IF FLINT’S ‘HISTORY’ has had an unfortunate afterlife as a bone much chewed upon by critical dogs in the dispute over whether Ford or Hulme should be seen as the Ur-imagist, Flint’s strong sense that Hulme’s contribution deserved acknowledgement had nothing to do with his personal feelings about Ford. Though he admired Hulme’s intelligence greatly, his relationship with him was always uneasy, whilst he and Ford responded warmly to each other. Indeed, his one concession to Pound was to say that ‘it was an omission on my part not to have mentioned [Ford’s] influence on you: it shall be repaired’. Ford had a strong sense of Flint’s worth – he later told Glenn Hughes that he was ‘one of the greatest men and one of the most beautiful spirits of the country’ – and he refused to be drawn into Pound’s quarrel with him. Flint had retained his friendship with Ford, in spite of Aldington’s grumbles about him, though as he said rather poignantly to Pound, ‘I wish I had more leisure, lived nearer, and could see him oftener’.86 Ford generally did his best to keep out of the disputes between les jeunes – after all, in spite of Pound’s opposition, he had been willing to go into Some Imagist Poets until turned down by Houghton Mifflin, while at the same time he had loyally continued to lend his name to Pound’s movement. It was doubtless the inclusion in Blast of his poem, ‘Antwerp’, which Eliot would describe in 1917 as ‘the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war’, that had led Aldington to identify him as one of the ‘Vorticist cuistres’, though he himself was well aware his work was very different.87 Ford later claimed that Lewis had denounced his writing, insisting that he was ‘Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact! … What is the sense of you and Conrad and Impressionism?’88 And, indeed, while Pound valued Ford’s support, his conversation and those of his critical views that agreed with his own, he rarely appears to have appreciated Ford’s own artistic achievements. Apart from ‘On Heaven’, he was lukewarm about his poetry, which like Lewis he complained was impressionist, and if he admired Ford’s wartime propaganda, he took little interest in his fiction. The Good Soldier, the novel which is generally agreed to be Ford’s finest, and indeed one of the finest of the period, had been published that March, but though the early sections had appeared in the first Blast, Pound appears to have ignored it. At the time, it didn’t get a good deal of coverage – the war saw to that – but it had admirers, among them Rebecca West, May Sinclair and H.G. Wells. But most critics thought it immoral, and were shocked that in the middle of this patriotic war the title turned out to describe an adulterer. Much of Ford’s self-division and unhappiness had gone into the book; he was still in love with Brigit and increasingly unhappy with Hunt, who, according to Aldington, feared Ashburnham’s suicide at the end of the novel might prefigure Ford’s. Ford, however, chose another way out of his predicament. He dramatically renounced literature (that of course did not last), and joined the army, using his influential political friends to get him a commission. He would later claim it was Gaudier’s death that convinced him that he should join up, writing plan-gently about his memories of the sculptor, as usual highly reinvented in ways that infuriated Aldington. Max Saunders, however, suggests that the assertion had a certain displaced truth: he ‘had identified Prussia … with commercialism’, and joining the war against those who killed artists like Gaudier was ‘his only means left to express his rage at a largely indifferent public, and against hostile critics and publishers’.89 But escape from Violet Hunt, including his financial dependence on her, was surely the central motive. At the end of July 1915 he joined the Welch Regiment. He was forty-one, and his health had not been good – the cause was diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia’, a fashionable category which included all kinds of nervous ailments and psychological stress. Two months later, according to Pound, he looked twenty years younger.
Aldington and H.D. had unequivocally taken Flint’s side in the quarrel with Pound. ‘Don’t – don’t worry about that beastly letter from E.P.,’ H.D. had written from Surrey on 5 July, before their return home. ‘He sent a copy to R. and that, you see, is the reason I know about it’.90 Pound had perhaps hoped to quarrel only with Flint, and to maintain the links with the Aldingtons. Although Aldington seems to imply to Lowell that Pound had written abusively to himself as well as Flint, no letter to Aldington on the issue is extant. Pound had used H.D. in his letter to Flint as the exemplum of imagism, and had also drawn a clear distinction between Flint’s history and Aldington’s article on himself: ‘Richard and Hilda both detest a certain part or phase of my work. I may not agree about “romanticism” etc. but it is obvious to any one that R. has been even meticulously careful to say nothing in his article that he does not sincerely believe to be true.’91 Yet if Pound thought he could drive a wedge between the Aldingtons and Flint, he was mistaken. They were horrified by what they saw as his bullying tactics, and for the next two years would have little to do with him. By August Pound was writing to Alice Corbin Henderson, ‘I am very much displeased with Richard, more displeased with Flint’. He and Aldington, he told her, were no longer ‘on terms’; he considered him poetically ‘dead stuck’, and insisted that all Aldington’s ideas, save a ‘feeble Hellenism’, were taken from himself or Ford.92 On the other hand, in September he was still including H.D. in a list of American poets who could put the English to shame.93 Yet he was now personally estranged from two of those he himself insisted were the three original imagists, and in America imagism would soon be much more readily associated with Amy Lowell than himself. He wrote to Harriet Monroe two months after the exchange with Flint, ‘Since the latest manifestation, I scarcely know whether to repudiate all connection, or whether to attempt to continue the movement on the basis of the common sense of the original program. I don’t suppose that either way it will matter a tuppenny d– –n!’94 Harriet read this out to Fletcher, who was once more visiting her Chicago office, and he reported it back with unkind glee to Amy Lowell. Pound would in fact tell Henderson the next year (in the context of one of his regular tirades against Lowell) that he had thought in 1914 of declaring the imagist movement over after the appearance of Des Imagistes, and much regretted that he had not done so.95 If this is true, it must have been a notion he swiftly discarded, because he battled hard and long to keep his position as leader and controller of the imagists.
Pound was not the only one to take issue with Flint’s ‘History.’ In the June issue of the Egoist was a letter from his friend Allen Upward, in the form of a poem called ‘The Discarded Imagist’, protesting that he had become an imagist through quite a different route from that Flint described:
In the year nineteen hundred a poet named Cranmer Byng brought to my attic
in Whitehall Gardens a book of Chinese Gems by Professor Giles,
Eastern butterflies coming into my attic there beside the Stygian Thames,
And read me one of them – willows, forsaken young wife, spring.
Immediately my soul kissed the soul of immemorial China:
I perceived that all we in the West were indeed barbarians and foreign devils,
And that we knew scarcely anything about poetry.
I set to work and wrote little poems …
Then I hid them away for ten or twelve years,
Scented leaves in a Chinese jar
The poem goes on to recount how Ezra Pound ‘the generous’ had pronounced him an imagist (‘I had no idea what he meant’), but how astonished he had been to discover, the previous month, that imagism had been started by Hulme and Storer.96 Whether Upward could really be described as an imagist is debatable, though it has to be said this particular poem is the most effective of his that I have read, and whilst in one way his poem might seem to be questioning Flint’s history, by pointing another path into imagism, more importantly he is reinforcing Flint’s argument that imagism could not be ascribed to the influence of any one person. In his portrayal of imagism as a moment of recognition of the inadequacy of Western traditions he is evoking one of its constant features.
If imagism was moving out of Pound’s control, perhaps what added to the bitterness with which he attacked Flint was that the Vorticist cause was in further danger. There were those who were now pointing out in the press that Gaudier, one of the three central Vorticists, was in the process of abandoning it when he was dispatched by a German rifle. When John Middleton Murry, in an article in the Westminster Gazette on 22 July 1915, referred to Vorticism as ‘a passing phase’ of Gaudier’s work, Pound sent in an indignant refutation, saying Gaudier had shown no sign of ‘recantation’ when he had written to him two days before his death.97 Murry’s response to Pound’s reproach added fuel to his paranoia: ‘the term “Vorticism”,’ he said, ‘has, since its promulgation, come to signal extravagance and fumisterie in art. Because of that, I was anxious that readers of the Westminster Gazette should not be prejudiced against a sculptor who had genius, merely because his fellow-Vorticists had none.’ In August, Roger Fry wrote in the Burlington Magazine that when Gaudier died he had been on the point of giving up Vorticism and returning to organic forms, emphasising that even in his most Vorticist sculpture, ‘the general principles of organic form are adhered to, the plasticity is rounded with peculiar bluntness and yet sweetness of form, but remains sensitive and full of life’.98 Fry’s assertion is corroborated by Aldington, who in his memoirs recalled that before Gaudier returned to the front for the last time he had said that he intended to go back to Greek models. John Cournos wrote an article on Gaudier’s sculpture for the September Egoist ignoring Vorticisim.99To prove that Gaudier had not defected from Vorticism became for Pound an urgent task.
Pound persuaded John Lane to let him bring out a memorial volume about Gaudier, which he produced at lightning speed, assembling Gaudier’s contributions to Blast, an article from the Egoist, his letters from the front to himself, Wadsworth and Olivia Shakespear, reproductions of his work, Pound’s own article on Vorticism, and two of the ‘Affirmations’ series, ‘Gaudier-Brzeska’ and the contentious ‘Analysis of this Decade’, to which he added some linking narrative; the job was done in about a month. The result was a book that remains a fascinating document in the history of modernist art, and one that profoundly influenced, among others, Henry Moore, but Pound’s account of Gaudier’s work has been repeatedly questioned. Both Jacob Epstein and Horace Brodzky, who would later himself write a book on Gaudier, thought Pound saw the sculpture too much through the prism of literature and did not really understand what Gaudier was trying to do. Levenson suggests Pound’s object was ‘as much to legitimise Vorticism as … to memorialise Gaudier-Brzeska’, and points out that in the last pages he ‘virtually disappears from the text’: it is certainly true that in that section Whistler is mentioned much more frequently than Gaudier.100
One striking, though unsurprising, omission in the book is that Pound refuses to acknowledge that Gaudier had never been solely within the Vorticist camp. As Timothy Materer has pointed out, Gaudier had had contacts with the Omega group, and continued to carry out commissions for them after his involvement with the Vorticists. He had also had dealings with Middleton Murry, and had done drawings for his magazine Rhythm. Fry and Murry in their comments may have aimed to damage Vorticism, but they may well have been drawing on firsthand knowledge of Gaudier’s thoughts in order to do so. Lewis himself, much as he admired Gaudier, would later say that he was ‘a good man on the soft side’, and that he was not ‘one of us’.101 In fact Gaudier’s work, as Fry had commented, had rarely been purely abstract; he had never shared Lewis’ Vorticist passion for the machine, though like Lewis he had a keen interest in ancient or so-called primitive art. In his ‘Vortex’, in the first issue of Blast, Gaudier had rejected a ‘derivative’ ‘petrified’ culture like that of the Greeks, and placed the origins of his work and those like him (such, he says, as Epstein, Brancusi and Modigliani) in palaeolithic cave painting, in ancient Egyptian sculpture, in Assyrian, Chinese, and African and Pacific art, the last two of which he admired particularly for the centrality of sexuality in their work.102 Gaudier was fascinated by this non-mimetic art’s exploration of expressive form, but he makes no mention of the modern industrial world, and, unlike Lewis, he was primarily interested in art that depicts animal life, like that of the Dordogne cave-dwellers, or the Assyrians with their man-headed bulls. By the time of his death, he was moving away from formalism: in April 1915 he wrote to Olivia Shakespear, to whom he had promised a sculpture of her cat Max, ‘I am getting convinced it is not much use going further in the research of planes, forms, etc. If I ever come back I shall do more “Mlles G …” in marble.’ Pound printed this letter in the book, but he added a footnote: ‘“Mlle G …” is the nickname of a naturalistic torse … He had repeatedly stigmatised it as insincere. However, this passage is all I can find about the “renunciation” so vaunted by our enemies.’103 Pound did not even include a photograph of ‘Mlle. G.’ in the book, so deep was his disapproval, and though he does acknowledge that Gaudier was planning an essay on the ‘Need of Organic Forms in Sculpture’, he did not admit the possibility that his fellow-Vorticist was rethinking his position. He told Henderson that the ‘present attacks have taken the form of defining “vorticism” to suit the attackers’ taste and then saying that Brzeska, or I Am, are, was, not vorticists, etc. ad infinitum’.104
It was not only in England that Pound felt unappreciated. In August, he wrote a furious letter to the editor of the Boston Evening Transcript accusing their ‘(?negro) reviewer’, William Stanley Braithwaite, who had earlier savaged Provença, of being a liar for saying that ‘my friend Robert Frost has done what no other American poet has done in this generation “… that is, unheralded, unintroduced, untrumpeted, he won the acceptance of an English publisher on his own terms”’. Not only had he, Pound, been published in just that way rather earlier, but ‘Frost was a bloated capitalist when he struck this island, in comparison to yours truly’. He recounted the story of his own dealings with Mathews, and went on to ascribe Frost’s success largely to being launched by himself, adding, ‘Of course, from the beginning, in my pushing Frost’s work, I have known that he would ultimately be boomed in America by fifty energetic young men who would use any club to beat me; that was well in my calculation when I prophesied his success with the American public and especially with the American reviews.’105 Frost, who had so feared Pound would damn him in American eyes, must have been amused to discover Pound thought his American success was due to Pound’s own endeavours, but Harriet Monroe wrote to Pound to remonstrate, pointing out the letter was simply taken as indicating that Pound was jealous of Frost, which at some unadmitted level he no doubt was.
There were other blows in store for Pound. Earlier that year, he had begun to plan a new anthology as a rival production to Lowell’s, his to be called the Catholic Anthology to indicate that he was now above sectarian schools. In the event, when it came out in late 1915, the title caused offence to the pious, who took it to be a blasphemous reference to the Catholic Church, and bookshops were unwilling to sell it. To Pound’s disappointment, very few copies were bought, and Noel Stock says that there were still copies available in 1936 at the original price of 3s. 6d.106 It was in fact a rather fine anthology, with poems by Yeats, Eliot, Williams and Pound himself, some of the Georgians, such as Douglas Goldring and Harold Monro, some of the Chicago poets, including Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Harriet Monroe and a striking poem by Alice Corbin Henderson, other Egoist regulars, like John Rodker and Allen Upward, and two of the New York poets connected with Others, Orrick Johns and Alfred Kreymborg. Aldington was highly amused when he heard that Pound was including poems by Monro, about whom he was usually totally scornful, but in fact one of the four Monro poems for the anthology was the wonderful ‘Milk for the Cat’, for which he is probably best remembered as a poet:
The children eat and giggle and laugh;
The two old ladies stroke their silk:
But the cat is small and thin with desire,
Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.107
Monro would complain later, when it appeared with great regularity in anthologies for schools, that it was an adult poem, not for children: what, he demanded, would they understand by ‘a creeping lust’? Pound, however, said that his chief pleasure in publishing the anthology was to have Eliot’s poems appear in a book, just as earlier he had conceived Des Imagistes to give book publication to Aldington and H.D. ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’, the latter having appeared in Others in September, were both included along with three shorter poems. Pound was still not convinced that Eliot was of the stature of Lewis or Joyce, to whom he referred in a letter that summer to Alice Corbin Henderson as ‘the two men of genius’, Eliot appearing solely as ‘a quaint mind full of intelligence’.108 Yet when writing publicly, he was already promoting Eliot as a leading figure. He had managed to include a reference to Eliot in the Gaudier memoir: Whistler, he wrote,
was almost the first man, at least the first painter of the last century to suggest that intelligent and not wholly ignorant and uncultivated men had a right to art … After an intolerable generation we find again this awakening … Lewis, Brzeska, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot all proving independently and sporadically that the possession of a certain measure of intellect, education, enlightenment does not absolutely unfit a man for artistic composition.
In this awakening I find very great comfort.109
By the next year Eliot would unquestionably be fêted by Pound on equal terms with Lewis, Joyce and himself, and Lewis would later immortalise the four of them as ‘the men of 1914’, ignoring with his usual insouciance the fact that Eliot was not published until 1915.
Pound was now seeing more of Eliot, who had given up his postgraduate studies at Oxford. In many ways the two of them were very different, Pound too loud and precipitate, Eliot too cautious and contained. Pound had no social skills; Eliot had impeccably good manners. Pound was always a maverick and outsider; Eliot assimilated into the most respectable English society. Pound eschewed logic and relied on intuitive convictions; Eliot could have been a professional philosopher, and was always, even after his conversion to Anglicanism, of a deeply sceptical turn of mind. Yet, as Peter Ackroyd points out in his persuasive biography of Eliot, they also had important experiences in common, both finding that American society could not nourish their desire for the arts and literature, and feeling impelled to make their creative lives abroad.110 In addition, however, they were both academics manqués, deeply disapproving of contemporary university education, yet eventually having a considerable impact on it. Both were extraordinarily literary writers, drawing repeatedly on earlier writers’ work to make their own. Both would write intensely personal poetry – what Eliot would call in the case of Pound ‘reticent autobiography’ – while claiming to be producing something quite impersonal.111 Both wanted to remake the canon of great works, to reconstruct the great tradition, and to establish themselves as arbiters of taste. In the last aim, Eliot would be much more overtly successful, although Pound’s influence – often through Eliot – would be far from negligible.
That June, Eliot had impulsively married a young, well-connected Englishwoman, Vivien Haigh-Wood, an abandonment of his usual caution that he would long regret, for it was to be a disastrous marriage for them both. Eliot was a virgin when he married, obsessed with and repulsed by sexual matters. He had spent a year studying in Paris in 1910, and like Fletcher had found the overt sexuality of the city nightmarish rather than appealing, as the disturbing, menacing yet pathetic and tawdry female presences suggest in the ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ that he had written there.112Vivien, it appears, found sexual relations equally distressing. Her brother Maurice, according to Ackroyd, said that the only person with whom Eliot ever discussed the sexual failure of his marriage was Pound, an astonishing claim, given Pound’s dislike of ‘personal tosh’. Yet, although there is so much less evidence about Pound’s married life, if, as Humphrey Carpenter surmises, Pound’s own marriage was also sexually unsuccessful, perhaps they did – I am sure in the most inhibited way – hint at their shared marital problems. Yet their situations were scarcely comparable; Pound was not entirely free of American puritan inhibitions, but his drives went elsewhere: into his work, of course, but also into his search for fame, for literary power, for leadership of the band of advancing poets. It was when he was frustrated there that pain and bitterness ensued. Eliot’s much deeper fear of the destructive consuming power of female sexuality appears in many of his poems, including one he contributed to the Catholic Anthology tellingly called ‘Hysteria’, as well as in The Waste Land. Yet one would guess that Pound, Eliot and Fletcher were all, to differing degrees, in emotional terms sexually dysfunctional; American puritanism took a heavy toll, though, of course, Hulme and Lewis, with their inability to bring affection and sexuality together, could be seen as emotionally dysfunctional in a very English mode.
At the time of his marriage, Eliot asked Pound to write to break the news to his father that he had married an Englishwoman, given up his studies, and now intended to make his way as a writer. It is possible Pound had been trying to persuade Eliot to abandon the academic world as he himself had done, and Eliot felt that the least Pound could do was present his arguments to his father. Pound told Henry Ware Eliot (prophetically) that his son would have a much easier time making his way in England than he himself had done. Eliot fitted in as he would never do. Yet, as Ackroyd points out, although Eliot was grateful for Pound’s help, and saw a certain amount of him over the next few years, he actually felt more at ease with the writers of the Bloomsbury group, who, for all their overthrowing of some conventions, were much closer to the world of well-bred English gentry to which Eliot was drawn. Pound despised the Bloomsbury group, no doubt encouraged to do so by Lewis. He never appears even to have met Virginia Woolf. One wonders what they would have made of each other. The limitation of Pound’s form of modernism is perhaps no more keenly illustrated than in his failure to appreciate the contribution to modern literature made by writers like Woolf.