VI

DURING THOSE AUTUMN months of 1915, a bond grew between H.D. and Lawrence. Although Lawrence was in a dark mood much of the year, he had another side. His sudden bursts of optimism made him sunny and kind, as that letter to Lady Cynthia shows, and his misanthropy could give way to gentleness and concern. Lawrence was perceptive about other people’s states of mind, and realised something of the psychic anguish that H.D. was experiencing. He called in occasionally to talk while Aldington was in Bloomsbury in the Egoist office, and was aware that she was still very distressed over the stillborn child; she would write, in Bid Me to Live, that Rico, the Lawrence figure, ‘was the only one who seemed remotely to understand what I felt when I was so ill – well – it was long ago, I know. But he understood that.’¹⁴³ As John Worthen puts it, ‘they had a special tenderness for each other thereafter’.¹⁴⁴

Like Lawrence, H.D. was discovering that the war had made her into an object of derision, with the widespread anti-Americanism that came with growing resentment at their non-participation. (Pound, incidentally, had feared the Catholic Anthology would be attacked for containing too many Americans, and indeed it was.) H.D. wrote to Lowell that November: ‘You don’t know how stodgy, how awful the war has made the average – no, not only the average English person! The most broadminded – they have all re-iron-coated their shells – and just the word America – American – and there is an inevitable burst of laughter and a “too proud to fight” … – It gets worse, every, every day.’¹⁴⁵ Living in this hostile, envenomed environment, she was acutely aware of how gruelling Frieda and Lawrence found the lurid, ever increasing hatred of all things German. That April, several days of anti-German rioting had broken out in the East End; in May, there were three days of anti-German riots in Liverpool. Deep prejudice was faced by anyone who sounded German; shops owned, or thought to be owned, by Germans, were sacked. Names were hastily changed: the royal family dropped Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor; before joining the army, Ford changed his middle name from Hermann to Madox; and the Bechstein Hall became the Wigmore. German men who had lived in Britain, sometimes for years, like the artist husband of H.D.’s friend, Lilian Sauter, were interned; Lawrence and Frieda feared that it might be German women next.

As a healthy twenty-three-year-old non-combatant, Aldington also knew what it was to experience hostility; in May he had published a misanthropic, bitter poem, ‘In the Tube’, in which he finds himself being watched by a ‘row of eyes,/Eyes of greed, of pitiful blankness, of plethoric complacency,/Immobile’:

Antagonism

Disgust,

Immediate antipathy,

Cut my brain, as a sharp dry reed

Cuts a finger.

I surprise the same thought

In the brasslike eyes:

‘What right have you to live?’¹⁴⁶

Yet though Aldington was shocked by the way Lawrence was treated by the authorities, notwithstanding his sturdy defence to Amy he remained ambivalent about him. He wrote later that Lawrence’s ‘psychological insight enables him to flatter women into bubbling sympathy and to irritate men into sharp hostility. Like most geniuses, he prefers women because they have been trained not to contradict and will not puncture his assertions with argument and fact.’¹⁴⁷ Possibly that was the pattern of the Aldingtons’ relationship with Lawrence that autumn. In retrospect, Aldington would write warmly of the sympathy between Lawrence and H.D., saying that ‘when we were all young together, it was obvious that there was a poetic kinship between them’.¹⁴⁸ When they first met in 1914, according to Bid Me to Live, Lawrence particularly admired her flower poems for their ‘bite and sting’, especially ‘Sea Iris’, which is ‘scented and stinging … sweet and salt’, its colour presenting a miraculous blaze in a harsh world:

Do your roots drag up colour

from the sand?

Have they slipped gold under you;

rivets of gold?

Band of iris-flowers

above the waves,

You are painted blue,

painted like a fresh prow

stained among the salt weeds.¹⁴⁹

By the time they met up again in the autumn of 1915, Lawrence had developed a keen interest in the Greeks, something which may also have played a part in their growing friendship. In July 1915 he had read a book by John Burnet, entitled Early Greek Philosophy, lent to him, incidentally, by Russell, which deeply impressed him. ‘Those early Greeks have clarified my soul. I must drop all about God,’ he told Russell. ‘I am rid of all my christian religiosity. It was only a muddiness.’¹⁵⁰ Paul Delany suggests that Lawrence was particularly impressed by Heraclitus, about whom H.D. had learnt from the pre-Socratic scholar and mesmerising talker, Henry Slominsky, on that Paris visit on the way home from Italy. In place of the Judaeo-Christian dualisms on which Lawrence had relied so far, such as ‘Love and Law, Body and Spirit, God and the Devil’, Heraclitus’ belief ‘that a constant intermingling of opposites constitutes the world’ meant that ‘to distinguish between, for example, good and evil was meaningless, and that to deplore violence and war was to deny life itself.’¹⁵¹ Burnet may have given him a new and deeper sympathy with H.D.’s poems, with their intermingling opposites, their liminal settings, between sea and land, their fascination with what like the sea iris is both ‘scented and stinging’, ‘sweet and salt’.

H.D. was probably not yet aware of Lawrence’s developing views on the need for male dominance, as from The Rainbow she had seen him as someone sympathetic to women’s need for independence and freedom. She might have been more wary of the exchange of poems they began had she known what he had written in late 1915 to the writer Catherine Carswell. He criticised Carswell’s poems for their lack of passion, telling her she needed to give herself more to the poem if she were to write something worthwhile, but then added: ‘I’m not sure I want you to – there is something tragic and displeasing about a woman who writes – but I suppose Sapho [sic] is as inevitable and right as Shelley – but you must burn, to be Sapho – burn at the stake. And Sapho is the only woman poet.’¹⁵² The imagery is curious – burning with passion is one thing; being burnt as a heretic is quite another. Did he think that in a woman writer the one might imply the other? It links up strikingly with what H.D. would write in Asphodel, when Hermione thinks with horror of the fate of Joan of Arc, emblematic of the woman artist: ‘I don’t want to be burnt, to be crucified just because I “see” things.’¹⁵³ Lawrence, like Pound, preferred women to be disciples rather than fellow-artists. On the other hand, H.D.’s poetry has a Sappho-like intensity, which was perhaps why he admired it. Aldington suggests persuasively that Lawrence was influenced at the time by the spare, direct form of H.D.’s poetry.¹⁵⁴ Another letter that Lawrence wrote to Catherine Carswell around that time gives an indication of how close he was at this juncture to the imagist aesthetic:

The grave-yard poem is very good. I do wish, however, you didn’t use metre and rhyme. It is verse which in spirit bursts all the old world, and yet goes corseted in rhymed scansion. Do leave it free … break the rhyme rather than the stony directness of speech.

The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and unlovely actualities is a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything can go, but this stark, bare rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry, today.¹⁵⁵

The ‘stark, bare rocky directness’ of H.D.’s poetry could well have been in his mind. When writing to Dollie Radford in January 1916 from Cornwall, Lawrence referred to H.D. as ‘Mrs Aldington’, so there was still some formality in their friendship, but he also expressed pleasure that Dollie had liked H.D., and asked her to try to persuade the Aldingtons to move to Cornwall too.¹⁵⁶ H.D. was not yet on his list of people to join Ranamin, but she soon would be.

That autumn, Aldington had kept himself busy with his work for the Egoist, to which he still regularly contributed reviews, articles and poetry. In addition, he had launched a Poets’ Translation series, the Egoist’s first book publishing venture, for which he himself translated Anyte of Tegea, because, he told Lowell, she was the poet who had suggested two of H.D.’s first poems, including ‘Hermes of the Ways’, and he thought that would make the work of interest to supporters of the imagists. He also translated some Renaissance Latin poets, and agreed to publish a rather laboured translation of Sappho by Edward Storer, who to Pound’s disgust was back in touch with the other imagists. James Whittall, the Aldingtons’ Philadelphian friend, was persuaded to provide a translation of Leonidas of Tarentum, one of the most prolific of the poets in the Greek Anthology, though scarcely a household name; it is hard to escape the conclusion that the series was set up to demonstrate the group’s recondite erudition as much as anything else. Aldington had been introduced by Flint to the bookstalls on the Farringdon Road, where Flint himself had first discovered Keats, and where it was possible to buy leather-bound classics at twopence each. Aldington was delighted when he found the copy of a particularly obscure and previously untranslated work, the Mosella, by a Latin writer, Ausonias, which he proceeded to get Flint to translate. H.D. had translated some choruses from Euripides’ rather better known Iphigenia in Aulis, the prequel to the play in which she saw Pound some ten years previously. Her translations, direct yet powerful, were much praised; Yeats expressed his admiration at the time, and Eliot would later say how superior he thought them to Gilbert Murray’s more authoritative, but also more florid, work. In Bid Me to Live, Rico, the Lawrence figure, also says he prefers Julia’s ‘Greek renderings’ to Gilbert Murray.¹⁵⁷ There is a description in the novel of how Julia works on such a translation:

It would take her for ever to get what she wanted, to hew and chisel those lines, to maintain or suggest some cold artistry … She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it. Then she tried to forget each word, for ‘translations’ enough existed and she was no scholar. She did not want to ‘know’ Greek in that sense. She was like one blind, reading the texture of incised letters, rejoicing like one blind who knows an inner light, a reality that the outer eye cannot grasp. She was arrogant and she was intrinsically humble before this discovery. Her own.

Anyone can translate the meaning of the word. She wanted the shape, the feel of it, the character of it, as if it had been freshly minted. She felt the old manner of approach was as towards hoarded treasure, but treasure that had passed through too many hands, had been too carefully assessed by the grammarians. She wanted to coin new words.¹⁵⁸

It is an account which works, like her poems, though the paradoxical linking of opposites. Although the language is so different from anything Pound would have used, she shares with him the combination of the emphasis on crafting the work like sculpture, ‘hewing’ and chiselling’, with the visionary, intuitive insight, the ‘inner light’. What is different is that wonderful image of her ‘brooding’ over the translations, ‘hatching’ them, the poet as mother, not, as increasingly with Pound, a figure of phallic power. The first chorus, spoken by the women of Chalkis, describes their dazzled admiration of the Greek fleet leaving before the Trojan War:

If a god should stand here

He could not speak

At the sight of ships

Circled with ships.

This beauty is too much

For any woman.

It is burnt across my eyes …

These are Achilles’ ships.

On the prow of each

A goddess sheds gold.¹⁵⁹

Euripides’ caustic view of the deceptive glamour of war, the godlike heroes setting out to pain, humiliation and death, was intensely topical. H.D. would write a few years later that Euripides was ‘caught in a mesh of political and social upheaval’ that could be compared with ‘a modern great-war period’, and his anti-war protest was as brave and unpopular a gesture as writing against the present war. ‘How would 1917 London have acclaimed such anti-war propaganda? Work that out,’ she says, ‘and you will have some idea of the power and detachment of the Attic dramatist.’¹⁶⁰ This translation was the first time H.D. had used her poetry to attack war, but it would not be the last. According to Flint, the warm review that the Poets’ Translation series received in The Times, which particularly commended H.D., was by none other than the scholar J.W. Mackail, the editor of Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, one of the imagists’ sacred texts.

Six of these pamphlets – which was really what they were, rather than books – had appeared by February 1916. Aldington was very happy with them, and also delighted that Harold Monro, in spite of his antagonistic review of Some Imagist Poets, had agreed to publish a book of poems each by himself and Flint under the Poetry Bookshop imprint, entitled respectively Images and Cadences. They came out in late 1915, and Flint wrote to Amy with some satisfaction in early January 1916 to say they had each already sold 250 to 300 copies, a good number for poetry; by June he reported that sales were continuing neck and neck, both volumes being almost sold out. There is a copy of Cadences in the Beinecke Library, inscribed ‘To Richard & Hilda Aldington quos amo plus quam me ipsum’ (‘whom I love more than myself’). It is signed F.S. Flint and dated Christmas 1915. Lowell, helpful as ever, found an American publisher for Aldington’s Images. H.D. found it hard to start to write poetry again after the loss of the baby, her first and only publication in 1915 after ‘Midday’ being the Euripides translation in November. Perhaps that released her; she began to write again, further encouraged by being given the third prize in 1915 by Poetry for the five poems that had appeared the previous March. It was for £10, and she celebrated the event with Aldington and Flint, according to the latter with plentiful red wine. Like them, she had put together poems for a collection, but she does not appear to have offered hers to Monro, whose attack on her poetry she had taken to heart – Monro thought most unreasonably so – but whilst she was the last of the imagists to have a volume published, she gained a rather more prestigious, or at any rate more mainstream, contract with Constable for the book that she would call Sea Garden, which appeared in the autumn of 1916.

Lowell herself had been as prolific as ever, in spite of bouts of serious illness. Her Six French Poets, the book version of her lecture series, was published in America in the autumn of 1915, though copies would not reach the British market until early 1916. Like the original lectures, the book proved very popular in America, half its first edition being sold out in the first three weeks, and it was well reviewed; it sold well in Britain too, although Middleton Murry and Lytton Strachey gave it somewhat cutting notices. The essays are highly readable and engagingly enthusiastic, although Lowell had neither the extensive knowledge of French literature nor the critical sharpness that these English critics demanded. Flint gave her a kind review, which, since she had warmly thanked him in the preface, was perhaps all he could do. Amy did not, as Pound was apt to do, bludgeon readers into a state of guilt for not knowing these authors, but simply gave the impression that reading these poets was an intensely pleasurable occupation and also, she managed to imply, something of a rebellious act. The new poetry, which refused the conventional in verse, went hand in hand, her message was, with the refusal of the conventional in life. None of her six chosen poets exemplified this more than Rémy de Gourmont, and she quotes at length from his ‘Preface’ to the Livre des masques:

‘What does Symbolisme mean? … it means: individualism in literature, liberty of art, abandonment of existing forms, a tending toward what is new, strange, and even bizarre … for poets, Symbolisme seems associated with vers libre … The capital crime for a writer is conformity, imitation, the submission to rules and teaching … The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass; his only excuse is to be original; he should say things not yet said, and say them in a form not yet formulated … Admit then that Symbolisme is, even though excessive, even though tempestuous, the expression of individualism in art.’

She would quote de Gourmont’s preface again in the introduction to the 1916 Some Imagist Poets. For her, his beliefs were central to imagism. As Amy sums it up here, ‘Individualism, not only in art, but in everything else, has been his creed’.¹⁶¹ This was the message that appealed to her young American readers, weary of the provincial propriety that had so exasperated Pound and H.D. It was also the message of her most popular poem, ‘Patterns’, which she had published the previous August in the Little Review, and which, in spite of being reprinted numerous times in the intervening nine months, was included in the 1916 Some Imagist Poets.

‘Patterns’ was a development of one of her constant themes, the person ‘miscast’, living in circumstances that stifle and confine. The speaker is an eighteenth-century aristocratic young woman, walking in her formal ‘patterned garden’, contrasting the daffodils and ‘bright blue squills’ that flutter in the breeze with her imprisonment in her ‘stiff, brocaded gown’. ‘With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,/I too am a rare/Pattern … not a softness anywhere about me,/Only whalebone and brocade’. She longs to bathe in the fountain, and imagines her lover near at hand watching her:

What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!

I should like to see it lying in a heap on the ground.

All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,

And he would stumble after.

She fantasises about the chase, and her lover’s embrace, ‘aching, melting, unafraid’, and then suddenly pulls back into the suffocating present: ‘I am very like to swoon/ With the weight of this brocade,/For the sun sifts through the shade.’ Then it emerges that she has heard just that morning that her lover is dead, killed in the war. Totally self-controlled, her only outward response is to walk in the garden: ‘Held rigid to the pattern/By the stiffness of my gown./Up and down I walked,/Up and down’. The poem ends:

I shall go

Up and down,

In my gown.

Gorgeously arrayed,

Boned and stayed.

And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace

By each button, hook, and lace.

For the man who should loose me is dead,

Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,

In a pattern called war.

Christ! What are patterns for?¹⁶²

To young people, chafing against the conformity and prudishness of American middle-class life at the period, it was an image of their condition, cut off from vitality and life by the stultifying patterns of convention. This was the generation that a few years later, in the early 1920s, would challenge their parents’ sexual mores, become the Bright Young Things, and herald the Jazz Age. Take Margaret Mead, for example, who by 1928 would achieve fame, while still in her twenties, with her controversial book, Coming of Age in Samoa, whose underlying message was the need for greater sexual freedom for American adolescents; fieldwork in Samoa was only the vehicle. ‘Patterns’ was her favourite poem, as it was of her friend, lover and fellow-anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, whose book, Patterns of Culture, it inspired. Mead had found breaking away from the values of her home painful but necessary, and both she and Benedict saw cultures as imposing patterns of behaviour on their members, patterns that might work well for some, but for others would be oppressive and restricting. ‘Patterns’ had a particular appeal for women, always more the victims of propriety than the men. When Amy visited Wellesley College, the famous women’s college just outside Boston, in 1918, Robert Frost’s daughter, who heard her read, said that every girl there knew ‘Patterns’ by heart. Amy Lowell herself was such a mixture of conformity and rebellion that she understood only too well the problems of breaking out. Her wealth let her ignore certain rules, but though she often defied Boston, she was very aware of pressures it exerted. She expected ‘Patterns’ to be considered quite risqué – what with a naked woman, the pursuing lover, and the blasphemous last line – and she sent it to the Little Review, which was proud of the fact that it carried work no other American publication would touch, rather than to one of the commercial magazines now willing to publish her. But the climate was changing more rapidly than she had realised. Everyone wanted it. It was, one might note, and perhaps this was the reason it was so successful, in some ways more conventional than her poetry often was – the sprinkling of rhymes, the heterosexual plot, the costume drama – though the impulse to write it actually came from one of her weeks of misery when Ada had gone off to visit her daughter. But it was the poem that in those years cemented her reputation as an advocate of new freedoms in verse and in life.