II

IN THE EARLY months of 1914, Pound was writing with manic energy, appearing in the Egoist not only as himself, chiefly now as an art critic, but in numerous other guises as well, as Ferrex and Porrex (a reference to Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, possibly something else he had been reading with Yeats), Bastien von Helmholtz and his brother Baptiste, and even, parodying Ford, as Hermann Karl Georg Jesus Maria. He was contributing reviews and articles to Poetry, and published some poetry in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama. Yeats had left for another American tour, on which Harriet Monroe gave a dinner for him on behalf of Poetry. He made a speech at the dinner, which was reported in the magazine, and which included a tribute to Pound, though as ever it was not unequivocal. Speaking of the Rhymers, Yeats had said: ‘We rebelled against rhetoric, and now there is a group of younger poets who dare to call us rhetorical. When I returned to London from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound. Much of his work is experimental; his work will come slowly, he will make many an experiment before he comes into his own.’²⁴ Yeats remained less sure of Pound’s skills as a creator than as an editor, though he went on to read to the dinner guests two of Pound’s poems that he said had ‘permanent value’, ‘The Ballad of the Goodly Fere’ and ‘The Return’, describing the latter as ‘the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form’. Yeats had, on the other hand, serious reservations about many of the satires Pound was now producing, to say nothing of the tone of his criticism, and was highly disturbed, Pound told Harriet, by his increasingly ‘unrestrained language’.²⁵

In early 1914, Pound briefly considered the possibility of taking a job in China; Homer had been offered a job in Peking by a Chinese official named F.T. Sung, whom Pound met in London, and who apparently was hopeful of finding a job for Pound as well. Nothing in the end came of it, though he left Pound with the manuscript of a sober assessment of the problems of contemporary China, which, although quite unlike anything else that appeared there, Pound published in the Egoist as ‘The Causes and Remedies of the Poverty of China’, with a prefatory note saying ‘At a time when China has replaced Greece in the intellectual life of so many occidentals, it is interesting to see in what way the occidental ideas are percolating into the orient’.²⁶ Pound decided to settle his future another way. The day before he had appeared at the Quest Society with Hulme and Lewis, he wrote to Dorothy: ‘Dearest, I perceive this week will be unduly elongated. I think you’d better perhaps marry me and live in one more room than the dryad.’²⁷ Surprisingly, despite Pound’s evermore ostentatious performance as avant-garde poet, the Shakespears finally agreed. ‘Consent appears to be given – with some reluctance,’ Dorothy reported some three weeks later.²⁸ Pound’s income was not noticeably better than it had been eighteen months earlier when Olivia had thought the match impossible, but perhaps Dorothy had at last convinced them that she would never marry anyone more suitable, and Pound was their only hope of getting her off their hands. He had indeed been hovering round her for so long that Olivia’s fear that gossip about them as a pair would spread may by now have proved only too true. All his close friends knew – H.D., Aldington, Walter, possibly Ford – and others, like Manning, had guessed: it is very unlikely they were all discreet. Yet Eva Fowler, who saw them regularly, was astounded: ‘Eva can understand how you might fall in love with me,’ Pound reported, ‘but – – – marry me – – – well she might have done it herself, but she wouldn’t have let anybody belonging to her attempt it.’²⁹ Olivia and Yeats must have talked over the possibility of the match, and Yeats may well have helped to sway Olivia in Pound’s favour. Certainly when it was announced he was delighted.

Dorothy’s devotion to Pound – in spite of their brief quarrel the previous June – was deep, and for the most part unquestioning. No one doubted that she was marrying him for love. Pound’s motives for marrying her, on the other hand, were under suspicion from the start. Frederic Manning’s first reaction was, he told Fairfax (they were both put out), that Pound was marrying her for her money (‘he is very practical,’ he had commented gloomily).³⁰ Dorothy’s allowance of £150 a year was less than H.D.’s, and there must have been plenty of wealthier potential brides, so that seems a most unlikely explanation. It has also been suggested, more plausibly, that Pound saw himself marrying into the literary aristocracy, Dorothy being, if not quite a relation, closely connected with Yeats. Humphrey Carpenter thinks that Pound was spurred on by opposition, and that he married Dorothy precisely because her parents tried so hard to prevent it. But H.D.’s parents had been almost equally opposed, without the same result. Possibly all those reasons were there somewhere, even if not consciously. But a purely cynical explanation of the marriage would not account for the fact that Pound in one way at least treated his relationship with Dorothy quite differently from any of his many others. He kept Dorothy’s letters. H.D., Viola Baxter, Mary Moore, his parents, Margaret Cravens – he burnt all their letters, as he told Margaret Cravens, once he had read them, a kind of scorched earth policy in his emotional life. That in Dorothy’s case the letters were preserved has to mean something.

Dorothy was of course, as Yeats told Pound’s father, clever as well as beautiful, and when he wrote to Pound himself he mentioned the cleverness again – ‘You will have a beautiful & clever wife & that is what few men get’.³¹ Pound already relied on Dorothy to be the first critic of most of his poetry, and paid attention to her often shrewd advice. Her letters show her to be full of intellectual curiosity, extremely well read, and always up to date with the arts. Pound’s enthusiasm for China undoubtedly owed something to her appreciation of Far Eastern art, and her interest in painting was at least one of the influences leading him to pay serious attention to the visual arts. She was a gifted painter (he had put several of her pictures up in Church Walk), but was always self-deprecating about herself and her talents; she had written to Pound in 1912, when he was working in the Bibliothèque Nationale in preparation for his walking tour: ‘You can be scholarly: I’ll be surface: I can’t be anything else! But nevertheless I am painting quite half-seriously. And I love it very much.’³² She appears to have been happy to think of herself as an amateur, never questioning the fact that of the two of them, Pound was the artist who counted; she was a helpmeet.³³ Pound liked his women intelligent as well as beautiful, but mainly so that they could be good disciples, and his model of marriage was certainly that the woman’s role was to nurture the man – though as far as nurturing on the literal level was concerned, he was quite emancipated – just as well, as Dorothy, who was not of the social class that learnt to cook, made it a condition of marriage that she should not be required to do so; he was a very good cook.³⁴

Until their marriage, Pound’s relationship with Dorothy had been remarkably troubadour-like. She was guarded closely by her family, a lady in a tower to whom her lover could only sing, in a way none other of Pound’s attachments had been, however much his poems might suggest it. No doubt the romance of that appealed to him, though it is not perhaps a good basis for a happy marriage, and possibly he should have worried more about the conventionality that had led her to heed her family’s prohibitions for so long. It may have been significant that Dorothy’s looks were not unlike Pound’s mother’s – the same regular features, high forehead and determined chin; and, like his mother, Dorothy had a great air of propriety. Iris Barry, who as a hopeful writer was given encouragement by Pound a couple of years later, wrote of Dorothy that she ‘had always the air of a young Victorian lady out skating’.³⁵ Other people refer to her coolness or passivity. Pound himself, if Asphodel is to be believed, was commenting on Dorothy’s inhibitions even before their marriage. She had inherited her gift for painting from her father, though he had given it up in early life, and she took after him, not her mother, both in features and personality. Like Hope, John Harwood writes, she was ‘reserved, correct and silent’.³⁶ Yet for all his noisy flamboyance, Pound was not much better at speaking of his own emotional life than she was, even if he were unstoppable on his poetic theories.

As I mentioned earlier, Humphrey Carpenter suggests Pound could well have been a virgin when he married. He bases this partly on a poem Pound published three years later about one Mr Hecatomb Styrax who ‘has married at the age of 28,/ He being at that age a virgin’, pointing out that Pound married at twenty-eight.³⁷The poem, of course, proves nothing, but it is not impossible; respectable young American men at that period were brought up to be cautious about sexual experience. Eliot appears to have been a virgin when he married; John Gould Fletcher was a virgin when he started to live with Daisy. While Pound in his ‘Contemporania’ enjoyed shocking his readers by sexual references, his delight in provoking such a reaction has something of the naughty schoolboy about it, suggesting perhaps that lack of sexual experience rather than abundance lies behind it. Another of his poems, ‘The Temperaments’, precisely makes the point that talking about sex is no guide as to sexual behaviour. Carpenter goes on to suggest that sexually the marriage was not a success, indeed he hints it was unconsummated, as they appear to have slept in separate rooms, and, even after they had been married ten years, H.D. would note that Dorothy had not been ‘awakened’.³⁸ A biography of Dorothy is in preparation, compiled from her voluminous papers, which may shed more light on the marriage. Certainly Dorothy took her role as aid to the great poet very seriously, whatever reservations she came to have about the man. Of course, Dorothy had grown up with parents who had had, Olivia told Yeats, no sexual relations since her conception. It is possible that Pound, an only child in an era when contraception was not practised by the respectable, had done the same. He may well have been attracted by someone who shared some of his fears of emotion, loss of control, the piercing of the mask. Much later, in the 1930s, according to Carpenter, Pound said to a friend: ‘I fell in love with a beautiful picture that never came alive.’³⁹ This suggests that Pound thought Dorothy was the problem in the marriage, but it was doubtless more complicated than that; Pound’s comment ominously echoes H.D.’s complaint in Her that George Lowndes wants to marry a picture out of the Renaissance art book, not a real woman.

If Dorothy’s resemblance to his mother was an unconscious draw for Pound, he never, of course, consciously thought her like his mother, or certainly not before marriage; the notion would have horrified him. Dorothy asked him about his mother a few weeks before the wedding – quite late on, one would have thought – because her curiosity was aroused by Isabel’s handwriting in a letter she had received welcoming her as a daughter-in-law. Pound replied:

Mother’s handwriting??? New York, born 14th St. & second ave. when it was the thing to be born there, porched house, 23rd st, also at the proper time. Uncle’s estate on Hudson, reckless rider. Married wild H.L.P. & went to a mining town, returned east to domesticity – traditions, irony, no knowledge of french literature in the original … Early painting lessons, penchant for the pretty – horror of all realism in art. Belief in the pleasant. Would like, or would have liked – to see me in the Diplomatic Corps – ‘Ambassadour to the Ct. of St. James’. Believes that I should be well clothed. Prude if god ever permitted one to exist.⁴⁰

His mother as he construes her here represents all he felt he was fighting, first in American provincialism and later in European bourgeois respectability; or was it that in fighting American provincialism and European respectability he was really fighting his mother? Something of both. And, of course, where Dorothy did differ from his mother was in her generally ready acceptance of avant-garde and non-realist art, though in March 1914 she was still suspicious of Pound’s new alliance with Lewis; she wrote to Pound, ‘I am sure BLAST will be horrible. I WON’T have a W. Lewis Lobster picture, anyway. I think they are filthy.’⁴¹ In the event, however, she would be loyally supportive, and was won round to, and even emulated, Lewis’ geometric style of drawing.

The first Pound’s parents had known of the wedding was a casual message in a letter to his father about the parodies of his poems which Aldington had published in the Egoist: ‘I suppose I shall get married in April, but you needn’t mention the matter. There will be no fuss … You needn’t mention the matter to Yeats. I shall write to him in due course.’⁴² Pound’s parents must have felt very relieved that at least this was going to be somewhat more orthodox than the elopement he had been planning fifteen months earlier, and they soon began mentioning it, if not to Yeats at least to their relations, because letters and presents began to arrive from the States. The warm praise of Dorothy that Yeats sent them must have been immensely reassuring. Homer wrote to Pound to ask for more information about the family and was told: ‘Mr Shakespear is “a solicitor” that’d be a “lawyer” in the U.S. Both families are “anglo-indian” (NO, not half breeds.).’ With that he had to be content. Isabel sent some jewellery to Dorothy. ‘Dorothy seems pleased with the necklaces,’ Pound wrote, ‘and wore the coral the same evening to the new Shaw play’; her gift of a cross was rather less welcome: ‘Christianity and all that thereto appertains is in England so detestable that I don’t suppose she will ever use what our dear friend Lower termed “the symbol of your faith”’.⁴³

Christianity was rather a sore subject for Pound at this point: the couple were married at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, the church of the offending bells, but only after a brief battle between Pound and Hope Shakespear. Pound had written to him shortly after the reluctant consent was given, on hearing Hope had suggested a church service, to say he would prefer ‘the simple and dignified service at the Registry’. He had nothing against Christ, he explained: ‘I can not find any trace of Christ’s having spoken against the greek gods. He objected, accepting the given documents, to Judaism which is the core of modern “Christianity” … I should no more give up my faith in Christ than I should give up my faith in Helios or my respect for the teachings of Confucius.’ Pound explained that he counted himself ‘much more a priest’ than most clergymen, adding: ‘It would be intolerable for instance to be put through a religious ceremony by an atheist like Galton, or by a cad like the bishop of London, who are fair examples of the upper sort of clergy’.⁴⁴ Considering Galton was an old family friend, this was, even by Pound’s standards, very tactless, but in any case the whole drift of the argument made no sense whatsoever to Hope. He sent Pound a somewhat bewildered, unhappy but dignified reply, telling him that:

I shall in no way try to force my views upon her, & if she conscientiously believes it is not right for her to take her vows in a Church I shall say no more of it tho’ it will be more distressing to me than perhaps you can understand.

I am a man of few words & keep my views on religious matters between myself & God and it pains me to have to write on such matters.⁴⁵

In a section that he eventually deleted he pointed out that the situation had arisen not because he had gone out of his way to insist on their being married in church, but because it had never occurred to him that anything else would happen. ‘Nothing was said as to her wishing to be married otherwise than in the manner in which people in her station in life are usually married’, a small reminder to Pound that he was perhaps not quite of the same station.⁴⁶ Perhaps Hope crossed that out because he felt the comment too pointed. The couple gave in: one suspects Dorothy took Pound to task quite severely. There is no record of Olivia’s view. Olivia loathed Christianity, and claimed either to be Buddhist or agnostic, but she believed in the conventions if not in Christ. She was probably on Hope’s side.

The marital home with ‘one more room than the dryad’ that Pound had proposed was the flat across the corridor from the Aldingtons’. Some people might have wanted more privacy when they started married life, but not Pound. He had spent a good deal of time with the Aldingtons over the last two years or so while his access to Dorothy was limited, and it appeared he had no intention of changing his bachelor ways. Dorothy in her letters to Pound had mentioned going to see the Aldingtons several times since their marriage, and clearly liked them very much, particularly H.D., and she seems to have had no objection to being so near them. Dorothy and Pound would not spend much of their married life à deux. In ‘Patria Mia’ Pound had commented that in America, ‘Our family bond is so slight that we collect another family, not bound to us by blood, but by temperament’, and Pound always liked a group of friends, or even better, disciples, around.⁴⁷ He had not mentioned to the Aldingtons that he was moving in, and H.D. recalled being quite taken aback. ‘It was so near,’ was her startled comment.⁴⁸ One day shortly before the wedding she had noticed the door to the flat immediately opposite theirs was open, and saw Ezra inside. He told her he was looking for a place where he could fence with Yeats. At the time of Pound’s marriage, the Aldingtons were out of London, having a holiday at Hindhead, and when they returned Pound and Dorothy were on their honeymoon at Stone Cottage – on which Pound spent his time working on Noh plays – so they may not have found out about their new neighbours for a while. Pound’s flat had three rooms; in the largest, which was very dark, he cooked; in the smallest, lighter and memorably triangular in shape, he worked and entertained. Before he was married he had written home to his mother asking for recipes for pancakes, waffles, cream soups and various fries, and said when they came to visit they must bring an American ice-cream maker. Mrs Langley, his landlady at Church Walk, would, he said, continue to look after him. Ford bought them some ‘High Wycombe’ chairs as a wedding present – perhaps in memory of the one Pound had broken at South Lodge – and May Sinclair gave them an armchair when she moved to St John’s Wood shortly before the wedding, but some of his furniture Pound actually made himself. Yeats gave him money, with which he bought his most treasured item, a clavichord, made by Arnold Dolmetsch, whom Pound got to know later that year, and who had earlier made Florence Farr her psaltery. The clavichord was commissioned in October 1914 after Pound had heard Dolmetsch play his own instruments, and Dolmetsch’s enthusiasm for baroque music would exercise a considerable influence on Pound in the years to come.

Before they married, Pound had written to Dorothy in late March to say with some satisfaction ‘“Anthologie des Imagistes” arrives from U.S.A. so that’s all right’.⁴⁹ English publication followed in April, when it was brought out by Harold Monro, who would a few months later publish the infinitely more profitable Georgian Poetry 1913–14. Several of the purchasers of the English edition returned their copies of Des Imagistes and demanded their money back, presumably on the grounds that it was not in fact poetry. None of the contributors appear to have been at all disturbed by this. By now, artists in any medium who were attempting something ‘modern’ would feel they had failed if they were not greeted with some public outrage, and the imagists did get a certain amount of coverage in the press. Aldington wrote with some excitement to Pound, on his honeymoon at Stone Cottage, to say:

You have seen the reviews of the Imagistes? New Age first – malignant squelch. Herald next; working man’s natural bewilderment at first being introduced to a gentleman. Morning Post says we are a ‘new Via Lactea’, ‘this slim gracious volume’ etcet. Thomas in New Weekly says we are like a marble column and that Flint is the ivy about our base. Fat Ford in the Outlook says he feels like a gargoyle in the midst of the Elgin Marbles … Apropos, Remy says we are ‘des poétes [sic] assez curiex [sic]’ and that he has ‘gouté’ us ‘avec plaisir’.⁵⁰

It was the first time either he or H.D. had had their poetry appear in a book, and it gave them considerable pleasure. Aldington was somewhat critical of Pound’s method of ‘just call[ing] on his friends’, regardless of any unity of poetic approach, though Pound insisted in an interview in the Daily News and Leader on 18 March that all the contributors agreed in avoiding the ‘cake-icing on the top of poetry’, i.e. ‘useless adjectives’ and ‘unnecessary similes’.⁵¹ Yet when Aldington reviewed the book for the Egoist later in the year he very pointedly commented on the fact that the poems of five of the contributors, ‘Mr Cournos, Mr Upward, Mr Hueffer, Mr Joyce and Mr Cannell’, though he had no objection to them in themselves, were not, strictly speaking, ‘Imagiste’.⁵² Of these five, the only one who was not Pound’s friend was Joyce, and he had been recommended by Pound’s friend Yeats. Originally, Aldington and H.D. had both been opposed to the inclusion of Amy Lowell. They only knew her first book of poems, and the still fairly traditional poems that had appeared in Poetry in July 1913, and had thought them insipid and conventional, ‘fluid, fruity, facile stuff’, as Aldington put it.⁵³ One guesses they suspected Pound was only including her because of her money. When they saw her contribution, ‘In the Garden’, however, they agreed it was imagistic, and a good poem. The other contributors, besides Pound himself, of course, were Flint, Aldington, H.D. and William Carlos Williams. Aldington had ten poems in the collection, more than anyone else, perhaps what gave Fletcher the idea that he was the central figure; there were six by Pound, ‘Δρια’, ‘The Return’, and the ‘three and a half’ Chinese poems; H.D. had five, much of her entire published oeuvre at that point; Flint five also, including the two that remained his best known, ‘London’ and ‘The Swan’; Allen Upward contributed a selection of his prose poems from ‘Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar’, whilst the others were represented by one poem each. In Aldington’s review, he singles out H.D.’s poems as the best – ‘like nicely carved marble … as good a specimen of Imagism as can be found. Hard, direct treatment, absolutely personal rhythm, few and expressive adjectives, no inversion, and a keen emotion presented objectively’.⁵⁴ For him, as for Pound, H.D. remained the exemplary imagist.

The various imagist contributors to the anthology provided between them most of the poems published in the Egoist during the first half of 1914, generally, one might note, poems that had had their first (paid) publication in Poetry. Aldington, H.D., Flint, Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams (the last with a poem about some strikes in Paterson, an early attempt at the subject of his later modernist epic based on the town) all appeared. Amy Lowell’s contribution, five new vers libre poems in the February issue, put her conversion to imagism beyond doubt. In addition, there were poems by Fletcher and D.H. Lawrence, who would both later appear in the next three imagist anthologies. Pound was still vigorously promoting the imagiste cause, and himself as its leader, though since his association with Lewis and the Rebel Art Centre he was beginning to see it in rather different terms. In the meantime, another journal that would publish the imagists’ work was starting up in Chicago. This was the Little Review, edited by a young journalist, Margaret Anderson, then twenty-one, who had been working as a reviewer for Floyd Dell, now literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post and very supportive of the project. Once she thought of the idea, she recounts in her memoir, ‘To me it was already an accomplished fact. I began announcing to everyone that I was about to publish the most interesting magazine that had ever been launched. They found me vague as to why it was going to be so interesting, nebulous as to how it was going to be published, unconcerned about the necessary money, optimistic about manuscripts. Where any sane person would have explained that, sensing the modern literary movement which was about to declare itself, a review to sponsor it was a logical necessity, I only accused them of being unimaginative because they couldn’t follow my élan.’⁵⁵ Her confidence paid off; she found someone to provide funding, albeit not much, and paying contributors was an impossibility, but the journal was launched that March, and would indeed, as she suggests, help ‘the modern literary movement … declare itself’.