FLETCHER REMAINED IN Paris until June, and was present at the famous first night of the Russian Ballet’s performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in which Nijinksy danced to his own choreography in Leon Bakst’s colourful and innovative costumes. Fletcher had already seen the Russian Ballet perform in London in what he described as ‘the barbaric splendour of Scheherazade’, and earlier that year in Paris he had visited it several times again, particularly admiring ‘Nijinksy’s daringly original and nakedly pagan conception of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune’. Fletcher writes in his autobiography that ‘It seemed to me that in such works as these lay the fusion of all the arts of which Wagner had merely dreamed; that here the conflict between Apollonian restraint and Dionysiac ecstasy that had gone on throughout the nineteenth century had been finally resolved into an art that was Apollonian only in that it expressed itself through the plastic relationship of the dancers’ bodies, but was fundamentally and overwhelmingly Dionysiac in general effect.’109 The last clause applies equally to much of Fletcher’s poetry. It is more often despairing than ecstatic, but it never shows Apollonian tranquillity. No wonder the Russian Ballet appealed so much, especially The Rite of Spring. Drawing directly on anthropological work on the ancient Slavs, the ballet portrays a solstice festival with the ritual sacrifice of a young woman, torn to pieces by an ecstatic, frenzied crowd. The music’s complex, insistent rhythms, its savage dissonances, caused Debussy, who admired it greatly, to describe it as ‘une musique nègre’.110 Like Debussy, Stravinsky saw himself as the transcriber rather than the creator of the music. He believed he was ‘tap[ping] some unconscious “folk” memory’.111 As Christopher Butler has pointed out, the Rite has many links with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon as an exemplary moment of modernist primitivism. In Picasso’s painting, urban prostitution and savagery meet, suggesting the disturbing continuity of savage impulses into the present day that was the constant warning of James Frazer. The Rite has the same message though it works differently, drawing the audience into the frenzy through visual and auditory colour. Many in the audience were furious at this assault on their cool rational distance, and began, in a counter-image of the action before them, to shout and scream at the stage. Those in the top balcony, students from the Latin Quarter and no doubt the sardonic young men from the Café du Châtelet, began to shout ‘Bravo!’ in support; between them the music was drowned, but applause slowly won over the catcalls.
For Fletcher, this experience was a further confirmation that he was on the right path. He wrote in Life Is My Song:
This performance of the Sacre du Printemps more than anything else that I have ever seen in my life confirmed me in my determination to risk everything to become a modern artist. To be a modern artist involved, I saw, a determination to make and accept every kind of experiment, and not to flinch from any novelty, however strange and uncouth it might seem, or however deeply it aroused the hatred of the mob. If one wished to be a modern artist, one must be prepared alike for one’s own isolation and the mob’s contempt – as Cézanne and Gauguin and Van Gogh had been prepared, as Nijinsky and Stravinsky were prepared.112
The modern artist, he continues, has only one lesson to learn, that taught by Synge, who had said ‘that poetry, to be human again, must first learn to be brutal’. This was fundamental to the art of the early twentieth century: ‘In revolt against the elaborations of end-of-the-century aestheticism, against the romantic movement faltering in sentimental prettiness, against the genteel tradition in decay, artists everywhere were turning back to the primitively ugly, knowing that in primitiveness alone lay strength.’ With hindsight, he adds, ‘As yet none saw the pitfall, that in a world given over to the worship of naked and raw force, war was inevitable. Only the man who had in my hearing, cried out on that first night of Stravinsky’s ballet, “C’est la musique boche,” had, probably unconsciously even to himself, hoisted the danger signal.’113 Fletcher himself had no apprehension of war; all the same, in another of his lists, this one marking important dates, he records this visit to Paris as the ‘last of the gorgeous times’.114
Fletcher’s attitude to the ballet was in marked contrast to Pound’s. Pound had also seen the performance of L’Après-midi d’un faune, in London that March, taking, though not paying for, Olivia and Dorothy. The two women were enthusiasts for the ballet, Dorothy particularly admiring Nijinsky, but Pound appears to have regarded it as womanly stuff, too easily enjoyed. Had he seen The Rite of Spring he might have felt differently, but by then he was in Italy. After leaving Paris he went to spend a fortnight in Sirmione, planning to meet up later with Aldington and H.D. He had remained in regular correspondence with them both while they journeyed round Italy, and had also no doubt followed Aldington’s bouncy and carefree articles about his tour in the New Age. They were still in southern Italy, and in no hurry to return. In his articles, Aldington for the most part gave the impression that he was a solitary traveller, though the Doolittles, unnamed, appeared with him on the drive from Amalfi to Sorrento, ‘two somnolent elders and a great artist’.115 That had been in early March, when they were heading, as H.D. notes, for the warm south, on the famous Amalfi drive, which at that time was still by horse and carriage, along a dramatically beautiful road cut into the coastal rock. On 14 March they crossed to Capri. However much the Doolittle parents might have liked Aldington, what happened next is remarkable for 1912. For ten days they were all together on Capri, but after that their paths diverged. Professor and Mrs Doolittle went on to Sicily, and H.D. and Aldington remained in Capri for what Pound was later to describe as their ‘unofficial honeymoon’, having arranged to rejoin the Doolittle parents later in Venice.116 They don’t appear to have been staying in the same place, so there may have been some element of keeping up appearances, and they were at the quieter end of the island, in Anacapri. (‘Laus Deo!’ Aldington exclaims in the New Age, ‘there are but few Americans and English, at least at Anacapri’.)117 There is no doubt that the Doolittles knew the two were remaining on the island together, for Helen Doolittle records on 25 March that ‘Hilda and R. came down to see me off’. The difference between the Doolittles and the Shakespears could not be more striking. The only comment in the journal is: ‘Sunday March 23. Made plans. Hilda remains here while we go to Italy.’
Aldington and H.D. were undoubtedly happy to be left alone together, and, in addition, were both probably glad to have a break from the family group. Devoted though she was to them, H.D. always had very ambivalent feelings about her parents, and Aldington, for all his diplomatic charm, was an impatient young man. In his notes from that holiday, as well as some quite erotic and passionate writing there is a poem recalling ‘trampling with this girl’s stupid mother/ Cursing her senile tears and kind inanities’.118 Scarcely fair, one feels: Mrs Doolittle was not yet sixty – she would have her sixtieth birthday later in the year – and gives no sign of senility or indeed of stupidity, though possibly that’s how Aldington interpreted her love of shopping. Luckily, she appears to have been unaware of this. Yet for both Aldington and H.D. the whole Italian visit was an idyll. Italy always signified for H.D. the time when she and Aldington were in love and rapturously happy, and that springtime in Capri was the jewel. So too for Aldington, who wrote in his memoir, ‘In Anacapri, time stood still between Monte Solaro and the blue waves far below. Beside the rocky paths grew white violets, purple anemones, star-of-Bethlehem, cyclamen, and scented jonquils.’119 In the New Age he said: ‘one lives in day-long blessed idleness and silence, and … one watches the spring growth of orchard and upland manifestly richer each day as the summer sun develops every green thing’.120 H.D. recalled the time there in her ‘Autobiographical Notes’: ‘C.L.D. leaves, mother joins him in Sicily, I am alone, move from Paradiso [the hotel where she and her parents had stayed] to little room in top of house, in garden, R.A. and work on Greek and walks, R. loses watch, rocks, swallows, etc. Roses, figs, goat-cheese, pear-blossom, iris, Monte Solara, daisies on walls.’121
H.D. and Aldington must have spent almost a month in Capri. As H.D. later told Norman Holmes Pearson, it was an important period for her development as a writer. She continued her ‘automatic or pseudo-automatic writing’, which she had begun the year before, in ‘Italy where I spent that winter, Capri especially, where I had some time and space and found the actual geographical Greece, for the first time, Syren isle of the Odyssey’.122 H.D. does not mention any specific poems that came out of that time on Capri, but she may have kept and reworked what she wrote then; the poems of her 1916 collection, Sea Garden, with their flowers and steep cliff paths, may well have had their first drafts there. She and Aldington were continuing their translations of Theocritus, one of H.D.’s first models. Theocritus had lived in Sicily but they associated him with ‘the miniature Sicily of Capri – with Vesuvius for Aetna’, as Aldington put it, for Theocritus, he said, described a countryside just like Capri’s, ‘the mingled austerity and richness of these southern rocks in their light garment of flowers’.123 ‘Mingled austerity and richness’ precisely describes those Sea Garden poems.
H.D., according to her mother’s journal, kept in regular touch by letter and postcard, and they were still exchanging letters with Pound, who wrote to Dorothy on 21 April from the Hotel Eden saying that he thought Richard and H.D. had been so ‘wholly Hellenized at Capri’ that they would be quite out of place in ‘bella Venezia’.124 Dorothy was expressing only moderate enjoyment of her holiday with her mother and Georgie Hyde-Lees near Rome; she had invited H.D. to visit them on her way north, but the visit never happened. Pound, of course, was not offered an invitation, but he seemed entirely cheerful by himself at the shores of Lake Garda. Dorothy said she was pleased he was not ‘pining’, and although she added that neither was she, clearly she was somewhat worried by this state of affairs.125 The fact that Pound was at Sirmione without her must have brought home to her the difficulty of achieving a future together. In Sirmione the weather was chilly, unlike the warmth when they were there together, but Pound reported that it was ‘cold & grey and full of tears and very wonderful, all the olive grove, and a few more little bits of stone have fallen from the grotte, and your altar is still pink slablet uppermost’.126 He appeared to be in ebullient spirits, but, though Dorothy’s letters were generally as calm and full of cultural activities as ever, she at times let slip signs of unusual depression. She wrote to Pound that ‘We don’t discuss the Universe much – I used to do so a good deal – lately I have an idea its no use, & that one can only be apathetic & shrug one’s shoulders. It makes no odds whether one believes this or that or ’tother – one writes, or paints, or is bored just the same.’ At the end of the same letter, after contemplating her plans for when she returned home, she added: ‘Any other suggestions for my welfare? Everything needs such a damned lot of application – & it never seems worth the trouble.’127 Pound paid no attention to this lowness of spirit and continued to fill his letters with his own concerns and his curiosity about Richard and H.D.
Pound reported to Dorothy on 25 April that the ‘Theocritan Idyll is, I think still at Anacapri. They’ve stopped going to Capri for their mail.’ He intended to meet up with them in Venice, claiming ‘the combination of Richard & Venice’ would amuse him.128 Dorothy was obviously uneasy about his motives for joining them, perhaps all the more so when Pound tactlessly sent her his latest poem, one about a faun, his nickname for Aldington, ‘sniffing and snoozling about among my flowers’.129 (Aldington and H.D. were well aware of this sobriquet, and Aldington would write poems using the persona of a faun, rather enjoying the suggestion of lustiness in the comparison; H.D., in the persona of Hermione in Asphodel, recollected seeing with Darrington ‘the Naples faun that held the wine jar’ on that Italian visit.)130 There was no doubt Pound was jealous, or at least possessive, and was finding relinquishing his H.D. to Aldington difficult, even though the poem also says, ‘But take it, I leave you the garden’. Dorothy must have found these signs of Pound’s continued feeling for H.D. painful, but with admirable self-control all she did was point out some of the structural weaknesses in the poem, which Pound accepted with unusual meekness.
Pound duly turned up in Venice, but found that Aldington and H.D. had not yet arrived. ‘R & H.,’ he told Dorothy, on 3 May, ‘appear to be falling in love with each other somewhere en route from Napoli. I suppose I’ll have to be ready with a pontifical sanction & then try to soothe their respective progenitors – at least their communications are very vague.’ But he told her he was very happy to be back in Venice, and found himself, as he put it enigmatically, ‘restored to the belief’ – belief in himself, his poetry, the imagist cause, the worthwhileness of life? – ‘even in the absence of the two people who in all decency ought to regard it as their sole duty to stand present & keep me amused. If not, why have I reared them with such persistent solicitude’.131 Aldington and H.D. had stopped off in Florence instead of coming straight from Naples to Venice. ‘Rebellion,’ H.D. wrote in her ‘Autobiographical Notes.’132 Her parents were not happy about it. Aldington wanted to write another article about Florence for the New Age, having only touched on it briefly on his journey south; not part of the plans made back in March. H.D. does not explain why the extra delay was thought to be so bad; her mother records receiving a letter from her on 28 April and a postcard on 2 May, so it cannot have been anxiety for her physical safety. Charles Doolittle was due to leave Italy for the States for some weeks on 14 May, so he may have wanted more time with his daughter before he went; but given the depth of the offence H.D. felt she gave, perhaps while the Doolittle parents could shut their eyes to the ambiguity of the couple remaining together in quiet Anacapri, appearing as an unchaperoned pair in a Florence full of American tourists was quite a different thing. Pound reported on 5 May that he had met ‘the dryad’s family disconsolate on the piazza yesterday afternoon & spent the evening consoling them for the absence of their offspring’.133 What the Doolittle parents thought of meeting this young man, of whom they had disapproved so much, in such embarrassing circumstances one can only guess; Mrs Doolittle’s journal entry gives no hint of anything other than pleasure in seeing him, and H.D. records that when they arrived there was a ‘general feeling of disapproval’, but that ‘Ezra takes on mother and dad’, so it sounds as if he took his self-appointed task of soothing the progenitors seriously.134 He had had dinner with them the two evenings before the prodigals returned, at the first discussing ‘the heresy of planetary influences’, surely an unwise topic of conversation between the ultra-rationalist astronomer, who had so frowned on his daughter’s predilection for the ‘sensational’ Flammarion, and the confidant of the astrological Yeats?135 Later in the week Pound gave a gondola party, he and Mrs Doolittle in one gondola and Richard and H.D. in another; Mrs Doolittle loved it. H.D. took longer to cheer up; guilt about her parents always oppressed her. Pound commented to Dorothy on her arrival that H.D. ‘doesn’t seem much more in love with [her faun] than when she left london, but her family distresses her & seems to drive her more fawn-wards’, but by the next day he was complaining that ‘H. & R. are submerged in a hellenism so polubendius and so stupid that I stop in the street about once in every 15 minutes to laugh at them’.136 He was definitely feeling excluded. He enclosed in the letter a postcard of a church, Santa Maria Miracoli, but doesn’t mention that he dragged H.D. through the streets to see it with him, (‘in and out of alleys or calles, across bridges, narrow passageways, the labyrinth,’ as she remembered it.)137 Ezra remained for another week, leaving probably the same day as Charles Doolittle, having, according to Mrs Doolittle, spent most of his time with them.
After Professor Doolittle and Pound’s departure, Aldington, H.D. and Mrs Doolittle stayed on for a couple of weeks before moving on to Verona, and then going to stay a few days at Sirmione on Lake Garda. After Pound’s ecstatic praise, a visit had to be made; in Asphodel Hermione recalls that ‘Darrington had wandered bare-foot under the olives, silver olives, olive silver Sirmio’.138 Mrs Doolittle was having another dress made for H.D., this time in violet crêpe, and records that H.D. gave her a present of Elinor Glyn’s Halcyone, rather a racy read for her, one might have thought. June the 6th was Mrs Doolittle’s birthday, and her diary entry goes: ‘Hilda made birthday very happy – gathered poppies before breakfast – afterwards gave me a lot of pretty crepe things daintily done up. Happy day.’ After Richard left, H.D. and her mother visited Innsbruck, and returned to Verona, where Professor Doolittle joined them again on 25 June; ‘so so happy,’ noted his affectionate wife. The Doolittles were planning to continue their European tour through Germany and Switzerland, but H.D. went off on 6 July to Paris, where Richard would soon join her, to continue their ‘unofficial honeymoon’, though that cannot be how they put it to H.D.’s parents. Her mother’s only comment was: ‘I know Hilda will enjoy settling down for a time but we shall miss her.’ H.D. corresponded regularly with her mother until her parents joined her in London in early September. H.D. recorded that she had been rather frightened in Paris before Aldington arrived: memories of Margaret and her fate perhaps haunted her. When Aldington arrived it was very different.
One additional pleasure on this visit was that they got to know Henry Slominsky, also visiting Paris from London, a Polish American who had been at Penn with Pound and had just published his doctoral thesis on the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus and Parmenides. ‘He made philosophy as attractive as a Persian tale,’ Aldington recalled. ‘On a bench under the trees in the Petit Luxembourg, away from the noise and glare of the cafés, we would sit for hours while he talked to us of Hellas and Hellenism, of Pythagoras and Plato … of Empedocles and Heraclitus’.139 Heraclitus, in particular – with his belief that opposites were always interconnected, not rigorously to be distinguished as in modern Western thought – was very much in tune with their generation’s understanding of the psyche. H.D. was already meeting such fusions in Sappho, who portrays passion as both fire and ice; such interminglings of opposites would come to be a central element in her poetry.
Pound returned to London to find Dorothy seriously upset with him. Uncomplaining though she generally was, she must have found it extremely galling to have a fiancé whom she was at the best of times only allowed to see once or twice a week in her mother’s drawing-room, especially when she was often obliged out of politeness to go on visits to people with whom she had little in common, while Pound swanned around London or Europe with his chosen friends, often attractive women. The Venice episode may have been the last straw. She had mentioned plans to go on a week’s sketching course when she returned, though whether or not she did so isn’t clear. She wrote rather wearily, ‘I suppose I must try to “Career” on my return!’ It does not seem to have been an attractive prospect. Their reunion did not go well, and Dorothy was soon saying, ‘I wonder if your congé is what you want? I wish I knew.’ She had earlier consulted him about what prints to put up in her bedroom, newly papered while she was in Rome, but now she wrote: ‘As to my room, it is you who can give me an answer, as to whether there is any prospect of my being able to leave it within, say, the next six months? I feel you might have got a job if you had really wanted to, by now … I think I have waited very quietly all this Spring for you to have time.’ But she hastily wrote again, apologising: ‘The boredom was of four square walls – not you. I am feeling better since I decided to have an Archaic Greek frock in seagreen.’140 Yet two weeks later Dorothy quite uncharacteristically lost her temper with him, when Pound, for his part entirely characteristically, tried to interfere with the guest list for a private concert that Rummel was to give – to Tagore, now back in England, among others – in the Shakespear drawing-room. ‘I think you fortify yourself too much against other people,’ she told him, ‘& so do not realise how you hurt them … You affect not to care about other people – – – but you try to interfere a good deal with their doings when they affect yourself.’ He sent her a reproving poem, in essence suggesting she was behaving not like herself but like ‘the cloud of beautiful women who do not concern me’, and Dorothy retreated once more.141 Then, another two weeks later, she wrote:
I cannot marry you. (I can but hope it’s not mere cowardice, but a true instinct.)
I am sorry, sorry, sorry, and send my
Love.
Pound simply replied, again enigmatically:
you can not,
you can not,
you can not.142
Was that agreement, or protest? Whichever, they were soon reconciled. Dorothy was devoted, unable, perhaps against her better judgement, to make the break.
Pound’s letters home reflected none of this. Indeed, he sounded very cheery. He told his mother that Seymour was waiting for the Patria Mia manuscript, his reworking in book form of his New Age articles, that his translation of Arnaut Daniel was ‘about subscribed already’, and that the Quarterly Review, ‘the one venerable & self-respecting organ left’, had accepted an article on the troubadours. In one undated letter to his mother, probably early July, he reports that Ford and Violet had had a garden party with ‘every one one has ever met’, that Katherine Heyman had had a musical party full of countesses and opera rehearsals, that he was being taken to the Oxford and Cambridge cricket match at Lord’s, and that he would be going again to the Russian Ballet.143 Ford’s garden party was an act of social defiance, as Pound must have known. Elsie had brought a libel case against the Throne, challenging its description of Violet as Mrs Ford Madox Hueffer, and the case had finally been heard that February. As it happened, Ford was staying in Boulogne at the time, and his doctor had written to the court to say he was in too poor a state of health to appear, as he had been suffering from ‘neurasthenia’ for the past six months or more; but even if he had been well and eager to be there, he would not have been called. Brigit Patmore among others testified in court that Ford and Hunt were widely known as Mr and Mrs Hueffer, but Elsie was, not surprisingly, successful: there was no evidence to prove either a divorce from Elsie or a marriage to Hunt. Violet fled to join Ford in Boulogne, where the other English guests in their hotel refused to speak to them. They moved further away from England, and spent an unhappy few months in the south of France, now scarcely talking to each other. Mrs Clifford, a novelist, who like Violet Hunt belonged to the Committee of Women Writers, a highly respectable body, wrote to say she thought they should stay away for three years: ‘I don’t think you know how strong the feeling about you is, and it would be impossible for you to go about and be received without first asking what sort of reception you would get or whether you would get any at all. I would do a good deal for you but I simply should quake if you came here on Sundays, and I believe other people would walk out.’144 Violet decided she had better resign from the committee, and wrote to May Sinclair to tell her. Sinclair had been very supportive, writing to Ford that ‘If it’s a question of “volcanoes”, I’d rather take a bungalow on the edge of yours, than row for five minutes in the same boat with Mrs Elsie Hueffer. I’m sick of the world we live in, with its cowardice & hypocrisy, & abominable, poisonous, sham morality.’145 But although she said that she personally did not ‘care two straws whether your marriage holds good in this country or not (and should not care if it had never taken place)’, she advised them to stay away for six months.146
In the event, they returned in late May because, as Violet told Ford’s mother, ‘The only thing for Ford & me to do is to wipe the unjustifiable mud Elsie has thrown off our faces, make ourselves presentable & go on as if nothing had happened.’147 Although Hunt would claim in her memoir that the summer of 1913 was a ‘gorgeous season’, and that her garden party on 1 July had never been so well attended, by no means everyone came. Douglas Goldring quotes some cutting refusals; he for some reason – it cannot have been disapproval – was unable to go, and surmises that the occasion must have been a flop.148 It certainly was not that. Those present included Ford’s politician friend, Charles Masterman, Yeats (a rare visitor – perhaps Pound persuaded him), Lady Gregory, Cunninghame Graham, Frank and Violet Flint, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska: their literary and artistic friends, it appears, largely remained loyal. Though both Ford and Violet hated the scandal, they reacted very differently: Ford never discussed the matter, while Violet wrote endless letters of self-justification to her former society friends. Goldring points out that ‘she had inherited and built up at South Lodge a “position in Society” which to a Victorian woman, even one as advanced and emancipated as herself, was of immense importance to her life and happiness. Although she enjoyed the friendship of writers and artists, she was in no sense a Bohemian and dreaded being ostracized by all the solid and respectable people who formed her real background.’149 Her memoir, The Flurried Years, published in America with the even more appropriate title, I Have This to Say, was her most extended piece of self-justification; in it she steadfastly maintains she believed that she was Ford’s wife. Her final attempt to have her name cleared was to ask Goldring to be her literary executor, and then to leave numerous letters tucked away in various books for him to find and, no doubt she hoped, to use as the basis for a convincing defence. Goldring was immensely sympathetic, but it was impossible for him to invent a legal contract that had clearly never existed.
Pound mentions none of this, but a letter from Dorothy at the time of the trial asking ‘Is Mrs F.M. Hueffer established?’ indicates that he talked to her about it.150 Hunt had another cause for distress that spring, as Pound probably also knew: Ford’s passion for the lovely Brigit Patmore. Patmore always denied that she had had an affair with him, saying in her memoirs that she was not attracted to him. Rebecca West, not attracted to him either, vide her famous comparison with the poached egg, was all the same convinced that Brigit and Ford were lovers. Iris Barry, who came to London in 1916, also – without evidence – thought it likely, telling Ford’s first biographer, Arthur Mizener, that ‘If Violet was jealous of Bridget [sic] P., well V. was jealous & presumably often with reason & Bridget was terribly attractive.’151 Mizener says Ford claimed that Brigit had given him a ruby cross, which he always wore, even when playing tennis. But Ford is a totally unreliable witness; Brigit denied the story flatly. Given Patmore’s admiration for Hunt – and ironically she especially admired her overturning of convention, something that Hunt was mortified to find herself doing at that time – she may have felt that adding to Violet’s problems by having an affair with her not-quite husband would be far from kind.
Some time in June, Fletcher returned, and the first person he contacted was Pound. He was invited to call on him in Church Walk, and was shocked by the conditions in which he lived. The entrance to Church Walk was down a narrow alleyway, past the churchyard, now disused, which was full of ‘sooty marble gravestones’, up a dark staircase to a badly lit room, ‘notably barren of comfort’. Shocked by the idea of living in a single room, he was dismayed to find that the first thing one saw was ‘a plain white-enamelled bedstead’. Under one of the two windows was a long oak table, lit from the left, ‘a concession to Pound’s own weak eyesight’; this he used as his desk, ‘usually littered deep with manuscripts’.152 There was a fireplace, which served as a waste-paper basket, another smaller table and two or three chairs, and a very basic iron washstand. With a certain embarrassment, he contrasted this with the comparative luxury in which he lived. When he had moved into his flat, Fletcher had bought Persian rugs, a Jacobean dining table (presumably Victorian Jacobean), a chesterfield and several elegant chairs. Pound was in fact extremely happy back in Church Walk, and had written to his mother on his return from Italy, shortly before Fletcher’s visit, to say how delightful his room was, ‘full of green trees and sunlight’.153 Lawrence, one might recall, had thought it ‘comfortable and well-furnished’.154 Fletcher saw none of that. He was perturbed by this poverty, and records that he wondered what he could do to help. Pound would soon have suggestions, but he, for his part, wanted to help Fletcher with his poetry and asked to see ‘Irradiations’, the series of poems on which Fletcher was working at the time. He read it meticulously and offered detailed criticisms, some of which Fletcher accepted, but most of which he decided to resist. Fletcher is not one of the poets who record their gratitude to Pound’s creative pencil.