PRIOR TO THE shocking news of Margaret’s death, Pound had found the first period of his walking tour intensely moving, as his letters and the notes that he made on his journey reveal. That walking tour would be crucial in his development, but perhaps not in ways he expected. During the period from 27 May to 7 June 1912, travelling through Poitiers and Angoulême to the Dordogne and then north-east to the Limousin, he had passed, as he put it, ‘within hale of all the best Troubadours save Piere Vidal’, and he had found the land ‘thick with ghosts’.1 He had gone first by train to Poitiers (Pound, incidentally, always uses the medieval spelling, ‘Poictiers’), ‘mother city’, in his words, of the troubadours, where the first of the troubadours, Guillaume IX, had been Count.2 There he was so overwhelmed by his sense of the palpable presence of the troubadours that he wrote an impassioned letter to Flint, justifying his love of the early Middle Ages. Possibly Pound felt somewhat guilty, or at least embarrassed, that he had got nowhere with his survey of the state of art in Paris, and needed to explain to Flint, who had urged him to read present-day French poets, why he found the troubadours so significant. He had not ignored Flint’s arguments altogether, but the beginnings of the interest he had prompted had lost out to his continuing passion for Provençal poetry.3 He is writing to Flint, he says, as the most ‘diligent’ of those who had criticised his obsession with the past:
Know then that I am resolved to go back. I have as far as one may escaped the limitations of place, I attack in what seems the logical order the limitations of time … not that I think the 12th century any better than our own but simply that I have not been penned up within the borders of one country and I am not minded to be penned into any set period of years.4
Whilst he prefers Montbazillac to ale, he says, he drinks both; similarly, while he is ‘as much alive in [his] time’ as anyone else, he cannot see why this should stop him ‘living in as many other ages as [he is] able’. It is not, incidentally, surprising that Pound with his sweet tooth should like Montbazillac, which he was drinking at that moment, he tells Flint, so he was presumably writing in a Poitiers café. In this part of the world, he says, he has found his ‘land of promise’, even more precious to him than Sirmione:
Garda was revelation, it was the unexpected … but this is my land, my chosen. And my time a time when all good things were set together. This land was English, and when England lost it my people, my own people fought some fifteen miles from here under the Black Prince and took it back again …
When I say ‘was English’ I do not flatter you or any of our friends in London. I am no anglo-phile. I give up no jot of my own nationality. With England after 1670 I have nothing to make, but England before 1670 is as much mine as it is any man’s and I decline to part with it for modern plumbing or the tower of the ‘Metropolitan Life’ – much as I appreciate both of these monuments to man’s intelligence.
Presumably he is thinking of 1670 as around the time when the Pounds left England for America, but also perhaps as the time of Milton (the first edition of Paradise Lost was 1667), when for Pound English poetry went into decline. His comment on the Black Prince presages the Cantos’ romantic and eclectic reading of history, when certain moments and figures draw to themselves intense and radiant – or sometimes darkly horrific – significance. He ignores the fact that the French reclaimed Poitiers for good twelve years later, and probably never knew that some historians argue that the Black Prince wasn’t intending to recapture Poitiers at all. He happened to be doing some routine sacking and pillaging in the area when he unexpectedly met the French Army; they insisted on fighting, but luckily so incompetently that to his surprise the Black Prince found himself the victor.5 But for Pound the heroic Black Prince is, like himself, claiming his rightful heritage; he has a visionary sense of the past and its ghosts, something Americans, he claims, are more conscious of than either ‘conservative or futurist’ Europeans; it is, he says, a ‘sense of narrative’:
I have had it once on Salisbury plain: This sense of event, of continuity, of people riding on one by one on the road, a sense of series, cavalcade, procession.
This whether we know it or not is what we come back for, we Americans with past inside of us … the sense of men, of men in sequence, intent upon this matter or upon that, wearing smooth the receptivities of the air with their going & coming, with their being ever upon the road for this errand or that, passing, & repassing, and giving salutation, and keeping silence.
That moment on Salisbury Plain, during Pound’s Christmas visit to Hewlett, when he had also felt the presence of figures from the past, appears again in Canto 80, in a passage that is helpfully clarified by this letter:
and for that Christmas at Maurie Hewlett’s
Going out from Southampton
they passed the car by the dozen
who would not have shown weight on a scale
riding, riding
for Noel the green holly
Noel, Noel, the green holly
A dark night for the holly
That would have been Salisbury plain.6
Pound defines ‘going back’ in one of the few remaining fragments of the manuscript of ‘Gironde’; it means, in this context, ‘feeling, as well as knowing about the troubadours’.7 Pound’s acute sense of the presence of these past figures has something in common with Rummel’s belief that he could and must hear the Egyptians’ music, still there to be listened to; he had, after all, earlier insisted in The Spirit of Romance that ‘all ages are contemporaneous’.8 There is little of what Pound says to Flint in this letter that actually disappears from his project for good. Pound never gave up on the past, though there were many other periods he would look to as well as this one. This walking tour, and the troubadours, appear frequently in the Cantos, as well as in other poems and articles; there are several references, even in this same Canto 80, to Périgueux, to Altafort, and to Excideuil, where ‘the wave pattern runs in the stone/on the high parapet’.9 Richard Sieburth, who has transcribed, ordered and edited Pound’s notes of his walking tour, argues convincingly that these fragmented, imagistic jottings, full of unexpected comparisons, references to a wide variety of artists, intended to be supplemented by extracts from the vidas and the poems, ‘unmistakably prepare the palette for the Cantos’. The very form of these medieval vidas, he adds, had its own influence: Pound was drawn to them by
their elliptical compaction of information – entire poetic careers epitomised by a few dramatic gists … Translated and summarised in Pound’s 1913 ‘Troubadours: their Sorts and Conditions’ … the spare, paratactic narratives of the vidas point unmistakably ahead to the modernist historiography and portraiture of the Cantos.10
There is, however, a striking contrast between the emphasis on continuity in this letter to Flint and the language of rupture that Pound would soon, in common with other modernists, come to employ. To some extent, one could argue, the contrast is more apparent than significant, more rhetorical than substantive; for Pound, the rupture would be construed as a break from the immediate past (though that was a dubious claim in itself ), not the past as a whole. What would be perhaps more surprising is the change in his use of the word ‘modern’, which in the notes on his walking tour Pound still uses only in the sense of an unsatisfactory present.11 By October that year Pound would have moved on to use ‘modern’ as synonymous with ‘good’, just like a New Labour politician. He would not, of course, be using ‘modern’ to mean simply ‘contemporary’ or ‘present’; it implied something more like membership of an elite avant-garde, that perilous ever-changing frontier, the meaning which, according to Eric Hobsbawm, ‘the modern’ had already acquired among French writers and artists by the 1880s.12 It is paradoxical yet significant that one of the first times Pound used ‘modern’ in the sense of ‘commendably avant-garde’ was in reference to the Hellenic poetry written by H.D., very much the product of ‘going back’.
By the time Pound was recalled to Paris, after only eleven days on his journey, already he was sure that he was succeeding in his quest to ‘feel’ as well as ‘know’ the troubadours, understanding their experience of ‘the discomfort of the rd. and the boredom in the castles’, living a life in which ‘the condition of the weather was a necessary concomitant of every action & enjoyment’.13 Richard Sieburth suggests Pound’s attitude to the recovery of his troubadours’ history is a ‘positivist’ one, mistakenly, I would argue. Pound certainly has no post-structuralist scepticism about historical ‘facts’, but his certainty about his insights into the troubadours’ lives is not simply an empirical position. What Pound is claiming is an intuitive and indeed mystical or visionary contact with these past figures. At times, however, for all his impassioned and imaginative reliving of their lives, the thought that their world had vanished saddened him; when he visited Hautefort (which he refers to by its medieval name Altafort) where Bertrans de Born had his castle, he writes: ‘going my way amid this ruin & beauty it is hard for me at times not to fall into the melancholy that it is gone, & this is not the emotion that I care to cultivate for I think other poets have done so sufficiently’.14 Perhaps one could see Pound’s efforts at going back into the past, recreating its vitality, ‘making it new’, as he would later put it, as a way of holding the melancholy of loss at bay.
One particular section of the notes for that first stage of the walking tour stands out from the rest. When Pound recounts his visit to Excideuil (with its wave pattern in the stone, referred to above), home of Giraut de Borneil, he begins for the first time to record his thoughts, not as prose, but broken into short lines, producing, as Sieburth puts it, a form which ‘nearly reads like stream of consciousness in enjambed vers libre’.15 Interestingly enough, it is not unlike H.D.’s writing in her diary. Again it presages the Cantos, though they never follow through in so straightforward a fashion, but it is perhaps a first attempt at the flow of thought that they present. Pound writes:
A couple of great fields
set up along with the church
spire, the sky pale blue
& white after the sunset,
with the tree on the skyline
outlined against it,
& the great gentle tower
clear edged,
unascendable, and
for no known reason
these things wrought
out a sort of perfect mood
in things …16
It could have been written in the late twentieth century rather than in 1912; this is the only passage like it in the first period of the walking tour, but there would be several in the second. After Excideuil, Pound’s ‘left shin denying [him] further assistance’, he went swiftly by tram and train to Limoges, where news of Margaret’s death awaited him.17
It is possible Pound told H.D. and Aldington about this experiment during his time in Paris. H.D. and Aldington were still discussing literary matters in spite of the shock, but whether Pound did so is harder to gauge. One entry in H.D.’s diary reads: ‘tea in “Mundora” – talked of James – Ezra came in very sad.’18 In spite of his attempts to reassure Dorothy and H.D. that he had pulled himself together, Pound seemed still in low spirits when he began the second stage of his walking tour. He appears from his letters irritable and uneasy, full of complaints about the heat and the fleas. Dorothy had already told him in June that the Cavalcanti translations were having adverse reviews, and in July he was incandescent when Monro’s friend Arundel del Re wrote a scathing piece about them in the Poetry Review, getting, Pound snorted, ‘a good deal out of six misprints. The rest is malignant buncomb’.19 His walking tour notes mention ‘false friends/ & lying reviewers’, clearly a reference to Monro and del Re, whose criticism had obviously cut to the quick, perhaps as much because of his general unhappy state as the accusation of inaccuracy, a criticism to which he was well accustomed and not something which had perturbed him particularly before.20 The loyal Aldington, he told Dorothy, had ‘withdrawn his contributions in a state of pious rage’.21 Pound would never entirely forgive Monro. Even Dorothy’s news that Yeats had pronounced ‘The Return’, which had appeared in the June English Review, ‘flawless’ did not appear to comfort him.22 He was, perhaps, infected once more with the ‘virus that makes one ask “to what end the attempting?”’, from which Margaret Cravens had rescued him.
Pound had hoped that the countryside would rekindle some of the enthusiasm he had felt when he originally set out, but the region in which he left the train on this second visit, Uzerche in the Limousin, was not saturated with troubadour memories as Poitiers had been. It took him time to feel that he had ‘reached [his] proper land again’, as he put it when he got as far as the Dordogne once more.23 Yet even when he reached Toulouse, home of Peire Vidal, and with a Romanesque cathedral that Pound thought second only to San Zeno – praise indeed – he was still somewhat morose. In a letter home, he complained bitterly to his father about ‘getting this damned book written, & I’ve got to go on writing books for the next decade if I’m to beef on drawing pay from Swift & co’.24 He suggested he would take up playwriting when he returned to London, an activity that he thought less uncongenial than writing prose, and more likely to earn him serious money than poetry.
Yet the open air and the physical exercise – he was covering kilometres at extraordinary speed – were therapeutic, and as time goes on his notes show him becoming calmer and more able to respond to the beauty around him. The visit to the Pyrenees was not part of his original plan, as he explains rather guiltily. ‘No known troubadour’, as he says, would have done such a thing; ‘to go for mere mts. is decadent, I presume, & modern or at least parvenu & dating from the Ossianic movement’. But he was rewarded: ‘Foix,’ he says, ‘was very right to come to.’25 From the Pyrenees he moved on to Carcassonne, and then down to the coast. One thing that is striking about Pound’s travel notes for the second stage of his tour is that there is less about the troubadours, with the exception perhaps of his visit to Toulouse, and more about the countryside through which he is passing. Uncharacteristically, Pound writes about what he sees, not what he has read, even if what he sees he often expresses in terms of its resemblance to works of art. When he reaches Souillac on the Dordogne River, he writes: ‘the land with light subdued is like a background in Leonardo, so do his rivers curve, so do his rocks vary from white grey to dark’.26 When he goes to the Pyrenees, he makes repeated references to Far Eastern art: at Foix he says: ‘We are come again to a place where the waters run swiftly & where we have always this chinese background. The faint grey of the mountains’; at Roquefixade the sky is ‘jap pink & grey’, at Quillan ‘at once metallic & oriental’, but by Axat it is ‘less Ming’.27 As these examples suggest, what he notices most often are the qualities of light and colour of the sky and hills. Pound’s response to scenery and his Neoplatonist affirmation of light reinforce each other, as they still do in the Cantos: in his lament for his ‘green time’ in Canto 115, he sees himself as
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change.28
When Pound had begun the second stage of this walking tour, after Margaret’s suicide, he had, one would guess, felt much like ‘a blown husk that is finished’, even at the age of twenty-seven, his future suddenly perilous and uncertain once more, his confidence in himself and his calling rudely shaken. Yet the prose in his notes at this stage of the journey is intriguingly often more intense and poetic than on the first stage, and after his rewarding ‘truancy’, as he puts it, in the Pyrenees, he makes more use of his loose free verse.29 Now he becomes, as Sieburth points out, unusually frank, his lines ‘bespeak a mood whose uncharacteristic autobiographical explicitness has clearly been heightened by heat and exhaustion’.30 Pound is working through a crisis in his hastily written notebook – never intended for direct publication – in a way rarely allowed elsewhere. He passes Capestang, home of Guilhem de Cabestang, whose heart was served to his lover by her husband, a story to which Pound repeatedly returns, as if being devoured by the forces against him was a deep and constant fear. Yet there he writes:
this walk
was like
a coming home,
one expected half … to
meet with one’s
people.31
By the time he had reached the sea coast, exhausted, full of terror at his future and exultation at the beauty of the countryside he had traversed, he had, it seems, struggled through to a resolution:
I came here
along the canal,
under a mediterranean
sky, ah
surely I know
my métier, there
are artists in
other media
but when it
comes to living I
know my métier.
I have made horrible
mistakes, I have
lived thru horrible
things – but horrible –
but still I know
métier, as perhaps no-one
since Flaccus [i.e. Horace]
has known it
And he continues:
Fools, readers of books,
go south & live
there. It is
all I have to
say for this time
to the end of it,
that life,
despite all
its damnable
tangles & circumformations
is worth the candle.
He has in mind Horace’s ‘Carpe diem’, ‘seize the day’, which he half quotes, ‘Carpe/and the rest of it/raris, the day’.32 What is the ‘métier’ he shares with Horace, author of the Ars Poetica? That of the poet certainly – back in Crawfordsville he had written to Viola Baxter of his ‘métier’ as a poet – but more specifically perhaps a poet living with intensity, and pouring that intensity into poetry. While he asks, ‘Can a man/be bothered making/poetry of nights like/ this!’ that is precisely what he is doing. The beauty of the coastal town of Agde moves him to ‘break/into dithyrambs’.33 The question that he has settled is whether he can go on as a poet or not. Common sense, both his parents and the Shakespears would have said, doubtless voices he heard in his head as he walked, dictated that now an academic job was imperative. But he was resolved; he was not giving up on life or on poetry.
Neither was he for now showing any sign of giving up on ‘Gironde’, though he was getting very fed up with it; he was under contract to Swift & Co., now his sole provider of regular income. There were hints, however, of changes of direction in his thinking. He was, most unusually, reading fiction, ‘completing [his] education’, he told Dorothy, ‘on Murger, de Maupassant, Turgenieff’, though he added that, apart from the preface to Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (‘surprisingly strong’), he found them less entertaining than James, Anatole France, and his friend Frederic Manning.34 Yet the very fact he was reading them at all suggests he was rethinking his dismissal of the arguments – of those like Ford or Flint – about the need for the artist to respond to modern life.
Pound returned to Paris on about 20 July, much earlier than he had originally intended; he had already let Dorothy know he would be back in London by August. He was working hard at the manuscript of ‘Gironde’, and doing more Provençal translations for Rummel, who had married Thérèse Chaigneau in his absence, and, Pound complained, ‘seem[ed] to have lost, eaten or mislaid certain opii in the excitement of his nuptials’.35 He told Dorothy that Aldington was no longer in Paris, having been ‘recalled to his “domestic den”’, and asked her if he should ‘bring the Hamadryad [i.e H.D.] back to England’ with him; he continued, apparently, to think of himself as H.D.’s controlling ‘male relative’.36 In the event he left by himself, and got back to London in very late July or early August. He had written rather oddly to Dorothy, having been so anxious to return, ‘don’t bother to have me in until its convenient’; perhaps he was dreading having to reveal to her his loss of income.37