POUND DID NOT see much of Lowell in the later part of July, as his parents came to London shortly after the dinner; they stayed in 48 Langham Street, where he had lodged when he first came to London, as had H.D. and the Greggs. Ever since Pound had returned to Europe in February 1911, his parents had been begging him to return home or suggesting they paid a visit. Finally, they had made it. In terms of world events, with a world war only a fortnight away, it was most unfortunate timing, but they were delighted to meet Dorothy. Amy was, meanwhile, seeing a good deal of the Aldingtons; she would tell Harriet Monroe that ‘The great thing which my summer has done for me is bringing me the intimacy of the Aldingtons. They are a perfectly charming young couple.’116 They, for their part, were charmed by her ‘vivacious intelligence’, as Richard described it.117 She had also been very pleased to meet Flint, whose expertise in French poetry greatly impressed her. Flint kept, as one might put it, as au courant as ever with French poetry; in June, Aldington had written in the Egoist of the ‘amazing energy’ with which he applied himself to it:
Whenever I meet Mr Flint, I say to him, ‘Well, I’ve read the latest thing from Paris you told me to read the other day,’ and he says, ‘My dear child, did I tell you to read that old-fashioned book? However, I am afraid I can’t stop now, because I have six new Fantaisiste authors, two volumes of Apollinaire and thirty-two other books by representatives of sixteen different schools to review by Saturday.’118
Lowell and Flint struck up a warm friendship, which never seemed disturbed by the gulf between their political views, and she was delighted too to renew her acquaintance with Fletcher. They all came frequently to the Berkeley. Amy would recall later:
What evenings we used to have in London in the old days, before the war! All of us sitting round a big box of candied fruit … glancing lightly over the literature and history of the world, cracking jokes, unmercifully criticising each other’s poems, and every now and then stooping to watch the moon cutting through the purple night outside the window.119
In the meantime, Amy was bending her mind to the future of imagism. By the second half of July she had indeed begun to work on the idea of a second anthology, but not on the rather random structure of the first. Foster Damon suggests she had been indignant at having been represented by only one poem, and that she wanted an anthology that would make clear that she was an equal partner. There may have been something in that; she certainly proposed a new format, whereby each poet should have equal space, choosing their own poems. But perhaps more significantly, she believed that an audience could be found for the new poetry; she had no wish for it to languish in exquisite obscurity. Already that April, she had told Pound that it was ‘necessary to create a public which shall no longer be bound by the Victorian tradition. That can be done … if one can only get an ear’.120 Hence she believed it was essential to find a more mainstream publisher for the imagists; and she would take it upon herself to find a publisher of ‘reputable standing’, as she would put it to Harriet Monroe that September, and if necessary pay for the publication. Lowell did not aim in the first place to take imagism away from Pound, only to make sure it operated more successfully. At that stage she was thinking of publishing the anthology for five consecutive years, which, she pointed out, ‘would enable us, by constant iteration, to make some impression on the reading public … it is a method which the editors of the “Georgian anthology” have found most satisfactory’.121
Aldington, H.D. and Flint thought it was an excellent plan. Pound, on the other hand was furious, accusing Amy, not entirely unjustly, of trying to usurp his place as editor. He said that he would only come in if Amy promised to give $200 a year to an impecunious poet. It was Amy’s turn to be indignant; she always deeply resented other people telling her how to spend her money, and regarded Pound’s ploy as a piece of blackmail: ‘I told him,’ she explained, ‘that the $200 a year might be managed should anyone in stress of circumstances need such a sum, but that I absolutely refused to be intimidated into buying anything, or to buy his poems at the expense of my self-respect. I also told him that I would not have suggested “The Anthology” had I known that he would not like the idea, and that it was intended to benefit him, quite as much as the rest of us.’122 Pound told the Aldingtons, according to Lowell, that they had to choose between Amy and himself, but they assured him that it was not a question of personalities but of principle. They liked the idea of selecting their own poems, and sharing equal space. Pound’s patronage, though so helpful two years before, was now, it appears, beginning to feel a rather irksome tyranny, as Aldington’s own account bears out. Amy, he says:
proposed a Boston Tea Party for Ezra, the immediate abolition of his despotism and the substitution of a pure democracy. There was to be no more of the Duce business, with arbitrary inclusions and exclusions and a capricious censorship. We were to publish quietly and modestly as a little group of friends with similar tendencies, rather than water-tight dogmatic principles … To preserve democratic equality names would appear in alphabetical order … On these terms Ezra was invited to contribute, but refused.123
While Pound was still resentfully mulling this over, Amy proposed another dinner party. There was one other of les jeunes that she was anxious to meet: D.H. Lawrence. When Pound had written to her about the projected quarterly earlier in the year, and mentioned Lawrence and Joyce as well as Ford and himself for staff, she wrote back to say: ‘I don’t know who Joyce is. You say he and Lawrence are the best among the younger men. I quite agree with you as to Lawrence.’124 Those who thought Amy had a ‘puritanic soul’ might have been surprised; Pound himself found Lawrence’s prose distastefully ‘heavy with sex’.125 Lawrence and Frieda had returned to England from Italy shortly before Amy arrived. Frieda’s divorce was now through, and they were going to get married. While in England Frieda hoped to see her children, and Lawrence to secure a contract for his next novel, currently called ‘The Wedding Ring’, later to be rewritten as both The Rainbow and Women in Love. He was also arranging the publication in book form of some of his short stories, which would eventually appear as The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. They expected to stay three months at the most, and then return to Italy, much better for Lawrence’s health, much cheaper, and where he felt happier than in England. Within a few days of his arrival he had been promised an advance of £300 for the novel, a gratifyingly substantial amount. In addition, Duckworth agreed to publish the short stories; it looked as if he were assured of a successful future. His relationship with Frieda was already tempestuous, but they had no doubt that they wanted to be together. On 7 July, he wrote to a friend: ‘Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit.’126 On 13 July they were married in Kensington Registry Office; according to Lawrence, ‘a very decent and dignified performance’.127
How Amy contacted Lawrence is not clear. Harold Monro, whose Poetry Bookshop she visited again, to hear an inaudible poetry reading by Rupert Brooke, may have told her how to reach him. (It is remarkable how many of these impassioned artists were incapable of projecting their voices.) She invited Lawrence for dinner on 30 July, along with the Aldingtons.128 Aldington later wrote, ‘It was the end of a sunny tranquil July day and, if we had been able to see into the future, the end of tranquillity in Europe for many a long and bitter year’.129 Austria had issued a final ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July; on the 24th, Sir Edward Grey warned the cabinet for the first time that there could be trouble ahead; on 28 July Austria declared war on Serbia; Russia began to mobilise, though most people still thought of it all, as Aldington put it, as one of ‘these senseless European squabbles’. But the posters on the news-stand at the other side of Piccadilly had flaring and ominous headlines, which Aldington remembered as ‘Germany and Russia at War, Official’ (if they said that, it was premature by two days), and ‘British Army Mobilised’. When Lawrence arrived, ‘a tall slim young man, with bright red hair and the most brilliant blue eyes … with a lithe, springing step’, he said to them all, even before the introductions, ‘I say, I’ve just been talking to Eddie Marsh, and he’s most depressing. He says we shall be in the war.’130 Marsh, as Winston Churchill’s secretary, was in a position to know, but according to Aldington, dinner began and they forgot all about the threat. Lawrence wrote to Harriet Monroe the next day, ‘I was at dinner with Miss Lowell and the Aldingtons last night, and we had some poetry.’ He complained ruefully about the fact that Monroe was proving difficult about publishing his ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia’, and talked of the effort and suffering in writing poetry, ending up by saying ‘Mrs Aldington has a few good poems.’131 He said nothing about the possibility of war.
When H.D. wrote about her first meeting with Lawrence at this dinner in Bid Me to Live, she suggests the war had already begun. They were all in
that great drawing room, overlooking Green Park. There were Elsa, Rafe, Mary Dowell of Boston and her friend Mrs Potter. Mary had collected them, was editing an anthology, a fabulously rich and gifted woman from Boston. Taking the whole top floor of the Berkeley, with the corner balcony overlooking Green Park. The window had been open. It was early August. The war was not a week old. ‘Don’t you know, don’t you realise this is poetry?’ said Frederick, edging her away toward the far end of the room. He held the pages she had brought Mary Dowell for her anthology.
‘Don’t you realise this is poetry?’132
That meeting was the beginning of a strong bond of sympathy between them.
The next day, Amy left London to pay a visit to Thomas Hardy in Dorchester. Even her vast motor car moved slowly, and she and Ada spent a night en route at Salisbury, where they were shocked to see the marketplace full of cannon, and soldiers everywhere. A waiter at the hotel assured them it was only manoeuvres, but the chauffeur, who talked to some of the soldiers, had had hints of something more ominous. When they reached Hardy’s house, they found him deeply gloomy about the prospect of war, yet, in spite of his anxious state of mind, he and Amy immediately took to each other. Hardy, by then seventy-four, was delighted to discover that Lowell was an admirer of his poetry, for which he was much less well known than his novels, even though he had published four books of poetry since his final novel, Jude the Obscure had appeared in 1895; Satires of Circumstance, which included the poems of 1912–13 mourning the death of his love for his first wife and which had been published that year, is now considered his finest poetry. Of course, the main reason for turning to poetry had been the comparative freedom it gave, just because it was so much less read. As he had said himself, if Galileo had expressed his views in poetry, the Inquisition would never have troubled him.
Ada and Amy spent two days in Bath, returning to London on Monday, 3 August. Lowell described the situation there later that year in the Little Review, the order in which she lists the tell-tale signs of war telling one much about her priorities. The economic evidence comes first: petrol had gone up to five shillings a can, and in addition there was no money to be obtained. Then there was the fact that Americans were pouring in from the continent, ‘Without their trunks, naturally. There was no-one to handle trunks at the stations in Paris. The refugees were all somewhat hysterical.’ Later that night, ‘A great crowd of people with flags marched down Piccadilly, shouting: “We want war! We want war!” They sang the Marseillaise, and it sounded savage, abominable. The blood-lust was coming back, which we had hoped was gone forever from civilised races.’133
War, however, had not yet been declared by Britain, but when Amy got back to the Berkeley she found a declaration of hostilities awaiting her from Pound. He had written on 1 August stating his views on the proposed anthology. He might give them permission, he said, to bring out an ‘Imagiste’ anthology, as long as it was made entirely clear that he had nothing to do with it. But he would then be deprived of his ‘machinery for gathering stray good poems … or poems which could not be presented to the public in other ways, poems that would be lost in magazines. As for example, “H.D.’s” would have been for some years at least.’ After all, he points out, the ‘present machinery was largely or wholly my making. I ordered “the public” (i.e. a few hundred people and a few reviewers) to take note of certain poems.’ It is a curious way of conceiving of editorship, and certainly suggests that Aldington’s analogy with the ‘Duce’ was not without justification. Amy has promised to find a ‘better publisher’, he wrote indignantly, ‘if I abrogate my privileges, if I give way to, or saddle myself with, a dam’d contentious, probably incompetent committee. If I tacitly, tacitly to say the least of it, accept a certain number of people as my critical and creative equals, and publish the acceptance.’ Her proposition would, he added, mean that ‘Imagisme’ would lose its meaning: ‘It stands, or I should like it to stand for hard light, clear edges. I can not trust any democratized committee to maintain that standard. Some will be splay footed and some sentimental.’ He suggests that what she is really saying is she is going ahead with the plan and he ‘could come in or go hang’, but then modifies what even he must have realised sounded very peevish. ‘At least that was my impression which may have been inexact. We may both have rushed at unnecessary conclusions.’134
Pound’s letter is a curious mixture of arrogance, conviction and pain. Here are these people whom he has nurtured biting the hand that fed them. He was angry at the loss of power, but there is no doubt that he sincerely believed he could use that power for artistic good. This was the first time since he reinvented himself in August 1912 that his movement appeared to be slipping from his control. Yet it was perhaps inevitable. As Herbert Read would comment later, Pound ‘was not made for compromise or cooperation, two qualities essential for any literary or artistic “movement”.’135 On the eve of the First World War, Pound was about to be worsted in literary battle.