III

IF POUND HAD pointed out the evils of German philology to Ford, in other ways he remained as yet uninfected by the current war fever. He may have been influenced by Yeats, who was maintaining a stance of wary neutrality. Yeats wanted to endorse neither British patriotism nor Irish nationalist anti-recruiting agitation. Pound was not interested in the Irish dilemma, but he certainly followed Yeats for now in his role as the artist who remained above partisan nationalistic squabbles. When he wrote to Harriet in November, he did his best to sound disengaged: ‘Ricketts,’ he told her, ‘has made the one mot of the war, the last flare of the 90’s: “What depresses me most is the horrible fact that they can’t all of them be beaten.”’⁵⁶ Like many in late 1914, Pound saw the war as a temporary interruption, and was busy reviving an idea, which he had earlier expounded in ‘Patria Mia’, of a College of Arts, about which he would write to Alice Corbin Henderson. This was, he told Harriet, a ‘scheme to enable things to keep on here in spite of the war-strain and (what will be more dangerous) the war back-wash and post bellum slump’.⁵⁷ The prospectus would be published in the Egoist in early November; the College of Arts, aimed at visiting Americans, would be doing something quite different from the formal courses given in conventional universities: ‘We aim,’ the prospectus said boldly, ‘at an intellectual status no lower than that attained by the courts of the Italian Renaissance … This instruction is offered to anyone who wants it, not merely to those holding philological degrees. A knowledge of morphology is not essential to the appreciation of literature, even the literature of a forgotten age or decade.’⁵⁸ The names attached were, of course, Pound and his friends, including Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Arnold Dolmetsch, Katherine Heyman (clearly still around, though Pound did not appear to see much of her), Alvin Langdon Coburn (a photographer with whom Pound would later evolve an abstract form of photography which they called a ‘vortograph’) and John Cournos. For Americans seeking European culture, Britain was now one of the few safe destinations; it could have brought in useful money, but this was not so much a Mother-Courage-like attempt to cash in on the disaster, as Pound seizing an opportunity to instigate his own alternative form of education, as he would do some decades later in Rapallo. It could potentially have been a wonderful crucible of artistic innovation, but nothing appears to have come of it; by the next year, when the Germans had started torpedoing civilian shipping and sending Zeppelins to bomb London, Britain joined the rest of Europe as an unattractive destination for all but the most determined American students of the arts.

The war frustrated other of Pound’s efforts to further his artistic projects. His essay on the Noh theatre came out in the Quarterly Review, but its editor, G.W. Prothero, told him, when he offered another piece, that he could not open the journal to anyone associated with Blast; he had given his word on the Noh article earlier in the year, so that had to go ahead, but there would be no sequel. It was an ill omen; the press would revert to a sturdy conservatism under the pressures of war, and Pound’s irreverent cocking of snooks, tolerated indulgently before the war, became increasingly unwelcome in the climate of hysterical patriotism. The other troublemakers, as George Dangerfield points out, the suffragettes, the trade unionists and even for now the Irish, had immediately reverted to being loyal and law-abiding citizens; the rebellious artists, London thought, should do the same. Before the war, being shocked by the latest artistic innovation was an agreeable pastime. Lewis was probably not so wrong when he suggested that it had been to some extent a mutually enjoyable game: ‘“Kill John Bull with Art!” I shouted. And John and Mrs Bull leapt for joy, in a cynical convulsion. For they felt as safe as houses. So did I.’ But now, even though, as Lewis says, ‘a bigger Blast than mine had rather taken the wind out of my sails’, that small artistic explosion appeared worryingly part of the conflagration.⁵⁹ Like Lawrence, Pound would find his earnings plummeting during the course of the war.

Pound did not reply to Lowell’s letter about the advertisement, and she continued undeterred with her efforts to place the anthology. Macmillan had appeared enthusiastic, but she discovered that Pound, as well as writing to her, had sent a stinging letter to them, which had the result of making them decide, in spite of the success of Amy’s own book, that they would rather not be involved with the new anthology. So she went back to Ferris Greenslet, the editor who had accepted her first book, to ask if Houghton Mifflin would be interested, and was so successful in convincing him that the new poetry was la nouvelle vague that he agreed to launch a whole new series devoted to the new poetry. Two of the first would be the anthology and Fletcher’s Irradiations; two of the others a volume of Binyon’s poetry, and some translations from the Japanese selected from the works of Lafcardio Hearn. Greenslet would publish eight volumes in this series in 1915, nine in 1916 and one in 1917. In November it was agreed that Amy would pay for the publication of the anthology, and Houghton Mifflin for advertising. There was, however, a stipulation. They would take it on only if Ford’s poem ‘On Heaven’, which earlier that year Pound and Aldington had both so extravagantly praised, were dropped, as they considered it blasphemous. ‘You know what the Puritan temper is,’ Amy wrote. ‘Orthodox religion has a strong hold over here, stronger than I, who live so far away from it, had realised.’⁶⁰ She wanted Aldington to ask Ford to submit some other work, but Ford, not unnaturally, would have nothing more to do with the venture.

Aldington was furious, and wrote Amy a long and impassioned letter, which he told her also expressed H.D.’s and Flint’s views. He appeared to have quite forgotten his recent attack on ‘the incurably vain and self-satisfied’ Ford, when all he had admitted in Ford’s favour was that he was ‘a good critic – when not blinded by prejudice or interest – a good poet in a few of his poems’. Now he claimed that ‘On Heaven’ was ‘their chief glory’. What would these ‘imbeciles’ object to next? he asks: ‘Do you think there is a probability of them censoring me and Hilda for being Hellenically “irreligious”? The last book contained a poem called “Lesbia” by me and one called “Priapus” by Hilda, as you know; would these religious gentleman censor them?’⁶¹ He asked her to remonstrate again with the publishers, but there was no suggestion that the other imagists would refuse to be published if her arguments failed. They were grateful to her for paying for the publication, and very happy that it looked like going ahead.

Houghton Mifflin remained resolutely opposed to ‘On Heaven’, though they said there was a possibility it might go in a later volume. Lowell in any case thought Ford’s style somewhat passé, but she refrained from saying so to her fellow-imagists, instead defending the firm on the grounds that it was purely a commercial decision, not a justification that can have impressed Aldington. A mixture of irritation and gratitude would characterise the Aldingtons’ relation with Amy: irritation less at her own actions than at her businesslike acceptance of the mores of American publishing. When Aldington told her the previous month that he had heard Rémy de Gourmont was sick and in penury, he was delighted when she immediately sent $200, saying it was ‘a very small sum to pay for the inspiration and knowledge I have derived from his writings. Through him I can pay off a little of my immense debt to his nation.’⁶² He was also grateful when she persuaded the recently launched New Republic, whose editor, Herbert Croly, was a friend of hers, to publish six articles by de Gourmont, which Aldington would translate. But there would soon be trouble.

The appearance of the New Republic had been welcomed in the Egoist (by Baptiste von Helmholtz, alias Pound) as a possible American equivalent to itself, because, like the Egoist, it promised to ‘respect no taboos’, though Pound had been dubious of such a claim by an American publication, citing the ‘male hen’ at the Atlantic Review and abusing the ‘little old ladies, male and female, of those aged editorial offices’ more generally.⁶³ Pound’s misogynistic rhetoric was regrettable, but his suspicions turned out to be justified. The editor explained to Lowell that ‘no taboos’ only referred to political matters: he had heard Rémy de Gourmont’s books were ‘very French’, and he stipulated that there must be ‘nothing too French for their readers’.⁶⁴ Unfortunately de Gourmont was not able to purge his Frenchness to their satisfaction; they then claimed the articles were not up to their standards, which Aldington refused to believe, though Lowell defended Croly by saying that once de Gourmont had had to remove his ‘Gallicisms’ he was not left with enough to say.⁶⁵ Aldington was outraged, and wrote an insulting letter to Herbert Croly, no longer extant, but Aldington’s comment on it to Amy suggests the flavour: ‘I am still sufficiently a goddam Englishman to do & say exactly as I please & to have a profound contempt for all things American.’⁶⁶ Amy, put out at his treatment of Croly, especially as she wished to go on publishing in the New Republic herself, rebuked Aldington in her most Boston manner for his lack of restraint and insularity, but with Ferris Greenslet’s help persuaded the Boston Evening Transcript to take the whole series, so there was a happy ending. De Gourmont sent her some manuscripts for her collection, and wrote to say: ‘In brief, I am shipwrecked, and I shall never forget that you came nobly to my rescue, you who know me only through my writings.’⁶⁷ Poor man, he did not have long to remember it; he died in September 1915.

For now Pound was not making difficulties, though Aldington told Amy he was worryingingly ‘unctuous’, and feared he was ‘meditating some devilry’.⁶⁸ Pound was in fact very preoccupied with his work on the Fenollosa papers, having moved on from the Japanese material to the Chinese. He was making translations, or rather, adaptations of translations, from Li Po, the poems which would appear the next year as Cathay, and rushed into the Aldingtons’ flat four or five times a day to show them his latest, which H.D. thought very beautiful; indeed their simplicity and tautness may have owed something to her example. In spite of Pound’s outbursts and Aldington’s suspicions, they were still friends. Ford and Violet Hunt invited H.D. to stay with them in their cottage at Selsey for a while, and when she returned Pound reported to his mother, with what seems affectionate solicitude, that she was now looking more robust. The Aldingtons were, however, becoming closer to Flint, whom they now knew as Frank or Frankie. H.D. would refer to Flint as a brother (the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood appears to be the reference, though there may also have been memories of the extended family of her youth), and even talked of little Ianthe, to whom she was much attached, as her niece. Flint was by now even more darkly suspicious of Pound than Aldington. When his friends quarrelled, Flint always felt he had to take sides, and he had no doubt sided with Hulme against Lewis, and hence against Vorticism, and increasingly Pound.

In late December, the climate suddenly changed again. Pound was working on two new articles on imagism, and realising afresh how important it was to him. The first was in the New Age, in a series entitled ‘Affirmations’, mainly promoting the Vorticist artists and sculptors, though one article dealt with imagism in poetry. He reminded his readers firmly that it was he who had named the movement: ‘Imagisme’, he says, ‘has been taken by some to mean Hellenism; by others the word is used most carelessly, to designate any sort of poem in vers libre. Having omitted to copyright the word at its birth I cannot prevent its misuse. I can only say what I meant by the word when I made it.’ He won’t, however, ‘guarantee that [his] thoughts about it will remain absolutely stationary’. He insists, as before, that ‘the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy’, but in other ways his definition has shifted somewhat again. He refers back to his earlier article in the same series on Vorticism, in which he had emphasised that the different arts have different ‘primary pigments’, but that all forms of Vorticism, of which imagism is one, have in common a reliance on ‘the creative faculty as opposed to the mimetic’. These points re-emerge (‘pigment’ has rather engagingly turned into ‘figment’), and he also repeats his conviction that energy or ‘intense emotion’ creates form. As he had explained by way of analogy in the ‘Vorticism’ article, ‘if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies of the magnet will proceed to organise form’, and it is, he says, ‘emotional force [that] gives the image’.⁶⁹

The second article was for T.P.’s Weekly. In it, Pound makes clear that his ideas have moved on yet again, for he now insists that imagism exemplifies all that excited him about the Chinese, through which he had recently found a new model for his poetics. The imagists, he says, have ‘sought the force of Chinese ideographs without knowing it’. It is the first expression of his conviction, which would remain central to his thought, that poetry should emulate what he believed to be the directness and simultaneity of the Chinese characters, his latest version of the poet’s Adamic language. English, ‘being the strongest and least inflected of the European languages’, is, he says, according to ‘the late Ernest Fenollosa, sometime Imperial Commissioner of Art in Tokyo’, the best language to ‘render the force and concision of the uninflected Chinese’. Imagism was not new, a point all the imagists repeatedly make, and to prove it he quotes from a range of authors from the poet of ‘The Seafarer’ to Swinburne, ‘the most uneven of the Victorian poets and the most splendid’, ending unexpectedly with Lionel Johnson – nothing, Pound claimed, could be more Chinese than his line, ‘Clear lie the fields, and fade into blue air’.⁷⁰

With this renewed consciousness of imagism’s significance, Pound began to complain again about the fact that the anthology was to have the word ‘imagist’ in the title. H.D., still hoping for peace, wrote to Lowell, begging her to change the name. It would be, she said, ‘much nicer not to be an –ism in any case. Weren’t the Pre-Raphaelites “The Seven” or possibly “The Nine”?’ Perhaps they should be ‘The Six’. H.D. would have greatly preferred to drop the contentious term; it meant a great deal to her to be one of a group of poets working together, but she hated being labelled. She added a postscript underlining twice that Aldington had said ‘in no event can we now appear under the direct title Imagiste’.⁷¹ Lowell cabled back that she would talk to the publishers.

Aldington wrote himself a few days later, urging Lowell again to drop the word. Having spoken to the publishers, however, she was reluctant to do so. Ferris Greenslet had suggested, drawing on her quotation from Henley in her preface to Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, that ‘Quintessentialists’ might actually fit them better, but he was in no doubt that imagism had, in today’s terms, market appeal. Amy wrote on 19 January 1915 (having said she had bankrupted herself on cables) to make the point:

‘Imagiste’ has come to have a certain meaning among lovers of poetry, and although Ezra is known to have invented it, it has swung far beyond him and really become a word to designate a certain kind of poetry. For that reason it has a commercial value, as people interested in our sort of poetry know that they are getting it when they see the word ‘Imagiste’ on the cover. Ezra knows that very well or he would not be so anxious to hang on to the word because, mind you, Ezra is thoroughly American in his understanding of the value of advertisement.⁷²

There is no doubt that Lowell was correct in that last statement (I have indeed quoted it earlier), and the same applied to herself; she and Pound were much more alike than either of them would ever be happy to admit. Yet whatever else one might think of her actions, it has to be granted that she took her promise of democracy seriously. Aldington – and therefore one presumes H.D. – reluctantly agreed, but Lowell would not go ahead without Flint’s support. He wrote her a letter, with his usual sardonic wit, which gave her more reassurance than she had ever hoped for:

Richard tells me that you have been disturbing the herrings in the pond with the multiplicity and plexity of your cablegrams. And that you want my permission to do something or other. Do it by all means; I leave everything to you on the spot. But don’t issue us into the world as the Quintessentialists or anything else high falutin’ and fantastic. Please don’t do that. Before you decide on anything: ask yourself: Would Boston do it? If yes, don’t. Perhaps you had better stick to the old title of Some Imagists or whatever it was. Never mind about Ezra. He no more invented imagism than he invented the moon. I have all the documents in proof. He got all his ideas about Imagisme from the little cénacle which used to meet at the Tour Eiffel, off Tottenham Court Road. He was a late comer to those meetings – much later than I said in my review of his Ripostes, where, in the preface to Hulme’s Complete Poetical Works, he refers to our jousts. There Hulme, the leading and combining spirit talked of Images, and so forth, as we all did, and produced the first Imagiste poems … All Ezra did therefore was to run about talking about the things which existed as though it was the thing that he had made. I thought his phrase in the preface … to the effect that the future was in the keeping of the Imagists was in jest at the expense of Hulme & co. Be all that as it may – Imagisme be damned! I don’t want to be called an Imagiste at all. I entered the whole thing as a joke, – une mystification littéraire – stratégie littéraire si vous voulez. That Ezra would strut about as the inventor of a real new live aesthetic afterwards did not occur to me. There is nothing new in Imagisme: and if I write its history it will be seen that Ezra’s part in it was very little more than the – very American – one of advertising agent; and he has done his work so badly that everyone has taken the thing as a silly joke.⁷³

Lowell was delighted, and it was decided that the anthology would be entitled Some Imagist Poets, eschewing Pound’s Gallicisms. Fletcher had also written to corroborate Flint’s version, saying that although he had not been part of the earlier group, he had been invited to join its meetings in ‘some dirty little Italian restaurant somewhere’, and recalled reading Pound’s statement in Ripostes to the effect that the imagistes were the descendants of this same Ecole des Images.⁷⁴ For now, resolution was at last achieved, and the anthology went to press.