II

A FEW DAYS before H.D. left London, ‘Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, British, French and Russian Artists’ had opened. In spite of Pound’s reference to the Post-Impressionists in his preface to Hulme’s poems, and although it was phenomenally successful – it had 50,000 visitors and continued to run until January 1913 – he does not appear to have gone. Apart from Whistler and Epstein, Pound was still not taking any great interest in the visual arts, though what with the crisis over Dorothy, and his energetic work on behalf of Poetry, perhaps he simply did not find the time. Perhaps Aldington had gone before he left for Italy; he had certainly learnt from somewhere to despise vérisme. What was significant about this second exhibition was the inclusion of the British artists: Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Frederick Etchells and Roger Fry. There was now, in Richard Cork’s words, ‘an emergent English avant-garde’ in the visual arts appearing simultaneously with Pound’s new literary movement.²⁶ Little more than a year later, Pound would be keen that they should join forces, but for now he focused solely on literature.

One poet who did visit that exhibition was John Gould Fletcher, still living a largely lonely and restless life, frequently visiting the continent, and only intermittently in London. He had missed Fry’s first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, being on another Italian visit with his sister, Mary. His mother had died earlier in 1910, and his sisters had agreed that instead of the second tranche of $25,000 that they had agreed to give him, they would provide him with an annuity of $3,000, then £600. Given his extravagant tastes and financial impracticality, it was a wise move, though he would repeatedly curse them bitterly while waiting for his next cheque. Fletcher had become interested in the visual arts by late 1910 after meeting the painter Horace Brodzky, who was later a good friend of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska and wrote a book about him after his death. For a while Fletcher acted as munificent patron to Brodzky, and wondered if he too should become a painter. They travelled on the continent together, sketching and visiting art galleries, until Fletcher became bored once more and decided to give up patronage. By now his main reading was in French poetry: more Baudelaire, and in addition Emile Verhaeran, Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière, people Pound had not yet glanced at. Fletcher’s poetry began to change; his subject-matter was now most often, as it was for the French poets, the modern city. In 1912 he made another friend, this time one of whom he would not tire so rapidly: Horace Holley, an American expatriate painter and poet who ran a gallery in Paris. Holley was an ardent supporter of the Post-Impressionists (it was he who published the collection entitled Postimpressionist Poems in 1914), and he introduced Fletcher to works by Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Deeply impressed, Fletcher wondered once more if he should become a painter, but decided instead to explore similar experiments in poetry. Back in London, enthused by Holley, he went to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, an experience that, he later told Amy Lowell, left all his aesthetic assumptions ‘demolished’.²⁷ Discovering the Post-Impressionists, like his reading of French poets, was moving him towards an increasingly experimental style. Holley was a regular contributor to a feminist journal, the Freewoman, which would later evolve first into the New Freewoman and then the Egoist, and become a crucial vehicle for imagism. It seems likely that it was through Holley that in 1912 Fletcher, who poured scorn on his sisters’ support for the suffragettes and wrote in one of his notes, ‘woman is purely animal’, finally achieved his first publication in this bastion of women’s rights.²⁸

In the meantime Pound, with the conflict with the Shakespears resolved, had returned once more to fashioning himself as a leader of the avant-garde. He was working, he told his father, on some thoroughly modern poems. In December he was interviewed by a fellow-Philadelphian, John Cournos, who had recently given up his job as art critic of the Philadelphia Record to come to London. Cournos summed up the poet’s work in what are clearly Pound’s own terms, echoing as they do his poem on Whistler in Poetry: ‘No one need be astonished if, after having passed through the various stages of his wide-ranged development and manifold experiment, he shall achieve something new and distinctly his own, just as in the art of painting a certain distinguished country-man of Pound’s succeeded in being Whistler, in spite of Velasquez and the Japanese.’²⁹ With Ripostes, mixed as it is, Pound had begun to find his poetic path. Both Yeats and Ford had found things to praise, which greatly pleased him; it contained some of the best poetry that he had written so far, ‘Δρια’, ‘The Return’, ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘Portrait d’une Femme’. Williams, to whom he had dedicated the collection, wrote what was clearly a long and detailed response to the volume, with which Pound was delighted, telling Williams, ‘you’ve seen a lot that I suppose nobody else will … So I suppose you’ve earned the bloody dedication.’³⁰

The reviews of Ripostes, however, were a mixed bunch. Pound was beginning to accumulate enemies. The note of ‘tactful iniquity’ that he had appended to Williams’ poems was ‘tactful’ about Williams’ poetry but scarcely so in other respects, for he had included a throwaway note, in which he said that ‘considering the tolerance accorded in England to such authors as Mr Noyes, Mr Abercrombie and Mr Figgis, I think there are a number of American works which might be with safety offered to the island market’.³¹ As he admitted to Harriet Monroe, ‘I make three enemies in a line … I raise up for Abercrombie passionate defenders (vid. R. Brooke in the next Poetry Review). Even Brooke can find little to say for Noyes, and nothing for Figgis’. He was quite unrepentant: ‘Until someone is honest we get nothing clear … I’m sick to loathing of people who don’t care for the master-work, who set out as artists with no intention of producing it, who make no effort towards the best, who are content with publicity and the praise of reviewers.’ He was saying all this as a means of stiffening Monroe’s resolve, adding emphatically: ‘I think the worst betrayal you could make is to pretend for a moment that you are content with a parochial standard. You’re subsidized, you don’t have to placate the public at once.’³² In one sense, it is a highly principled stand, but it presupposes that one’s judgements are always right, and that the making of correct poetic judgements justifies cruel and painful attacks. Pound’s attitude is, of course, very much tied in to his belief that producing good art is a moral act, a truth-telling process; bad art is a lie. Pound, in fact, had in some ways a similar mind-set to the contemporary Russian revolutionaries, whose hour would come in five years’ time. They were convinced that it was essential to destroy the present structure to bring in utopia, even if death, wretchedness and suffering had to be inflicted on the way. A stinging review is, of course, in another league from violent death, but Pound’s belief in the necessity of frontal attack was not dissimilar from the Bolsheviks’. It is possible, indeed likely, that he brought about poetic change more rapidly by his blitzkrieg tactics (to change the historical analogy), but he would himself – like many of the Russian revolutionaries – pay a heavy price for it. Already he was beginning to recognise this. ‘I’ve got a right to be severe. For one man I strike there are ten to strike back at me. I stand exposed. It hits me in my dinner invitations, in my weekends, in reviews of my own work. Nevertheless it’s a good fight.’³³ Aldington’s later comment was, ‘Unluckily, Ezra had read Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and practiced it without the “gentle”’.³⁴ Yet, on the other hand, there are numerous testimonies to his great generosity to other struggling artists. John Cournos, who after that first interview would become friendly with all of Pound’s circle, wrote in his autobiography in 1935: ‘Ezra … was one of the kindest men who ever lived’.³⁵ And even Aldington admitted that ‘when he wants [Ezra] can be a pleasant companion and the most generous of men’.³⁶

Pound was to pursue his conflict with Abercrombie further. He had probably been irritated when some of his poems in the February issue of Poetry Review were followed by a eulogy to Abercrombie, written by the latter’s close friend Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, claiming that ‘Since the issue of his first book … there has been no doubt in the hearts of those who care most for poetry … that Mr Abercrombie’s is the most significant voice of our time’.³⁷ That, Pound doubtless felt, was his own place. When Abercrombie published an article recommending that poets study Wordsworth, Pound was outraged, and challenged him to a duel. He was still indulging in his wild fencing, literally as well as metaphorically. Abercrombie, who heard greatly exaggerated accounts of Pound’s fencing skills, suggested that they attack each other with unsold copies of their books, which, as Pound probably had more than Abercrombie, could have been thought of as a generous suggestion. Luckily, however, the event never took place.

When Ripostes appeared, with its reference to the Tour Eiffel days and Hulme’s five poems, Hulme himself was no longer in London, nor indeed at Cambridge. He had retreated in September to Macclesfield, where his kindly aunt Alice Pattinson lived, and would move on to Germany in November, to flee the wrath of a philosopher acquaintance, Herbert Wildon Carr, who accused him of corrupting his sixteen-year-old daughter, Joan, still a schoolgirl at Roedean. Hulme had tried to seduce her, though unsuccessfully, in spite of the fact she was infatuated with him, but they kept in touch, Hulme writing her letters which could hardly be called love letters in the usual sense, but which apparently (none appear to be extant) introduced her to a range of four-letter words she had failed to learn at Rodean, and described the sexual act to her at length and with clinical exactitude. Anti-romanticism, or anti-pathos, the quality David Trotter ascribes to Hulme and Lewis, could not be taken much further; it is perhaps appropriate that Joan disengaged herself from Hulme’s spell by reading Swinburne by candlelight and deciding she preferred his romanticism to Hulme’s variety of classicism. She broke off with Hulme, but one of Hulme’s letters came to light. Wildon Carr contacted his solicitors and, later, Hulme’s Cambridge College, St John’s, to which Hulme would never be able to return. He had aborted an academic degree for the second time. He kept the whole thing a secret from his family, who never found out why he had to leave Cambridge once more.

Given Wildon Carr’s fury, Hulme might have felt happier if he could have got away sooner from England, in case word spread, but before he left he, or rather Flint, had to complete the translation of a second book, Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Flint was resistant at first to pressure to work at greater speed, pointing out he could equally well do overtime at the Post Office, where at least he could rely on payment: but he admired Hulme considerably, and in the end said that he would do it because Hulme was the most intelligent man he knew. Sorel was a socialist of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies, which might make him seem an unlikely choice for a self-proclaimed Tory, but Hulme’s idea of a Tory had no more to do with the Conservative Party than his religion had to do with the Anglican Church. Sorel, like himself, was fiercely anti-democratic, and scorned the belief in progress. As an anarchist, like Hulme he rejected philosophic systems and argued that revolutionary action would come about through the direct response to myths or images, rather than reason, an idea with clear analogies to Hulme’s Bergsonian view of poetry, and indeed Sorel had been much influenced by Bergson. Sorel was much admired by the Action Française group, as well as by Benito Mussolini, then still a socialist himself. The deadline for the translation was met, but by then Swift & Co., which was publishing the book, had gone bankrupt, and it did not appear until 1916, appropriately enough being reviewed in 1917 by T.S. Eliot, who would later do so much for Hulme’s posthumous fame. Eliot admired the book greatly, commenting that ‘it expresses that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time … the scepticism of the present, the scepticism of Sorel, is a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief’.³⁸ This ‘violent and bitter’ anti-romanticism could well have been what centrally appealed to Hulme. The book finished, Hulme left for Germany, having promised Wildon Carr to stay out of the country for a year. He did in fact return the next May, but the visit to Germany, although involuntary, would bear fruit, introducing Hulme to fresh ideas that offered a new answer to his own tortured scepticism

Like his family, Hulme’s London friends were never told of his reasons for leaving the country. The loyal Tancred published another Herricklike poem in the Poetry Review as a send-off, suggesting Hulme was having a well-earned rest:

Great Hulme! as you by dint of toil have won

Laurels and cater for your pot, have done

With fostering verse, lay by Sorél, desist

From turning your yoked brain-might into grist.³⁹

Pound must have missed his conversations with Hulme, but he was seeing more of Ford, spending Christmas with him and Violet in a cottage in which he reported Milton had once lived, not a good omen, as perhaps Pound should have realised; it was damp and dingy, and without enough inkpots to go round, a trying situation for three writers spending a week together. (In fact Milton had lived some miles away; his biographer Max Saunders thinks that Ford was probably romancing again, and Pound a gullible victim.) Ford and Pound would always get on best in briefer encounters. Living together did not go well. Ford knew Elsie’s libel suit was in the wings, and he was dreading it; tension was high between himself and Hunt. Being a third party cannot have been easy.

Even without H.D. or Aldington, Pound’s life remained busy and sociable in early 1913. As well as meeting up with Yeats, Ford and Plarr, he was seeing more of Flint and Brigit Patmore. He saw Dorothy, though she was out of London for much of the time. Frances Gregg he had continued to see occasionally after H.D.’s departure, sometimes without Louis, for whom he did not care – it was mutual – but she had returned to America at the end of 1912. When not occupied with his own work, he sought out talent for Poetry, and, in particular, he applied his mind to furthering the cause of imagism. Three poems of Aldington’s had appeared in November, with a note which explained that ‘Mr Richard Aldington is a young English poet, one of the “Imagistes”, a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in vers libre; trying to attain in English certain subtleties of cadence of the kind which Mallarmé and his followers have studied in French.’⁴⁰ Wrong again, as Pound told Alice Corbin Henderson in exasperation: ‘The note in Poetry is very incorrect. Imagism is concerned solely with language and presentation. Hellenism & vers libre have nothing to do with it … There is Imagism in all the best poetry of the past.’⁴¹ The notion that imagism was limited to Greek themes must have, however, been reinforced for the readers of Poetry that January by the appearance of three of H.D.’s very Hellenistic poems that Pound had sent to Harriet Monroe the previous October. These were published in January and ascribed to ‘H.D. Imagiste’: ‘Hermes of the Ways’, ‘Priapus: Keeper-of-Orchards’ and ‘Epigram: After the Greek’. Rather surprisingly, Harriet Monroe had not objected to the title of ‘Priapus’, nor to its sexually charged content. The former (Priapus is a phallic god of lust) might have been made acceptable by its classicism, and she may not have noticed the latter.⁴²

The publication of the sobriquet imagiste appears to have taken H.D. somewhat by surprise – apparently she had not realised that Pound’s urge to advertise the imagiste brand would mean that she would be presented to the world in quite this way. Certainly next time she had poems published she wrote to Harriet Monroe to say that she would prefer that ‘imagiste’ be dropped. She would, however, continue to use the name H.D. Some feminist critics claim that she had already decided H.D. was to be her writing name before the day in the British Museum tea-shop, as she had earlier signed a letter to Williams that way. But we have all occasionally used initials as shorthand. It is certainly unlikely she used it to hide her gender, as has also been suggested. Monroe’s note on her in that January issue of Poetry had stated that she was ‘an American lady resident abroad, whose identity is unknown to the editor’, and reviews always made clear it was widely known that H.D. was a woman.⁴³ It was more likely that in the first instance she welcomed the initials because she was always embarrassed by the name ‘Doolittle’; after her marriage, she said, the initials ensured that she and Aldington kept their poetic identities separate. Back in January 1913, however, this mysterious H.D.’s poems had been read in Boston by another poet, Amy Lowell, whose first book of poems, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass had been published the previous year. Lowell decided she too was an imagist. It was to be a significant decision for the history of imagism.