I

‘THE SEASON OF 1914,’ wrote Douglas Goldring, ‘was a positive frenzy of gaiety. Long before there was any shadow of war, I remember feeling that it couldn’t go on, that something had to happen. Something certainly did!’¹ Goldring is one of many memoir writers of the period to chronicle the abrupt passing of what came to be seen in retrospect as a golden, halcyon age: ‘With the outbreak of war,’ he recalls, ‘the nineteenth century ended with dramatic suddenness.’² At a stroke, there vanished the security and stability which they assumed existed under merely superficial tremors of industrial unrest and artistic protest. August 4, 1914, was the end of an era, an era, as most of the rebel artists and radical thinkers had agreed before the war, of commercialisation, hypocrisy and injustice, when plutocrats and philistines held sway. But it had also been an era when those with modest incomes, secure in the metropolitan heart of the British Empire, could live lives of peaceful privilege.

Pound, Aldington and H.D. would all look back at the years 1912 to 1914 as their happiest. They were not unaware of the brutalities that had kept that privilege intact: exploitation abroad, deprivation at home, violence inflicted on the colonised in the Empire, on strikers and suffragettes in Britain itself. Yet none of that impinged very closely on their personal sense of freedom and possibility. And nobody was prepared for the carnage of the next four years, for a generation of young men who would be killed, maimed, traumatised or brutalised by trench warfare. ‘War was a fiend that stopped our clocks/Although we met him grim and gay,’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon. For almost a hundred years, it had been largely in the colonies that the British Army fought its battles, and there on the whole, for all the occasional spectacular defeat like that of Gordon of Khartoum, they could be sure that their superior arms would ensure victory. (‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not,’ as the marauding Captain Blood says as he faces a group of unruly natives in Hilaire Belloc’s anti-imperialist satire, The Modern Traveller.)³ Now two massive forces could achieve little but mutual destruction: the devastation that the European powers had inflicted on so many areas of Africa in the hectic scramble for resources and possessions they would now mete out to each other on European soil.

Few people had been prepared for the outbreak of hostilities. The papers immediately before the war had been full of the troubles in Ireland. The British soldiers, who had refused to move against the Protestant Ulster Volunteers, turning a blind eye to their acquisition of 30,000 rifles, had opened fire in Dublin at a demonstration of unarmed Nationalist sympathisers, killing three. Fury swept the nationalist community, and civil war was feared to be imminent. The papers talked of little else. The Egoist was no exception. The 1 August number had an editorial by Dora Marsden on the Ulster Rebellion, while Aldington began a review of a book on Conrad with the comment: ‘The artists of today are its true religious. There is more acrimonious feeling between two artists of opposing theories than there is between a Catholic Nationalist and a Protestant Orangeman.’⁴ No hint that a world war would begin in three days’ time. Only in the last 48 hours were there rumours everywhere. Germany had declared war on Russia on 1 August, and on France on 3 August, threatening to invade France through Belgium; Belgium appealed to Britain for help. Britain asked Germany to send its promise to respect Belgian neutrality by 11 p.m. on 4 August. Crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace waiting for an announcement. The Aldingtons and John Cournos were there when the proclamation of war was made. Until that minute, Cournos says, people had been standing in silence; when the news came, they danced in the streets, singing ‘Rule Britiannia’, or chanting anti-German insults: ‘Orgiastic hysteria had taken hold of the people,’ he wrote; it ‘swept them into the holocaust of destruction and self-destruction’.⁵

H.D. was appalled by the deadly frenzy of patriotism, and fearful of what lay in store. In Paint it Today, she writes of the coming of war, ‘Time had them by the throat. Time had the world by the throat, shaking and shaking, evil and vicious.’⁶ There was as yet no conscription, but just six days after war was declared, Aldington, in spite of his erstwhile pacifism, went with Hulme, characteristically eager to join combat, to enlist with the Honourable Artillery Company. Hulme was immediately accepted, but Aldington was turned down, on account of the hernia operation that he had had as a teenager. The burly Hulme consoled him for his rejection by saying, somewhat patronisingly: ‘War is not for sensitive men.’ Aldington commented later: ‘He thought he was tough. He was, I think.’⁷ Aldington felt humiliated, though Hulme was right. Aldington was a sensitive man, but in 1914 sensitivity and manliness were hard to reconcile, and Aldington definitely wanted to be thought manly. He doesn’t mention Hulme’s comment in his memoirs, but he does record that at the interview he was ‘told contemptuously that there wasn’t the slightest chance of [his] ever getting into the army’. He got lost on the way out, and wandered into the armoury, where he was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy because of his ‘small beard’ and ‘French jacket’.⁸

According to Jean Gould, even though Amy’s elder brother Percival, also in London at the time for an astronomers meeting, wanted her to leave immediately with him, her only fear was that her car might be commandeered; she sent that on ahead along with the chauffeur, deciding to wait for the publication of her second book, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. The faithful Ada, and presumably the maid, remained with her.⁹ Amy was having far too good a time to leave, though the American writer Robert McAlmon, who met her at that juncture, remembered her storming up and down her suite at the Berkeley, complaining: ‘My book is supposed to come out! A lot of attention it will get now with a war on! What’s the matter with England? Why don’t they just stop the war?’ She offered her help to Herbert Hoover, who was organising both the Belgian War Relief and the repatriation of stranded US citizens, and joined his committee. Not only did she donate $10,000 to the work (Amy could be generous when she thought it right) but she also met the trains coming in from the continent at Victoria station, with a large placard hanging in front of her imposing bosom which read, ‘American Citizens Apply Here’.¹⁰

She had not, however, been distracted from her plans for the new imagist anthology. She saw more of the Aldingtons, and had long discussions about modern French poetry with Flint, who recalled their meetings in 1916 in a review of her Six French Poets, a book which she acknowledged owed much to these conversations with him:

Through the long French window open in the corner could be seen the length of Piccadilly, its great electric globes, its shiny roadway, and on the left, the tops of the trees of Green Park, dark grey in the moonlight; the noise of the motor-buses and of taxis reached us in a muted murmur, and at the corner of the park opposite, beneath a streetlamp, stood a newsboy, whose headlines we strained our eyes from time to time to catch. It was in this tenseness created by the expectation of news that Miss Lowell read Paul Fort or Henri de Régnier to us (she reads French beautifully).¹¹

When Amy read this, she wrote to Flint immediately:

How I wish we could resume those happy evenings at the Hotel Berkeley! I never enjoyed anything so much, nor found anything so stimulating. That they left upon you such a happy impression is not the least of the satisfactions of your review to me. Do you realize that we only saw each other for seven weeks? And yet those seven weeks have left a bond which only grows stronger. You and Richard and Hilda seem to me a part of myself, and we are all banded together against a common enemy.¹²

Who was the common enemy? For Pound it would have been the respectable bourgeoisie, but it is hard to imagine Amy would think in quite those terms; probably it was more generally a philistine culture with no time for poetry and the arts – though she could just conceivably by 1916 have been referring to Pound himself. But not in August 1914; she was still anxious to settle her quarrel with Pound amicably. She must have sent a soothing letter in reply to his invective of 1 August, because he wrote again on the 12th, centainly not going so far as agreeing to contribute, but saying he thought the anthology in itself a good idea, though he would prefer it to be called Vers Libre, because he wanted imagism ‘associated with a certain clarity and intensity’. He did not, he said, want to prevent anyone else joining in with her, and in fact rather generously said he would refrain from publishing another anthology in America before 1916, because he realised that the Aldingtons were keen to be published by Macmillan, with whom Amy was then in negotiation. He ended by suggesting that if she wanted to ‘drag in the word Imagisme’, she should have a subtitle which said ‘“an anthology devoted to Imagisme, vers libre and modern movements in verse” or something of that sort. I think that will be perfectly fair to everyone’.¹³ That does seem quite reasonable, though Amy could have pointed out that Des Imagistes contained a number of poems which could hardly be called imagist, but that had not stopped Pound from using the title. Her reply to Pound has not survived, but it was presumably placatory once more, because he and Dorothy came to the dinner, and they passed a cordial evening. But she was not giving way to any great degree. She had decided they should call the anthology ‘Some Imagiste Poets’, so that Pound could publish another Des Imagistes if he wished, but she was not going to drop the word altogether. Amy still hoped that Pound would relent and join them, if not in this anthology, then a later one. One can be sure that at that stage she genuinely would have preferred to include Pound, if only because she would have calculated he would have been good for sales. But when he would not join forces on her terms, she swept on regardless. When Harold Monro told her the anthology would fail without Pound, she brushed his comment aside.

In her remaining weeks in London, Amy also saw more of Lawrence. It is a testimony to how little credence he had given Marsh’s warning of a coming war that he had left London immediately after their dinner for a week’s walking tour in Westmorland, but he was back in London with Frieda by 8 August, making contact again with the Aldingtons and Amy. Now faced with the actuality of war, Lawrence was appalled by the prospect. Writing to Lowell on the 9th, he said to her, ‘we are so miserable about the war. My wife is German, so you may imagine – her father was an army officer. Everything seems gone to pieces.’¹⁴ Anti-German feeling was everywhere, and Frieda had found herself suddenly surrounded by hostility and suspicion. When they went round to dinner with David Garnett in his father’s Chelsea flat shortly after Lawrence’s return, Garnett had three visits from the police in the following week, having been, he was told, one of hundreds each day reported by vigilant neighbours on suspicion of being German spies. One of the other guests had been heard jocularly calling Auf Wiedersehen to Frieda on the stairs.¹⁵

Luckily no one had the temerity to investigate Amy when she invited Frieda and Lawrence to dinner at the Berkeley. Lawrence had just heard that Methuen had, after all, rejected his novel. He would spend the next six months rewriting it, making it less overtly erotic, but it was a depressing intimation of the difficulties his work would have from now on, and of the money problems that would ensue. When Lowell attempted to persuade him to contribute to the anthology, she met little resistance. He insisted he wasn’t an imagist, and indeed, according to Damon, regarded imagism as an advertising scheme.¹⁶ Lowell, he told Glenn Hughes, tried to convince him that he was an imagist by quoting his lines, ‘The morning breaks like a pomegranate/In a shining crack of red’.¹⁷ As he was financially completely dependent on his writing, he would probably have agreed at that moment to any paying publishing venture. He was also, of course, publishing with the Georgian anthologies, but Amy was unconcerned about that. It being impossible to return to Italy for the present, he and Frieda moved out of London to a cottage at Chesham in Buckinghamshire in an attempt to save money, and possibly also to get away from prying eyes. When he sent Amy his selection of poems for the anthology, he invited her warmly to visit them there, saying it would all be ‘perfectly rural and idyllic’.¹⁸ She and Ada went on 27 August, taking the Aldingtons with them, as usual in a motor car, though it cannot have been the maroon Pierce-Arrow, by then safely back in the States. Lawrence had written to Edward Marsh just a couple of days earlier: ‘The war is just hell for me. I don’t see why I should be so disturbed – but I am. I can’t get away from it for a minute: live in a sort of coma, like one of those nightmares when you can’t move. I hate it – everything.’¹⁹ Yet in spite of that underlying nightmare, the day was a great success, Amy’s exuberance temporarily banishing Lawrence’s gloom. H.D. recollected that they met Katherine Mansfield there and also the painter Mark Gertler, whom Lawrence later so cruelly depicted as Loerke in Women in Love. By then, however, Amy had regretfully decided that she should return to America, as she had heard that the British publication of her book had been delayed, whilst the American edition would appear in the States in September. By the time she and Ada sailed, the manuscript of the new anthology was near completion.

The Pound parents had also been caught in England. Homer Pound, who had to return to work, left at much the same time as Amy, though not, like her, travelling first-class, and suffered abominably from seasickness. Eventually Isabel, clearly fully approving of Dorothy as a wife for her adored son, reluctantly tore herself away and returned to Philadelphia at the end of October. No one yet thought the war would imperil civilian shipping. Fletcher, who with characteristic bad timing had left for a holiday in Switzerland at the beginning of August, had had a difficult journey back to London, though one on which, he told Amy Lowell, in spite of suffering ‘a great deal of inconvenience and anxiety’, he was never in any real danger.²⁰ With some aplomb he had visited the British consul in Geneva posing as a British aristocrat, obtained a British passport, and made it back through Paris, complaining bitterly about the lack of taxis and porters. He joined Daisy in Cornwall, where she was on holiday with her children and Malcolm. To the children, Fletcher was only the lodger, so there had been no question of his accompanying them solo, originally the reason that he had taken his holiday abroad. How comfortable a party they were Fletcher does not reveal, though as he always appeared to get on much better with Malcolm than Daisy, he at least may quite have enjoyed it. Fletcher, Daisy and the children then returned to Sydenham once more, but he soon decided to head back across the Atlantic, giving as his reason to Amy, perhaps in case she thought it was fear, a new and portentous sense of an American mission. ‘The war and the resulting utter confusion of intellect and intelligence that it has brought about over here,’ he told her, ‘has increased my desire to revisit my country. This is certainly America’s opportunity to prove herself fit to carry on the great traditions of literature and the arts. She has now her unique chance to do original and vital work. Whether she will avail herself of it remains to be seen.’²¹ He told Daisy that he would be back within three months, but he had already decided he would not return to her unless she obtained a divorce. He sailed back to New York on 14 November.

Neither Pound nor H.D. appears to have contemplated a return to America, and in spite of the contentious anthology, the Pounds and the Aldingtons for now remained on reasonably good terms, though Aldington’s earlier admiration was certainly dinted. On 21 September he reported to Amy, with whom both he and H.D. would now be in regular correspondence, that Pound was unwell, lying on a couch and telling everyone that he had ‘cerebral gout’. ‘Poor devil,’ he added, ‘I wonder if Fat Hueffer was right? Perhaps Ezra is a little cracked. He doesn’t seem able to talk of anything except himself and his work.’²² Pound’s obsessions would certainly grow during the war years, but he wasn’t totally self-absorbed. He was still on the lookout for new talent; on 22 September, the day after Aldington’s letter, he met another young American expatriate, T.S. Eliot, at that stage studying philosophy and apparently on the way to brilliant academic success. Eliot was also, however, a poet, though his only publications so far were as a student at Harvard, including the Class Ode that he had recited at his graduation. A week after their first meeting, he sent Pound a copy of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Pound was enormously impressed; whether he compared the poem’s ironic, witty yet compassionate treatment of its indecisive anti-hero with his own less poised attempts at modern satire, he did not say, but Eliot was one of the few fellow-writers he would come to treat as an equal. Pound sent the poem immediately to Harriet, telling her that Eliot had ‘actually trained himself and modernised himself on his own. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both (most of the swine have done neither). It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar.’²³

The language of the nursery perhaps indicates Pound’s own childish excitement, though Eliot might have been in two minds about being thus patronised. For his part, Eliot was far from impressed by Pound’s poetry at the time, though admittedly he had only read some of the earlier poetry, and the poems in Blast: if he had seen Ripostes or Pound’s contributions to Des Imagistes he might have thought differently. He had been two months in London before he got round to introducing himself to Pound, though his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken, who had just published his own first book of poetry, had been pressing him to do so from the start. Eliot’s background was rather grander than Pound’s, if not quite as grand as Lowell’s. He came from the American haute bourgeoisie: one Andrew Eliot had come to New England in the seventeenth century, from East Coker in Somerset, but the original Eliots had, it was said, come to England with the Norman invasion. (As I noted earlier, the Lowells, going one better, actually claimed to be descended from William the Conqueror himself.)²⁴ Eliot had been brought up in St Louis, his grandfather having gone there from Boston as a Unitarian missionary to the largely French Catholic frontier city. His family were cultured and highly respectable, with a deep work ethic and ingrained puritanism, but the young Eliot, as the descendant of New Englanders, felt out of place in St Louis, and, as a student at Harvard, found that his Midwestern upbringing made him feel equally alien in Boston. At Harvard he had discovered the poetry of the 1890s and had read Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature, so discovered Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue several years before Pound had done so; their ironic urban poetry was an important model for the poetry he had shown to Pound. Eliot was quiet, courteous, and would rapidly be accepted as an honorary English gentleman, a feat Pound never achieved, nor indeed wished to. But at first Pound had to struggle to get Eliot’s work into print, and it was some months before Monroe agreed to print the poem, which she found perplexing and un-American; Pound’s letters on the subject grew increasingly acrimonious.

Eliot, on a travelling scholarship from Harvard, and due to spend a year at Merton College, Oxford, had been on a summer philosophy course in Marburg in Germany when news of the imminent war broke, and he hurriedly returned to England. He was one of a number of English and American students abandoning German universities in haste to return home. Another was Alec Randall, Aldington’s University College friend, who had been studying for a postgraduate degree in German literature at the University of Tübingen. Back in England, he and his wife Amy and the Aldingtons saw each other frequently, and Randall would write articles on German writers for the Egoist. Nearly all Aldington’s acquaintances, in fact, appear to have been required to produce copy; as the work was unpaid, it was clearly easier to ask friends. Aldington himself, as well as being assistant editor at the Egoist, was now acting as secretary to Ford, having taken over from the traumatised H.D. Ford had been recruited (on his own insistence in an honorary capacity) by his friend Masterman, who, having lost his parliamentary seat at the last election, had been put in charge of a secret department dedicated to combating German propaganda in America. Ford was to write anti-German propaganda, a curious task for a comparatively recent applicant for German nationality, but, although Ford as a good European was profoundly grieved by an inter-European war, his loyalties were solely to the southern Germans; he already loathed the Prussians and was able to turn his ire on them.

Aldington was asked to extend his duties from dictation to researching Prussian history for Ford, and his friend Alec Randall was also recruited for his German expertise, in his case the experience setting him on the path to a distinguished diplomatic career. They had to find evidence for Ford’s argument that, unhappily for Europe, Germany had become dominated by Prussia, whose culture was in his view (as Max Saunders summarises it) ‘materialist, egoistic, philological, and militarist’.²⁵ For Ford, the war was a battle for the cause of creativity, the imagination and freedom, against academicism, instrumentalism and regimentation; it was another version of his Pre-Raphaelite forebears’ campaign for arts and crafts instead of industrialism, or the aesthetes’ opposition to a materialist and philistine bourgeoisie. In his first propaganda book, When Blood is their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture, he particularly attacks the Prussian educational system, giving an account of its dehumanising schooling that could well, one suspects, owe something to Pound’s hatred of Germanic scholarship. Ford, not having been to university, and with no experience of a philological training in literature, had less first-hand knowledge of the matter than Pound and is unlikely to have lighted on the study of philology as the expression of an autocratic and martial spirit without some prompting. Pound was delighted, writing to his mother that ‘The book is very good. I trust the faculty of my rotten University will read and digest it. The preface contains a number of statements similar to those which I have made repeatedly any time for the last ten years.’²⁶

Aldington himself appears to have been convinced by Ford’s arguments, denouncing the Prussians in the Egoist and describing the war to Lowell with some passion as one ‘of democracy against autocracy, of the individual against the state, of the Anglo-Latin civilisation against the Prussian, of even vers libre against academic metres!’²⁷ The British generals would have been startled by that last point. His letters to Lowell included frequent news of the deaths of young French writers, which he also reported in the Egoist, an increasingly grim and ominous tally that he feared might presage his own demise. He was unable to write any poetry, he told her, only journalism and translations, though that must have been true only fairly briefly, for he went on producing poetry regularly throughout the war, even in the trenches. He was working frenetically, contributing articles to almost every issue of the Egoist that autumn, yet at times even journalism was hard; as he wrote that November, ‘when the most bloody battles of the world are taking place a few miles away, it needs a certain amount of phlegm – which I frankly don’t possess – to be able to write precisely and dogmatically on the latest Anglo-American literary productions’.²⁸

H.D. also wrote to Amy in October saying he felt ‘every swing of this war pendulum so keenly!’ The same was undoubtedly true of herself. H.D. was pregnant, having discovered the news, Barbara Guest suggests, on the day the war was declared.²⁹ Whilst that date has symbolic appeal, it doesn’t fit the biological facts; the earliest she could have known would have been some weeks later, though the baby must have been conceived very near the outbreak of war. The war was a dark cloud over this pregnancy. H.D. was apprehensive from the start: a war was the wrong time to have a baby; Aldington might have to fight, and in any case, even if he didn’t have to enlist, H.D.’s £200 allowance and their meagre literary earnings would scarcely provide lavishly for family life. H.D. was completely undomesticated. She must have wondered if she was capable of looking after a baby without the services of a nanny, and indeed it is most unlikely that she would have been; when eventually she did become a mother, full of maternal love though she was, and rapturous about motherhood at an exalted level, she took no part in the physical care of her child. But in addition to those more practical worries, she must have been fearful that a child might put an end to her recently launched poetic career. The successful women writers she knew, like Violet Hunt and May Sinclair, were childless, as had been the best-known women writers of the previous century, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. Rebecca West was now a mother and carrying on with her writing, but her illegitimate son was a well-kept secret, and H.D. would have had no inkling of his existence. Pregnancy, Asphodel suggests, made her feel drained of all creativity: ‘her mind glued down, broken, and held back like a wild bird caught in bird-lime … months and months when her flaming mind beat up and she found she was caught, her mind not taking her as usual like a wild bird but her mind-wings beating, beating, and her feet caught, glued like a wild-bird in bird-lime’.³⁰ H.D. recorded that the woman doctor whom she consulted pressed her to have the baby, implying, though she does not say so directly, that she wondered about termination. As abortion was both illegal and dangerous at that time, that she even contemplated such a course indicates the panic that pregnancy induced in her. If Brigit’s near-fatal operation had been an abortion, it is even more remarkable, but H.D., who always lived somewhat on the edge of breakdown, was already under great nervous strain. Like Lawrence, she would experience the war as an ongoing nightmare, which the events of her personal life would only make darker.