ONE HAS TO sympathise with Pound. Even if there is much in what Flint says about the fact that Pound did not invent a new aesthetic, he gave the movement direction, manifestos, drive and, most importantly, a name. He had constantly revisited it, suggesting new metaphors and analogies by which those original ideas could be understood. On the one hand, for him it had come to have a visionary significance. On the other, he had invented a brand, one with ‘commercial value’, as Amy said, and even if Pound would not have wished to make his protest in those terms he was conscious of what its loss would mean. He considered himself the major poetic talent of the imagist movement, and most literary critics would still agree, though some might now argue the case for H.D. or, if one includes him among the imagists, Williams, but at the time Pound was an established poet in the way none of the others were. It is hard to gauge his inner feelings; if, as Williams had noticed a decade earlier, he rarely even as a young man gave away any hint of his vulnerabilities, one has glimpses of them in his letters to Margaret and occasionally to Dorothy, and in the notes on his walking tour. The letters by this stage are largely public performances, full of fireworks and bravado. Yet Pound was without doubt deeply hurt by what he felt was a betrayal, though he responded by demonising Lowell cruelly and unrelentingly; her reputation is only just beginning to recover from his malign denunciations.
Yet, in addition, Pound must also have felt a crisis of identity; two years earlier he had reinvented himself as a leader of a movement, and now that movement was in disarray. What made things even worse was that, if Amy were edging imagism out of Pound’s grasp, there were already ominous signs that Vorticism would not survive the war; Pound’s efforts to prolong it would grow more and more frenzied. The Rebel Arts Centre had dissolved after Lewis and Lechmere fell out bitterly, shortly after the Blast dinner. Within a fortnight, the Great Ormond Street premises had been vacated. In happier circumstances, alternative accommodation might have been found, but the war began a week later and the painters went their separate ways. Richard Cork has suggested that, apart from Lewis, they were in any case always restive under the collective name of Vorticists, which they felt Lewis and Pound had sprung on them. Even Lewis and Pound had rather different views of what Vorticism was, although Pound at least does not seem to have realised this, certainly not at the time. One of Lewis’ several manifestos in Blast proclaimed, ‘Our vortex is not afraid of the Past: it has forgotten it’s [sic] existence’.75 (Lewis’ misuse of the apostrophe rivals even that of most present-day undergraduates.) Lewis in particular blasted the years 1837–1900, while Pound quoted both Pater and Whistler as ancestors; he did not repudiate everything between 1837 and 1900. In Pound’s manifesto he wrote that ‘All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live’. With Vorticism as with imagism, Pound argues that the best art of the past followed similar precepts. ‘Music,’ he insisted, ‘was vorticist in the Bach–Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description.’76 Lewis in the 1920s would assert that Pound was at heart a passéiste, and that the literary side of the movement always had lagged behind the visual, but at the time he tolerated Pound’s continued interest in the past; making the best of it, he would describe him in the second issue of Blast as a ‘Demon pantechnicon driver, busy with removal of old world into new quarters. In his steel net of impeccable technique, he has lately caught Li Po. Energy of a discriminating Element.’77 It was a description that delighted Pound.
There were other differences between the two. Whilst Pound wanted to emphasise the energy and fluid force of the Vortex, Lewis, anxious to distance himself from the Futurists’ love of speed and movement, stressed its still centre. According to Douglas Goldring, Lewis would explain the Vortex to all and sundry thus: ‘You think at once of a whirlpool … At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist.’ Goldring’s comment on this definition was simply: ‘Whatever else the Vorticists may have been, they were certainly not silent.’78 Noisiness was something Pound shared with Lewis, but Lewis’ insistence that the machine and the industrial are the proper subject of Vorticist art found little echo in Pound. His example of a Vorticist poem had been H.D.’s ‘Oread’, whose sea, pines and rocks could not be more different from the subject-matter advocated by Lewis. When Lewis changed his mind about the machine, he would distance himself from Vorticism for reasons Pound appears never to have grasped.
Lewis did not reject the past completely, but he saw it very differently from Pound; like Hulme, Lewis asserted the kinship of this new geometric art with that of archaic and non-Western peoples. ‘The Art-Instinct,’ he wrote in Blast, ‘is permanently primitive.’79 Like Worringer, the German art historian who had so influenced Hulme, he saw geometric form, wherever it appeared, as a defence against the fearful chaos of existence. The Vorticists, with what he described as their ‘egoistic hardening’, their concentration, their eschewal of the softness of the humanistic, representational tradition, their rejection of the messiness of everyday life for the abstractions of art, are in tune with those archaic and non-Western people: he praised an exhibition of German woodcuts because the ‘black, nervous fluid of existence flows and forms into hard stagnant masses in this white luminous body … It is African black … disciplined, blunt, thick and brutal’.80 As with Hulme, one is left with the paradox that an aggressively masculine stance comes out of a fearful core. The belligerence of Vorticism is a response to what Lewis saw as a violent and predatory world. If, like Lewis, one thinks the cultured surface of bourgeois life a sham, and sees a society of embattled desires and hostile forces, an industrial world of competition and ruthless disregard for the weak, the metropolis as an ‘iron jungle’, as Blast 2 would put it, the world is a dangerous and cruel place.81 All one can do is to fight aggressively to be one of those who win. Lewis’ vision of the world in 1914 has at base much in common with that of his Marxist contemporaries, though while they would condemn the way the strong oppressed the weak, Lewis takes it as a fact of life. Pound’s version of primitivism was very different; he loved the periods when art forms were young and new, simple yet intense, and his values were more purely bound up with his belief in the importance of art, an aestheticism for which Lewis would later castigate him.
Lewis’ differences with Pound would gradually become clear to him, but for now they were on the barricades together. In 1914, they both had immensely high hopes for the movement they called Vorticism. Under the antics and the quarrels they had been deadly serious; the showmanship was, they believed, simply a necessary tactic. At the imagists’ dinner, Pound, Lowell reported, quite openly described Blast as advertising, and he would write in 1915 that Blast’s ‘large type and the flaring cover are merely bright plumage. They are the gay petals which lure.’82 But this did not mean that he and Lewis did not believe in the Vorticist mission, even if they thought it meant different things. As Lewis would write later of himself: ‘He thought the time had come to shatter the visible world to bits, and build it nearer to the heart’s desire; and he really was persuaded that this absolute transformation was imminent … The War looked to him like an episode at first – rather proving his contentions than otherwise.’83 Perhaps it was a folie à deux, but they had really believed they were going to change the world, and their disappointment would be bitter. Pound was still writing in January 1915, ‘are we, as one likes to suppose, on the brink of another really great awakening, when the creative or art vortices shall be strong enough, when the people who care will be well enough organised to set the fine fashion, to impose it, to make the great age?’84 His use of the word ‘impose’ is characteristic, and emblematic of his misunderstanding of how artistic changes come about, or, at any rate, worthwhile artistic changes – in two decades’ time, the Nazis and the Stalinists would certainly be imposing artistic styles by decree. Yet Pound’s question mark itself perhaps indicated that doubt was already setting in. As Lewis later wrote: ‘We are the first men of a Future that has not materialised. We belong to a “great age” that has not come off.’85 Ultimately, as far as the world of the arts and of literature was concerned, those pre-war artistic experiments did indeed make an impact, but the next few years would prove dark and discouraging.
One after another, many of the rebel artists and their supporters left for the war. By the autumn of 1914, Hulme and Gaudier were already at the front, Gaudier having like Hulme immediately enlisted, in his case in the French Army. Initially, he found this a problematic venture, having deserted the army some time before; for a while he was in danger of being court-martialled rather than sent to the trenches, but he was finally accepted. Epstein recalled in his autobiography seeing him off at Charing Cross station: ‘The turmoil was terrible. Troops were departing and Sophie was in a state of hysterics and collapse. Gaudier’s friends, including Hulme, Richard Aldington, Tancred and Ethel Kibblewhite, were there to see him off, and Gaudier himself, terribly pale and shaken by Sophie’s loud sobs, said good-bye to us.’86 Aldington later recalled that they sang the Marseillaise as Gaudier left, adding even more to the noisiness of the scene.87 Lewis would be around for a while; he was suffering from severe gonorrhoea that had turned into septicaemia, which made enlisting out of the question for now, but Pound reported to Harriet Monroe that ‘Wadsworth, along with Augustus John and nearly everybody, is drilling in the courtyard of the Royal Academy’.88
Those of the Blast group who were left out of uniform were moving in different directions. Lewis and Epstein had quarrelled, much to Pound’s dismay, though as Epstein was very much Hulme’s protégé and friend, it was not surprising that once Hulme and Lewis had become enemies, Epstein would take Hulme’s side. In addition, Blast looked a very different production in the autumn from the way it had appeared in June. Even some of those who had enjoyed its rebellious energy in June began, once the war was under way, to find the aesthetics and antics of those that Aldington described as the Blastites disturbingly akin to the bombardments on the front. Aldington, who had already decided he wanted no more truck with Lewis, reported to Amy: ‘I met Epstein the other day and he told me he had also determined to have nothing to do with Lewis … I said Lewis was a charlatan, and he said yes, but he wasn’t even a decent charlatan, he was ungenerous.’89 It might seem a volte-face on Aldington’s part, but the world had changed. In June 1914, Blast’s aggression was a delightful joke. By the end of the year, the bleak message behind what Pound had called the ‘bright plumage’ and ‘gay petals’, that the world was engulfed in a hard, violent, mechanised conflict, felt terrifyingly like the glorification of a grim truth.
Judgement of the movement depended, perhaps, on whether one thought of the Vorticist vision as diagnosis or programme; in the later war years, to most people, even to Lewis himself, it began to look more like the latter. Yet Lewis had earlier argued in Blast that ‘an Art must be organic with its Time’, and Ford, in full agreement with this doctrine, had defended the Vorticists as recorders of the modern world when he had reviewed that first issue: ‘Nowadays, ten times a day we are whirled at incredible speeds through gloom, amidst clamour. And the business of the young artist of to-day is to render those glooms, those clamours, those iron boxes, those explosions, those voices from the metal-horns of talking machines and hooters.’90 From the longer perspective, many critics would agree with Ford that the power of Vorticism came from its diagnosis of the time. Paul Overy has written of the movement that at ‘their best the Vorticists achieved a strong visualisation of the headlong flight of Europe into mechanical barbarity, an awareness of the brutalisation of man by his irresponsible control of his environment that is lacking in the idealised art of Cubism and the romanticized art of Futurism.’91 Such a diagnosis is what Jacob Epstein himself said he offered in his famous carving of the Rock Drill, which he would exhibit the following spring. Epstein remained deeply opposed to Lewis, and in no way considered himself a Vorticist, but Richard Cork suggests that this work, which had originally appeared mounted on a mechanical drill, is ‘the most unequivocal and haunting sculptural expression of the Vorticists’ dual concern with the machine and with dehumanised destruction’.92 Epstein himself in his autobiography describes it as ‘the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into.’93 The Jewish Epstein was by then looking back after the horrors of the Second as well as the First World War, and in retrospect he saw his work as a prophetic and terrible warning, but even at the time it may have been his horror at the deadly and destructive modern machines of war, of which news came from the front daily, that had made him so suspicious of Lewis. When Epstein exhibited the piece again in 1916, he had removed the drill, cut off the driller’s legs, making his work, according to Cork, ‘a victim of the machine age … his eyes look pitiful under their metal hood as they peer into the distance with no hope’.94
In spite of these departures and dissensions, Vorticism hung on. Ford had given Lewis a commission to do up his study, ‘transforming it,’ as Richard Cork puts it, ‘into a crimson Vorticist showpiece’, not perhaps very restful for a study, but then Ford was not a resting man.95 The next year Lewis with Helen Saunders’ help would decorate a Vorticist room at the Tour Eiffel restaurant. Lewis and Pound were planning another issue of Blast, though they would not be able to produce it until the following July; 1915 would also see the first and only Vorticist Exhibition. Pound was coming to think that the war climate was inimical to good art. He wrote to Monroe in November 1914 to say there was a Rodin exhibit at the South Kensington Museum (it had been the Victoria & Albert for some time, but no one appears to have used the name), ‘good of its kind but it does look like muck after one has got one’s eye in on Epstein’s Babylonian austerity’. An exhibition of Modern Spanish Art – with no Picassos – was also ‘MUCK’, this time in capitals.96 The violence of Pound’s judgements was steadily increasing; under criticism from others, he was becoming more and more locked into his persona of the authoritarian arbiter of artistic excellence, the ruthless denouncer of all sham art, the lonely but fearless battler against the forces of philistinism.
War damage was taking its toll on London’s literary world and in one way or another openings for the ‘newer’ poets were closing. The New Age took up a patriotic pro-war position, and was notably less sympathetic to artistic and poetic experimentation than it had been; it still continued to publish the young avant-garde, but denounced them more and more belligerently.97 Monro’s Poetry and Drama would cease publication at the end of 1915, largely on account of paper shortages, and the Egoist was shaky. The latter had a tiny circulation, and never made money, as it attracted little advertising. Even the Freewoman had carried more, with regular advertisements for women’s clothes from places like Debenham and Freebody’s, but those had all gone. During 1914, the magazine brought in £37, but had cost £337 to bring out, and was in fact being funded by anonymous donations from Harriet Shaw Weaver herself. Pound suggested they suspended publication until after the war, but Weaver was not one to give in easily. She wrote to Amy in November asking her to buy the literary section of the magazine for £300 a year. Amy thought London was too far away for her to have the control she would have liked; in any case she loathed Dora Marsden’s articles, and felt she would be too out of sympathy with that side of the paper. Dora Marsden was increasingly opposed to democracy, which she saw as a sham that offered the illusion that the people had some say in their government, whilst in fact it was controlled by vested interests. Like Pound at this stage, in the war she saw little difference between the sides. All this shocked Lowell, but Dora Marsden was equally opposed to Lowell. That she had reluctantly agreed to approach Lowell again is a measure of her anxiety about the paper’s financial health. In the event Harriet Shaw Weaver managed to keep it going by herself. She cut the size of each issue to 16 pages, changed it from fortnightly to monthly, and cut the editorial salaries, and, of course, put in some more of her own money. The Egoist would outlast the war.