III

IN MAY, THE second imagist anthology appeared. It was widely reviewed, even occasionally in complimentary terms, and again sold well. Amy had already written in February to say that vers libre was being much discussed in all the papers, and in June she told Aldington that ‘Imagism is fast ceasing to be a freak subject over here and is beginning to be treated with respect; people are fast getting inoculated; and I think in a few more years we can feel we have really succeeded.’ By July she was saying, ‘It is extraordinary how the movement is progressing … One can hardly take up a paper that does not mention some of us; in fact it is becoming a country-wide movement on this side of the Atlantic, and it is astonishing to think that a little handful of perfectly unknown poets have done this thing.’³⁴ When she had lectured that March in Chicago on ‘The New Poetry, with a Particular Inquiry into Imagism’, a hundred people were turned away. Her ‘Spring-Day’ with its description of her bath continued to be controversial, but 500 of the 1,000 copies of the anthology were sold in the first month, and sales of the first anthology had reached 1,301. A drop in the ocean by Georgian Poetry standards, but excellent compared with most volumes of poetry. Amy had cautiously predicted the previous November that the ‘storm of abuse’ which had greeted the 1915 volume would be turned by that of 1916 into ‘reluctant praise’, and she was proved right.³⁵

Lawrence wrote to Lowell from Cornwall later that month, to thank her for his copies, saying it ‘looks very nice, as usual, the book. And I think it quite up to the mark, don’t you? It should make a considerable impression’, though he would later say to a former colleague from Croydon that his and H.D.’s were the only good poems.³⁶ The Aldingtons also wrote to acknowledge theirs; over the last few months neither of them had written with any frequency to Amy, as she plaintively pointed out. Their lives, though she did not know it, were in some turmoil. They had not taken up Lawrence’s suggestion that they should join him and Frieda in Cornwall. H.D. was tempted, but Richard, despite his admiration for Lawrence as a writer, saw he could be a difficult neighbour, as indeed Murry and Mansfield, whom he succeeded in enticing down, were to find. The idea of escaping London, the Zeppelins and the winter fog had, however, been immensely appealing, and in addition, according to Aldington’s biographer, Charles Doyle, they were told it was advisable for the sake of H.D.’s health. John Cournos, of whom they had been seeing a good deal, suggested that they went to north Devon, to a village called Martinhoe by the coast, near which lived two of his writer friends, Carl Fallas and John Mills Whitham. Cournos had shared lodgings in London for a while with Fallas, and thought highly of him as a short story writer; although Fallas never became well known, in 1955 Winston Churchill unexpectedly awarded him the first Prime Minister’s Annual Literary Award, as Aldington noted in a letter to H.D. at the time. Fallas had a young wife, Flo, like him from Manchester, and a baby; they had little money, and in London the three of them had all lived together in one room. Fallas was unfailingly cheerful and ‘happy-go-lucky’: Flo, Cournos said, was ‘very good-looking, fully a head taller than Carl; charmingly simple, a country-girl in spirit’.³⁷ Whitham was a novelist, according to Aldington writing Hardyesque ‘rural tragedies which terrified the subscription libraries’. He had ‘cast off puritan doctrine but retained the puritan temperament’, and although he had ‘prodigious ideals, was often as melancholy as a gib cat’.³⁸ It was Flo who found the Aldingtons a cottage, or rather half a cottage. Pound reported to his mother in late February that he had heard that they were going to Devon for a while, and they probably went in early March. Cournos promised that he would come and join them as soon as possible, but it took him time, as an American, to get the necessary permit. The Aldingtons tried to persuade Flint to give up his job and to bring his family to join them, but he lived too near real poverty to do anything so reckless. In any case, working in the Post Office was still a reserved occupation – that would later change – and while he remained there he would not be called up, even if – or rather, as they well knew, when – married men’s conscription was introduced. Aldington was still undecided what he would do in that eventuality. H.D. told Flint that he was wondering about going to prison rather than fighting. Neither prospect was appealing.

Devon was a welcome respite. Aldington wrote in his memoir: ‘I got to like that valley. In front of the cottage ran one of those rocky Devonshire trout streams, “warty” as Herrick calls them. Across a meadow there began a wooded hillside, and about a mile and half down the valley was the sea.’ Until spring finally came – there had been six inches of snow when they arrived – he spent much of his time cutting wood to burn. With the warmer weather there were walks, beach parties and sea bathing, and they ‘recaptured the good fellowship and gaiety which had vanished from London’.³⁹ Even so, John Cournos records, when he came to join them, ‘our little colony lived in a state of perpetual apprehension … A terrible war was on, and in its repercussions our nerves were badly jangled.’ He shared the Aldingtons’ house, Carl and Flo Fallas lived half a mile, and Whitham two miles away. They were all, with the apparent exception of Flo, spending much of their time writing, though she was sometimes employed by one or other of them as a typist. Cournos himself was working on his first novel, based on his early childhood in Russia and his subsequent move to Philadelphia, but they all met three or four times a week, for meals, or long walks. Cournos comments somewhat mysteriously that they suffered from ‘abnormal moods needing abnormal outlets’, though the examples he gives do not seem particularly strange. Their bathing was naked, but that had become quite the fashion among young intellectuals. He also mentions that they discovered that the local inn had quantities of German wine in the cellar that the landlord was unable to sell to the patriotic inhabitants of Devon; to this they applied themselves merrily – presumably, since they were all hard up, at a very cheap price – and ‘like souls possessed, danced and capered up and down the Devon Hills, and scintillated with a wit which but rarely sprang from sober tongue’.⁴⁰ None of this sounds very abnormal, but perhaps Cournos was hinting here at another kind of taboo-breaking and excess that he could not mention in a memoir: Aldington had an affair with Flo Fallas.

Aldington had been immediately attracted to Flo, as he wrote to tell Flint in March, although at that time he dismissed the idea of an affair, as he felt it would be too hurtful to H.D. Some commentators have suggested that the Aldingtons had agreed to have an open marriage, as George Winterbourne and his wife Elizabeth do in Aldington’s 1929 novel, Death of a Hero. In the book, they both have other relationships from the beginning of their marriage, but there is no reason to suppose that this was true of Aldington and H.D. Aldington’s letter to Flint does not suggest that he expected H.D. to be anything but deeply unhappy about his infidelity. It was certainly true, however, that they distinguished their marriage from the conventional bourgeois tie. They held theoretically to the de Gourmont view of individualism and liberty, but that does not mean they ever expected it to apply to their relationship. Aldington’s anti-bourgeois precepts had emerged strongly in a review he had written the previous June of a book by Anna Wickham, an Australian poet married (unhappily) to an English solicitor; she was in rebellion against conventional marriage, and he commended her opinions thoroughly, if not always her verse. (Under her married name of Mrs Hepburn she had, incidentally, been blessed in the first Blast.) ‘Anna Wickham’s book,’ Aldington had written, ‘is a chunk of life. She makes me think of those punching machines on Folkestone pier; you hit a leather projection, and a dial registers the force of the blow. Life hits Anna Wickham and she registers a poem … She wants to know what the devil women are to do with their lives.’ Her poems, he says, are the ‘protest of a sane woman observing the insane things which are exacted from her sex by bourgeois rules … Her misfortune is to be clear-sighted among the blind, vital among the insipid, natural among the affected, sane among the stupid.’ He quotes one poem that begins, ‘I have been so misused by chaste men with one wife/That I would live with satyrs all my life’, and another called ‘The Tired Man’, whose second verse goes:

I am a quiet gentleman,

And I would sit and think;

But my wife is walking the whirlwind

Through night as black as ink.

Her book ‘registers’, Aldington concludes, ‘the revolt of a human mind from the exasperating restrictions and limitations of English middle-class life. It is not a work of art; it is a series of cartels.’⁴¹ The Aldingtons had come to know Anna Wickham, who lived near them in Hampstead, and though they liked her, began to understand something of her husband’s desire for a quieter life. In her ‘Autobiographical Notes’, H.D. writes of their time there, ‘Anna Wickham is rather wearing.’⁴² Yet Aldington’s somewhat vague condemnation of middle-class mores here did not necessarily mean very much in practice. Aldington and H.D.’s time together in Paris and Capri had certainly been a gesture of defiance to the conventional world, but up to this point they appear to have been a devoted couple. Richard and Brigit would flirt, but Brigit appears to have flirted a good deal, and she was devoted to H.D.; although H.D. would much later come to wonder if they had had an affair in those years, it seems clear from Aldington’s extant letters to Brigit that they had not. By 1918 Aldington was certainly putting forward the theory that he and H.D. could both have other relationships without damaging their essential closeness, but this does not seem to have been an idea that he thought H.D. would be happy with in 1916. H.D. undoubtedly had told him about Pound’s multiple ‘engagements’, and he must have been well aware of how she would react to betrayal by himself. Aldington’s instinct was always to protect H.D. from the world; she had felt safe with him, but he would hurt her bitterly all the same.

Flint, his wife and their two children came to visit at Easter. Whether Aldington talked over his feelings about Flo with Flint, there is no record, but one presumes he did. Flint, whose unpublished writings suggest both that he was deeply attached to Violet, but also worn by the strains of a poverty-stricken domestic life and resentful that he could not live in a freer, more expansive way, may have encouraged him. Easter was late that year; Easter Monday was 24 April, the day on which what became known as the Easter Rising took place in Dublin. Aldington had never shown any great interest in the Irish question, and he probably never knew that the uprising sealed his fate. In March, the first bill had been passed in Parliament paving the way for legislation to conscript married men, but it was not until May that such conscription – universal military service up to the age of forty-one – began. Asquith’s government was riven in two over the issue and he was afraid to pursue the bill, but news of the Dublin rebellion produced a surge of support in Parliament for the measure, and on Tuesday, 25 April he was able to get it through.

The rising itself was put down in a few days, but the scars left by the heavy-handed English response soured relationships between England and Ireland for decades. The English authorities had been taken off their guard. Just as at the beginning of the war, everyone had been looking at Ireland instead of Europe, now, with all eyes on the Great War, they had forgotten the possibility of trouble there. Even Yeats, Pound told his parents, had been taken by surprise. Pound probably would not have known at this stage that his erstwhile fellow Tour Eiffel poet, Desmond FitzGerald, had been involved. Joseph Campbell, with whom FitzGerald hid for a few days that week, had stayed with Pound as recently as late 1914, and Nancy kept in touch with Dorothy, so Pound would certainly have been aware that there was deep anger at the failure to implement Home Rule. The leaders of the Easter Rising, many of whom Yeats knew, were executed, transformed instantly into martyrs, and memorialised in Yeats’ great poem on the rising in which he declares ‘a terrible beauty is born’. Roger Casement, who had been knighted in 1911 for exposing the abuses inflicted on workers in the rubber industries in the Congo and the Amazon, was hanged for treason in August for his attempts to get German support, though only after diaries relating his homosexual activities had been used to besmirch his name. (John Quinn, the nearest thing in Pound’s life to a Renaissance prince, tried to plead for Casement, and was one of the few of those who, on being shown selected pages from the diary, did not desist.) Yeats wrote to Asquith on Casement’s behalf; Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was both heart-broken at Casement’s death and somewhat envious of his martyrdom; Joseph Campbell, who had never forgotten Casement’s earlier kindness, wrote a tribute to him as one of a line of Irish heroes. Pound had at first treated the uprising fairly flippantly, having by now been trained by Yeats and Joyce to despise Irish nationalism (though this incident would change Yeats’ attitude), but even he realised the British government was bungling things. In any case, he, like them, remained deeply critical of the British Empire; he told the young aspiring writer, Iris Barry, who contacted him for advice that year, that the only comparable decadence had been that of the late Roman Empire, and the British treatment of the rebels seemed another example of both this decadence and ineptitude.⁴³

How much the Aldingtons heard of the rising in Devon is hard to know. Brigit, who was corresponding with H.D. and still a keen Irish nationalist, would undoubtedly have written to her about it, and even the Egoist mentioned it, so they cannot have missed it altogether. Probably, like Lawrence, who wrote indignantly about the events to Ottoline Morrell, they saw the executions as more evidence of English militaristic barbarity, but they must have been much more exercised by the news about conscription. Whitham decided he would be a conscientious objector, prison or no, and indeed to prison he went, though he was out by early September. Cournos, as an American, was exempt from military service. Carl and Aldington decided to enlist together in late May; if they did so voluntarily, they could choose their battalion and stay together. It was finally in May, too, it appears, that Aldington and Flo briefly became lovers. Presumably Fallas, who according to Cournos prided himself on the docility of his wife, knew nothing about it, though one wonders at the logistics. Aldington described to Flint his panic when the postman knocked on the door of the Fallas cottage when he and Flo were in bed together. But where, one wonders, was Carl? And where was the baby? Aldington was taking a risk with his own marriage and with Flo’s, but with the thought of war service ahead the future carried few guarantees for him. The affair was perhaps as much an escape from fear of life, or worse, of death, at the front, as anything else, a desperate effort to seize, if only temporarily, the simple, uncomplicated joy espoused by his Greeks that the world denied him.

Whether Aldington told H.D. or not about the affair, and he seems not to have done at the time, she was aware of it. In her ‘Autobiographical Notes’ many years later, she recalled of that time: ‘R. goes much to the Fallas cottage’.⁴⁴ John Cournos became her confidant, as Flint was Aldington’s. She tried to be calm and reasonable. She knew the strain that Aldington was under. Though she was emotionally very dependent on him, their sexual life must have been at best attenuated at this period. In Bid Me to Live, Julia says she had lived in fear of Rafe’s ‘over-physical sensuality’ since ‘the ordeal in the nursing home’.⁴⁵ Aldington was behaving like many a Victorian husband, though he would have been aghast at the thought; when the next year H.D. would hint at a comparison with the womanising Deighton Patmore, whom he despised, he was appalled. Aldington was deeply romantic, as well as highly sexed, and, in a somewhat naïve though not uncommon fashion, always held to the idea that his sexual liaisons were in themselves good and beautiful expressions of the human spirit, no matter what devastation they caused. And H.D. was certainly devastated. But her feelings were all the more confused because Aldington almost immediately had to enlist. The person who had hurt and betrayed her was now one who needed all the love, support, warmth and encouragement that she could give him.

Government regulations, Richard told Amy, allowed them five weeks from enlisting to put their affairs in order. He went off for army training on 24 June, and H.D. was left both anguished and concerned. Aldington hated army life, as he was sure he would. He had enlisted as a private; he had some hopes that his father’s connections through the Ministry of Munitions might get him a commission, but his father was as unsuccessful as he had been in his attempts to find Flint a position there. Even before he joined up, Aldington had dreaded, as he told Amy, ‘ceas[ing] to exist as an individual’ once he had entered the military machine.⁴⁶ ‘My number on the form,’ he told her, ‘is 61, so that in a fortnight I cease to be “Richard Aldington, the celebrated Imagist poet” (vide Dramas ad!) and become Private R. Aldington, 61, 6th Devonshire Regiment.’⁴⁷ Once there, it was even more of a ‘soul-destroying mechanism’, as he describes it, than he had feared.⁴⁸ He found himself revolted by the tasks he had to carry out. Aldington wrote bitterly to Flint and Cournos of the degradation he had to endure. For the Officers’ Mess Fatigue, he was given tasks generally done by female domestic servants: Aldington, free though he thought he was of class prejudice, found, as an ex-public-school boy, working as a kitchen maid intensely galling.

H.D. stayed on in Martinhoe for about a month, and Cournos stayed with her. He commented later, somewhat harshly, for by then much had gone wrong between them, that ‘H.D. was dreadfully upset by Richard’s departure, though she had had ample time to prepare for it.’⁴⁹ At the time, he was more sympathetic, saying to her, when she told him of the affair, that he felt responsible for her unhappiness over Flo, as he had introduced them to the Fallases; H.D. would tell him in early September that during that month he had saved her life, doubtless an exaggeration, but one she probably believed. Cournos had become a close friend to both the Aldingtons. Although, ever since he had come to Europe, he had hoped eventually to persuade Arabella, the beautiful Philadelphian art student whom he had followed to Paris, to marry him, and had made intermittent though unsuccessful attempts to renew his suit, he was by now in love with H.D.; H.D., in her distraught state, saw him as her only support. ‘Psychically wrought up, immediately after [Richard’s] departure,’ Cournos says, ‘she impetuously walked over to me in the sitting room we all jointly occupied and kissed me.’ Was this true? He is clearly hinting that this was a sexual advance, and continues ambiguously, ‘This revelation of confidence and its implication of the two of us being left to maintain the thinning thread of spirit in growing chaos, touched me, and I resolved to help her breach the emptiness of the days immediately before her’, a course of action which his readers could interpret either as disinterested kindliness or an affair, though it appears not to have been quite either.⁵⁰ H.D.’s letters to Cournos suggest that he was the one who declared his love for her, ‘absolute and terrible and hopeless love’, as she puts it in one letter, while she, though both grateful and anxious to hold on to his affection and sympathy, told him that, fond of him as she was, she cared for Aldington in a way she did not for him.⁵¹ The letters H.D. wrote to Cournos over the next few months are almost frighteningly intense; she writes like someone living on the very edge of complete breakdown, but, although she speaks obsessively of Aldington, of her anxieties about what he is enduring in the ‘hell of soldiering’, and of her desperate unhappiness about Flo, one cannot really blame Cournos – as she begs him repeatedly to continue writing and pours out her gratitude and affection – for being confused about her attitude towards him. One critic has referred to these letters as flirtatious, a word that with its connotations of fun and light-hearted dalliance suggests a different universe from the fevered torment that the letters convey.⁵² But that H.D. was eager to keep the sustaining emotional bond between them is very clear.

Cournos, whatever his feelings for H.D., was anxious to remain in the role of faithful friend to Richard. Two days after Aldington left, sitting with H.D. in the cottage sitting-room, he recounts that they both heard Aldington’s voice calling him ‘Korshoon’, his original Russian name by which Richard and H.D. knew him.⁵³ H.D.’s letters repeatedly tell Cournos how fond Richard is of him, and how much his letters meant to him. Aldington, for his part, as well as trying desperately to convince H.D. that he still loved her, was attempting to prevent her from realising how much he loathed the army. His unhappy letters to Flint and Cournos include repeated instructions not to tell H.D. of his misery, though she appears to have been well aware of it. On his weekend leaves, surprisingly frequent, he was desperate to reassure H.D. of his devotion. She ceaselessly encouraged their friends to write to him. Indeed, both of them tried, in a somewhat frenzied, but not necessarily insincere, way, to prove how devoted they were to each other.

Amy Lowell was one of those H.D. begged to write, a more complicated matter than she had realised. Her letter to Amy giving the camp address was returned by the censors, as the location of camps was not to be revealed to foreign nationals. Lowell had to write to the Egoist, which forwarded her letters. Amy had been much dismayed for them both when she heard Aldington was in the army, writing to him in late June to say ‘I cannot bear to have your brains and beautiful imagination knocked here and there in the rough duties of a private soldier’s life’, though adding a trifle bracingly that poets must be ‘virile’ and that the war might be ‘a splendid experience, which will enlarge not only your outlook on life but your suggestions for poetry’. She added with some embarrassment that she must sound ‘sententious’, but didn’t seem to recognise that Aldington feared he might soon no longer have a life on which to have an outlook.⁵⁴ There is no extant comment from Aldington on that particular letter, but he would grow increasingly irritated by Lowell’s upbeat exhortations. He was grateful for the generosity with which she worked to help him continue to publish while at the front; from the time she returned in 1914 she had been assiduous in placing poems by both Aldington and H.D. in the American press, acting as unpaid agent, but she now redoubled her efforts. Yet when she wrote saying she almost wished that she too could be at the front, Aldington furiously condemned her hypocrisy in making such statements from her ‘fat Boston sitting room’.⁵⁵ Her ‘almost’ wish was, however, probably genuine. Part of her always wanted to be able to do the things that in Boston were restricted to men. It is not surprising that in her letters and lectures she applies the word ‘virile’ to poetry with almost as much zest as Hulme had done. But she would never have wanted to be a private; a general would have been much more to her taste.