Sill, and he was back in Paris by 10 June. Dorothy, who heard the news from Rummel, had written, saying, ‘Perhaps … it will not be altogether a shock to you?’, possibly because Walter had told her that Margaret had ‘had these attacks already often, and it was but a matter of years’.185 Yet Margaret’s death was a great shock to Pound, not something he had expected at all. He wrote back to Dorothy: ‘Sadness and nobility and so many things are in the web that it is hard to exercise so wooden a Thing as my profession, that is words – even to you. Someday we will talk, perhaps – if, that is, the Thing comes near you. Write to me dear, and I will answer as best I can. I won’t say, “don’t write to me of trivial things”, but write to [me] gravely for a little.’186
H.D. commented in her diary on Pound’s deep sadness on his return; she certainly intuited the depths of his pain, but she cannot have realised how complex and many-stranded his grief must have been. Margaret had been a close friend; there was no other woman to whom he wrote so much as an intellectual equal. Apart from his personal sense of loss, Pound may have felt even more acutely the guilt and consciousness of failure that H.D. experienced after her much shorter acquaintance. He may have had more specific cause for guilt, as others besides H.D. were to speculate. Margaret’s friend Alice Woods Ullman alleged that a letter or telegram from Pound was found in Margaret’s apartment after her death, which Alice suspected of being the cause of the suicide, though her husband removed it and its contents have never been revealed. But the Ullmans might have misinterpreted a perfectly innocent communication. Yet whilst there is no doubt that Pound grieved deeply for Margaret as a friend, for him there were other horrendous implications. Two-thirds of his regular income had disappeared at a stroke, his chances of marrying Dorothy were set back, perhaps for ever, and, possibly worst of all, he had lost the sense of divine blessing on his mission that Margaret’s belief in his work had given him. The overwhelming sense of mystic acknowledgement of his gift, which he had experienced when she first offered him support, must now have seemed a hollow irony. This patron who had revived his faith in himself because of her belief in his art had, as it were, casually abandoned him, thrown him on the waste-heap. Anger, it is said, is one of the emotions felt most acutely by those bereaved by a suicide; Pound must have felt it intensely. Not, of course, that he could ever express it, but there was a new bitterness and pepperiness that crept into Pound’s relationships from then on, which might be attributable to this searing experience. It has been suggested (by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo) that Margaret had asked Pound to marry her, and he had refused in the mysterious communication suppressed by the Ullmans. It seems most unlikely; Margaret had earlier in May sent an invitation to Dorothy to come and stay – an invitation Dorothy regretfully refused on the grounds that she and Pound had no formal engagement, so she could not travel to be in a foreign city where he was. Dorothy had sent Margaret a copy of Pound’s Cavalcanti translations just days before she died, and Walter was able to report to Dorothy that Margaret had spoken of her ‘just a few hours before the accident, saying she knew you by correspondence and cared for you’.187 At the level of Margaret’s conscious mind, she behaved impeccably towards Dorothy, whatever her real feelings for Pound. But her unconscious motivations might have been very different. There could have been a repressed desire for revenge: suicide is an aggressive act. Intriguingly, H.D. suggested in the 1940s that it was Margaret who had introduced Pound to psychoanalysis. Yet knowing about repression intellectually does not necessarily mean that one understands one’s own.
Years later, H.D. recalled walking for miles with a distraught Pound through the Parisian night. ‘We were standing in the dark by an old bridge … Ezra waved his affected stick somewhere towards it all in a vague helpless kind of manner … towards the river, bridge, the lights, ourselves, all of us, all that we were and wanted to be and the thing that I wanted to say and couldn’t say he said it before he dismissed me: “And the morning stars sang together in glory.”’188 As far as Margaret was concerned, Pound persuaded himself that she had found peace, reincarnated, as he wrote to Dorothy, as ‘a small fat brown god sitting in a huge water-lily, splashing over the edge’, an image he was later to incorporate in a poem, published in that far from peaceful publication, Blast. At the time he told Dorothy, ‘Said image may sound ridiculous, but it is a great comfort to one, and so unanswerably true that I don’t dare mention it to anyone else. It is however the solution of the whole affair, and we rest of us who are not ready for such damp white-petaled beatitude may as well continue with our paradise terrestre.’189 This comment may hint that for a while Pound had thought about the option of not continuing in the terrestrial world. Many years later he would write to H.D., describing Margaret Cravens’ death as one of the most terrible ‘flaying[s]’ of ‘destino’ that he had experienced; his belief that destiny was on his side crumbled, at any rate for the time being.190 Whether that drove him to consider suicide, one can only speculate. Once more, however, he picked himself up. On 16 June he reported to Dorothy: ‘I’ve got myself in hand again and did a real days work at the Bibliothèque [Nationale] yesterday’.191 He completed two chapters of ‘Gironde’, and on 27 June left again for his travels. But he knew he had to rethink his life. Margaret Cravens had saved him when he thought his career as a poet might be at an end two years earlier. How could he save himself now?