III

LEWIS, MEANWHILE, WITH Helen Saunders’ help, was carrying out his next commission, painting three abstract panels for a Vorticist room at the Tour Eiffel restaurant, which he frequented at the time (he lived at no. 4 Percy Street, and it was no. 1). It was now a more expensive restaurant than it had been in 1909, but Stulik liked Lewis, and his eating there was subsidised. Possibly he was paid for the decoration in free meals, which was what Stulik had given William Roberts for some earlier painting. In July, the second issue of Blast was finally published. Entitled War Issue, with a powerful Vorticist drawing by Lewis on the cover, it lacked, scarcely surprisingly, the ebullience of the first. Pound wrote defensively that Blast ‘alone has dared to show modernity its face in an honest glass … to present the actual discords of modern “civilization”, DISCORDS now only too apparent in the open conflict between teutonic atavism and unsatisfactory Democracy’.⁵⁷ Yet the editorial, written by Lewis, who was responsible for over half of the issue, was almost apologetic: ‘BLAST finds itself surrounded by a multitude of other Blasts of all sizes and description. This puce-coloured cockleshell will, however, try and brave the waves of blood, for the serious mission it has on the other side of World-War’.⁵⁸ This must have been written before Lewis decided to produce this issue in a sober black and off-white cover; it had been due out in December 1914, and Lewis appears to have done little to revise the contents. Even the sentiments here seem outdated; few people now saw the war as a temporary blip in a generally calm world. Nor did many feel the confidence Lewis displays later in the issue that ‘Life after the War will be the same brilliant life as it was before’.⁵⁹

Apart from Lewis’ contributions, in which he attempted to associate the Vorticists with the war effort, claiming that the Kaiser has ‘declared murderous war on Cubism and Expressionism’, Blast 2 contained poetry by Dismorr, Saunders, Ford, Eliot and Pound.⁶⁰ Eliot had originally offered some of the rather schoolboyish scurrilous verse that he was apt to circulate, but Lewis, after the trouble with Pound’s ‘testicles’ the year before, rather wisely turned it down. Instead he published some of Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ and his ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, all poems from his Parisian days, and by far the most impressive contributions to the issue. Pound’s poems were among his weakest, and he caused a furore with a poem about Rupert Brooke’s sexual escapades in the Pacific. Brooke, now a national hero, was not admissible as the butt of ribald jokes. Pound was apologetic, saying he thought Brooke the best of the Georgians and pointing out that the issue had after all been meant to come out the previous year; he blamed Lewis, and indeed a more careful editor might have thought to remove the poem. (Pound republished the poem in his 1926 collection, which suggests his penitence was not deep.) Also reproduced was a drawing by Dorothy entitled ‘Snow Scene’, and her design for the cover of Ripostes, along with an advertisement from Elkin Mathews for Pound’s books.

Perhaps what was most disturbing were some notes sent by Gaudier from the trenches:

This war is a great remedy.

In the individual it kills arrogance, self esteem, pride.

It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become notorious as the recent trade crises have shown us.

He admits he had found a Mauser rifle, which seemed to him an ‘IMAGE of brutality’, and had cut off the butt to carve something with ‘a gentler order of feeling’, but adds, ‘I WILL EMPHASIZE that MY DESIGN got its effect (just as the gun had) FROM A VERY SIMPLE COMPOSITION OF LINES AND PLANES.’ Yet, though Gaudier says, ‘My views on sculpture remain absolutely the same’, those notes were written when he had been fighting only two months, probably no later than December 1914.⁶¹ As would soon become public knowledge, by the time of his death he had changed his mind, and planned a piece for the third issue of Blast in which he would announce his return to organic sculpture. One by one, as they became painfully aware of the brutal horror of the war machine, the Vorticists would return to more representational art, natural rather than mechanical form, though often an inventive and arresting fusion of the two. The War Issue published some fine drawings, but for all the high artistic achievements of Vorticism, it was a doomed movement. Gaudier’s statement was followed, as if symbolically, by the announcement of his death, ‘MORT POUR LA PATRIE’, one last-minute change that Lewis, who, like Pound, saw Gaudier’s death as a tragic loss, took the trouble to make.

Among the poems Pound contributed was one beginning, ‘I cling to the spar’, which vividly demonstrated how his sense of persecution was escalating. The seafarer is now shipwrecked, ‘Washed with the cold salt ice’ and ‘Insidious modern waves’. He is threatened by ‘cowardly editors’, who tell him he must not say what he thinks, utter his hates or his loves, praise people like Lewis, Epstein and Brzeska, nor ‘spit out the later Rodin’, or ‘they will have my guts;/they will cut down my wage, force me to sing their cant … be before all a model of literary decorum./Merde!’ Abandoning the watery image with which it begins, the poem ends up in a Dantean forest, on the way, presumably, to explore Hell:

Friends fall off at the pinch, the loveliest die.

That is the path of life, this is my forest.⁶²

One might have expected the warm reception of Cathay to have led Pound to feel less beleaguered, though it is likely he had written this poem some months before that appeared, when the New Age had refused to let him finish his series, ‘Affirmations’; the hates and loves he mentions here are a good summary of the topics he covered then. Yet the aggressive stance of the poem itself, the emphasis on hatred, and swearing at the world in general, hardly add up to the best way to promote your friends. It was true that much of the press was nervous, conservative and wary of anything that did not support the status quo: there were few prosecutions of literary works under the Defence of the Realm Act, brought in at the beginning of the war, and since then made more draconian, but editors were wary. Pound’s income was indeed affected; he would calculate that November that he had only earned £42 10s. during the last twelve months, considerably less than a working man’s wages, though Dorothy had her £150 a year to help him out. While it was a wild exaggeration to suggest that editors like Orage or Prothero had any specific designs on his guts (Orage would continue to publish him for the rest of the war, albeit towards the end largely under pseudonyms), some people in London literary circles had always disliked Pound, though in the past not enough, in numbers or intensity, for him to notice. The balance was shifting. Wyndham Lewis – not entirely a reliable witness – later described the aversion of some of those who met Pound in 1910 to what they saw as ‘a bogus personage’ who was a ‘tiresome and flourishing, pretentious aspirant to poetic eminence’.⁶³ Then Pound had been happily unaware of any adverse impact he had; by 1915, he was indignantly answering charges of charlatanry in the daily papers. Visitors to Yeats’ Monday evenings, which he continued to dominate, took against him in increasing numbers, as he continued to be, as R.F. Foster puts it, as ‘energetically offensive’ as ever.⁶⁴ Yet years later, Aldington would write in Pound’s defence: ‘He is sensitive, highly-strung, and irascible. All this throwing down of fire-irons and sputtering of four-letter words is merely Ezra’s defence against a none too considerate world. I should say Ezra has had to put up with far worse annoyances from other people than they ever have from him.’⁶⁵ All very true, yet Pound remained intent on provoking vilification. And if in 1913 he had been delighted when he was attacked in the same week in the New Age and the New Freewoman, now the attacks ate into him.⁶⁶

Significantly missing from his poem, in the list of those to whom he is offering support, are Pound’s former protégés, H.D. and Aldington. One suspects they may be included among the ‘friends’ who ‘fall off at the pinch’. Yet it was only after Blast was out in July that Pound decided to take issue with the May Egoist. He had by no means lost interest in imagism, nor shed his sense of ownership, and the long work he was beginning to plan he saw as a long imagist poem, something that he had referred to as a possibility in his article on Vorticism in the Fortnightly Review the year before, and which he mentioned again when discussing the Noh plays in Drama that June. The Cantos would be structured round a series of repeated images, or linked analogies, that build a pattern rather than form a narrative, a structure he described earlier in the year as ‘pattern units’. Pound was looking for ways of creating a poem that would bring together the present and the past, the social and mystical, his personal life and public order, hellish depths and paradisal light. In August he wrote to Henderson, ‘I am working on a long poem that will resemble the Divina Commedia in length but in no other manner. It is a huge, I was going to say, gamble, but shan’t, it will prevent my making any money for the next forty years, perhaps.’⁶⁷ In that latter point, he would largely be correct. Some critics suggest that the Cantos’ form was influenced by the repeated motifs in Vorticist drawings, but it was more crucially a product of what Pound called the ‘mytho-poetical’ quality of imagism; at its core is a series of mythic references, a form of Eliot’s ‘mythical method’, still owing much to Frazer.⁶⁸ For Pound in 1915, if this ‘huge gamble’ was to be a long imagist poem, he needed to assert his pre-eminent right to the movement. At the end of June he did so.

Aldington wrote to Amy on 8 July 1915, the day after they had arrived back from H.D.’s convalescence in the country, reporting crossly that ‘Ezra has been annoying Franky [i.e. Flint] and me with absurd and abusive letters about the Imagist number of the Egoist. Franky sent him a fairly crushing retort, I have taken no notice.’ In fact, Pound was not attacking the issue in general, but venting his ire on Flint’s ‘History.’ ‘After deliberate consideration,’ Pound’s letter to Flint said firmly, he remained of the opinion that Flint’s article was ‘BULLSHIT’.⁶⁹ Flint’s ‘History’ had been similar to – though more detailed and more neutral in tone than – the one that he had given to Lowell, and on factual grounds it would be hard to fault. The meetings at the Tour Eiffel, the group’s experimentation with forms, the interest in vers libre, the influence of French symbolist and Japanese poetry are not in question. Hulme was, Flint had said, the leader of the group, insisting on direct and unelaborated presentation; encouraged by Storer in particular, the idea of the image was much discussed and practised. Again, it was a simple account of the facts. Pound, Flint pointed out, only joined the group a month after they began to meet; he had then no interest in French poetry later than the Middle Ages: ‘he was very full of his troubadours; but I do not remember that he did more than attempt to illustrate (or refute) our theories occasionally with their example’. It was, Flint added, with total accuracy, only in 1912 that Pound began to take some interest in this intellectual debate. He recalled that Pound had included, at the end of Ripostes, the complete poetical works of T.E. Hulme, and had there described the imagistes as ‘the descendants of the forgotten … “School of Images”’. ‘In that year,’ Flint continued, ‘Pound had become interested in modern French poetry; he had broken away from his old manner; and he invented the term “Imagisme”, to designate the aesthetic of “Les Imagistes”’. Pound set out the four ‘cardinal principles of “Imagisme”’ in the ‘interview’ in Poetry, and edited the anthology Des Imagistes, ‘which, though it did not set the Thames, seems to have set America, on fire’. He made no mention of the latest anthology. Flint had begun by quoting Hulme’s ‘Autumn’ as one of the first imagist poems, and quoted from Storer’s Mirrors of Illusion as the first book of imagist poetry; Storer then believed in a form of poetry which Flint himself had described, he reminded his readers, as ‘a form of expression, like the Japanese, in which an image is the resonant heart of an exquisite moment’. The very first poem in that collection, he noted, was entitled ‘Image’. Flint ended his article by asserting – and this he must have known would be contentious – that ‘there is no difference, except that which springs from difference of temperament and talent, between an imagist poem of today and those written by Edward Storer and T.E. Hulme’.⁷⁰

Although Flint does not say in this history, as he had to Lowell, that Pound was only imagism’s ‘advertising agent’, that is certainly what he implies; his tone, however, is scrupulously dispassionate and he makes no explicit attack on Pound. Of course, the very fact of pointing out that Pound, who had presented himself as such a knowledgeable advocate of modern French poetry, had so recently discovered it, must have been galling in itself. Yet, as Christopher Middleton first pointed out, there is a much more virulent draft among Flint’s papers; he had considerably tempered the language of his final account, if not its thrust. In the draft he makes clear that he thinks Pound simply stole the ideas of the Tour Eiffel group and presented them as his own: and whilst he does not say this in so many words in the published version, it could be deduced. Pound began his counter-attack on Flint’s article, not with the treatment of his part in the story but by demanding that Flint acknowledge that ‘the whole drive towards simple current speech etc. comes from F.M.H. [Ford Madox Hueffer], and that it was never decently considered by the group of 1909’. Flint pointed out in his reply, which he sent the next day (‘I hasten to acknowledge your bolt from Olympus’), that many others had advocated this besides Ford: ‘The whole drive towards simple current speech does not come from F.M.H. He was one of the generals of division in an army composed of many divisions. No doubt his operations seem of paramount importance to you because you were enrolled under him.’⁷¹ Certainly Pound was on weak ground there: if the Tour Eiffel poets, who had indeed tended to use ‘simple current speech’, did not talk much about it, neither did Pound in his early definitions of imagism; the first public imagist statement to speak of the ‘language of common speech’ was in fact the recent preface to Some Imagist Poets, with which Pound had had nothing to do. Pound, however, was also angry about the reference to Storer: ‘it is ridiculous’, he wrote, ‘to pretend that the Hellenic hardness of H.D.’s poems is in any way traceable to his custard.’ Poor Storer! what a noun – evoking the soft, the sweet, the cowardly, the bland; in a word, the despised feminine, as opposed to H.D.’s paradoxically masculinised hardness. Yet ‘hardness’ was not a quality mentioned in the first imagist manifestos, though it had been evoked by Pound elsewhere since early 1912. Flint responded by explaining that he wasn’t saying H.D.’s poetry was ‘traceable’ to Storer, merely that Storer’s poetry at that stage had certain imagist qualities, including ‘direct speech, or simple current speech’. In any case, he added, he wasn’t sure the word ‘hardness’ conveyed very much as far as poetry was concerned.⁷²

Only half-way through his letter did Pound mention his real grievance: ‘As to the energy, the organising faculty, the whole formulation of Imagism, and the effort that went to making it what it is, i.e., the dominant force in contemporary english and american verse, oO, la la! We will leave that unimportant factor out of the case.’ Flint’s reply was:

You deserve all the credit for what you have done, and occupy therefor [sic] a proportionate place in … The History of Imagism. But where you have failed, my dear Ezra … is in your personal relationships … You had the energy, you had the talents (obscured by a certain American mushiness), you might have been generalissimo in a compact onslaught: and you spoiled everything by some native incapacity for walking square with your fellows. You have not been a good comrade, voilà!⁷³

In what way had Pound not walked square? Pound could bully, and he could patronise, but perhaps Flint had in mind actions like Pound’s cavalier take-over of his own expertise on French poetry without due acknowledgement, for which he was belatedly taking his revenge; in the draft he shows he had not forgiven Pound for this, emphasising that it was only in August 1912 that Pound ‘was led to discover the “Approach to Paris” … which I had made for him’.⁷⁴ Most centrally, however, Flint was angry about what he saw as Pound’s passing off as his own the ideas of the Tour Eiffel group, in particular those of Hulme: in the unpublished draft, he had written that Pound ‘added nothing of any value to the discussion. Most of the members of the group were pretty widely acquainted with … French theory, and Mr Pound had nothing to teach them; but he took very much. He took away the whole doctrine … of what he later on called Imagisme.’⁷⁵ In his reply to Pound, Flint wrote, ‘You don’t pretend that there is anything particularly original or revelatory to me, a student of French theory and practice, in your Donts of an Imagist … My dear chap, think again!’⁷⁶ Flint was pouring out all the resentment that he had built up over the years towards Pound, and was no longer inclined to make the allowances that he had in 1913.

Flint’s anger with Pound had increased even since he had written to Lowell in January, his indignation having been fuelled in February by Pound’s claim in his ‘Analysis of this Decade’ that he was the originator of the concept of ‘the Image’. Had Hulme himself been around in early 1915, and not, as Flint put it, ‘read[ing] German philosophy in the trenches’, he might well have taken it ill that Pound was appropriating ownership of his earlier ideas. Flint, who visited Hulme in hospital, perhaps told him, another reason for Hulme’s growing dislike of Pound. Flint had written in another draft for the history, ‘Mr Pound, in The New Age, has been claiming “The Image” as his own peculiar contribution to the aesthetic of the past decade. His claim, however … does not hold water.’ His reply to Pound ended up being quite as abusive as Pound’s letter to him. He accused Pound of being ‘entangled in the charlatantry of Vorticism’, said he was probably not even an imagist poet himself, and added that there were faults in Pound’s work which were of ‘equal and greater avoirdupois’ than Storer’s.⁷⁷

On 7 July Pound wrote back once more, ignoring these ad hominem remarks, and insisting that ‘when, on a certain evening in, I think, 1912, I coined the word Imagisme, I certainly intended it to mean something which was the poetry of H.D, and most emphatically NOT the poetry of friend Storer’. He went on to emphasise that ‘in that definition the other two original imagists most certainly concurred’, as if to make the point that Flint was in this instance a later comer, as Flint had said that Pound himself was at the Tour Eiffel. (Pound describes Flint nonchalantly as the ‘fourth or fifth’ imagist, though undoubtedly he was the fourth.) In reply to Flint’s comment on the imprecision of the term ‘hardness’, which may have hit home, as Pound’s use of the word is so obviously rhetorical machismo, he said peevishly that the advantage of a ‘precise’ term was that it made it ‘unnecessary to discuss with every Frank, John and Amy, whether “hardness” for example is or is not a virtue in itself’.⁷⁸ Refusal to admit discussion, dogmatic statement, a conviction that his own views were entirely right, and the belief that he was being unfairly and cruelly attacked for his attempts to shed light were becoming default positions for Pound.

Flint pointed out to Pound that, ‘in my History, I was tracing Imagism to no particular person … Imagism, like all other literary movements, was a general movement, a product and impulse of the time.’⁷⁹ In this, he was surely correct, and indeed one of my aims in writing this book has been to show how right he was. Yet Pound’s panache and energy galvanised the currents that were already flowing and gave a focus and intensity to the changing aesthetic climate; even finding a name was not a negligible contribution. Another way of saying Pound was the movement’s advertising agent would be to say he brought it to public attention; he created the spectacle of imagism; he performed flamboyantly the role of leader of the imagist avant-garde; he accelerated the forces for change that were already in motion, and channelled them so they became a powerful stream. It was of course to Flint he owed his first understanding of how continental avant-garde movements worked, but his years as a Whistlerian genius had been an excellent training. Pound’s energetic formation of the movement and fiery framing of its creed was the vortex into which the numerous ideas of the time poured. As Michael Levenson has said, ‘Pound willed [imagism] into being, wrote it into doctrine, and publicized it into prominence.’⁸⁰ The lines from ‘Portrait d’une Femme’, that I earlier suggested could be read as a comment on his poetry, could equally apply to his shaping of imagism: ‘No! there is nothing! In the whole and all./Nothing that’s quite your own./Yet this is you’.⁸¹ Nothing in imagism was singular to him, or originated with him, but it still bore his stamp.

As far as the ideas were concerned, however, Flint was understandably angry to have Pound tell him that ‘the light fell on’ him when Pound explicated to him the theories to which he had been endeavouring to get Pound to listen for the previous four years. As he said in his draft, Pound only came to accept these ideas after repeated ‘indoctrinations’, and did not have his own first ‘illumination’ until the spring of 1912, presumably when Flint introduced him to the work of de Gourmont and de Régnier.⁸² Yet Pound was able to communicate those ideas dramatically and concisely in a way Flint could never have done. Where they differed was that, to Flint, imagism was an aesthetic theory, to Pound, a religious doctrine; to Flint, imagism was a practice, to Pound an essence; Flint wanted to argue that H.D. simply wrote better poems than Storer, Pound that they were of a different species. Pound himself accused Flint of confusing imagisme and Impressionism, the latter being for Pound passive and descriptive, whilst the former, as he had argued in the New Age, was actively creative, the product of ‘intense emotion’ which causes ‘pattern to arise in the mind’.⁸³ Pound was aware that he had made the most of the glitter and razzmatazz of leading an avant-garde ‘mouvemong’, but he also believed that he had produced something new, his particular version of the image, with its visionary intensity. It is true that Hulme’s Bergsonian images, whose conjunction sparked the intuitional insight into the nature of reality, the ever-flowing flux of duration, were closely allied to Pound’s ‘cluster of fused ideas … endowed with energy’. Whether his definition of the image as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time’, or more recently as a ‘radiant node or cluster; … a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’, was in fact so different in nature from Hulme’s is a matter for debate, but it is more memorably put.

One can sympathise with both Flint’s and Pound’s viewpoints. In fact, they were not so far apart. Even in Pound’s second letter, he had written that if Flint would allow that there was a difference in form and style between Storer and H.D., they could come close to agreeing. In 1921, the two of them would work on a sketch for the history of imagism which would not differ in essence greatly from Flint’s 1915 version, though it carried the story on further, and in that version Pound prominently acknowledged Hulme’s introduction of the idea of the image and the importance of Flint’s article on French poetry. But for now, Flint and Pound remained furious with each other, and both were left bruised. Flint had ended his letter to Pound by saying, ‘life has made a mess of the job that was in front of her when she created the lot of us’.⁸⁴ It appears to be about this time that Flint began to write his melancholy autobiographical novel, Failure, never apparently completed and certainly never published, but it may have been his sense that Pound had cheated him out of success that turned him back to look at the way that his childhood had undermined his self-belief. He wrote there that it was from his mother that he ‘inherited that artistic instinct and lack of self-assertion which in a queer ravelled thread of gold and grey had twisted round and strangled what might otherwise have been a commonplace, successful life’.⁸⁵ Artistic instinct he certainly had, and if in this correspondence he had for once been self-assertive, he was badly bruised as a result. Unlike Pound, he did not find it easy to pick himself up after a blow.