I

ALDINGTON, MEANWHILE, WAS continuing to work on the imagist number of the Egoist, only viable because someone had anonymously given the magazine £50. The donation, he told Lowell incredulously, had come because the donor ‘admired D. Marsden’.¹ Although pleased they could go ahead, he was dismayed by this boost for Marsden; he had been trying to persuade Harriet Shaw Weaver to break with her, which she now could not do. As the anonymous donor was very likely Weaver herself, she had perhaps chosen an astute way to protect her friend without offending Aldington. Flint was writing a history of the movement for the issue, along the lines that he had sketched in his letter to Lowell, and Aldington had asked Monro, who had written a warm review of Des Imagistes the year before, to review the anthology. The imagists would each contribute one poem, and there would be a series of articles about them individually, largely by each other. Aldington had asked Pound to send a poem too but he had not replied: ‘really absurd,’ he complained to Amy, ‘considering how long & how intimately I have known him … he imagines I want his poem because of his “great reputation.”’² He had also asked him to get one from William Carlos Williams, but there was no word on that, although May Sinclair contributed one, on her time in Belgium with the Red Cross in the first weeks of the war; it was something of a coup, not because it was a particularly powerful poem, but the signal that this prestigious and well-established writer was throwing in her lot with the imagists was invaluable. Marianne Moore, then an unknown at the beginning of her career, had sent in some unsolicited poems, already in the accomplished syllabic verse for which she would be famous; some had appeared in April, and one would be included in the May imagist number. This latter, a wry elegant poem, ‘To William Butler Yeats on Tagore’, commended his belief that ‘it pays,/To cut gems even in these conscience-less days’, an insistence that art still mattered that Aldington was happy to print.³ H.D. wrote to Marianne Moore to say she remembered her from Bryn Mawr, and told her how much she and Aldington admired her poetry. She urged her to come to London. ‘I know, more or less, what you are up against, though I escaped some five years ago!’⁴ One wonders what Marianne Moore replied, but she stayed in the States. By 1915, the literary and artistic scene in America had changed considerably since H.D. left in 1911, and Moore had no wish for the expatriate life.

The May Egoist, when it appeared, was not altogether successful as promotion for the imagist cause. When Harold Monro’s review of the anthology came in, it was disappointingly negative. Monro was deeply opposed to the log-rolling habits of the London literary press; one reason for his falling out with the Poetry Society was his refusal to praise its members’ poetry uncritically; and perhaps the very fact that he was a good friend of Aldington and Flint made him all the more determined to prove his impartiality. He was also in low spirits, upset especially by Brooke’s death. The imagists’ emphasis on technique, and their lack of concern, as he saw it, for social and political questions, appalled him in the present circumstances. When he had met up with Pound in the early days of the war, he had felt him to be, according to his biographer Dominic Hibberd, ‘almost contemptibly irrelevant, a long-haired dilettante chattering among the teacups’.⁵ The tone of his review conveys a similar irritation: it rebuked the imagists for their ‘fixed principles of not admitting their obligations’, describing them as ‘one of the latest groups in the forward movement of English poetry – not the only one’; the preface’s statement that imagism was now a household word was, he pointed out, a ‘vain exaggeration’. All very true. The imagists, he asserted, in their determination to cut out cliché, to pare down their work, had scarcely left themselves with anything to say or with the means to say it. H.D.’s ‘Oread’, so admired by Pound, he describes as ‘petty poetry’, ‘minutely small’. He calls her the ‘truest “Imagist” of the group’, but it is clear that that is not a compliment. ‘Her poems,’ he says, ‘have a slight flavour of brine; they are as fragile as sea-shells. If I came too near them I should be afraid of crushing them into the sand with my clumsy feet.’ He had slightly kinder words for Flint and Aldington, but Lowell he dismissed as prose, but then she had greatly upset him by some unkind comments on the Poetry Bookshop in the Little Review the year before. He ended by saying the imagists’ chief fault was pretension: they ‘labour to appear skilful’.⁶

The issue also included articles on each of them, generally by a fellow-imagist, and these were far more sympathetic, though in the case of Fletcher’s article on Lowell too much so. He sent in a gushing eulogy that Aldington felt obliged to tone down, much to Fletcher and Lowell’s annoyance. All the others avoided unqualified praise. Aldington wrote warmly though not uncritically on Flint, and in mixed terms on Pound, an article included at the last minute; he had earlier thought to ignore him altogether. In the end he gave Pound both considerable praise and some mockery, identifying him as a Romantic poet, about which, as he knew, Pound would not be happy. Flint wrote a tribute to H.D., quoting Aldington’s description of her work as ‘an accurate mystery’, justifying this appropriation by saying, ‘I could not find a better phrase, for in detail it has the precision of goldsmith’s work, in ultimate effect it is mysterious and only to be comprehended by the imagination’.⁷ Ferris Greenslet, the editor from Houghton Mifflin, supplied a judicious piece on Fletcher; he had visited London earlier in the year and met Aldington; presumably he had spoken well of Irradiations, which he had then just accepted for publication, giving Aldington the idea of asking him. The mutual congratulation, even though it was laced with qualifications, rather backfired; Eliot’s friend Conrad Aiken attacked them in the New Republic and accused them of simply giving each other undeserved puffs, and the accusation of being a self-promoting coterie would return to haunt them. Yet the attacks the imagist Egoist provoked, like those on the anthology itself, usefully played their part in increasing its notoriety and its sales. The issue itself sold many more copies than usual, 1,000 rather than the average 750.

Aldington had arranged for 150 extra copies of the May Egoist to be printed for distribution by Lowell to American bookshops, to promote the anthology there. When they reached her, however, she was horrified: Dora Marsden’s opening article would, she was convinced, prevent most from looking further and, if they did, Monro’s caustic review, ‘in which’, as she put it to Aldington, ‘he pitches into us all and the movement in general with the most delightful impartiality’, would be appalling for their reputations.⁸ Quite what she had against this particular Marsden article is hard to know, though Marsden’s cumbersome style and tendency to argue in the most abstract of terms – ironic in light of the fact that her main theme at that period was the danger of abstractions – made her philosophical pieces far from lively reading. As she was writing in that May article about the power of images in the mind, it was curiously appropriate for the imagist issue. Lowell, however, was also horrified by Lawrence’s war poem, which ‘for farfetched indecency beats anything’ that she had ever seen. ‘Sometimes,’ she added, ‘I think his condition is almost pathological, and that he has a kind of erotic mania.’⁹ Lawrence’s poem was called, ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’, that is, ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, Christ’s words from the cross. It is spoken through the persona of a soldier recalling the act of bayoneting, with the killing of the enemy coming to represent some perverted sexual rite:

Like a bride he took my bayonet, wanting it,

Like a virgin the blade of my bayonet, wanting it,

And it sank to rest from me in him,

And I the lover, am consummate,

And he is the bride, I have sown him with the seed

And planted and fertilized him.¹⁰

It is a powerful and disturbing depiction of the perversions of emotion that war produces. We are now familiar with the idea that in war sexual and aggressive drives become strangely and dangerously mixed; not so Amy Lowell and the people of Boston in 1915. It would, she said, ‘do us immeasurable harm to be associated with such an outpouring’.¹¹ She refused to distribute the copies, but sent Harriet Shaw Weaver the $15 that she should have made on commission, only mentioning Dora Marsden’s prominence (a gibe she was happy to make) as the reason. Lowell often admired Lawrence’s eroticism, but she liked eroticism to be about happy love, not connected with the darker emotions.

Sexuality is never a topic raised in Amy’s voluminous correspondence, or not in any I have read, though she did talk about its portrayal in literature in a letter to Margaret Anderson, reminding her of a conversation they had had about the difference between love and lust, when they had both agreed, according to Lowell, that ‘love on the purely mental side is apt to be as dry and brittle as a withered leaf; but love on the purely physical side is as unpleasant as raw beef steak. It is the combination of the two which is perfection.’¹² What comes out of Lowell’s own love poetry is indeed a combination of warm affection and delight in sensuous, sexual response. She often thought Lawrence achieved that perfect combination: in 1918, she would say of him in a lecture given at the Brooklyn Institute, ‘Other poets have given us sensuous images; other poets have spoken of love as chiefly desire; but in no other poet does desire seem so surely “the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace” … Mr Lawrence has been spoken of as an erotic poet, and that is true, but it is only one half of the truth. For his eroticism leans always to the mystic something of which it is an evidence.’¹³ Amy was also an erotic writer, expressing the ‘outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace’ through the dapple of light and shade, the bright colours and movement of flowers. Yet she could only accept eroticism in the context of love, something that placed a distance between herself and most of the modernist male, and some female, writers of the period. Amy could be open about so many things that it is always a surprise when suddenly she bangs the door closed; one might hazard a guess that she felt so strongly that her own feelings for Ada were not perverse, however others might perceive them, that she found the imputation of perversity to any kind of eroticism deeply disturbing. Ada had helped her escape from a place of darkness and pain, to which she never wanted to return.

Luckily, however, notices began to appear of the anthology, most of them unsympathetic, but it was unmistakably creating a stir. Amy was delighted at the sensation they were causing, and forgot her criticisms of the Egoist. What Pound thought of Some Imagist Poets when it appeared in 1915 he never said. He would later tell Aldington that he never read any D.H. Lawrence after 1914, so, if that is true, perhaps he did not look at any of the rival anthologies, in which case his continued strictures about the dilutions introduced by Amy remained largely theoretical, though he must have seen the various imagists’ poems that appeared in either Poetry or the Egoist. Several of the poems in this 1915 volume had indeed been published in Poetry on his own recommendation. The new anthology contained many of H.D.’s finest early poems, and was arguably a more cohesive and even volume than Des Imagistes. Lowell’s poems included ‘Venus Transiens’, and among Lawrence’s was his fine early poem, ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia’, as well as ‘Green’, another poem that Lowell might have used to point to his affinities with imagist poetry:

The sky was apple-green,

The sky was green wine held up in the sun,

The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green

They shone, clear like flowers undone,

For the first time, now for the first time seen.¹⁴

The preface, written by Aldington and edited by Lowell, who removed a conciliatory mention of Pound, followed the original imagist precepts fairly closely, though without mention of a doctrine of the image; however, ‘the language of common speech’, ‘the exact word’, ‘new rhythms’, ‘poetry that is hard and clear’ and the presentation of ‘images’ are all mentioned. There is no reference to the French vers libre as such, but the preface claims that ‘We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of the poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence is a new idea.’ This emphasis on individualism and liberty, while not necessarily inconsistent with Pound’s poetic doctrines at this stage (he had after all insisted that Vorticism was a movement of individuals) places a weight on freedom that he would increasingly prefer to place on technique and control. Michael Levenson in The Genealogy of Modernism uses this preface as an example of what he sees as early libertarian modernism in contrast to the more authoritarian and prescriptive position to which Pound was moving, exemplary, he argues, of high modernism. The preface’s final point is intriguing: ‘most of us believe concentration is of the very essence of poetry’.¹⁵ Which ones did not? Lawrence almost certainly, and possibly Fletcher. Fletcher still did not really feel at ease with the imagist programme; writing to Daisy that March, he had said he was only in the anthology because Lowell had been very ‘decent’ to him, and he ‘wanted to get back at that wretched little viper, Pound’.¹⁶ Yet it could be argued that whilst Fletcher, unless he disciplined his work, rapidly lost focus among a riot of effects, Lawrence was moving towards an open and flowing form of poetry, which had considerable power, without conceding to the imperative that Pound decreed to achieve concentration. It is a pity Pound never read the later Lawrence; perhaps he would have acknowledged that a poem like ‘The Ship of Death’ achieved its own power by other means – or perhaps he would indeed have thought that the development of the ongoing image of the ship of death gave the poem concentration and intensity after all.

Although Some Imagist Poets had appeared at its due date in April in the States, the May publication in England was delayed because of troubles with shipping. What did come to London in April 1915 were the German Zeppelins. They had first been sighted over the coast on 29 December 1914: now they reached the capital, adding to the growing hysteria and fear. By the scale of the Second World War, bombing from the air did comparatively little damage, though in the 1914–18 war 1,127 civilians were killed in England, enough for the air raids to be a powerful psychological weapon in spreading dismay and anxiety. From then on in the war, the imagination of Londoners would be dominated by the air raids, at first curiously exciting as well as terrifying, as Shaw so graphically suggests when, at the end of Heartbreak House after a Zeppelin raid, which the characters have watched in rapturous terror, Mrs Hushabye and Ellie fervently hope they will be back the next night. Lawrence greeted his first sight of a Zeppelin raid as a cosmic Apocalypse, the bringing in of ‘a new heaven and a new earth, a clearer eternal moon above, and a clean world below’.¹⁷ But the mixture of thrill and fear soon gave way to steady, draining dread. People who had children, like Flint, found the raids unbearable from the start; the better off, as he later told Amy, would send their families to the countryside for the duration, but that was not an option for him.

The war was intensifying in other ways. Germany introduced gas into warfare and in early May sank the liner Lusitania: 1,200 of its civilian passengers were drowned. (One was Hugh Lane, who had offered his Impressionist pictures to Dublin; Yeats and Lady Gregory would be closely involved in the wrangling over whether his will left the paintings to Ireland or England.) The manufactured atrocity stories, such a feature of First World War propaganda, reached a new level with the account in The Times on 10 May of the crucifixion of a Canadian soldier by the Germans.¹⁸ There was rigorous censorship, and war correspondents were kept well away from the front, but the bellicose press improvised relentlessly, and its endless stream of horrors – a kind of verbal bayonet practice designed to dehumanise, indeed demonise, the enemy – intensified the ever-present nightmare of war. In a story H.D. wrote in 1930, ‘Kora and Ka’, she depicted the mind of a man, John Helforth, suffering a nervous breakdown precipitated by the war, in which he had been too young to take part; what he cannot get out of his mind, as Trudi Tate has pointed out, are the atrocity stories he has read, systematic propaganda to inculcate murderous war fever:

we were trained to blood-lust and hatred. We were sent out, iron shod to quell an enemy who had made life horrible. That enemy roasted children, boiled down the fat of pregnant women to grease cannon wheels … His men raped nuns, cut off the hands of children, boiled down the entrails of old men, nailed Canadians against barn doors … and all this we heard mornings with the Daily Newsgraph and evenings with the Evening Warscript. The Newsgraph and the Warscript fed out belching mothers, who belched out in return, fire and carnage in the name of Rule Britannia.¹⁹

Yet the fervid patriotism in the press could not disguise the fact that the war was going badly. Gallipoli, where an Anglo-French offensive had begun in April, had not produced the rapid defeat of the Turks that had been expected. Three battles were lost in France, and it was becoming apparent to many that Kitchener as Secretary of War was running the campaign disastrously. Many of the Liberal leaders resisted the move to something nearer the command economy essential in a modern war; in particular, the army was desperately short of shells, as Kitchener refused to use any but a limited number of established firms, and was unwilling to spend the necessary money. In early 1915, the Germans were producing 250,000 shells a day, France 100,000, and Britain only 22,000. Soldiers on leave told of their lack of supplies and of the misery of trench warfare. Hulme, who had been in the trenches on the Belgian border, not far from Ypres, farming country that at first reminded him of his native Staffordshire, though shells and mud rapidly eliminated the resemblance, was invalided back that April with a wound in his arm, and gave a vivid account of the British lack of supplies to Pound, who visited him in St Mark’s College Hospital in Chelsea. Countless other soldiers must have been telling similar stories. Northcliffe, proprietor of both The Times and the Daily Mail, got wind of the shell shortage and prepared to launch a campaign exposing the scandal, but before he did so the Liberal Government gave way to a coalition, still with Asquith as Prime Minister and Kitchener as Secretary of War, but with Lloyd George in the newly created post of Minister of Munitions. By the end of the next year, he would be Prime Minister.

It was against this backdrop that H.D went into a nursing home to have her baby. She gave birth on 21 May to a little girl, who was stillborn. Aldington wrote to Amy Lowell that ‘the nurse said it was a beautiful child & they can’t think why it didn’t live. It was very sturdy but wouldn’t breathe. Poor Hilda is very distressed, but is recovering physically. I don’t think there is any danger.’²⁰ In Tribute to Freud H.D. wrote that she lost the baby ‘from shock and repercussions of war news broken to me in a rather brutal fashion.’²¹ In a later unpublished manuscript, she says more: using the names she would ascribe to Aldington and herself in Bid Me to Live, she wrote, ‘Rafe Ashton … destroyed the unborn, the child Amor, when a few days before it was due, he burst in upon Julia … with “don’t you realise what this means? Don’t you feel anything? The Lusitania has gone down.”’ But she added a marginal note, ‘But this never happened. Surely this was fantasy.’²² H.D. certainly felt that the death of the baby was in some way connected with the war strain she was experiencing, exacerbated by the militaristic, jingoistic atmosphere; Charles Doyle says that Aldington was curiously elated by the sinking of the Lusitania, hoping, like many, that it would bring the Americans into the war, so there may be something behind H.D.’s memory. In Asphodel she says simply, ‘Khaki killed it.’²³ Perhaps the fantasy memory of Aldington destroying the child Amor with news of the war fuses two facts: first, that their marriage never recovered its closeness after the loss of this baby, and secondly, that their relationship would be finally destroyed by the changes brought to Aldington’s personality, and perhaps to her own, by the war. The war would kill their ‘Amor’, as it had the baby.

The nursing home was, Aldington told Amy, considered a good one, but even the nurses seemed brutalised by the war atmosphere. In Asphodel, they certainly could be said to breathe ‘fire and carnage in the name of Rule Britannia’, as they callously discuss stories of atrocities: ‘they stood at the end of my bed, and told me about the crucified –’, Hermione begins to say to Darrington, who won’t let her finish. In the novel, the baby is actually born during an air raid, and Hermione thinks of the nurses as ‘Good old ecstatic baby-killers – killers like the Huns up there’. They make her suffer for being the wife of a young and healthy-looking non-combatant: ‘how lucky for you,’ they say, ‘to have your husband when poor Mrs Rawlton’s husband is actually now lying wounded … Why isn’t Mr Darrington in Khaki? … Why isn’t Mr Darrington in khaki?’²⁴ Aldington was well aware of their attitude, which they made plain to him too, and he realised how they added to H.D.’s unhappiness; he wrote to Amy five days after the stillbirth, ‘I wish to God you were here – these English people are awful; they haven’t the faintest idea how to treat a fine mind like Hilda’s.’²⁵ H.D. had to remain in the nursing home, however, for another two or three weeks, after which Richard took her to stay in the country, Brigit having lent them her car for the journey.

While she was in the nursing home, friends rallied round. In her ‘Autobiographical Notes’, H.D. writes: ‘1915. Spring, confinement. Mrs Fowler brings iris, May Sinclair, strawberries; Mrs Wadsworth comes [Fanny Wadsworth, the Vorticist Edward Wadsworth’s wife]. Brigit in beautiful summer dresses, blue hydrangia [sic]. Flint comes, nurse is surprised when he rises and opens door for her … I have phobias of khaki, fear the street and soldiers. I get back into the dark blue skirt and coat that mother had made for me in Rome, it is a beautiful costume; R. brings huge bunch of violets; the whole nursing-home had looked askance at me, as R. is not in uniform.’²⁶ She would tell Amy Lowell next January that her ‘nerves’ had been ‘shattered’ for months after the stillbirth. In both the war period of Asphodel and the whole of Bid Me to Live, the narrative emphasises the half-suppressed hysteria, near-breakdown of the H.D./Hermione/Julia figure. Trudi Tate has argued convincingly that H.D. was by now in a state of ‘war neurosis’, a condition doctors at the time were beginning to realise was experienced by civilians, as well as soldiers.²⁷ In Asphodel, Darrington is tender, kind, distressed at Hermione’s unhappiness, but Hermione feels very alone in her grief: ‘“But don’t you care?”’ Hermione asks him, and Darrington replies ‘“Darling. You – know – I – do.” … Tea steamed into her face and she drank the tea like some drug fiend, the scent of drug. Tea smelt of far sweet hours, of afternoons of all the happy little times they’d had together. Darrington had made the tea while she lay listening. He was nice, did nice things. She supposed he really did care, had been sorry. It’s so hard for a man to say such things. He knew it hurt her to talk about the baby. She supposed he had cared.’²⁸ Communication between them was no longer as easy as it had been.

That was not all. H.D. was told she ought not to have another baby until after the war – she never says on what grounds, but perhaps the doctor agreed with her view that the war strain had killed the baby. Birth control does not appear to have been an option; it is not clear whether her sexual relationship with Aldington ceased altogether for the meantime, but it was undoubtedly problematic for them both. In Bid Me to Live, Julia thinks:

Then 1915 and her death, or rather the death of her child. Three weeks in that ghastly nursing-home and then coming back to the same Rafe. Herself different. How could she blithely face what he called love, with that prospect looming ahead and the matron, in her harsh voice, laying a curse on whatever might have been. ‘You know you must not have another baby until after the war is over.’ Meaning in her language, you must keep away from your husband, keep him away from you. When he was all she had, was country, family, friends.²⁹

Aldington was deeply distressed by the loss of the child, but only able to express his grief repackaged as concern for H.D., and he had the additional dread, always in his mind, of being sent to the front. H.D. understood and sympathised with those fears, but their different traumas would have the effect, as for many others in the war, of pushing them apart rather than together. What had seemed to their friends a perfect marriage would become increasingly strained.