THE DAY AFTER Blast appeared, the London Standard announced a very different invasion: the arrival of Amy Lowell at the Berkeley Hotel. Great Britain’s declaration of war on Germany would come only a month and a day later, though Lowell had no intimation on her arrival of that imminent cataclysm. In the wake of the Archduke’s assassination, which had happened while Amy was still at sea, Austria-Hungary had immediately begun to plan reprisals against Serbia; its close ally, Germany, had the task of making sure that Russia did not mobilise in Serbia’s defence, and that Russia’s ally, France, remained neutral. Russia’s third ally, Britain, was not thought likely to take much interest. Things would not work out to plan, but in the meantime Kaiser Wilhelm left for his annual cruise on 6 July; on the 23rd, Lloyd George assured the House that relations with Germany were at their best for years. The London that greeted Amy was unconcerned. This year she was accompanied by Ada Russell, a maid, and her maroon Pierce-Arrow motor car with a maroon-liveried chauffeur to match. She arrived with letters of introduction to, among others, Thomas Hardy and Mrs Havelock Ellis. The Russian Ballet was back in London, and she and Ada went several times with great excitement; Lowell, like Fletcher – and perhaps influenced by him – immediately decided that The Rite of Spring was a masterpiece. Her main impulse in coming was, however, to meet up again with Pound and reconnect with the imagist movement. She arrived with much-improved credentials as an imagist poet. As well as the five vers libre poems that had appeared in the Egoist in February, she had had another set of eight poems in the April Poetry, only one of which was in a traditional metre, and seven more vers libre would appear in the August Egoist. Her second collection was due out with Macmillan in the USA in September, and a few days after she arrived they agreed to bring out an English edition. Pound had been in touch with her earlier in the year; having given her advice on her poetry, he now turned his attention to her money, urging her to take over the Egoist, whose American correspondent she appears to have suggested earlier she would like to become. Pound gave her a quite erroneously rosy picture of its finances – he may well have honestly believed it was doing better than it was – and urged her to think of paying contributors and selling in America, possibly installing himself and Ford as paid staff. ‘My flair,’ he added, ‘is also at the service of anybody. That may be a drawback.’93
That was in mid-March, but a week later he had written to say that the Egoist had had an anonymous donation of £250 (it was of course from Harriet Shaw Weaver) and so was not available for takeover. Dora Marsden, who disliked the patrician, capitalist Lowell intensely, was most relieved. When she had heard of Pound’s negotiations, she wrote to Weaver to say she feared that ‘The Egoist spark of intelligence’ would ‘be extinguished under Miss Lowell’s respectable bulk’.94 It was at that point that she had begged Weaver to take over the editorship, while she herself would remain as a contributing editor, still writing her ‘Views and Comment’ and other articles. Pound, however, now suggested Lowell set up a quarterly, to be staffed by himself, Ford, Joyce, Lawrence and Flint on, as he put it ‘this side’, and by herself and anyone she liked on the other.95 (Had Pound consulted any of his suggested collaborators? Unlikely, but the mention of Flint shows he still thought highly of him.) Amy did not bite, though she did send him a wedding present; how large is not recorded. According to a letter she wrote to Monroe that September, Pound came to see her as soon as she arrived in London, wanting her to take over and guarantee the Mercure de France with himself as a salaried editor. Amy did not reject the idea out of hand, but having worked out the minimum cost as $5,000 a year, decided she could not afford it. Pound did not believe her, and it must be true that, had she chosen to, she could have found the money – fewer sheep-dogs, fewer cigars, fewer dinner parties, fewer private theatricals, staying somewhere less grand than the suite at the Berkeley, a smaller car, only one chauffeur – there were all kinds of minor economies she could have made which would certainly have released the necessary sum, but such a notion was inconceivable to her. She felt Pound exaggerated her wealth: ‘Like many people of no income,’ she said to Harriet, ‘Ezra does not know the difference between thousands and millions, and thinks that anyone who knows where to look for next week’s dinners, is a millionaire, and therefore lost his temper with me completely, although he never told me why, and he accused me of being unwilling to give money towards art.’96
Amy was not used to people losing their temper with her, and she felt maligned by Pound’s accusation, but for now relations continued in a reasonably civil fashion. Pound may have been cross that she would not fall in with his plans, but he still found her, as he told Alice Corbin Henderson some years later, a ‘charmer’, and in any case he may have hoped there might be other ways of encouraging her to spend the Lowell fortune on his projects.97 What happened next is more in doubt. There were two dinners in mid-July, and both became the stuff of legend; although there are multiple accounts of these dinners, they by no means agree, and what actually went on is to a certain extent a matter of conjecture. Peter Brooker has written a brilliant summary of the confusingly varied versions of these dinners, pointing out that sometimes not only do names of guests and topics of conversation differ strikingly, but even the venue shifts.98 One thing one can be sure of, in fact, is that these two dinners were at the very smart Dieudonné restaurant; one can also be sure that the first dinner, on 15 July, for which guests paid 10s. 6d. (though some versions reduce the price to ten shillings) was to celebrate the publication of Blast, and the second, two days later, at which Amy was hostess, was to celebrate Des Imagistes. But it was not true, as has been alleged, that Amy gave her dinner because she was mocked at the first; she might have been mocked on that occasion, but she had started planning the second dinner before the first took place, and Pound had drafted in Richard Aldington to help her with the organisation.
Pound himself complained to his parents that he had been left to do all the work setting up the Blast dinner as Lewis had gone off to Paris, which perhaps explains some of the eccentricities of the guest list, which included not only Amy and Ada, but also Arthur Symons, recovered somewhat from his mental breakdown and occasionally visiting London. Gaudier-Brzeska came, giving Pound a small carving in lieu of his 10s. 6d.; Wyndham Lewis as editor was of course there, as was Kate Lechmere, whose money had partially supported Blast (the rest came from Lewis’ mother), and an American novelist, Mary Borden Turner, with whom Lewis was having an affair. Presumably some of the other contributors to Blast, or those who signed the manifesto, attended; Ford appears to have been there, though apparently neither of the Aldingtons, nor Flint. In William Roberts’ painting entitled The Vorticists at the Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915, which depicts what must have been a dinner for Blast’s second and last number, which appeared in June 1915 (although the copy of Blast that appears in the painting is the first), the guests depicted – in addition to Pound and Lewis, there is Roberts himself, Cuthbert Hamilton, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth, Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders – were all members of or associated with the Rebel Art Centre and are quite likely to have been at the first dinner at the Dieudonné.
It has generally been assumed that Amy Lowell was immediately horrified by Vorticism; certainly before she returned to the States she would speak critically of it and of Blast to Harriet Monroe, but not till later that month, and much had happened by then. Lowell, with her admiration for imagism, for contemporary French music and poetry, and even for the controversial Rite of Spring, took readily to certain aspects of the avant-garde. She would later refuse to see any good in either Eliot or Joyce, but that was after the rift with Pound and may well have been because they were his protégés; nor did she care for Gertrude Stein, but perhaps they were too alike, as her biographer Jean Gould has suggested – born in the same month, large, imperious and charismatic – and she also drew the line at certain writers she thought too violent or too crude. Possibly she thought from the start that this latest movement came into this category. But there is no evidence. Fletcher had already taken against Lewis, but not so much on artistic grounds as because he resented the way that Lewis, when Pound introduced him, had treated him as a disciple of Pound’s who could be immediately commandeered for the Rebel Art Centre. On the other hand, Fletcher admired Epstein and very much liked Gaudier, whom he memorably described as ‘looking like a combination of a faun and medieval Christ’ – as he would have known, Gaudier was described by his friends as the ‘savage messiah’ because of his love of what was then thought of as ‘primitive art’.99 But Lowell was always ready to give anything new a go. According to Foster Damon she visited Gaudier in his studio under the railway arch, and had a ‘very jolly picnic luncheon’ with her fellow-contributor to Des Imagistes, Allen Upward, whose views on conventional religion probably accorded well with her own.100
On the day of the Vorticist dinner, Aldington’s full review of Blast appeared in the Egoist. Aldington had been, as he puts it, one of those who ‘gleefully’ put their names to Blast’s manifestos, though, perhaps significantly, neither H.D. nor Flint had done so, and his review was, as W.C. Wees points out, the most positive the magazine received. Yet all the same, in it the signs of a crack between Pound and his fellow-imagists begin to appear. Aldington began by lambasting the generality of English fiction and poetry before welcoming Blast as a periodical ‘designed to be the organ for new, vigorous art in England’. ‘This purely English art’, he says, is ‘naturally … energetic, tremendously energetic, but with frequent British grins, and rather religious’. He praises Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’, which he says ‘stirs one up like a red-hot poker’; he likes its ‘sudden clear images – flashes of lightning suddenly displaying forms above the dark abysmal conflict … It seems to me that this hard telegraphic language expresses pretty well one side of our modern life … when we want to get to the crux of the matter, the intensity of emotion, as quickly as possible, the telegraphic method seems to me to have very serious recommendations … Mr Lewis’ play solves it in one way; I think the best of the Imagiste poems do so, too.’ Gaudier comes in for some affectionate though teasing praise:
Mr Gaudier Brzeska is really a wild, unkempt barbarian, with a love of form and a very clear knowledge of the comparative history of sculpture. He is the sort of person who would dye his statues in the gore of goats if he thought it would give them a more virile appearance … Fortunately … his worst crimes consist in the abuse of all Greek sculpture whatsoever, and of everything which is not tremendously virile and cannibalistic and geometric … He is perhaps the most promising artist we have. If he ever becomes civilised he will lick creation.
Aldington’s appreciation of this Vorticist art, however, does not, he adds, ‘in the least spoil [his] old literary love for such terribly over-suave, over-sweet, over-graceful productions such as Tanagra statuettes and Japanese prints’, and he thinks the ‘one danger of the thing’ is the ‘religious part’: ‘Some people like religion; I don’t. And it seems to me that the profound intellectuality, the love of abstract design, of abstract colour, the serious revolt against the Renaissance and all sensuousness – all of which I agree is perfectly and truthfully English – gives to this movement something that I can only call religious.’ What he sees there – and this is, I think, perceptive – is a puritanism lurking underneath Hulme and Lewis’ anti-pathos; it is present in Pound as well, Aldington points out, in a fairly damning dismissal of the poems Pound published here:
As the uncleanness of his language increases to an almost laughable point the moral sentiment of his writing becomes more and more marked … It is not my business to abuse Mr Pound – he gets enough of it from other people – and I shall probably be called all kinds of sad names if I say that his contributions to ‘Blast’ are quite unworthy of their author … Mr Pound cannot write satire. Mr Pound is one of the gentlest, most modest, bashful, kind creatures who ever walked this earth; so I cannot help thinking that all this enormous arrogance and petulance and fierceness are a pose. And it is a wearisome pose.101
This is of course tongue in cheek: modest and bashful are risible epithets to apply to Pound. The schoolboy rudeness of the poems can be wearisome, but whether it is precisely a pose is more doubtful: Hugh Kenner sees ‘Salutation the Third’, for example, as a failed attempt to emulate Lewis’ bitingly satiric tone, likening it to the ‘impotent vituperation’ of Pound’s wartime broadcasts; one might also compare it with the passages of paranoid fury in the Cantos.102 Pound has assumed yet another persona; like his troubadours, this persona is unsuccessful yet undefeated, but instead of Cino or Marvoil’s cheery insouciance, the speaker is bitter, contemptuous, resentful and, unusually at this stage, but as would regularly be the case in those later instances, anti-Semitic. In ‘Salutation the Third’ Pound wishes death on a hostile reviewer, whom he describes as ‘You slut-bellied obstructionist,/You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,/You fungus, you continuous gangrene’. He accuses such people of driving artists to madness or death, and insists ‘I will not go mad to please you./I will not FLATTER you with an early death./OH, NO! I will stick it out,/I will feel your hates wriggling about my feet,/And I will laugh at you and mock you.’103 David Trotter in his book, Paranoid Modernism, reminds us that, according to Freud, paranoia springs from repressed desire – in Freud’s view repressed homosexual desire. Trotter quotes Freud’s summing up of the psychic mechanism involved: ‘“I (a man) love him (a man)” becomes “I do not love him – I hate him”, which in turn becomes by projection, “I do not love him, I hate him, because he persecutes me”’. ‘By this account,’ Trotter adds, ‘the paranoiac attributes the hatred he has unconsciously made of his love to someone else.’104 I think in Pound’s case this psychic pattern is suggestive, though I would argue that what is repressed is not homosexual desire, but the desire for success and fame. Pound desperately craved public success, as earlier he had to some extent acknowledged, but now he was repressing that insufficiently satisfied craving, masking it by his proclaimed belief in the serious artist inevitably unappreciated by the vulgar canaille. At least persecution would show some interest, and Pound – like Lewis – is courting persecution here; but I think Kenner is right to suggest that while paranoia honed Lewis’ art, it caused Pound’s to disintegrate. These Blast poems mark a new and disturbing strand in Pound’s work, and one can sympathise with Aldington’s alarm. Whether or not he was ‘called all kinds of sad names’ by Pound as a result of these comments, they cannot have gone down well. Lewis, on the other hand, must have liked the review; a copy of that issue of the Egoist was found by Patricia Hutchins in his empty flat after his death.
Whatever the variations in detail, most accounts suggest that the atmosphere at the Vorticists’ dinner was as spiky as their paintings. Lewis quarrelled with Mary Borden Turner, and Foster Damon reports that Lowell had a disagreement with Ford over ‘literary principles’, something Ford himself alleges in an account he gave in 1919, though one which appears to scramble the two dinner parties, while the time and place he mentions fits neither.105 He describes being at a dinner hosted by a woman, a ‘Neutral’, who was a ‘monstrously fat, monstrously monied, disagreeably intelligent coward’ – coward, the suggestion is, because she wanted to get away from the war, which, at the time of the Dieudonné dinners, was for most people still unimaginable.106 When rebuked by Flint for such a cruel description, Ford pleaded that he had written that under the effects of shell-shock; he claimed he had been thinking of someone quite different, certainly not Lowell, about whom he would never have said such things. Even in the unlikely case of that being true, his words could be an unconsciously accurate account of his instinctive feelings towards her. For both Pound and Ford, creativity in a beautiful and sexually attractive woman was permissible, but not in a plain, fat one. Hunt, H.D. and Dorothy passed the test; Amy did not. Ford was not in a strong position to accuse other people of being overweight, but in his and Pound’s view, ‘Fat Ford’, as Pound and Aldington called him, could be both stout and a poet; Amy, as a woman, had to endure the humiliation of the sobriquet ‘hippopoetess’, as Pound liked to call her.107 What is intriguing in Ford’s description is his comment that she was ‘disagreeably intelligent’. Amy was indeed very sharp, and it sounds as if she perhaps worsted him in their dispute, if they had one.
Leaving aside Ford’s malign account, whichever dinner it refers to – or rather whichever it embroiders – the two main versions we have of the dinner hosted by Lowell are from Fletcher and Cournos. Written over twenty years after the event, they both suggest it was less than a happy occasion for Amy. Fletcher, who took along his copy of Des Imagistes and asked all the diners to sign it, then keeping it for the rest of his life, can probably be relied upon for an accurate guest list. Present were, he said, in addition to their hostess and Ada Russell, Pound and Dorothy, Ford and Violet Hunt, himself, the Aldingtons, Allen Upward, John Cournos, Flint and Gaudier. ( Jean Gould says Amy ‘could not abide’ Gaudier, but gives no evidence, and there is simply no reason why she should have invited him if she disliked him.)108 According to Fletcher, along with the coffee there was a series of speeches, mainly about the impossibility of defining imagism, and there was an argument between Aldington and Gaudier about the value of Hellenic sculpture – Pound referred later to their ‘perpetual, acrimonious, and fundamentally amical dispute as to whether Greek art and civilization were worthy of serious consideration’.109 Pound meanwhile had left the room, and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, deposited it on the floor and then announced that there was to be a new school, ‘no longer called the “imagiste” but the “nageiste” school’, and the bathtub would be its symbol. The school had been inaugurated by Miss Lowell with her poem ‘In the Garden’, whose last line Pound quoted, ‘Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness bathing’. Here, Fletcher says, everybody laughed; Amy took it all good-naturedly, and the ‘evening ended in a general display of high spirits, a great deal of it at Ezra’s own expense … Ezra’s squib had fizzled out, after all. Every one felt as I did, that we now owed homage to the gallant spirit of this woman who had brought us together, and who maintained her position with unruffled dignity under the most difficult circumstances.’110
Cournos’ account is very different; he loathed Amy, perhaps because she represented the wealthy American elite who, Cournos felt sure, despised poor immigrants like himself, though in actual fact she was very impressed by his Russian credentials. There was, he says, at the dinner ‘an undercurrent of hostility, and if not hostility, then condescension towards the hostess’. In his version, only Allen Upward makes a speech, there is no bathtub, but Upward took ‘as his text’ that same poem, and ‘pictured the poet bathing in the moonlight, and he did so in such a way as to perturb and vex her puritanic soul’. Again, everyone laughs, but Cournos says he could not help feeling sorry for her as ‘the butt of the excruciatingly witty if cruel jest’.111
Clearly the subject-matter of Amy’s poem was evoked by someone, and the ‘nageiste’ school does sound very like Pound; Fletcher was not strong on jokes, and it seems unlikely he could have invented it. Whether Pound actually found a tin bathtub is more open to doubt; Damon records him juggling with some waiters’ trays. But the story is intriguing. Fletcher says that Amy’s response was to say that ‘for her part, she was sure that, whether as “imagiste” or in Ezra’s newly discovered “nageiste,” the new movement in poetry would go on’.112 And, of course, it would, and under Amy’s aegis, not as something inaugurated, but certainly continued, by her. But Pound – unless it was Upward – had picked on the element in her poetry which would cause most consternation in the future: her motif of the female body bathing. Cournos suggests she had a ‘puritanic soul’ but it was her critics’ narrow prejudice that was at issue, not hers. It was simply unthinkable to connect a woman of her bulk with erotic feelings. Amy was breaking a taboo that went further than either these revolutionaries, or the conservative American public, could stomach. In this particular poem, the body is in fact not hers, but that appears to have gone unnoticed. The response is deeply misogynistic; whether it was homophobic as well is harder to gauge. Possibly H.D. would have recognised it as a lesbian love poem, but no one else at the time appears to have done so. Lowell was able to exploit the lack of gender specificity in the imagist ‘I’; when she wrote love poems to Ada, most of her listeners assumed she was speaking though a male persona.
Lowell, acutely sensitive about her appearance, was deeply wounded by this mockery, even though she carried it off so well. In August two poems of hers entitled ‘Miscast’ appeared in the Egoist. In the first, the miscasting is social, and the poem shows more projective imagination than the Boston capitalist has always been given credit for, but the contrast between the appearance and the inner life is also the one she had experienced herself:
I have whetted my blade until it is like a Damascus blade,
So keen that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by,
So sharp that air would turn its edge
Were it to be twisted in flight.
Licking passions have bitten their arabesques into it,
And the mark of them lies, in and out,
Worm-like,
With the beauty of corroded copper patterning white steel.
My brain is curved like a scimitar,
And sighs at its cutting
Like a sickle mowing grass.
But of what use is all this to me!
I, who am set to crack stones
In a country lane!113
It was one of a fine group of poems, which helped her establish her place with the Aldingtons and Flint, even if Pound was now cooling towards her.
Amy’s reason for offering the second dinner was most likely that she felt that if a magazine to which she had not contributed was having a dinner to celebrate its launch, the anthology in which she had appeared deserved no less, but a more sinister motive has often been suggested: a determination to seize control of imagism now Pound had loosened his grasp, the desire to transform it into what Pound would call ‘Amygism’, which he saw as a deliberate effort to dilute his pure concepts. Certainly Amy preferred instinctively to lead, rather than to be led, and without question in hosting the dinner she was moving herself from a peripheral position as minor contributor and latecomer to a central position within the imagist project. She had no thoughts as yet, however, of parting ways with Pound. If she had thought of sponsoring the next anthology, she had not yet mentioned it; certainly not to Pound. Fletcher’s later assertion that Lowell arrived in England ready to conduct ‘a carefully planned and long-sustained literary campaign’ is dubious.114 In the account Amy gave to Harriet, she says the idea of the anthology came to her in the wake of Pound’s accusation that she would give no money to the arts, as a way in which she could do just that, while, she admitted, engagingly honestly, helping her own career at the same time. But she only appears to have suggested this some time after the dinners.
Yet if in mid-July Amy had not yet planned her dawn raid on the imagist movement, it is also incorrect to say, as is frequently done, that Pound had lost interest in imagism. Had he done so, the fight with Amy would not have been so bitter. When Pound published an essay on ‘Vorticism’ in the Fortnightly Review on 1 September, he made it very clear that imagism was the poetic arm of the Vorticist movement, and still his chief preoccupation; indeed he spends most of the article talking about imagism, before finally getting on to the question of its relationship to Vorticism in painting. His explanation of imagism, it is true, has changed a little. He repeats the three main tenets, and still believes the image should make an instantaneous impact, but now he is drawing on the model provided by Kandinsky rather than Freud or Bergson. Following Kandinsky’s theory that certain colours and forms can directly convey particular emotions, he writes, ‘The image is the poet’s pigment.’ This immediacy of impact is for Pound one of the things that Vorticist painting and sculpture share with imagism. His language is much less provocative than in his account of the vortex in Blast, but as there he puts great emphasis on intensity, something that had been central to him since his walking tour in France, and that he had recognised anew during the winter that he shared with Yeats. ‘Vorticism,’ he says, ‘is an intensive art … The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.’
To this dynamic, energised theory, he adds one more element: what he calls ‘super-position’, the technique of the haiku, ‘one idea,’ as he puts it, ‘set on top of another’. He may already have taken this idea from the Chinese pictogram, which he would use to illustrate it later, but it was precisely the idea that Hulme had put forward in Bergsonian terms in 1908, and it may have been lying dormant with him from the Tour Eiffel days; it is perhaps significant that the first haiku he mentions is the same as the one Flint had quoted in the New Age, in Pound’s version: ‘The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: A butterfly.’ He quotes his poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, as an example of this ‘hokku-like’ super-position, but adds a footnote to say, ‘Mr Flint and Mr Rodker have made longer poems depending on a similar presentation of matter. So also have Richard Aldington, in his In Via Sestina, and “H.D.” in her Oread, which latter poems express much stronger emotions than my lines here.’ So he was far from repudiating his fellow-imagists at this time. Imagism, he says, is the kind of poetry ‘where painting or sculpture seems as if it were “just coming out into speech”’, which again echoes Hulme’s 1908 insistence that modern poetry should resemble sculpture.115 Throughout the article he emphasises that he is an imagiste, something that is not negated by the fact that ‘vorticism’ is the overarching term that includes ‘Imagisme’ in poetry. Pound probably wrote this piece in July, so it is a fair assumption that at the time of the July imagist dinner he had no intention of dropping imagism, any more than Amy had any idea of imagism continuing without Pound.