A MONTH AFTER Aldington joined the army, H.D. moved to Corfe Castle in Dorset, to be near his camp at Wareham. John Cournos returned to London, where he was put up by Richard’s friend Alec Randall and his wife Amy, both of whom now contributed to the Egoist. Flo and the baby went to stay with her parents back in Manchester, where Carl went to see her on leave in September. The Fallases were desperately short of money, and H.D., in spite of everything, tried to help. The £40 that Amy had earlier sent her when her allowance was late she had refused to keep for herself, but with Amy’s agreement gave it away to various writers even more hard-up than themselves; some of the money went to the Fallas family, a generous gesture in the circumstances. H.D. was determined to be civilised. As she recalled later in life, thinking over this period, the ‘impulse to fling plates, à la Lawrences, has been discreetly suppressed in me … I can feel the old insufficiency and frustration but I never flared out at Richard or at the earlier Ezra with his relay or chorus.’56 H.D. did, it must be said, resist a suggestion that Flo should come and stay with her in Corfe Castle so that she too could be near her husband; there were limits to her generosity, though she wavered even on that. But having moved there, what with the beauty of the place and the fact that she could see something of Aldington, at least her anxieties moved to her husband’s misery in the army. When she first arrived at Corfe Castle, she told Cournos later, ‘I was so intense in my prayer for Richard’s mere physical safety, that I could not complicate it with other things. I came to him as if nothing had ever happened. I think we were happy together.’ In late August she was saying to Cournos that she ‘hope[d] to soon be [her]self again’.
She had, as well, other things to think about. On 1 June, a notice had appeared in the Egoist, informing readers that Aldington had been called up and that the assistant editorship would be taken over in his absence by ‘“H.D.” (Mrs Richard Aldington)’. She had to turn her mind to soliciting copy, and to writing it herself. Her first review appeared in August, of Marianne Moore’s poetry, an indication of how much she admired her former fellow-student’s work, as Moore’s first book was not published until 1921, and reviews of uncollected poems are rare. ‘Miss Moore,’ she wrote, ‘turns her perfect craft as the perfect craftsman must inevitably do, to some direct presentation of beauty, clear, cut in flowing lines, but so delicately that the very screen she carves seems to stand only in that serene palace of her own world of inspiration – frail, yet as all beautiful things are, absolutely hard – and destined to endure longer, far longer than the toppling sky-scrapers, and the world of shrapnel and machine-guns in which we live.’57 H.D. was developing her own poetic doctrines, which share elements with both Hulme and Pound’s but are in other ways very different. Like them, H.D. sees beauty in what is ‘hard’, but, unlike them, in what is simultaneously frail. She uses the analogy of carving, as Pound does, though he generally thinks of sculpting stone, and she is talking of delicate wood fretwork; she evokes qualities like those Hulme recommended for modern art, which he thought should be ‘austere’, ‘bare’, ‘clear cut’. But Hulme had added the word ‘mechanical’, and like both Yeats and Lawrence, she is wary of that; the machine for her, as for them, is inevitably connected with the machinery of war.
What H.D. says of Moore’s poetry could be read as an oblique manifesto for her own collection, Sea Garden, which came out in September, and which also presents an imagined world which is ‘frail, yet as all beautiful things are, absolutely hard’. Sea Garden was, overall, a supremely impressive first volume, restrained yet intense, passionate yet disciplined. Like Cathay, the poems evoke the wartime atmosphere; for all their beauty, they are bleak, stoical and stark. In the flower poems, such as ‘Sea Rose’, with which she opens the volume, emblems of love and femininity are transformed into stony but delicate, battered though enduring, images of the time. Some of the poems predate the war, though even they are uncannily appropriate to its dark atmosphere. ‘The Last Gift’, after all, which reappeared here, with its ‘bare rocks/dwarftrees, twisted’, recalls the landscape of her first published poem, ‘Hermes of the Ways’.58 They are, in Pound’s word mythopoetic, visionary poems, some evoking Pater’s image of the return of the gods that Pound had drawn on in ‘The Return’, and which became an urgent wartime theme for H.D., representing to her the need in ‘the world of shrapnel and machine-guns in which we live’ for the artist to make possible the imaginative recreation of a more humane and worthwhile world. As a whole, the volume makes clear that her rejection in ‘The Last Gift’ of an ‘over-sweet’, ‘over-painted’ beauty was the rejection of a conventionally feminine traditional verse for one that can speak to the tortured intensity of the present, her own version of the modernist revolution; in ‘Sheltered Garden’, for example, she writes:
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves …
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.59
What she seeks is a vision and a poetry that can endure and transcend the buffetings and violence of the times. Sea Garden is a version – an unusual version – of the pastoral, like the sea iris, stinging as well as scented, salt as well as sweet; it ends with the poem ‘Cities’, which had appeared in the July Egoist and which returns the reader to the metropolitan world, evoking the oppressive here and now, but with new hope and insight, the traditional end of the pastoral.
Sea Garden had few reviews in England, though H.D. told Amy that it had found some appreciative readers. Fletcher, now back in England, would give it a warm review in Poetry (why, Pound demanded of Alice Corbin Henderson, had it not been sent to the foreign correspondent?). When Lowell had written to Aldington in June, she asked if they had yet seen Fletcher, to whom she had regretfully said goodbye in late May. Only earlier that month, she had been telling them what a solace he was to her, and how well settled in Boston, so he must have left it to the last moment to break the news that he was definitely going. He had told her about Daisy in late 1915, but vacillated for months about returning. He was as ambivalent and changeable as ever about the marriage, and, even when he decided he wanted to be with Daisy, was appalled by the thought that he might be conscripted if he returned to England. He had written as one of his ‘symphony’ poems a long nightmarish meditation on an earth ‘sown with dead’, entitled ‘Poppies of the Red Year: a Symphony in Scarlet’, vividly evoking the horror of the battlefield. The third section imagines the carnage:
Scarlet tossing poppies
Flutter their wind-slashed edges,
On which gorged black flies poise and sway in drunken sleep.
The black flies hang
Above the tangled trampled grasses,
Grey, crumpled bundles lie in them:
They sprawl,
Heave faintly;
And between their stiffened fingers,
Run out clogged crimson trickles,
Spattering the poppies and standing in beads on the grass.60
No illusions about the glamour of warfare there, but added to this sharp fear of being sent to the front was the fact that Lowell endeavoured to persuade him that it would be ruinous for his poetic career to return to England. He was slowly building up his reputation in America, she said; in England he would be forgotten and dismissed as an expatriate. She could have given as warning the contrast between Frost and Pound. If Frost had stayed away and allowed himself to be promoted as one of Pound’s ‘American literary refugees’, he would never have been taken up in his home country. Now, safely back, he was a bestseller; Pound’s admirers were still little more than a handful. In April Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas had appeared, containing what was perhaps the most successful and moving poem he ever wrote, his long poem of childhood memories, ‘The Ghosts of an Old House’, which he had written on that first miserable return home. The volume had been due to come out at the same time as the 1916 Some Imagist Poets, but the anthology was delayed, so he at least had the pleasure of separate reviews; they were mixed, but the book was certainly noticed.
Fletcher was, however, a good deal more worried about being overshadowed by Lowell in America than of being forgotten when he left. He remained in many ways under the spell of her powerful personality, and was well aware she could be a useful influence with publishers, but, as her success grew, so did his rancour; when Daisy said she thought Amy plagiarised him, he was delighted to agree. While he rarely, if ever up to this point, appears to have criticised Lowell to her face – she thought him her most sympathetic literary contact – his letters about her to Daisy had become vituperative. One letter written in January 1916 lists a range of slights and ill-deeds – some clearly imaginary – chief among his complaints being her suggestion to Aldington, whom he now described as ‘very decent and upright’, that he should become editor of an American Mercure de France, a project she then decided she couldn’t afford to set up.61 Fletcher felt he had been compromised because he had written to encourage Aldington to accept. In fact Aldington, though he liked the idea, had been well aware that, given the likelihood of conscription, he would not have been allowed to leave England, and was much less perturbed than Fletcher was on his behalf. As Fletcher’s biographer suggests, his real grouse was probably that Lowell had not asked him to be editor. Fletcher was now full of good will – temporarily at any rate – towards the Aldingtons; he talked with sympathy about their lack of funds, H.D.’s delicacy and Aldington’s anxiety about leaving her if he were called up. Ever since the stillbirth, his attitude to them had markedly changed. In April 1916, he wrote a sympathetic review of Aldington’s Images for Poetry, praising its ‘simplicity and restraint’ in contrast to much American verse, which was ‘hectic, disorganised, lacking in reflective judgment’.62 When he returned to England, he was ready to be friendly, and H.D. and Aldington to welcome him. Fletcher had sent ‘The Ghosts of an Old House’ to the Egoist the year before, where it appeared in instalments; Aldington was deeply impressed by it, and, with his own memories of childhood unhappiness, had come to feel a new sympathy as well as respect for Fletcher. It would be some months, however, before they met up.
Fletcher arrived in England on 8 June, just three days after Lord Kitchener drowned when the vessel that he was on struck a mine. It was a blow to the country’s prestige, and there was a clamour for further internment of Germans living in Britain as the rumour went round, Fletcher told Lowell, that Kitchener had lost his life as the result of information passed on by a German spy. Fletcher was amazed by the surface calm. There were notices everywhere, warning people not to discuss military and naval matters, and most people avoided the subject of the war altogether, venting their anxieties by complaining about the high prices, double, he estimated, those of 1914. (By the end of the war, the pound would be worth a third of what it had been pre-war.) Half the bus conductors were now women, London swarmed with soldiers, and the fashionable ladies of the pre-war era had largely disappeared. A notice by the Trafalgar Square lions read: ‘To dress extravagantly in war time is worse than bad form. It is unpatriotic.’ Fletcher described all this in a letter written to Amy within three days of his arrival, and signed ‘yours affectionately’, so he was not yet making any very decisive break. He wrote again later in the month, saying he was appalled by the feebleness of the poetry that was emerging during the war, ascribing this to the fact that no one ‘wants to think of the tragic side, and everyone is trying to be as cheerful as possible … a lot of the old Puritan morality has been swept overboard at a stroke. The amount of immorality that goes on in munitions factories, etc., is staggering.’63 Presumably the latter information he had from the papers, as he had no contact with munitions factories, and outrage at loose wartime morals was a favourite topic in the press. He had seen no one he knew, bar of course Daisy; he had called in at the Poetry Bookshop, but found that Harold Monro was engaged in anti-aircraft work, having joined the army just that same month. One would not have expected him to seek out Pound or Lewis, and indeed Lewis was no longer in London, but training for the army in Dorset, though in frequent communication with Pound over the progress of negotiations for selling his work to John Quinn. Fletcher, however, exchanged letters with the Aldingtons. Amy had secured a position for Aldington as foreign correspondent for a new journal that was about to be launched by William Stanley Braithwaite, who had come to admire Lowell, but now Aldington was in the army he could no longer do it, and Fletcher offered his own services in his place; they were not taken up, yet another grievance.
Fletcher and Daisy were married on 5 July. Poor Amy! Carl Engel married the same month, so she lost the attentions of the two friends that she had leant on most, always of course excepting the rock-like Ada (Lowell would frequently call her Peter, in tribute to that quality). In early August, Fletcher wrote to Lowell, after a honeymoon in Cornwall, sounding depressed, saying now he had been back for two months he found himself thinking constantly of the war. Horrific numbers of wounded soldiers arrived back daily at Charing Cross, to be greeted by women who threw flowers into the ambulances, while the soldiers appeared pitifully indifferent to their heroes’ welcome. He made no comment on married life, but his unhappy tone suggests he was already uncertain that he had done the right thing. He spent the month of August with Daisy and her children at Ramsgate, so he was not back in Sydenham until September. In the meantime, Aldington, who had expected to be sent abroad that month, had a reprieve. He may have hated army life, but he was a hard worker, highly competent at whatever he did, as well as strong and muscular. Dover College would have been gratified to know that his superiors soon decided that he had the makings of a leader. His physical appearance, in any case, fitted him for officer class; few working-class privates had his height and build. H.D. told Cournos that ‘R. looks so much a “gentleman” that from a distance approaching Tommies prepare to salute. It is a great joke – they are so surprised when they find R. one of themselves.’ By early September he was promoted to non-commissioned officer, which meant he would not have to go to France for another three months. His adjutant had even asked him if he would like a commission, but he had said not yet. H.D. does not explain why; one might surmise that even though he had earlier hoped his father would obtain one for him, his dislike of what he saw as the snobbish distinction accorded to the officer class made him hesitate, though later in the war he agreed to become a lieutenant. Almost immediately, however, that he learnt of his delayed departure, there was a further crisis in his relationship with H.D. With the imminent threat of danger to his life removed, her other fears returned: she came across in the Poetry Review of America two poems by Aldington, clearly written about Flo, with whom she was now convinced Aldington was passionately in love. ‘I have lived through hours of torture,’ she wrote to Cournos, ‘beside which those in which you saw me were paradise.’
She poured out her despair, anger and pain in a series of long poems, very different from the brief, highly charged and honed work that she had published in Sea Garden. These poems are, as Louis Martz, the editor of her Collected Poems, has commented, much more personal, and mark a new stage in her writing, as if imagist control could not withstand the flood of psychic pain; they are driven, anguished, much more explicit about the human situation from which they arise.64 They remain Sappho-like in their intensity and conflicting range of emotions; the Greek frame is still there, but there is a new dramatic urgency and directness. She saved three of these poems, ‘Amaranth’, ‘Eros’ and ‘Envy’, keeping them in a folder marked ‘Corfe Castle, 1917’. That was the wrong year; she would no longer be in Corfe Castle in 1917, but Aldington would betray her even more disastrously in that year; as she would later learn to say, it was a Freudian slip. She never published these in full in her lifetime, though she printed some extracts from them in the 1920s, describing them as ‘Fragments from Sappho’ and making changes to disguise the personal source. The first section of ‘Envy’ begins:
I envy you your chance of death,
how I envy you this.
I am more covetous of him
even than of your glance …
After a powerful personification of death, who even if he ‘pierce me with his lust/iron, fever and dust’ cannot hurt her as much as her faithless lover, she asks,
What is left after this?
what can death loose in me
after your embrace?
your touch,
your limbs are more terrible
to do me hurt.
What can death mar in me
that you have not?65
For all the pain, there is an extraordinary fire and energy in these poems; as she said to Cournos, ‘the hurt has freed my song’.
H.D. described the poems that she wrote at Corfe Castle to Cournos as ‘a series that all runs on continuously but can be read as single poems. I feel it will be very, very far ahead of all my other work if I find strength to go on with it … These poems seem absolutely dictated from without. I am burning all the time like an early Christian, like a mad fanatic in the desert, well, like a poet.’ The imagery of burning is reminiscent of what Lawrence had said of Sappho to Catherine Carswell; as he was writing regularly to H.D. at the time, he may well have said it to her too. It is an image that runs through all the letters to Cournos, where she uses it both of her writing and of her feelings about Aldington, her passion for him and the pain he caused her. Explaining to Cournos why she had not accepted the relationship he offered, she said that, though she might have found some consolation with him, it would not have been so productive for her writing: ‘I love Richard with a searing, burning intensity. I love him and I have come to this torture of my free will. I could have forgotten my pride broken and my beauty as it were, unappreciated. I could have found peace with you. But of my own will, I have come to this Hell. But beauty is never Hell. I believe this flame is my very Daemon driving me to write. I want to write.’ Both Aldington and Brigit would in later life comment – disapprovingly – on what they saw as H.D.’s puritanism and her embrace of suffering: neither of them was in favour of mad fanatics in the desert nor of early Christians in general. But for H.D., if this extremity led to art, that was enough.
Though H.D. expresses misery in her letters to Cournos, she is scrupulously and strikingly uncomplaining and uncritical of Aldington. At times, she attempts to be almost superhumanly unselfish: ‘if Flo loves R, there is nothing I would not do for her and for R … She may be a great help, a great influence in R.’s life. If so, I will always be tender and grateful to her.’ At other times she blames herself: ‘I feel myself such worthless trash somehow. No personal consideration should count in the stark face of death – and the idea of death, I know, is with R. so much of the time: – But I feel chained at times to a tortured ego and my fear is that I give only pain. Yet the ego is in a sense, pain … I am neurotic – a wreck – really unfitted for life. At times, I feel a sort of beautiful serenety [sic] – and poof – a breath, and I am prisoned by that miserable, hyper-sensitive, nerve-cracked, self-centered self!’ Yet in the letters the anger and indignation that she expresses in the poetry are never allowed to appear. In ‘Amaranth’ she writes
But I,
how I hate you for this,
how I despise and hate,
was my beauty so slight a gift,
so soon, so soon forgot?
Only later in the poem she adds, ‘Turn, for I love you yet’.66 In the letters the hate is never acknowledged, only the love.
H.D. still tried to live, certainly in her relationship with Aldington, by the standards of unselfish womanly goodness and kindliness she had learnt from her Moravian mother, though her religion was now that of beauty. She and Aldington idealised each other, and they both tried desperately to live up to each other’s view. Because they were artists, with a mission to bring beauty back to the world, sordid emotions like jealousy and possessiveness were not for them. Aldington, she knew, saw her as high-minded, spiritual, beauty-loving, sensitive, delicate; all true of course, but when he aroused in her emotions that didn’t fit that image, she was thrown into mental anguish. While she was agonising in Devon, Aldington was writing to Amy, ‘H.D. has been truly wonderful; her affection and unselfish devotion have been the prop of my existence. There is a general idea prevalent in England that American girls are selfish; it is a silly lie, for no one could ever have a more unselfish wife than my American one! I think she will come to stay near here in a couple of weeks, so that I can see her on Sat & Sunday afternoons. That will be fine, won’t it?’67 Knowing he thought that, and one can be sure he said the same to H.D. herself, how could she acknowledge, even to herself, the fury she felt about Flo? She could admit to being neurotic and nerve-cracked, but certainly not – outside the poetry – to bitterness and resentment.