III

FLETCHER, THAT OTHER uneasy recipient of Pound’s support, also often took him angrily, but his outburst over the articles on French poetry, and indeed his more surprising reconciliation, may have owed something to the fact that his personal life was in a turbulent state at that period. In the summer of 1913, Fletcher was still a nervous North American virgin, fearful of female sexuality. He had found his visits to Paris particularly disturbing, where the existence of sexual activity and indeed pleasure was so much harder to avoid than in Boston or Little Rock. He writes in his autobiography that when he first came to Europe he invited his sister to join him for a while in order ‘to postpone the hour when I would fall victim to some unknown woman’. ‘Victim’ is a telling word: Fletcher saw women as predatory and dangerous. On the visit to Paris when he met Pound, he had contemplated the possibility of ‘physical fulfilment’, something he was beginning to feel was almost de rigueur for a modern poet, but shrank away once more, recording with relief that there was ‘so much for me to see and do, so many impressions crowding into my mind, that I put from me, during the entire time of my stay, all thought of sexual adventure. I was in love now, not with a woman, but with Paris, that combination of masculine rationality and of the eternally feminine which the French genius had conceived.’⁵³

It was in England that Fletcher would succumb. He was not an unattractive man, indeed, in a melancholy way, quite handsome, and his wealth, although he never boasted of it, was abundantly clear to the general run of impoverished artists that he met. He was, as he feared, spotted, ambushed and eventually captured. He had made the acquaintance of a gifted photographer, Malcolm Arbuthnot, one of those who, like Stieglitz in New York, wanted photography to be considered as an art form, and who later exhibited with the Vorticists. Arbuthnot had gone for a while to Liverpool, and invited Fletcher there to speak at the opening of a Post-Impressionist exhibition that he had organised. Fletcher met Arbuthnot’s wife Daisy, about ten years older than himself, a forceful and striking looking woman, who took Fletcher for a walk by the Mersey, and quite suddenly kissed him. Arbuthnot, as Daisy knew, had another relationship, but whether she already saw Fletcher as a possible alternative to her unfaithful husband, or perhaps felt she might re-engage Arbuthnot’s interest if he knew he had a rival, one cannot tell. Whatever Daisy had in mind, Fletcher was appalled and he left as soon as possible, deciding once again that life in Paris would be a sounder idea. He went back to France for a couple of weeks, but by mid-September he was back, and seeing Daisy again. Nervously, he confessed all to Arbuthnot, who said immediately, to Fletcher’s mixed pleasure and alarm, that he had no objection to Fletcher having a relationship with Daisy, and indeed would be happy to divorce her. Fletcher as usual fluctuated between extremes of emotion, writing on one occasion to his sisters, ‘I am at this moment in Paradise’ and on another ‘My doom is sealed’.⁵⁴ Daisy at first resisted the divorce, but appears to have had no intention of letting Fletcher escape. In March 1914 he came to a financial agreement with Arbuthnot. To enable Arbuthnot to set up a photographic studio in London, Fletcher would agree to make over a third of his income to Daisy and her two children for the next three years, and he would move into Daisy’s eleven-bedroom Sydenham house, officially as her lodger. He wrote in his journal that he was burdened with ‘a woman whom I must support for three years and whom I do not want’.⁵⁵ Many years later he would write to a friend, ‘My own sexual state has been curiously morbid and abnormal all my life’; judging from his journal, simultaneous desire and revulsion appear to have marked his feelings towards her.⁵⁶ Yet, though their relationship would always be tempestuous, and they seem to have quarrelled most of the time, something about Daisy held him. He had now a split existence: a stormy emotional life in the quiet respectability of Sydenham, and a rather more restful one in Soho cafés and restaurants mixing with avant-garde poets and artists, none of whom knew about his unorthodox domestic arrangements.

The articles on contemporary French poetry that had caused Fletcher such ire had continued in the New Age until mid-October 1913, and Pound also published a brief overview of the same topic in the October Poetry. The articles covered a range of poets including Vildrac, Francis Jammes, Rémy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Corbière and Rimbaud. Pound had started with zest, claiming in one of the early instalments, in an idea he possibly took from Yeats, that: ‘For the best part of a thousand years English poets have gone to school to the French, or one might as well say that there were never any English poets until they began to study the French … The history of English poetic glory is a history of successful steals from the French.’⁵⁷ By the final instalment, actually written in early September, his zeal for French poetry was already flagging. There were, he admitted, many other young French poets, but they would ‘doubtless receive fitting recognition at the hands of Mr Flint’; he had merely, he said, wanted ‘to write in conversational tone of my personal adventure; of such French poetry of today as had seemed of interest to one as easily bored as I am’.⁵⁸ As T. S. Eliot was to say of a slightly later article Pound wrote on French poetry, the series read ‘like the report of a tourist in French poetry, rather than like the conclusions of a reader who has digested the matter slowly and over a long period of time’.⁵⁹ There is no doubt the Parisians had helped Pound find his own vers libre form and many of the precepts included in ‘A Few Don’ts’, and he had certainly learnt from the French poets what Flint would describe as a stratégie littéraire; in his case, how to be the leader of an avant-garde school. But for now it was, one suspects, the chutzpah of the sardonic young poets in the basement of the Café du Châtelet that had taken his fancy rather than anything they produced. What had really captured his interest that month were some ‘chinese things’ in the September Poetry, which, he told Dorothy, ‘were worth the price of admission’.⁶⁰ It was to China that he would now turn.

Dorothy herself was taking her study of Chinese culture increasingly seriously. As well as her interest in the art, she was now applying herself to the language. She had begun to teach herself Chinese in 1901, at the age of fifteen, and she now took it up again, as Pound mentions in a letter to Williams in December 1913.⁶¹ By January 1914 she decided to get a ticket for the British Museum Reading Room so she could study Chinese further, having obviously overcome the inhibitions about going there which had so troubled her when she had been copying out Cavalcanti four years earlier. Pound’s hopes for enlightenment from India had now ebbed away, but he still felt he needed to go beyond Europe. Tagore had returned to India in late August 1913, and Pound had attended the farewell dinner. He still liked Tagore personally, but when he said that autumn in a review of Tagore’s second book of poems in English that ‘Mr Tagore has come and gone’, the phrase perhaps indicated more than Tagore’s return home. On the surface Pound’s praise was still strong, though he was very critical of the way Tagore had been received. ‘If his entourage has presented him,’ he wrote crossly, ‘as a religious teacher rather than an artist, it is much to be lamented … Why the good people of this island are unable to honour a fine artist as such; why they are incapable … of devising for his honour any better device than that of wrapping his life in cotton wool and parading that about with the effigy of a sanctimonious moralist, remains and will remain with me an unsolvable mystery’. Yet, although Pound claimed that there were verses of ‘pure Imagisme’ in Tagore’s ‘Theocritan idylls’, Tagore was for him now simply an example of world literature, no longer a pre-eminent one.⁶² Pound’s enthusiasm for Tagore had lasted less than a year, dampened already after six months by his growing popularity as a religious poet, not least, to Pound’s irritation, with his own mother. (It may have been of her he was thinking when he wrote in 1917 that Tagore had ‘relapsed into religion and optimism, and was boomed by the pious non-conformists’.)⁶³ Yet he was certainly delighted that November when Tagore won the Nobel Prize, telling his father he was ‘chortling’ with delight over it, and that he and Yeats had had much ‘gay & unhallowed mirth’ at the discomfiture of Gosse and others who had refused to elect Tagore to the Academic Committee.⁶⁴ But although he commented on how good the news would be for the reform party in India, an intriguing indication either that anti-imperialism had been part of his support for Tagore, or that he had learnt to be anti-imperialistic through him, poetically and intellectually his interest was moving from India to China.

The Chinese ‘things’ in Poetry were by Allen Upward, an eccentric polymath and traveller aged fifty, with whom Pound struck up a friendship that summer. Upward and Yeats had known each other in the past; they had even attempted to communicate telepathically across the Atlantic, though sadly if predictably they failed, but Pound met him either through the New Age, or the New Freewoman, with both of which Upward was closely connected. Upward was to be an important influence, though to Pound’s lasting indignation his ideas were not taken seriously by many others. Like Edmund Gosse, he was the son of Plymouth Brethren who escaped into free-thought and the intellectual life in adulthood, though, unlike Gosse, he always remained on the radical fringes. He had trained as a barrister, but only practised when short of funds, preferring to be a thorn in the side of the governing classes, producing journalism attacking the great and the good for their oppression of the people’s rights, and supporting nationalist movements in Ireland and elsewhere. In about 1900, he met the poet Lancelot Cranmer Byng, who introduced him to Chinese poetry and philosophy, which became one of his main passions; together they established a printing house which they called the Orient Press and launched a series of translations from the Chinese called ‘The Wisdom of the East’. He and Cranmer Byng also formed an Order of Genius, which, Michael Sheldon says, was ‘for the furtherance of those supremely gifted individuals, like themselves, who felt threatened by the increasing cultural emphasis on mass mediocrity’, a way of thinking about the world to which Pound was already inclined, now reinforced by Upward.⁶⁵ In 1901, Upward went to Nigeria as an official in the Colonial Office there, and was fascinated by the local customs; he was only there for four months before being invalided home, but he felt himself from then on an expert in ‘primitive’ ways, and much more authoritative than armchair anthropologists like Frazer. In 1913, just at the time he met Pound, he published (at his own expense) The Divine Mystery, an anthropological investigation of the development of religion, in which he suggests that Christ was a genius, ‘the ascription of divine fatherhood to Genius [being] a convention of the age’; he also provocatively claimed that those thought of as ‘witch-doctors’ were also people of genius, prefiguring more recent interpretations of the shaman as poet, priest and healer combined, and an idea on which Pound would seize.⁶⁶ Much like Frazer, Upward believed religion to be the prelude to science, though like Pound, but perhaps even more so, his notion of science included every shade of the paranormal and occult investigations of his day. Again like Pound, he had no time for organised Christianity, for which he thought Christ had no responsibility, and he was fiercely hostile to academic philologists, as he made abundantly evident in his 1907 book, The New Word.

Pound reviewed The Divine Mystery enthusiastically in the November New Freewoman, describing it as ‘the most fascinating book on folk-lore that I have ever opened’. It is, he points out, ‘not a mass of theories’, but a ‘history told in a series of vivid and precise illustrations’, in other words, an exemplum of Pound’s method of luminous detail. Upward, he says, ‘has traced the growth of religion and superstition from the primitive type of the thunder-maker to the idea of the messiah. He has traced many of the detestable customs of modern life to their roots in superstition … Mr Upward has left the charming pastoral figure of Jesus in a more acceptable light than have the advocates of “That religion which the Nazarene has been accused of having founded.”’ Though not identical to Pound’s synthesis of pagan, Provençal and general mysticism as a counter-religion to established Christianity, it was near enough, and indeed, Pound said, offered ‘clues and suggestions for the Provençal love customs of the Middle Ages’; Allen Upward, he says approvingly, is ‘one of the devoutest men of the age. He insists that the real God is neither a cad nor an imbecile, and that is, to my mind, a fairly good ground for religion.’⁶⁷

All these different aspects of Upward made him fascinating to Pound, but what was most immediately significant about this new friendship was Upward’s conviction of the importance of Chinese thought. Upward’s poems in Poetry were entitled ‘Scented Leaves – from a Chinese Jar’. Poetry’s note, as usual slightly wrong, said that these were not translations but paraphrases, but Pound wrote to Harriet to tell her that Upward (‘very interesting chap’) had told him ‘that he made it up out of his head, using a certain amount of Chinese reminiscence’.⁶⁸ Their form, in fact, like his own in ‘The Return’ and his ‘“Metro” hokku’, was the fabricated translation, the evocation of another world. Some people might call such works inauthentic, but to Pound they represented imaginative leaps of crucial aesthetic value. But Upward led Pound to actual translations of Chinese poetry as well. Pound visited him in the Isle of Wight in early October, and it appears to have been then that Upward put him on to Herbert Allen Giles’ History of Chinese Literature, from which he would adapt some of his most successful short poems.

Upward also introduced him to the works of Confucius, whose philosophy would hold an increasing appeal for Pound. The very story of Confucius’ life – a great teacher who never obtained much recognition in his own day, but whose ideas were spread by his disciples – must have fitted with Pound’s own idea of the artist struggling for long-awaited recognition. Confucius did not believe in an inherited nobility, but a nobility of the virtuous, just as Pound believed in an aristocracy composed of artists. Like Pound, too, he was deeply religious, whilst being utterly opposed to the way religion was practised in his own day, and he held that it was imperative to use language clearly, just as Pound did. As Pound’s own thought became more reactionary, he would increasingly urge the significance of Confucius’ stress on order, though it has to be said, in an increasingly disorderly way. There are many references to Confucius (or Kung, as he more often calls him) in the Cantos, but Confucius by no means ousted his pagan gods. In Canto 52, Pound asserts that the poles on which his thought turn are ‘KUNG and ELEUSIS’, though it is not always easy to see how he proposed to reconcile Confucian order with Dionysiac ecstasy and the fertility rituals associated with the Eleusinian mysteries.⁶⁹

As Pound told Dorothy, he was now getting ‘orient from all quarters’. He had been to an exhibition of Chinese artefacts, and to a ‘new curious and excellent restaurant chinois’. He was, he told her, ‘stocked up with K’ung fu Tsze [Confucius] and Men Tsze [Mencius], etc. I suppose they’ll keep me calm for a week or so.’ In the event, it appears he did not turn his attention to them until later in the winter: for now he was concentrating on Giles, whose account of Chinese poetics immediately suggested parallels with his own. ‘I find the chinese stuff far more consoling,’ he told Dorothy. ‘There is no long poem in chinese. They hold if a man can’t say what he wants to in 12 lines, he’d better leave it unsaid. THE period was 4th cent. B.C. – Chu Yüan, Imagiste – – – did I tell you all that before???’⁷⁰ Zhaoming Qian points out, in his illuminating study of the influence of Chinese poetry and thought on the work of Pound and Williams, that, for all his enthusiasm, Pound only ever referred to half a dozen of the many poets discussed by Giles, and none later than the T’ang period (618–907 A.D.). He suggests Pound picks out those poets most akin to his imagist aesthetic, like Qu Yuan (Pound’s Chu Yüan), whom he mentions here, and later the T’ang poets Wang Wei and Li Po (also known as Li Bo, and referred to by Pound by his Japanese name Rihaku). Qu Yuan and his followers, according to Giles, ‘indulged in wild and irregular metres which consorted well with their wild irregular thoughts. Their poetry was prose run mad. It was allusive and allegorical to a high degree, and now, but for the commentary, much of it would be quite unintelligible.’⁷¹ (That latter point sounds particularly applicable to the Cantos, to most readers, if not all, inexplicable for much of the time if it were not for the work of commentators.) As Qian suggests, Pound was probably most interested in the ‘wild, irregular metres’, being delighted to discover that the Chinese had their own version of vers libre.

Yet more than Giles’ comments, it was the poems themselves that made the greatest impact on him. Giles’ History consists to a large extent of translations, some as prose and some as poetry, produced largely for the scholarly reader rather than the lover of poetry, but, although they have a slight fin-de-siècle archaism, they are free of the heavy imposition of Victorian forms and diction in earlier translations of Far Eastern verse. Pound immediately set about making his own versions, nearly always tighter and more concise than Giles’ own. He was working, perhaps, on the model of the haiku, only a few years earlier translated in a far more Victorian way than Giles’ Chinese translations, but now presented with such brevity and simplicity. Indeed Pound’s first versions of Giles’ translations appear very much like haiku, for example when he reduced Giles’ 10-line translation of Lady Ban’s ‘Song of Regret’ to a brief three lines. Entitled, ‘Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord’, Pound’s version goes:

O fan of white silk,

clear as frost on the grass-blade,

You also are laid aside.⁷²

This was one of the first he attempted. There would be many more. Pound may have known that Lady Ban had been called the ‘Sappho of China’, and so might have felt this elliptical form especially appropriate for her poem.⁷³ Yet for Pound what was most significant was that these early Chinese poems, like those of Sappho, made it possible for him to achieve a form of poetry in which, as he had put it earlier in the year, ‘an “image” presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. And, as Heaney suggests, what is conveyed so powerfully is again the sense of passing and loss.

Just at the time that Pound was discovering Giles’ work, he made what was perhaps his most significant Oriental contact: ‘Dined on monday,’ he told Dorothy on 2 October, ‘with Sarojini Niadu and Mrs Fenolosa, relict of the writer on chinese art, selector of a lot of Freer’s stuff etc.’⁷⁴ Sarojini Naidu, whom Pound had probably met through Tagore, was a Bengali poet who wrote in English, a Nationalist who would become a supporter of Gandhi. She had published her first book of poems at the age of nineteen, while a student at Girton. She was taken up by Edmund Gosse, who in his introduction to her 1912 book of poetry, The Bird of Time, describes how when he first met her he was shocked by how much she was ‘a mocking bird with a vengeance’, imitating the British Romantics. What the British reader wanted from her, he explained, was ‘some revelation of the heart of India, some sincere penetrating analysis of native passion, of the principles of antique religion and of such mysterious intimations as stirred the soul of the East long before the West had begun to dream that it had a soul’. Naidu duly complied, producing, as Elleke Boehmer points out, poems once more in ‘the tones of the mocking bird with a vengeance’, though this time giving the West the version of the Eastern soul that it wanted.⁷⁵ Her story is reminiscent of Ford’s desire for Lawrence to write about the equally unknown and exotic working class; just that month, in fact, Pound would review Lawrence’s first book of poems, finding only the dialect poems really admirable.

Mary Fenollosa was an American, widow of Ernest Fenollosa, who had died unexpectedly in 1908, at the age of fifty-five, after thirty years of immersion in the culture of the Far East, seventeen of those years being in Japan. His widow was twelve years younger, forty-eight when she met Pound, and had published several novels and some poetry. Fenollosa, a Harvard graduate, had gone to Japan in 1878 to lecture at the University of Tokyo on European philosophy; Japan was anxious to westernise, and his lectures on Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary sociology, and later on Hegel, with their shared assumptions about the inevitability of Western progress, proved very popular, though Fenollosa himself came rapidly to the conclusion that Hegel’s dismissive attitude to the Orient was entirely mistaken. He still thought in terms of a Hegelian synthesis, however, and was convinced that the world needed to incorporate both Western and Eastern traditions. Ironically, the Japanese took much more convincing than he did that Hegel had been wrong about their culture; just at the time when Japanese prints were being taken up by Western artists, traditional Japanese art was being abandoned in Japan in favour of Western modes, a curiously similar situation to that of indigenous art in India, though the West had made its impact in quite a different form. Fenollosa began a compaign for the appreciation of Japanese art both in the West and in Japan itself, persuading the authorities there to reintroduce the brush into schools, where children were being taught to use Western pens and ink. He collected Japanese art himself, some of which he sold to Charles Freer, whose famous collection of Far Eastern art and Whistler paintings he gave to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where Fenollosa, when he returned home in 1890, would take up a post as Head of the Oriental Wing.

In 1895 Fenollosa was divorced by his first wife and married Mary, then thirty, one of his assistants and very beautiful. Divorce in Boston in 1895 was a major scandal; he resigned his job, left Boston never to return, and they went back to Japan. Things had changed while he had been away; so successful had he been in reviving Japan’s pride in its art, that it no longer wanted help with promoting it from a Westerner. He devoted his time now to exploring Japanese Noh plays and Chinese poetry, with the help of several scholars, accumulating information about interpretations, nuances, form and subject-matter. Fenollosa himself knew no Chinese, so with the Chinese he was working at a double remove, but that did not dampen his enthusiasm, and Pound would treat his observations as scriptural truths. The couple returned to New York in 1901, where Fenollosa took up a job at Columbia University, and he began to prepare his manuscripts for publication, a task never completed.

After his death, Mary worked on some of the voluminous notes, translations and incomplete manuscripts he had left, putting together a two-volume work from his research on the visual arts, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, which appeared in 1912, published by Heinemann.⁷⁶ There still existed much more material, and Mary Fenollosa was looking for someone who would edit the manuscripts from those last five years in Japan on the Japanese Noh plays and Chinese poetry. Whether she had sought out Pound for this task, or was just so taken when she met him with his newly sprung passion for Chinese poetry, it was Pound to whom she offered the manuscripts. Many years later Pound would recall that Mary Fenollosa had said ‘that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done. Fenollosa saw what needed to be done but he didn’t have time to finish it.’⁷⁷ Mary Fenollosa promised that when she returned home she would send him the manuscripts. The next major shift in Pound’s literary life was about to begin.