II

NOW THAT HE had gathered together a reasonable number of practitioners of the ‘newer school’ in poetry, Pound began to plan an anthology, in which many of the poems included in the 1 September issue would reappear. This anthology has always been presumed, almost certainly correctly, to have been set up by Pound in imitation of, and in rivalry to, Georgian Poetry. Certainly this was the rumour going round London: Eddie Marsh had written to Rupert Brooke to say, ‘there’s a movement for a “Post-Georgian” Anthology, of the Pound-Flint-Hulme school, who don’t like being out of GP [Georgian Poetry], but I don’t think it will come off.’²⁴ When Pound first mentioned the projected anthology in a letter home in early September, he described it as a collection of poems not by imagists but by ‘les jeunes’, and in Fletcher’s account in his autobiography he mentions that H.D. referred to it at that time as an anthology of ‘all the writers who don’t belong to the Georgians’.²⁵ Perhaps that was how it began: certainly not all the writers could be claimed as imagists, although by the title, Des Imagistes, Pound was resolutely signalling one more stage in the establishment of his movement. Pound tried to persuade Fletcher to contribute, but Fletcher, although he shared Pound’s dislike of the Georgians, was not at all sure he wanted to be labelled an imagist. Pound sent him off to meet Aldington and H.D., in the hope that they would have more luck in drawing him in. Fletcher had already been introduced to Flint (‘bespectacled, shy, apologetic’) but the two of them never got on particularly well.²⁶ Fletcher respected Flint’s knowledge of French poetry, but their backgrounds were perhaps too different for them to have much mutual sympathy.

Both Flint and Pound had praised H.D.’s poetry highly, Pound telling Fletcher that her work was the best example of what he meant by imagism. Fletcher duly applied himself to reading it, but says that whilst he admired her ‘very vivid and keen sense of rhythm’, he found himself ‘slightly repelled, despite my admiration, by an archaism in choice of subject … I was too deeply committed to the task of attempting to deal, as a modern poet, with the life all about me to take much pleasure in H.D.’s Hellenism … H.D.’s retreat into the past seemed to me to smack somewhat of an evasion’.²⁷ It is curious that Fletcher can write this only a few pages after lavishly praising Stravinsky for setting his ballet in ‘remote pagan Russia … back behind recorded history’.²⁸ That H.D. also used her remote subject-matter to attain a ‘primitive’ strength with which to dramatise modern emotions was not something that he recognised until later.

Fletcher was struck by how different H.D. and Aldington were: ‘While H.D. was tall, slim, lithe, with a pale oval face framed in masses of dark hair, and a nervous shyness of manner that only emphasized her fragility, Aldington was bluff, hearty, and robust, with the square shoulders of an athlete, the bullet-head of a guardsman, and a general tendency to beefiness which proclaimed his British quality’.²⁹ Out of sheer nervousness, Fletcher burst into extravagant praise of H.D.’s poetry, while she, equally nervously, told him that ‘she was never sure that anything she had ever written had been good. Ezra encouraged her to write and go on writing. She simply wrote as she felt.’ Aldington was the only one at ease, and proceeded to lecture Fletcher on his poetic theories. Fletcher thoroughly took against him, and left all the more determined not to join the anthology. Their poetry, he says he told them, was ‘remote, refined, and pure, like the Parthenon’, his, ‘shambling, grotesque, formless, like a primeval monster’. They wouldn’t want ‘a dinosaur in the Parthenon’.³⁰

With Fletcher’s uncanny ability for getting the wrong end of any available stick, he went away convinced that it was really Aldington who would be the editor of the projected anthology. He wrote in alarm to Amy Lowell to warn her to have nothing to do with it, as its real aim is ‘to boom Aldington’.³¹ At this stage, Lowell was very unsure what to make of Fletcher’s outbursts, but his warnings may have had some effect. When Pound wrote to her in November to ask whether he could include in the anthology her poem, ‘In a Garden’, she first agreed, but then changed her mind and refused on the grounds that she too was no longer sure that she was an imagist. She claimed he never replied, though there is extant a letter to her from Pound, saying that it was ‘too late to monkey with the Anthology’, dated in fact after Des Imagistes had appeared in New York, and it is hard to imagine what the context of that letter could have been it was not a reply to the request to withdraw her poem.³²

Fletcher would spend the next year alternately furious with Pound and under his spell once more. Even in the first flush of admiration that summer, he had brooded on the changes Pound had wanted to make to ‘Irradiations’, becoming progressively more resentful, but he was grateful to Pound for taking him seriously and making it possible for him to publish his work. When, however, Pound began to bring out his series of articles on French poetry, ‘The Approach to Paris’, in the New Age in mid-August, using among others the books he borrowed from him, Fletcher became incandescent, rebuking Pound bitterly for passing off his (Fletcher’s) discoveries as his own. He was furious not to be given an acknowledgement. So, possibly with more justification, was Flint. Pound simply handed Fletcher his books back, and said that even if he wanted no more to do with him he would still like to send his poetry to Harriet Monroe at Poetry. Fletcher was so impressed by this disinterested generosity that he became friends once more. He wrote twice to Lowell that autumn saying he was breaking off all contact with Pound and was no longer intending to fund the New Freewoman’s literary pages, yet, although by the end of the year he appears to have withdrawn his financial support for the journal, he was still uneasily and moodily on the edges of Pound’s circle when Lowell returned the next summer.

Meanwhile, H.D. and Aldington were married on 18 October in Kensington Registry Office. H.D. does not say what she wore, but it may well have been one of the dresses made in Italy, which she records elsewhere as wearing for special occasions. Her parents were present, and so was Pound, but not apparently any of Aldington’s family. H.D. never mentions when she was first introduced to Aldington’s parents, though she recalled later that his father was the only person she met in England who had heard of the Moravian Brethren. H.D.’s parents do not appear to have had anything like the anxieties over Aldington’s income that the Shakespears had over Pound’s, even though Aldington’s earnings were sparse compared even to Pound’s. H.D. had her allowance, about £200 a year, enough for them to get by on. According to Lawrence Rainey, average working-class annual earnings were then £75, and middle-class, £350. Even with their occasional payments for poems and articles, they were scarcely well-off, but money never seems to have worried them. Aldington and she moved from their rooms in Church Walk round the corner to a small flat in Holland Park Chambers. A few days later the Doolittles returned home, H.D. and Aldington seeing them off at the station. It would be the last time H.D. saw her father.

One other person that one might have expected to have attended the Aldingtons’ wedding was Brigit Patmore, but as H.D. mentions in her ‘Autobiographical Notes’, Brigit was having an operation at the time of the wedding. When Pound wrote home in November to say that ‘Richard and Hilda were decently married last week, or the week before, as you have doubtless been notified’, he added, ‘Brigit Patmore is very ill but they have decided to let her live, which is a mercy as there are none too many charming people on the planet’.³³ Violet Hunt and Ford went to see her in her nursing home, after what Violet describes as ‘that terrible operation’.³⁴ Aldington in a later letter to H.D. refers to Brigit’s having had an abortion, so that was possibly what ‘that terrible operation’ was, presumably one that went horribly wrong. Derek Patmore says his mother was unable to have children after his younger brother Michael was born, which may have been as the result of what happened here. An abortion for a married woman begs many questions. Brigit was a devoted mother, who would not, one would think, be likely to resort to an abortion if it were not forced upon her. If Deighton had insisted on it because he knew the baby was not his, it would certainly explain her later bitterness towards him. Of course, Aldington could simply have been jumping to conclusions. It could have been an ectopic pregnancy, which can be extremely dangerous and life-threatening. Violet’s comments, it is true, sound as if she is implying that there was a scandal, but as scandal-mongering was her favourite occupation, that is no proof. Perhaps she wondered if it had been Ford’s child, as indeed perhaps it was, the origin of his dark hints in later years of his relationship to Derek, a surrogate for the lost baby. But Ford needed no grounds for his fantasies.

Aldington comments on how much energy Brigit lost after this operation, but by early the next year she must have been well recovered, as she would go to stay with Ford and Hunt in their cottage at Selsey on the West Sussex coast, to act as Ford’s secretary, and while there Ford dictated the first part of The Good Soldier to her. Being secretary to Ford took considerable stamina, as H.D., who took over her role later in the year, would find. According to Aldington (who in due course took over from an exhausted H.D.), Ford produced 6–8,000 words a week, and taking that down in rapid longhand (as amateurs, none of them knew shorthand) was highly stressful. Ford claimed the problem for his secretaries was not just the amount but the intensity of his dictation; he couldn’t, he said, resist trying to get a reaction: ‘At last you say: “Damn it all, I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!” And then you are lost … When I was dictating the most tragic portion of my most tragic book to an American poetess [H.D., of course] she fainted several times. One morning she fainted three times. So I had to call in her husband to finish the last pages of the book. He did not faint. But he has never forgiven me.’³⁵ Yet even if the fragile Brigit was usefully recording Ford’s declamations, it is remarkable that Hunt chose to invite the woman she knew Ford loved to stay with them in this intimate setting; perhaps she felt she could control the situation best that way. What is even more curious is that her successor, Stella Bowen, would do exactly the same ten years later when Ford fell in love with Jean Rhys, taking her off on holiday with them, disastrously for all concerned. What was it about Ford that made women act in so self-destructive a way? In neither case did the women Violet Hunt and Stella Bowen feared form a lasting liaison with Ford, but in each case their own relationship with him would never recover, and in a few years end for ever.

Pound, meanwhile, was continuing to supply Harriet with poetry. He had sent the Fletcher poems off to her in mid-August: a selection from ‘Irradiations’, accompanied by a request to ‘use the full sequence’, or as much as possible, ‘in some way that will establish the tone and in some way present the personality, the force behind this new and amazing state of affairs’.³⁶ Pound would soon become more guarded in his praise of Fletcher, lamenting his unevenness in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson soon after. In his letters to Harriet, one should perhaps be careful about accepting at face value his exuberant writing up of poets whom he wanted to promote. He may well have felt that unless he piled on the glowing commendations he would never persuade her to accept the more experimental poets that he sent. In this case, Harriet was won over without difficulty and ‘Irradiations’ duly appeared in December, with Pound’s review of two of Fletcher’s volumes of poetry, The Dominant City and Fool’s Gold, in the same issue. During the autumn more poetry by Yeats and another instalment of Pound’s ‘Contemporania’ appeared. Pound mentions in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson that Frances Gregg, who had been briefly back in London, had done a ‘permissible’ poem and he had encouraged her to send it in along with anything else she had that was ‘decent’.³⁷ The permissible poem may have been the love poem for H.D. that appeared in Poetry later that year, which begins, ‘You were all loveliness to me:/Sea Mist, the Spring’, and ends with one of H.D.’s own lines, ‘spare us from loveliness’.³⁸ In mid-September Pound sent Harriet some poems by Lawrence, saying grudgingly, ‘Lawrence, as you know, gives me no particular pleasure. Nevertheless we are lucky to get him. Hueffer … thinks highly of him. I recognize certain qualities of his work … As a prose writer I grant him first place among the younger men.’³⁹ Pound was deeply ambivalent about Lawrence. He had written to her earlier in the year, when Lawrence’s Love Poems and Others was published, ‘Lawrence … is clever. I don’t know whether to send in a review or not … Detestable person but needs watching. I think he learnt the proper treatment of modern subjects before I did.’⁴⁰ He did in the end review the book, not only in Poetry but also in the New Freewoman, where he wrote that ‘The disagreeable qualities of Mr Lawrence’s work are apparent to the most casual reader’, but then added, ‘let me say without further preamble that Mr Lawrence’s book is the most important book of poems of the season’.⁴¹

Lawrence was in 1913 still living on the continent, though he and Frieda had made a quasi-secret visit back to England for a few weeks that summer, when she had hoped to see her children, while Lawrence arranged for the publication of stories and poems. He did not see Pound on that return visit, though he had been invited to the garden party given by Violet Hunt to which Pound had gone, but received the invitation too late to attend. Since he and Frieda passed as Mr and Mrs Lawrence, with no more foundation than Violet and Ford as Mr and Mrs Hueffer – and for the same reason, Frieda not yet having had her divorce – they would have been particularly appropriate guests. Pound, however, got in touch with Lawrence on that visit, asking him for some stories because ‘he had got an American publisher under his wing’.⁴² This was Willard Huntington Wright, editor of the Smart Set from 1912 until 1914, who had now like Monroe taken up Pound as a quasi-agent for London contacts, though Pound never had the same relation with the Smart Set as with Poetry. The latter he longed to forge into the most prestigious poetry magazine of the day; the Smart Set was a place where he and those he thought worthy of help could be paid a reasonable rate for their work. Pound placed several of Lawrence’s stories and poems in the next year in both the Smart Set and Poetry. Lawrence was, as he put it himself in a letter to Harold Monro, ‘woefully poor’, so the publications must have been helpful to him – as well as to Pound’s reputation as a literary impresario – but it did nothing to encourage either of them to renew their friendship.⁴³ The poems sent to Monroe appeared in January 1914 – Pound had said they should not go in until after Fletcher’s had appeared – and included among others Lawrence’s love poem for Frieda, ‘Gloire de Dijon’, which H.D. admired greatly, a poem to which she alludes in her fictional account of their relationship in her novel, Bid Me to Live.

Pound, one might think, would have earned the gratitude of those like Lawrence whose work he promoted, but it was not always so. Pound not only aroused hostility in those whose work he denounced, but he was also regarded with suspicion by some of those he tried to help. Fletcher was a case in point, but the most bitter and resentful recipient of his assistance was Robert Frost, one of whose poems Pound sent off to Monroe at much the same time as Lawrence’s. Robert Frost was at that time living in England with his family, and he had made Flint’s acquaintance at the January 1913 opening of the Poetry Bookshop, one of his first forays on either side of the Atlantic into the literary world. Flint, as Frost told him later, was the first poet he had ever met. Flint instantly recognised him as an American, and when Frost asked how he did so, laconically replied ‘Shoes’. Flint asked him if he knew his countryman Pound, and when told he had never heard of him, replied, ‘Well, if you ever meet him, you won’t be foolish enough to say that to his face.’⁴⁴ Frost’s first volume of poetry, A Boy’s Will, was not yet published, though it had been accepted by a London publisher, David Nutt; Flint promised to review it, and also encouraged him to seek out Pound as a useful contact in the literary world. Frost, for his part, was very taken with Flint, and bought a copy of In the Net of the Stars, writing to Flint in warm praise of the poems a few days later and later telling him he had been ‘childishly happy in being allowed to make one for a moment in a company in which I hadn’t to be ashamed of having written verse. Perhaps it will help you understand my state of mind if I tell you that I have lived for the most part in villages where it were better that a millstone were hanged about your neck than that you should own yourself a minor poet.’⁴⁵ How true this was one can’t be sure, as Frost was a great mythologiser of his own life, but given the painful lack of interest in the arts in the world in which the young Flint had grown up, his sympathy was instantly engaged. Frost’s poems were about the New England countryside, and Flint’s about the London streets, Frost used rhymed stanzas, though in very flexible ways, and Flint vers libre, but there was much in common in their conversational tone, their interest in the quotidian life and their belief in the importance of cadence in verse, although they approached it very differently. Frost and Flint became good friends for a while, and even thought of writing a joint book on metre and cadence. Lawrance Thompson, in his lengthy biography of Frost, in which Frost is presented as thoroughly disagreeable, suggests he was to some extent making use of Flint as a handy contact, but his letters hardly bear that out.

Flint, with the best of intentions, encouraged Pound to take an interest in Frost, and Pound gave him one of his visiting cards to send to Frost, writing on it the message, ‘At home – sometimes’.⁴⁶ Frost thought this insultingly casual, but after a month or so grudgingly went to Church Walk to visit Pound, who rebuked him for taking so long to call, and instantly marched him to David Nutt’s office to collect an advance copy of Frost’s book. On their return, Pound began to read it, expressing his admiration in what Frost felt – or said he felt – were pompous and patronising terms. Frost took the opportunity to fill in the background to his poems of country life by telling Pound quite inaccurate tales about the ill-treatment and harsh financial hardship his family had inflicted on him because he was a poet, and perhaps more accurately about his difficulties in finding magazine editors who would publish his work. Pound sent him home without his book but with a promise that he would review it. He wrote to Alice Corbin Henderson, ‘Have just discovered another Amur’kn. VURRY Amur’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace’, and told Monroe it was their ‘second scoop’ – the first being Tagore – remarkable in that he had ‘only found the man by accident’.⁴⁷ As Frost himself would later point out, it had in fact been Flint who discovered him, not Pound, and he would tell Flint that tolerating such claims was another of the ways in which he allowed Pound to exploit him. Flint loyally tried to defend Pound, saying, ‘You know I think his bark is much worse than his bite … and that much that seems offensive to us externally is merely external and a kind of outer defense – a mask.’⁴⁸ It was a perceptive and compassionate comment, and goes a long way to explaining why Flint was so patient for so long under Pound’s high-handedness.

Frost was irritated by the review, which described his work as a ‘little raw’ and ‘simple’, though also as ‘without sham and … affectation’, and was unreasonably indignant that Pound repeated the story he had told him about his grandfather’s disinheriting him because he was ‘a useless poet instead of a money getter’. What upset him most, however, was that Pound had seized the opportunity to abuse American editors for not accepting his poetry. He feared it would make it harder for him to make his way in the literary world in the States if he were associated with Pound’s vendetta against them. Yet he was also seriously affronted, because, in order to explain the value of folk poetry, which Pound took Frost’s to be, he told a story he had heard from Joseph Campbell, one he would repeat in other contexts, about an Irish peasant Campbell had met on ‘a desolate waste of bogs’, who when asked if he found life there dull replied ‘Faith, ye can sit on a midden and dream stars’.⁴⁹ Frost thought this shockingly vulgar, and bridled at the comparison between himself and an Irish peasant, as well as between a bog and his farm. Frost’s horrified reaction to Campbell’s delightful story might seem to prove that Pound was right to think Frost lacked urban sophistication, but Frost was surely right that Pound misunderstood the subtlety and craftsmanship of his work. He was indignant that Pound saw him as a naïve, literary Douanier Rousseau, and by July was complaining that Pound was trying to bully him into writing vers libre; he sent Flint a free verse poem attacking Pound, suggesting he was not so much interested in helping Frost’s reputation as a poet as his own as a poet-maker.⁵⁰ Pound’s estimate of Frost’s worth was more genuine than he suggests, but it’s true the terms in which he described his discovery of Frost to Harriet – ‘our second scoop’ – echoed the language of the commercial newspaper press, out entirely for their own interests. Many years later Frost would refer to Pound’s ‘selfish generosity’; in helping new poets, he noted, Pound was also helping himself.⁵¹

Frost was right: Pound was immeasurably generous in many instances, but he was pursuing his own agenda too. He wanted to wield power and influence in the literary world, and was baffled when his efforts were unappreciated. Pound believed his disinterested goal was the promotion of the best literature, which would in turn produce a better society. If he were at times also aware that he was personally ambitious, it does not seem to have struck him that disinterestedness and ambition might clash. Given his belief in the absolute rightness of his judgements, perhaps there did not appear to him to be a problem. Nor did he realise – and this would be true of several of his fellow-imagists – that those whose careers he helped to launch, grateful though they might be in the beginning, would tire after a while of being treated like pupils and followers, subservient paragraphs in the narrative of Pound’s artistic achievements. Yet Pound was often genuinely attached to those he tried to help, and pained when they turned against him; he was like an autocratic father, who cannot understand why his much-loved children reject him when everything he has done, he is convinced, has been for their own good.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story of Pound’s dealings with Frost is what it reveals about Flint’s attitude at this period. Frost says in one letter to Flint that ‘you take Ezra sadly, and I angrily.’⁵² Pound was frequently far from tactful in his dealings with Flint, and Flint’s feelings were often bruised. Yet there is no evidence that Flint said anything to Pound at this stage about the way that Pound had reinvented himself as an advocate of French poetry without ever acknowledging how much he had learnt from Flint, and it would only emerge much later that Flint resented the way Pound had taken up the ideas and theories about poetry that he and Hulme had propounded earlier, and drawn on them for his own poetic doctrines, once more, he would come to feel, without due acknowledgement. For now, he was happy for Pound to be the promoter of the new poetry, a role for which he, unlike the diffident Flint, was so extraordinarily well fitted.