I

NEITHER H.D. NOR Aldington was to meet Tagore. In his memoirs, Aldington says he was not allowed to, as he was ‘too profane’. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I could always tell when Ezra had been seeing him, because he was so infernally smug.’ ‘We had pi-jaw stuff about Tagore for weeks,’ he recalled. ‘Yeats would read the same things over and over from Gitanjali, as if they had been the Book of Common Prayer and we a congregation of fanatical Episcopalians.’ Aldington saw the whole thing as a marketing ploy, not unlike certain critics of modernism today: ‘The snob appeal was worked with consummate skill, and the first edition of Tagore’s book was limited to five hundred expensive copies. May Sinclair gave me one, which was stolen long ago – anyway I didn’t want it. But by the time the popular edition was out, all the cliques were chattering Tagore like mad though most of them had never seen a word he had written. Naturally it was a bestseller.’¹ Was H.D. also too profane? She may simply have been too busy packing up to join her parents in Italy, where they were about to arrive for their much delayed visit. A year after they first mentioned the visit, they finally reached Europe in October 1912 for a year-long tour, beginning with Italy. They had spent their honeymoon in Venice; now Charles Doolittle was retired, they wanted to visit it again.

Given the excitement with which H.D. had greeted the art collections of Paris and London, one would have expected her to look forward eagerly to Italy, but that was not the case. ‘The Dryad is much depressed at the prospect of returning to its parental bosom,’ Pound informed Dorothy in late September.² At the time H.D. must have seen this tour as the possible end of her London life. Her parents would expect her to go home to America with them. Her freedom would be over. A few art galleries could not compensate for that. Even if it wasn’t the end, attached as she was to her parents, sightseeing with them, observing the proprieties, did not have the same appeal as wandering around a city alone or with her contemporaries. Moreover, as she told Isabel Pound, if she did not mind forgoing the London fogs, it was heart-wrenching leaving her London friends – in particular, perhaps, though she does not mention this to Isabel, leaving Aldington.

Her parents were sailing to Genoa, where H.D. was to meet them. She put off her departure till the last minute, travelling direct, even turning down the offer of the Rummels’ guest bedroom in Paris for the night. Dr Snively and his daughter, H.D.’s friend Margaret, had crossed with her parents. Margaret’s mother appears to have been dead by this time, though, as she is never mentioned by H.D., perhaps Margaret had been motherless all the time she had known her; in the 1920s, when Mrs Doolittle died, Margaret said that she felt she had lost a second mother. Margaret and Mrs Doolittle were very close, and in some ways Margaret had more in common with her than H.D. had; Margaret was soon to settle happily into domestic life, as Helen Wolle had done, and to occupy herself with her husband and family. Writing to H.D. some forty years later, the greatest tragedy she had to mention was breaking a couple of her favourite plates.

H.D. met up with the four of them on their arrival in Genoa on 14 October.³ In the very brief ‘Autobiographical Notes’ that she made for Norman Holmes Pearson’s projected biography, she records the event: ‘I leave Oct. fog for Genoa, bright green shutters, I have long blue coat and black figured VEIL over largish hat, alone in hotel. Dr S. and M. come with mother and father from big liner. I see tall, grey figure of dad, standing as boat comes slowly in.’⁴ They remained in Genoa a day or two, then went to Pisa, and on to Florence by 18 October. H.D.’s mother kept a diary of the tour, though one without many personal details, mainly just where they had been, what she had bought, to whom she had written, or had heard from, only just occasionally, when very excited, saying a little more. She was clearly having a wonderful time. She threw herself into sightseeing – galleries, churches, museums – often with H.D. and Margaret, sometimes just with Margaret, occasionally with Charles, sometimes by herself. Charles appears generally to have gone to sights on his own, or stayed at home reading. On 25 October she bought a dress for H.D. – the first of several on the journey. H.D. was delighted with them. They bought gloves, and looked at rings. H.D., Margaret and Professor Doolittle took Italian lessons in what H.D. recalled as ‘a small stuffy upstairs room’.⁵ In early December the Sniveleys left them: Dr Sniveley was going to a position in Nice, presumably at an Episcopalian church there, and he and Margaret remained in Nice till his death two years later. The Doolittles went on to Rome. More sightseeing, more shopping, another dress, or rather the material for one, so visits as well to the dressmaker. According to her mother, H.D. met up a few times with ‘English friends’. On 19 December, the entry in Mrs Doolittle’s journal reads: ‘Richard A. arrived and will be in Rome for a time.’⁶

Aldington apparently had no plans for following H.D. when she first went off. The visit to Paris had already stretched his resources. But he missed her badly, and he had had a stroke of good luck. Since Pound thought highly of Aldington’s work and was keen to promote him, he had recommended him to A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age, the fairy godmother to so many of the young modernists. Not only did Orage agree to publish some poems, prose poem translations from Renaissance Latin, admittedly without payment, though gratifying none the less, but in addition he offered to commission a paid series of articles if Aldington could find a suitable subject. One wet, foggy morning Aldington had a postcard from H.D. (described simply in his autobiography as ‘a friend’). The postcard ‘showed a hillside of blossoming almond trees on the Italian Riviera. Underneath was scribbled: “These will be full out in a few weeks”’.⁷ By the same post arrived his cheque of $40 from Harriet Monroe for the three poems that had appeared in the November Poetry. Aldington went to Orage, and suggested Italy for the series. Orage agreed: Richard bought a ticket for Rome (price £3) and set off.

Aldington was later to claim that at nineteen (he was actually twenty) he did the grand tour of Italy on thirty shillings a week, rather overstating his poverty, as he often did, but it was a spirited act all the same. What the Doolittles thought of Aldington and his friendship with H.D. is not recorded, but the journal entries suggest that they liked him. They invited him to dinner on Christmas Day, met up with him frequently and did not appear to mind that he and H.D. went off by themselves exploring Rome. Aldington was good at charming older women, and he quickly won round Mrs Doolittle. (Fayne Rabb says of the Aldington figure in Paint it Today, ‘He was very tactful with Mother. Mother adores him.’)⁸ Aldington’s biography furnishes many more examples. Professor Doolittle did not seem to have any qualms either. In February, when Aldington accompanied them further south to Naples, Paestum and Pompeii, H.D. reports that her father was ‘very happy and impressed with temples’.⁹ If he had been worried by Aldington’s presence that could hardly have been the case. Perhaps after Pound and Frances Gregg, Aldington was something of a relief. In Paint it Today, in which Aldington appears as Basil, and the Doolittles as the Defreddies, he is recalled as

the thoughtful, flattering young Englishman who had befriended her against the Americans in Rome. ‘I came to Rome to see Rome and devils and ghosts and the yellow Tiber,’ she had raged at her poor mother, almost in hysteria, one day, ‘not just the very same kind of people we used to have at home, and all those American School of Excavation idiots.’ Basil had rescued her from a tea party. He had not only rescued her with the utmost tact. He had rescued poor Mrs Defreddie as well. He had actually taken her to the party in Midget’s place and had come back to the hotel with her and expounded on the party until it really seemed there might be some grain of truth in his convincing statements. ‘Lord, they’re alive. You ought to see the tribe up at the British consulate.’¹⁰

So perhaps Aldington actually helped soothe any family tensions that may have arisen – not that Mrs Doolittle’s journal gives any hint of them – and he seems a welcome presence.

Quite apart from anything else, Aldington was probably an excellent guide: he was very knowledgeable about the classics, and although it was his own first visit to Italy, he had had Mr Grey’s extensive introduction to Italian culture and places and had read, no doubt under Mr Grey’s guidance, all the well-known British homages to Italy (Ruskin, Browning, Addington Symonds and Berenson are all mentioned in his New Age articles), and had undertaken strenuous study of his Baedeker. He must have been an informative as well as lively companion, even if his information was at times a bit shaky; his New Age articles are full of snippets of vaguely remembered facts that he happily admits may not be quite accurate. Being Americans and unworldly, the Doolittle parents probably would not have picked up the subtle signals that hinted that he was not quite a gentleman, that Virginia Woolf for one sniffed out so quickly when she met him. Aldington was intelligent, good-looking, good-natured and very fond of H.D. That appeared to be quite enough for them.

Mrs Doolittle’s diary suggests she, like her husband, was very happy on that journey south. Her entries become longer, with exclamations of delight at the beauty of the scenery. The spring weather was lovely, and, she writes, they ‘saw flowers everywhere’. Aldington in his memoir wrote about that journey that ‘In Pompeii the bees hummed softly over the dwarf wild flowers among the ruins, while we rested and looked drowsily at the white smoke ebbing from Vesuvius. At Sorrento there were the freesias under the orange trees of the Coccumella garden … At Paestum the mourning asphodel grew profusely and there were tiny wild roses, descendants I like to think of the once famous rose-gardens.’¹¹ For H.D. and Aldington, ‘ardent Hellenists’ as Monroe described them, what was most magical about this area of Italy was that it had been settled by the Greeks before the founding of the Roman state, in the fifth or sixth century BC, and was full of Greek remains and associations.¹² Paestum’s magnificent, ruined temples (Mrs Doolittle stressed the hawthorn and the narcissi growing round them) made a powerful impact on them all. Aldington wrote a poem about that visit to Paestum:

Steal out with me

Over the moss and the daffodils,

Come to the temple,

Hung with sprays from untrimmed hedges …

Wild roses of Paestum.

It is a love poem, but also, like the asphodel, it is mourning, in this case for the disappearance of a past world and past ecstasies: ‘Ghost moths hover over asphodel;/Shades … drift past us’.¹³ Aldington’s poems often evoke this sense of loss, the disappearance from the modern world of the beauty and passion of an earlier time, especially in his poignant evocations of a lost Greek world.

If that Paestum poem is melancholy, Aldington’s articles for the New Age certainly were not, though they too condemn ‘the feebleness of the modern mob’ and celebrate the Greek love of beauty.¹⁴ These ‘Letters from Italy’, as they are entitled, share two of the characteristics of much of British travel writing about Europe at the time: they do not dwell on the major sights, which Baedeker had now been describing in authoritative detail for over seventy years, and they express enormous disdain for tourists, among whom travel writers never included themselves. Edith Wharton, for example, in her 1905 travel book, Italian Backgrounds, insists that Italy is ‘a foreground and a background. The foreground is the property of the guide-book and of its product, the mechanical sightseer; the background, that of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy’, such, of course, as herself.¹⁵ This is very similar to Aldington, though he is a rather scatty student, notwithstanding his impressive width of reading for a twenty-year-old; yet there’s certainly plenty of dawdling and dreaming, and very high spirits into the bargain. In some ways his pieces seem remarkably modern, very much the kind of ego-journalism so much practised today – a great deal about himself, highly opinionated and often extremely rude about the people he meets. Before the end of that first journey he has written off the entire Italian peasantry, on account of their habit of spitting: ‘I am a friend of the people; I “hold enlightened views on the franchise”; I never speak of the “hoi polloi” … I was once a socialist – but I cannot wholly sympathise with a class whose members have such unpleasant habits.’ He has an asterisk by the word ‘socialist’, linked to an Author’s Note at the foot of the page, which reads: ‘Since writing this I have become an anarchist.’¹⁶

Aldington’s views are certainly anti-establishment: he is appalled by the behaviour of the Italian soldiers in Rome. ‘Militarism,’ he exclaims, ‘O bilge, O sentiment!’¹⁷ He blatantly refuses to be patriotic – one article in which he describes telling a would-be friendly compatriot in Naples that he hates the English prompted an indignant letter of complaint to the New Age. But in other ways he unthinkingly reproduces the prejudices of his day. His jibes against militarism include his scorn for ‘ecstasies over darky soldiers from Lybia’, and he talks of the way that in England he has been ‘“fighting the lone hand” against the Jew and the Philistine’, apparently equating ‘Jew’ here unquestioningly with commercialism.¹⁸ And if he dislikes the English, he appears to have nothing but disdain for most other races, especially the Americans, though he does say – perhaps again to be provocative – that the ‘pleasantest person’ he met on his journey to Rome was a young Bengali friend of Tagore’s: ‘Odd that one feels such a toad besides these cultured Orientals’.¹⁹ He makes it clear, however, that his programme is an aesthetic rather than political or moral one: ‘In spite of Mr Shaw,’ he writes, ‘who thinks that because he is virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale, we still dream of the city walled with jasper, where folk, like the ancient Greeks, are more concerned with beauty and the beautiful appearance of things than with any system or work of ethics and conduct.’²⁰

These articles give an intriguing insight into this young poetic revolutionary’s views on art and literature. Some of his comments are definitely calculated to shock, as, for example, when he writes indignantly, ‘What has Dante to do with Florence? That old poker-up of hells, and investigator of vague heavens?’²¹ In architecture Aldington rejects everything later than the early Renaissance, and in painting much Renaissance and post-Renaissance work into the bargain. ‘Today,’ he writes, ‘when we have had every degree of photographic vérisme, and the weariness of the artists therewith has shown itself in wave after wave of drastic and sometimes ridiculous revolt, the Chinese, the Byzantines, the Greek vase-painters, stir one far more than all the square miles of canvas between Michelangelo and Courbet.’ In fact, although his tone is so often brashly iconoclastic in a typically modernist way, in taste he is quite literally a pre-Raphaelite – Raphael, incidentally, he cannot abide, ‘good to sentimentalise over, and … meat for the bourgeois’. He dismisses even Michelangelo as ‘more madman than mystic, too vague and terrible for anyone but a Blake to worship’. His one ‘perfect type of the Renaissance artist’ is Leonardo, ‘subtle, curious, delicate in technique, seeking all knowledge, beginning everything and completing so little’.²² Leonardo here is aligned with Sappho and the imagists, as the maker of beautiful fragments.

The works, however, that Aldington praises most on the journey are always Greek; like some bas-reliefs of Bacchic maenads he found in a Rome museum: ‘You will not find it in your Baedeker, O earnest student, neither does Cook’s conducted take cognisance thereof,’ he says, with evident satisfaction.²³ As he walks through the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, marvelling at the beauty of these ‘pre-Periclean Greek things’, he says: ‘I knew how foolish and trite our “civilisation” is, and that the few who care for beautiful things will not look for them in the twentieth century. What part have we in this loveliness? We have built Balham and Manchester and the new Law Courts as our memorials – and here are these perfect creations, abandoned and silent, with the life that created them lost, but still such a delicate rebuke to our vulgarity.’²⁴

The writers whom Aldington commends are as eclectic a bunch as his choices in the visual arts, but they are those who are central to the imagists: he admires Catullus and Ovid; Homer and Shakespeare are quoted passim; but the poet he extols most is Theocritus, whom he and H.D. were translating together; he quotes his own translations frequently, but he doesn’t mention a companion translator. He pays tribute to ‘M. de Régnier’s beautiful vers libre’, and comments that de Régnier must know Theocritus’ eclogues by heart, establishing Ancient Greece and contemporary Paris as his main axes.²⁵ In the period between the Renaissance and the present, he mentions a variety of writers, but there are only two for whom he goes out of his way to signal his affection. One is that eighteenth-century proto-modernist, or indeed protopostmodernist, Laurence Sterne, whom he evokes as a model for his own travel-writing, which does indeed have some of the anecdotal, inconsequential style of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. Like Sterne he doesn’t stick simply to the English language, but while Sterne introduces the occasional piece of French dialogue, Aldington bestrews his text with French, Latin, Greek and Italian phrases. The other writer he applauds is Swinburne, as he would continue to do long after he fell out of favour with other modernists. In 1950, Aldington would bring out a collection of the aesthetes’ writing, in which Swinburne features conspicuously, entitled The Religion of Beauty. In 1913, that was very much his own religion, and the same could be said of H.D. The next few months in the peace and beauty of Hellenistic Italy were to be the happiest that H.D. and Aldington would have together.