I

ON THAT LONDON visit Amy may not have stayed long enough to meet Aldington or H.D., who returned from Paris around the time she went home, though she certainly learnt that H.D. was one Hilda Doolittle. More surprisingly there is no mention of her meeting Flint, a frequent visitor to the Poetry Bookshop, but perhaps he and his family were away in the country on their annual two-week holiday, always very precious to him. When Harriet had finally published two of Lowell’s poems in the July Poetry, they had followed Flint’s four poems ‘in unrhymed cadence’. Lowell would surely have wanted to meet this other imagist, had he been in London. The four poems included the one for which Flint became best known, ‘London’:

London, my beautiful

It is not the sunset

nor the pale green sky

shimmering through the curtain

of the silver birch …

that moves me.¹

Pound would later complain that Flint was an Impressionist rather than an imagist, by which he appears to mean that his poetry, like Ford’s, was too visual, too descriptive, not sufficiently concentrated. There are visual elements here, but they are scarcely the point of the poem. The name ‘London’ instantly evokes its crowds, its buildings, the life of its streets, but all of that is elided in the opening, as in a Hulme-like way the poet looks to the sky and the coming of night; the only life on the ground comes in a reference to ‘hopping birds’. Eventually, however, the poem returns to those inhabitants, to ‘the glow’ which London, like the moon, ‘sheds on men’. It is a compact statement of Flint’s aesthetic-political beliefs: ultimately, art and beauty would bring a better world to all. It is a very different picture of London from the evocation of dreary streets in his earlier poems. Flint was now living in Highbury, and the poem reflects a particular aspect of London’s charm compared with other capital cities – the large number of houses with gardens even comparatively near the centre; but this new appreciation of the city might owe something to his extensive reading of contemporary French poetry, which so often concentrated on the urban, both its squalor and its beauty.

Much at the same time as he met Amy Lowell, Pound gained access to a second magazine. In the 1950s he remembered that it all started when ‘as I recall a very noble, slightly bedraggled probably heroine of Suffragette struggle turned up in Church Walk, … working class to school-teacher, to which we owe D.H.L.’² The probable heroine had arrived, apparently on Ford and Hunt’s advice, to ask Pound if he would care to be literary editor, responsible in the first instance for three columns, of a magazine which had appeared for eleven months as the Freewoman, and was about to be relaunched as the New Freewoman. He could not recall her name, but it was probably Grace Jardine, a close friend and secretary to the magazine’s editor, the tiny, utterly resolute Dora Marsden. According to Rebecca West, then assistant editor, Marsden had ‘exquisite beauty … the only person I have ever met who could so accurately have been described as flower-like that one could have put it down on her passport’: yet, she adds, she also had ‘wit and common sense and courage, and each to the point of genius’.³ This flower-like genius had already been in prison several times, had thrown iron balls into a Liberal party meeting in Manchester, and had climbed on to the roof of the Empire Hall in Southport to denounce Winston Churchill through a porthole while he addressed the faithful. Whether Grace Jardine was ‘working class to school-teacher’ is not certain, but Dora Marsden certainly was, moving from pupil teacher, to university scholarship, to headmistress by the age of twenty-six. She had been born in a small village at the head of the Colne Valley, the constituency that had elected Victor Grayson, the Marxist so admired by Flint, and while by 1913 she was an anarchist rather than socialist she shared his belief in the necessity of revolutionary change. ‘Violent or peaceful,’ she said, ‘the revolution must come.’⁴ She threw up her job to work full time for Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU tried to exert iron discipline over its workers, but failed dismally with Marsden, and they parted acrimoniously in 1911. Marsden had become increasingly critical of WSPU policy, which she felt was wholly mistaken in concentrating solely on the question of the vote. Women’s social and sexual oppression needed, she argued, to be radically confronted. Suffrage was not enough.

Later the same year Marsden launched the Freewoman as a platform for this wider debate. ‘Woman,’ she insisted, ‘must be taught she is not an adjunct to man.’⁵ Dora was backed by Charles Granville, whose company Swift & Co. had given Pound his short-lived contract, and one of the journal’s future admirers was to be Floyd Dell, Pound’s loyal supporter among American reviewers. In spite of their apparent differences of interest, Pound and Marsden were both recognisably part of a revolutionary tide, and that they should be supported by the same people and eventually join forces was not so surprising. The Freewoman, well before Pound in his own poetry attempted any kind of risqué subject-matter, ran articles on monogamy, prostitution, divorce, masturbation, abortion, homosexuality, free love, contraception and venereal disease. The highly respectable feminist Millicent Fawcett was so horrified when she saw a copy of the magazine that she ripped it up into little pieces. It was grist to the mill of the arch anti-suffragist Mrs Humphry Ward, who proclaimed that it revealed ‘the dark and dangerous side of the “Woman Movement”’ that she had always warned was there.⁶ (Dora was so delighted to have outraged Ward she used that quotation regularly as advertising copy along with feminist eulogies and praise from freethinking intellectuals.) Radicals like H.G. Wells and Edward Carpenter admired the magazine wholeheartedly. It was directly responsible, according to Rebecca West, for her change of name: ‘I never wrote for The Freewoman,’ she said later, ‘till it had got such a bad name for its candour that I was forbidden to read it by my family, and thus I came to adopt my present pseudonym.’⁷

In September 1912, W. H. Smith banned the Freewoman, drastically affecting distribution. Les Garner, Dora Marsden’s biographer, suggests that Marsden was probably right when she ascribed the ban not just to horror at the outspoken discussions of sexual matters, but to the fact that the journal was seen as part of a growing revolutionary socialist menace. ‘The opposition in the capitalist press,’ she commented, ‘only broke out when we began to make it clear that the way out of the sex problem was through the door of the economic problem.’⁸ As with the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, radical moves in any sphere were instantly associated with the threat of political dissent. The year 1912, with its many strikes and unrest in Ireland, was a troubled one; women like Dora Marsden unsettling home life as well was too much. The final blow to the magazine was Granville’s disappearance and the liquidation of Swift & Co., a disaster that simultaneously deprived Pound of £100 per annum. The Freewoman closed in October.

Although the Freewoman had many socialist and anarchist contributors, it had never been affiliated to any one political party. Even its commitment to feminism in the usual sense had become increasingly uncertain. Marsden was becoming unhappy with the very category ‘women’, questioning the existence of the shared and stereotypical characteristics the common noun implied, and was moving to a much more individualistic position. She had come across a recent translation of a mid-nineteenth-century German book The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner, unsuccessful in its own day but revived in the wake of the stir caused by Nietzsche and his rejection of the herd mentality, and published in an English translation in 1907. Stirner believed in the uniqueness of the individual, seeing individualistic anarchy as the way forward, and when the New Freewoman opened in June 1913 Dora Marsden proclaimed in her editorial that the magazine was ‘not for the advance of Woman, but for the empowering of individuals – men and women’.⁹ Pound at that stage would probably have accepted the literary editorship of any shade of magazine, and would not have been alarmed had the paper been rabidly suffragist, a position he regarded with indulgent amusement; but as it was, Marsden’s individualism sat comfortably with his own. When offered the post, he was not required to show support for women, though he reassured Dora cautiously: ‘I suppose I am an individualist, I believe in the arts as the most efficient propaganda for a sort of individual liberty that can be developed without public inconvenience.’¹⁰

The New Freewoman was set up as a limited company, whose largest shareholder was Harriet Shaw Weaver, honorary secretary to the magazine and later Joyce’s chief benefactor. She was known to all as Miss Weaver, for she would not allow her first name to be used outside her family, a fact which in itself indicates how unlikely she was as a core organiser of a journal that had promised to ignore ‘all existing tabus’. Up to that time she had been chiefly concerned with issues of social deprivation in the East End, for although she came from a solidly respectable family, by 1912 she was a convinced socialist, believing one should combine social justice with the promotion of individual freedom. Like Dora, she was a disillusioned former member of the WSPU and no longer believed that women’s freedom from oppression would necessarily be achieved by the vote. Dora was once again editor, and Rebecca West, then just twenty, assistant editor.

The magazine’s revival was welcomed by its previous feminist supporters, but many soon began to have second thoughts when they realised how far Dora had moved. The first issue, in June 1913, announced that: ‘“Woman” is doing nothing – she has indeed, no existence. A very limited number of individual women are emphasising the fact that the first thing to be taken into account with regard to them is that they are individuals and cannot be lumped together into a class, a sex, or a “movement”.’¹¹ Many present-day feminists would agree entirely that ‘Woman’ has no existence, even if they might be less sure about the moral claims of egoism, but it was not an idea that went down well at the time. Dora also attacked the Pankhursts viciously, particularly unjustly over the death that month of Emily Wilding Davison, who had thrown herself under the King’s horse at the Derby. It was perhaps partly because she was aware that her earlier readers were alarmed, and indeed were defecting, that she agreed with Rebecca West that the magazine’s appeal should be increased by the inclusion of a literary section.

The Freewoman itself had never neglected literature or the arts. One of its most lively and entertaining regular items had been Rebecca West’s own irreverent and controversial weekly reviews; it published occasional poems (the main contributor of verse being John Gould Fletcher’s friend, Horace Holley), well-known writers, such as Wells and Galsworthy; promising new ones, like John Rodker, had also written for it. There had been intermittent articles on the visual arts, including a very enthusiastic review of an exhibition of Chinese painting, though they were generally on the Post-Impressionists or Futurists. The readers liked their culture to be as contentious as their social theory. A telling advertisement, nicely gauged for this niche market, had appeared in May 1912 for Florence Farr’s marriage question novel, The Solemnization of Jacklin: Some Adventures on the Search for Reality. This encouraged readers to ask for the book at their library, adding in bold print: ‘Please insist upon getting it, as you will probably find some resistance.’ Along with quotations from admiring reviews of the novel was one that read, ‘It bears only the resemblance to life that the wildest of Futurist landscapes bears to nature.’ Sexually and artistically shocking: what could appeal more to their readers! So, if they were to extend this area, who more appropriate than an iconoclastic, avant-gardiste poet for literary editor in the new phase of the magazine? West had met Pound at South Lodge, and liked him, although she had given his Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti a very mixed review the previous year, describing Pound as ‘a poet of an infuriating and fascinating nature’. She thought most of the translations showed a ‘petulant disdain for the English language’. ‘Probably in the Elsyian fields,’ she wrote, ‘Guido Cavalcanti, with his ghostly blood up, is busy translating “The Chansons of Ezra Pound” into Italian. Some great revenge must be brewing.’ In only one poem she found ‘the very breath of poetry’ – significantly, perhaps, not a courtly love poem at all but one about a shepherdess – so charming that she decided that ‘Mr Pound’s heart is in the right place’.¹² Pound didn’t comment on the review, though later he remembered West as an admirer of his work; the reviews of the Cavalcanti book had been so uniformly dire he may have been quite pleased with it.

Pound stipulated that he must have sole jurisdiction over all verse that appeared, to which Dora agreed, if a little anxiously. The New Freewoman could not afford to pay contributors, but Pound persuaded John Gould Fletcher to put up the money for payment on his section. Fletcher would later claim he produced the money out of concern for Pound and his fellow-poets’ poverty, though he was for now so entranced with Pound he would have agreed to anything. The fact that his first publication had been in the Freewoman probably helped to make Fletcher sympathetic to the request, and Pound wrote to Dorothy in high spirits: ‘Had tea with J.G.F … he gave me some £s wherewith to feed Flint & Cannell & R.A. & such others as I may want to print in The Freewoman, which was, I think, fairly decent of him.’¹³ In the early months of this arrangement, Fletcher insisted that nothing by himself should now appear in the journal, in his tortured way fearing to appear to be buying favours for his own work; he soon changed his mind. In any case, as he also changed his mind about Pound, he did not continue to provide the money for very long.

In August 1913, Rebecca West helped Pound launch his page and a half with a puff for imagisme. Her article was largely extracts from Flint’s Poetry interview and Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts’ (which Dora Marsden’s biographer rather appropriately misnames as ‘A Few Darts by an Imagiste’), with some introductory sentences in her own unmistakable prose.¹⁴ Pound must surely have been impressed by the accuracy and the panache with which she summed up his principles. She began:

Poetry should be burned to the bone by austere fires and washed white with rains of affliction: the poet should love nakedness and the thought of the skeleton under the flesh. But because the public will not pay for poetry it has become the occupation of learned persons, given to soft living among veiled things and unaccustomed to being sacked for talking too much. That is why from the beautiful stark bride of Blake it has become the idle hussy hung with ornament kept by Lord Tennyson, handed on to Stephen Phillips [the nineties poet who had become the staid editor of Poetry Review in place of Harold Monro] and now supported at Devonshire Street by the Georgian school … Just as Taylor and Galbraith want to introduce scientific management into industry so the imagistes want to discover the most puissant way of whirling the scattered star dust of words into a new star of passion.¹⁵

West is throwing herself behind this revolutionary movement with aplomb. It is a tribute to the success of the first Georgian Poetry that the Georgians had after only eight months become identified as a school of their own, even if here only to be reviled. West’s language picks up on Pound’s own imagery, poetry ‘closer to the bone’, and akin to the quest of the scientist. West, like Pound and Hulme, is using gendered imagery when she speaks of poetry, but unlike them she doesn’t reject the feminine. She merely commends the ‘beautiful stark bride of Blake’ over the ‘idle hussy … kept by Lord Tennyson’.

Pound published seven of his own poems in the 15 August issue, a selection of the ‘Contemporania’ that had appeared in Poetry in April. Had she read them, Dora might have approved. She did not bother. ‘As for E.P’s poems,’ she told Weaver, ‘I haven’t read ’em. Speak it not. He is a nice old thing.’¹⁶ Not everyone said that about Pound; perhaps his niceness at that point was because he was also for the meantime a happy old thing; he had, quite by chance, secured an English outlet for his ‘mouvemong’. For the most part and to most readers, the literary section appeared to have little in common with the rest of the magazine, and Pound and his fellow-imagists would complain regularly about Marsden’s convoluted editorials and articles. Yet Marsden was developing a view of language which at a theoretical level shared much with Pound’s, in particular an opposition to fixed ideas, clichés and abstractions, the ideas in fact that Pound had expounded in his Osiris articles under Hulme’s influence, and they would also come to share an opposition to democracy and government. But they expressed their ideas very differently and may never have realised what they had in common, beyond a general opposition to the status quo. There was, as David Moody puts it, ‘no meeting of these like minds’.¹⁷ Yet, as Bruce Clarke first pointed out, Marsden’s interrogation of Pound on the question of the use of poetry prompted him to write ‘The Serious Artist’, the series of articles in which he developed his view that there was a role in art for social diagnosis as well as the creation of beauty. She may well have contributed, through her very hostility to the idea, to his growing sense of the importance of the arts to cultural well-being.¹⁸

The good news that Pound would be publishing their poetry in the 1 September issue of the New Freewoman greeted Richard and H.D. when they returned to London in the second half of August. They had come back separately, Pound’s letters indicate, though only by a day or two. Travelling à deux to London could have provoked gossip. When they caught up with the news about Ford and Hunt’s turbulent year, H.D. must have thought they had been wise to be discreet; life could still be hard for a woman who stepped out of line. They now both spent much of their time in the British Museum Reading Room, since Aldington was finally eligible for a ticket, having had his twenty-first birthday that July. H.D.’s parents returned to England from Germany in early September, for the final phase of their European tour. The visit had an anxious beginning, for when they reached London by the overnight boat train, H.D.’s father was far from well. The pre-war London tourist trade was buoyant, and H.D. and her mother had to search for a hotel, only managing to secure a room at the third they tried, one close to the British Museum. The next day, H.D.’s father was worse, ‘in a wretched condition’, her mother says in her diary, clearly deeply worried, and the hotel recommended a doctor from nearby Gordon Square. By 10 September, H.D.’s twenty-seventh birthday, Professor Doolittle was beginning to recover, and they all spent the day together. Two days later, the Doolittles left for Bournemouth so her father could recuperate. From then on, things improved. A week later, ‘a beautiful day’, her mother recorded, H.D. and Richard came for the day to see them and ‘to talk over the future. Such a lovely time and I am happy for them both.’ H.D. and Richard caught a train back to London, and Mrs Doolittle went to bed ‘happy and peaceful’. Ten days later, on 29 September, the Doolittle parents returned to London, staying again in Bloomsbury, this time off Russell Square, and Mrs Doolittle indulged very happily in an orgy of shopping, most of it for H.D.’s coming marriage. Mrs Doolittle had been in London for less than a week when she noted in her diary that she was ‘feeling especially well and at home’.

Pound saw a certain amount of the Doolittle parents, giving them a copy of the 15 August issue of the New Freewoman so they could read his ‘Contemporania’, which, he told Dorothy with some pleasure, they found quite bewildering. H.D. presumably had seen ‘Contemporania’ before, but she must have been struck by a couple of the articles in that issue on subjects close to her heart. There was one by Edward Carpenter on women in early Greece, which argued that they had a much higher status, particularly in Sparta, than they would have later in history, when a wife became ‘a domestic drudge, whose ideal was “to stay at home and mind the house”’.¹⁹ It was a view that must have confirmed the intransigently undomesticated H.D. in her sense that early Greece was her spiritual home. The second article, entitled ‘The Earth-Goddess’, recommended highly Jane Harrison’s work on primitive Greek religion, especially her emphasis on the female principle.

H.D. herself probably showed her parents the New Freewoman for 1 September, in which, under the heading of ‘The Newer School’, her poem ‘Sitalkis’ appeared along with a selection of poems by her fellow-imagists. One of the images in ‘Sitalkis’ is of ‘Argestes’, the Greek autumnal north-west cleansing wind, ‘Scattering the broken leaves’; she later recalled writing it after shuffling through the leaves outside the British Museum, presumably the previous autumn.²⁰ Sitalkis was an avatar of Apollo as an autumn sun god, and the poem refers to the myth that Apollo withdrew for the winter months, this disappearance, like that of Persephone, being a version of the death and rebirth fertility theme that Frazer had made so fascinating to her generation. It is, one guesses, a love poem to Aldington, unusual for her poems of the period in mentioning one of the main Greek gods, though significantly in a little-known guise, and firmly preferred to a ‘high god/Who touches us not’. Aldington was represented by ‘To Atthis’, a translation of one of the recently found Sappho fragments, the original of which H.D. had copied out for him in the British Museum. Pound had tried to persuade Monroe to take it for Poetry, but she had shown it to some classicists at the University of Chicago, who thought it too free a translation, and so she refused, though Pound fumed that the text was so mutilated that it was impossible to know exactly what it meant. Lowell’s ‘In the Garden’ appeared, and there were poems by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, in whom Pound was briefly showing an interest, and a poem entitled ‘Postlude’ by William Carlos Williams, one of the few free verse poems in The Tempers, Williams’ second book of poems, which Elkin Mathews finally published that September. It was not, incidentally, one of the selection of Williams’ poems that Pound had printed the year before in the Poetry Review, all of which were in traditional forms.²¹ A number of the poems in Williams’ volume were influenced by Pound’s own earlier enthusiasms – Provençal subjects and translations from the Spanish – but in just a few, both form and subject were changing. The poem in The Tempers that indicated best the way Williams would develop is not ‘Postlude’, which is a rather languid, classicist piece (‘Let there be gold of tarnished masonry/Temples soothed by the sun to ruin/That sleep utterly’) but a short poem, called significantly, like Pound’s latest poems, ‘Contemporania’, which begins with the conversational simplicity and quotidian subject-matter that was to be so characteristic of Williams’ poetry: ‘The corner of a great rain/Steamy with the country/Has fallen upon my garden.’²² Yet Pound was convinced of Williams’ future as a poet, and that December he wrote to say, ‘I still think as always that in the end your work will hold.’²³