NOW THAT LOWELL had Ada Russell living with her permanently, she was settling down to a very comfortable way of life in her vast house in Brooklyn. Ada Russell was housekeeper, critic, adviser and friend. She organised the household, which she made sure carried on its business as silently as possible until Amy rose at three in the afternoon. Ada would always be available to read and comment on Lowell’s latest poem, playing such a vital role in sustaining Lowell’s efforts and advising on them, to say nothing of being the inspiration of much of her writing, that Lowell suggested she should put a sign over the front door saying ‘Lowell & Russell, Makers of Fine Poems’.98 What would Pound, or even Aldington, have said about this shameless analogy between poetry and trade? Ada also arranged Amy’s frequent dinner parties, entertaining the guests until the hostess appeared late in the meal, accompanied by her sheep-dogs. After dinner, they would move to the library, and Lowell would sit and talk vivaciously to her guests, while cigarettes, cigars, coffee and liqueurs were passed round. Guests were provided with towels for their laps, in case the sheep-dogs wanted to sit on them. The evening would finish sharply at 12.05, and guests would depart to catch the last car to Boston at 12.15. Amy would then start work, with a cold supper tray laid out for her in case she felt hungry during the night. In the morning her two secretaries, whom she began to employ after her return from London, would type up the previous night’s work – new poems, corrected drafts, articles and lectures. After three they would be summoned to the bedroom to take dictation, mainly of Amy’s voluminous correspondence. They kept carbons of all her letters, which means that copies still exist of letters that never reached her English recipients because the top copies had gone on ships that were torpedoed en route.
In early December, John Gould Fletcher came to stay for a week. He had written to Amy before he left England, saying he would be staying in New York, but wouldn’t be able to afford the trip to Boston. Somehow he managed it. Lowell was apprehensive about the visit, writing to Aldington that ‘I am a good deal worried over Fletcher’s arriving as I can see no future for him with his inability to put himself in harness and his untactful manner with people.’99 In the event, the visit was a great success, with Lowell reporting that Fletcher was much improved, a ‘most delightful companion’ and ‘a thoroughly nice fellow’.100 There was one difficult scene, when Fletcher was taken out to dinner by Carl Engel and another musician, and, in a fit of irritation, was extremely rude to them both and stormed out of the restaurant. Amy, he said later, rebuked him fiercely and he burst into tears, whereupon she became sweetness and light, calmed him down, and appears not to have held the incident against him. Fletcher was full of admiration for her work, praising her poetry and telling her that her prose poems, which he named ‘polyphonic prose’, were something absolutely new in poetry, as new, in fact, as Chaucer had been. Fletcher was right that Lowell’s polyphonic prose was strikingly innovative, and if, like all her poetry, it was neglected for many years, it has recently been much praised for its rich and musical synaesthetic evocation of the sounds, colours and smells of city life, a new kind of poetry responding to modern urban experience.101 Lowell enjoyed Fletcher’s praise, and she felt that, being American and on hand, he was a particular ally. His views coincided with her own on many points, including their shared loathing for Pound. More positively, they both wanted to develop a new poetry in America, but not one that rejected outside influences. Commenting on an article that she had just published in Poetry on ‘Nationalism in Art’, he said he too was quite sure that ‘there is an American note, and it is to be found precisely in those works which carry on and develop further the elements of the universal art-tradition, not in those who try to be “barbaric yawps” and nothing else’.102 At this point he saw Lowell very much as a comrade. Poets must free themselves, he told her, from the kind of internecine artistic bickering that goes on in London: ‘It is time for artists to become a new army and to make some sort of a stand against the encroaching bourgeoisie, instead of wasting time in sharpshooting among themselves’.103 Unfortunately, Fletcher would prove incapable of eschewing sharp-shooting for very long, but he was on his best behaviour for now.
Fletcher went on to Chicago, a two-day train journey though blizzards, but he was rewarded by a wonderful view of the Niagara Falls, with all the surrounding trees coated in ice from the spray, and, he noted approvingly, free from tourists. He had gone to meet Harriet Monroe, who accepted an article from him on Lowell’s poetry. At once his resolution against artistic infighting was sorely tested: he told Amy he had had ‘to talk about nothing but Lindsay and Pound since I arrived. I am sick of those two worthies’. He assured her, however, that he had been polite, though he did acknowledge that he probably ‘hadn’t made a hit’. He also called in to meet the editor of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson, whom he scornfully described as a ‘Vassar sophomore … Giggles, enthusiasm, blind confidence, utter lack of knowledge’, by which latter trait he appears to mean that she had never heard of him.104 He was introduced to Edgar Lee Masters, of whom he had never heard. Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology was about to be an instant success, translated into seventy languages, became in Monroe’s eyes the third figure in the Chicago renaissance, joining Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay as exemplars of Middle Western poetic vigour. Even Pound admired Masters for a while, saying at one stage he thought he and Eliot were the two most promising American poets, but he soon lost his enthusiasm; he had probably genuinely changed his mind, but he could not have brought himself to admire a bestseller. It is just possible Pound’s description of Masters in the January 1915 Egoist as the first poet discovered by the American press was an oblique way of pointing out that in his view Amy was not a real poet, since the American press had discovered her some time earlier. Aldington certainly thought that was Pound’s aim.
Fletcher never even briefly admired the Chicago triumvirate. He told Lowell that Monroe had wanted him to meet Lindsay and Sandburg, but he had managed to avoid them. He tried to persuade Harriet not to accept a ‘neurasthenic’ war poem by Lawrence, and tactlessly told Amy that Lawrence had sent the letter criticising ‘The Bombardment’ for its frivolity, which Harriet had unwisely shown him. Monroe also let him read Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, to get his opinion of Pound’s latest discovery. She had written to Pound complaining that it was ‘too much like “Henry James carried to the Nth degree”’, part of its strength, one might argue. Fletcher thought it rather good. ‘It has an excellent beginning – a description of a London fog (Eliot is in London somewhere) and is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” being an attempt to put down the state of mind of a man who is so well bred as to be incapable of affirming his love for anyone on earth.’105 Fletcher’s biographer suggests that he recognised Prufrock’s problem so sharply because it was so very much his own. He thought the poem went off towards the end, a judgement which led Monroe to attempt to get Eliot at least to rewrite the conclusion before she published it; she predictably received an incandescent letter from Pound: ‘a portrait satire on futility can’t end by turning that quintessence of futility, Mr P. into a reformed character breathing out fire and ozone’. And he added: ‘Fletcher is no great judge of anything. He has a lawless and uncontrolled ability to catch certain effects, mostly of colour, but no finishing sense’, a comment that has a certain validity.106 ‘Lawless and uncontrolled’ was true of Fletcher’s personality as well as his poetry. Fletcher, however, became a great admirer of Eliot’s poetry.
From Chicago, Fletcher returned home to Arkansas, finding it very dull. He had only gone there in order to dun his sisters for money to return to live in Boston, but it would be some months before he could persuade them to give him enough to get back. His sisters, he told Amy, took no interest in his poetry. He mooned around the house by himself, brooding over his relationship with Daisy and his past. Yet while he was there, he wrote his moving sequence, ‘The Ghosts of an Old House’, recalling his childhood there. He starts with his father’s bedroom:
The clump of jessamine
Softly beneath the rain
Rocks its golden flowers
In this room my father died:
His bed is in the corner.
No one has slept in it
Since the morning when he wakened
To meet death’s hands at his heart.
I cannot go into this room,
Without feeling something big and angry
Waiting for me
To throw me on the bed,
And press its thumbs in my throat.107
The jessamine tenderly rocking its flowers, the dark terrors the father in death still inspires: the longings and agonising fears of his childhood are simultaneously evoked here. The sequence is one of Fletcher’s most powerful and poignant works.
One reason for Fletcher’s visit to the Little Review had been to report to Lowell on whether it might be a good investment for her. Although she had turned down the Egoist offer, owning a portion of a magazine still appealed to her. Fletcher gloomily warned against it, saying it was bound to fail, as the only things behind it were ‘girlish enthusiasm and complete ignorance’. Lowell would have trouble ‘restraining Miss Anderson’s exuberance’, and Harriet Monroe would undoubtedly become jealous.108 Anderson, he added, was too much under the influence of people like the anarchist Emma Goldman, and poets like Vachel Lindsay and Rupert Brooke – an extraordinarily diverse set of influences – and Fletcher was suspicious of her printer, apparently on the grounds that he was Jewish; since he published the Little Review for free because his wife liked the magazine, he sounded ideal. Lowell was not to be deterred. After all, Anderson had been a keen supporter of the imagist cause from the start, in July 1914 reprinting some of the original Des Imagistes, including Lowell’s ‘In a Garden’. Amy travelled to Chicago in January 1915, partly to see Harriet Monroe, who threw a poets’ party for her, but also to meet Margaret Anderson.
Anderson recounted the episode in her memoir, My Thirty Years’ War: ‘Harriet Monroe,’ she recalled, ‘appeared at the door of 917 one morning with a visitor – a large and important visitor whom I have always considered among the most charming people I have known.’ She had already spoken to Lowell on the telephone, and from her voice had imagined her ‘a slender and imperious blonde’. Well, imperious was right. ‘Culture and good taste were stamped upon her. She was brunette, her voice was contralto, her nose like a Roman emperor’s and her manner somewhat more masterful.’ Lowell’s proposition was that for $150 a month (slightly more than the Egoist had been asking) she would direct the poetry department. She introduced this offer in a way that delighted Anderson: ‘I’ve had a fight with Ezra Pound,’ she began. ‘When I was in London … I offered to join his group and put the Imagists on the map. Ezra refused. All right, my dear chap, I said, we’ll see who’s who in this business. I’ll go back to America and advertise myself so extensively that you’ll wish you had come in with me.’ Having control of poetry at the Little Review would enable her to support the cause of modern poetry, and she assured Anderson that she could count on her ‘never to dictate’. Anderson thought otherwise: ‘No clairvoyance was needed to know that Amy Lowell would dictate, uniquely and majestically, any adventure in which she had a part.’109 She turned her down, though she would continue regularly to publish her work, as well as that of the Aldingtons, Flint and Fletcher. It’s a highly entertaining story, but was Anderson’s assessment of Lowell’s character right? In fact, Lowell never precisely dictated to her fellow imagists – they would have taken it very ill – though it has to be said, as with the issue of the anthology’s title, they would often come round to her point of view in the end. Perhaps it was her charm as much as her purposefulness, though one should not ignore the fact that publication of the anthology depended on her money. The flaw in Lowell’s view of poetic democracy was the same as that in her very American understanding of political freedom: she would never recognise that those who set out with money were more equal than those without.
In the meantime, Lowell had had a much more cheerful letter from Aldington. In December, he and H.D. had moved to a larger flat in Hampstead, with, as he told Amy, ‘a real bathroom & kitchen’. Both of them preferred the country to the city, but Hampstead, living as they did in Christchurch Place close to the heath, was in some ways the best of both worlds. They were much happier out there, Aldington reported: ‘I surprise my useless American wife with my skill & accuracy in cooking potatoes & mending chairs – they are admirable avocations for clearing one’s mind in this cleaner atmosphere, away from Kensington squabbles.’ Aldington said optimistically that the anthology would bring them ‘fame, if not fortune’. Unlike Lowell, he did not anticipate wide sales. Aldington had been schooled by Pound to distrust the public; contrary to Anderson’s view, he thought Lowell too democratic, and upbraided her for it: ‘You still believe in the people! My dear Amy, that is because your means allow you to ignore the people. If you wish accurate accounts of the people, apply to Lawrence, Flint & co, who have risen from the deep.’110
Whether H.D. still went to the British Museum during the remainder of her pregnancy is hard to guess. She and Aldington kept in touch with their Kensington friends – in spite of Aldington’s disparaging comments on Kensington squabbles – and Aldington went regularly to Bloomsbury to the Egoist office. But the British Museum Reading Room was at the best of times a male-dominated place, and she may have felt self-conscious going there as a pregnant woman. One indication – not conclusive, of course – is that her poems during that period were no longer translations, on which she generally worked there, though she would return to these later in the year. Aldington claimed the two of them were happier, but walks on the heath, even the coming of spring, could not banish the war. Rereading her early poems many years later H.D. was struck by how sad they were, and recalled that at this time an ‘iron-curtain’ fell between her and her secure upbringing, with her ‘somewhat – well – not hot-house, but in a way, very comfortable surroundings’ and her ‘very petted and spoiled American life’.111 She was now in a bleak and menacing world, vulnerable and afraid. One poem she wrote that spring was entitled ‘Midday’, in which emotional exhaustion and debilitating strain are suggested through the enervating, corrosive heat of a too hot noon:
The light beats upon me.
I am startled –
A split leaf rushes on the paved floor
I am anguished – defeated.
A slight wind shakes the seed-pods.
My thoughts are spent as the black seeds.
My thoughts tear me.
I dread their fever.
I am scattered in its whirl.
I am scattered like hot shrivelled seeds.
The shrivelled seeds are spilt on the path.
The grass bends with dust.
The grape slips under its crackled leaf.112
Paradoxically, she had created a powerful poem about the loss of creativity, evoking a sense of the barren, anguished, diminished existence experienced by so many civilians at the time, torn by constant anxiety about the war.
The Aldingtons did not move in order to put distance between themselves and Pound, but given the tensions it may have been an added bonus. Pound and Dorothy were in any case out of London for January and February 1915, having gone to Stone Cottage with Yeats at the end of December. One might think this an odd experience for a new wife, but Dorothy appears to have accepted it with good grace. She was used to spending time in country houses. Yeats reported that she was doing the housekeeping, but that must only have meant that she was giving Alice Welfare the orders for meals. Dorothy, of course, did not cook. She was an avid reader, and she was doing more painting, in particular designing a Vorticist cover for a new edition of Ripostes that Mathews was to bring out later in the year. Yeats wrote to Mabel Beardsley that Pound’s ‘charming young wife’ looked ‘as if her face was made out of Dresden China. I look at her in perpetual wonder. It is so hard to believe she is real; & yet she spends all her daylight hours drawing the most monstrous cubist pictures.’113 For all three, it was something of a relief to get away from the talk of the war, from the troops passing through London on their way to the front, from the newspapers full of loud patriotism and dark news. Yet on one occasion they had a blackout imposed – an unheard of thing at that time, though something to which the country would get rapidly accustomed. Soldiers were constantly manoeuvring all around them; one day, Pound told his mother, a regiment descended on them and drank all their cider. In addition, as James Longenbach points out in Stone Cottage, Pound was hearing regular reports from Gaudier in the trenches, and Yeats news from Maud Gonne, who was nursing the wounded and dying in France. Even in their country retreat, the war could not be kept at bay.
Pound’s main task as Yeats’ secretary, as the year before, was to read to him in the evenings, to save further damage to Yeats’ eyes. That winter, as well as a wide variety of poetry, he read aloud to Yeats a strange travel book, for which they both professed great admiration. This was C.L. Doughty’s long Arabia Deserta, little read when it was first published in 1888, written in strangely convoluted and archaicised English, so that the desert Arabs appear distanced in time as well as space, and the language itself gives the impression that they still live in biblical days. Longenbach suggests the experience of reading Doughty encouraged both poets further in their belief that they should speak only to an elite audience. He quotes what Pound wrote in 1917 in the New Age: ‘the number of people who can read Doughty’s “Arabia Deserta” is decently and respectfully limited; so much so that the readers of that work tend to form an almost secret society, a cellule at least of an actual, if almost imperceptible, aristocracy’.114 Yet, Pound was also attracted by Doughty’s acounts of the djinn, the spirits of the dead that speak through living people, in whom Allen Upward had already aroused his interest, the artist’s ‘allies aforetime’, as he had called them in his article on ‘The New Sculpture’ the previous February. Longenbach suggests the djinn must have recalled to Pound his intense experience of the presence of the troubadours on his walking tour, for in March he published a poem, entitled ‘Provincia Deserta’, full of memories of the places he passed through then, recalling the fascination with the light in the mountains that he had recorded in his diary: ‘I have lain in Rocafixada,/level with sunset,/Have seen the copper come down/tingeing the mountains,/I have seen the fields, pale, clear as an emerald,/Sharp peaks, high spurs, distant castles’. He ends simply: ‘I have walked over those roads;/I have thought of them living.’115 ‘Provincia Deserta’ has the direct, conversational tone of the free verse he had written on the walking tour itself. It is a poem of memories, a Proustian recall of the past emotions reawoken in the present, and some of these memories would become a key element in the Cantos, on which he would start work that year. Since he had taken on his role of leader of the newest literary school, his love of the troubadours had been in temporary eclipse, but they were too important for him to be dropped for long.
Yet in spite of this reawakening of his affection for the troubadours, China remained dominant. Pound was correcting the proofs for Cathay, and continuing to study Fenollosa’s observations on Chinese characters. In Poetry that February he argued that if poets used the Chinese as a model, the American renaissance for which he hoped would come: ‘The first step of a renaissance, or awakening,’ he said, ‘is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing … The romantic awakening dates from the production of Ossian. The last century rediscovered the middle ages. It is possible that this century may find a new Greece in China.’ Pound had taken this idea of the need for fresh, little-known models from Rémy de Gourmont, whose views on tradition Aldington had translated for the Egoist the previous July. De Gourmont made a distinction between a ‘continuous tradition’, which he regards as stultifying, and the ‘renewed tradition. They must not be confounded. The seventeenth century believed it was renewing the bond with antiquity. The Romanticists believed they had rediscovered the Middle Ages. These discontinued traditions are more fertile when the period being renewed is distant and unknown.’116 Pound could draw on the distant – such as his troubadours or eighth-century China – and still claim to be making a break with conventions of his day. Yet in practice, the imagists had worked by using imported models from the start – Japanese, Gaelic, Greek and indeed Chinese; as so often, the theory was simply catching up.
For his renaissance to succeed, however, Pound still believed that patrons were vital. If the best art could only be appreciated by a tiny handful, an aristocratic ‘cellule’, there was no alternative. Much of his quarrel with Lowell was over her insistence on being an artist rather than a patron: ‘Too bad about Amy,’ he had written to Harriet in January, ‘why can’t she conceive of herself as a Renaissance figure instead of a spiritual chief, which she ain’t.’117 (The situation is very different, but there is an echo of his insensitivity to Margaret Cravens’ artistic hopes.) But for Pound and Lowell the question of audience went to the heart of their dispute. Amy believed not only that it was it possible to educate readers to appreciate modernist verse, but that it was essential to let more people know, appreciate and be liberated by this new poetry, a continuation, in another form, of her earlier good works. Jane Marcus has suggested that ‘Amy Lowell’s American imagism for the people … was a direct threat to the Eliot/Pound European modernist mode of the cult of genius’, a shrewd observation, and even if to say Amy was hoping to reach the ‘people’ is perhaps an overstatement, she was much more optimistic than Pound about her likely audience.118 Whilst it cannot be denied that she enjoyed self-promotion as much as Pound, and though the democracy she had introduced into the imagist group had its inbuilt limitations, it was quite different from Pound’s desired autocracy as presiding genius. Pound wrote that January 1915 to Monroe:
In the Imagist book I made it possible for a few poets who were not over-producing to reach an audience. That delicate operation was managed by the most rigorous suppression of what I considered faults.
Obviously, such a method and movement are incompatible with effusion, with flooding magazines with all sorts of wish-wash and imitation and the near-good. If I had acceded to A.L’s proposal to turn ‘Imagism’ into a democratic beer-garden, I should have undone what little good I had managed to do by setting up a critical standard.119
Pound wanted desperately to be acknowledged as leader of the poetic avant-garde, and not solely because of personal ambition; it was only he, he was convinced, who had the artistic judgement to advance the cause. ‘My problem,’ he told Harriet, ‘is to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization.’ That has a certain heroism, if tinged with megalomania, but keeping the advancing poets under his control was to become more and more difficult.
Yet good news was in the offing: a possible patron for his renaissance was about to emerge. He was back in touch with John Quinn, the lawyer whom he had met along with Yeats’ father in New York in 1910. In January 1915 he had published an article on Jacob Epstein in the New Age, lamenting the fact that American collectors would not buy works like his, but only ‘autograph MSS of William Morris, faked Rembrandts and faked Vandykes’.120 John Quinn, who had bought Morris manuscripts in the past, took this to be a personal attack, and wrote to Pound to say that he had given up buying manuscripts and was now buying modern art – Picasso, Matisse and Derain; and he had – as Yeats had told Pound after the article was published – even bought an Epstein; he was now interested in buying work by Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound was delighted, and in March replied at length, apologising for apparently attacking Quinn so unjustly and assuring him he had not had him in mind. (He might equally well, he said, have mentioned those who bought Keats manuscripts, in this case undoubtedly with Amy in his sights.) He promised to find out what Gaudier might have to sell: ‘My whole drive,’ he told Quinn, ‘is that if a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time and food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist: he is building art into the world; he creates.’ With just a few patrons who ‘back their own flair’ and ‘buy from unrecognised men’ there could soon be a renaissance in the arts.121 John Quinn was going to play the role in which Lowell had so conspicuously failed. He and Pound would work together over the next few years, Pound as adviser, Quinn as investor, supporting in one way or another, among others, Lewis, Joyce and the Little Review.
Pound also proclaimed a new renaissance in the New Age, this time with no suggestion it would be a specifically American Risorgimento, though again China would play a central role. His article on Jacob Epstein had been one of a series, entitled ‘Affirmations’, defending Vorticism and his related current enthusiasms. Another, titled ‘Analysis of this Decade’, had argued that a few men, mainly the Vorticists, were introducing some innovative ideas that would bring ‘a new focus’ to the age. Pound mentions Ford’s ‘mot juste’, Lewis’s ‘sense of emotion in abstract design’, and his own ‘qualitative analysis in literature’. He also more controversially claimed he had introduced the notion of the ‘Image’: one would have thought that as Mathews was republishing Ripostes at much the same time, including his preface to Hulme’s poems and his tribute to the ‘School of Images’, he would have had some qualms about making such claim to sole authorship of this idea. Yet what Pound emphasises most in this article are the outside sources from which these new forms of art sprang: his own concern for ‘world-poetry’, Gaudier’s ‘feeling of masses in relation’, practised by ‘Epstein and countless “primitives” outside the Hellenic, quasi-Renaissance tradition’, and, of course, ‘Fenollosa’s finds in China and Japan’: ‘these new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex of London,’ he writes. ‘They cannot help but bring about changes as great as the Renaissance changes … The Renaissance sought for a lost reality, a lost freedom. We seek for a lost reality and a lost intensity’.122 In China, he believed, they would find it.