IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, in the midst of the crisis over Flo, Flint, Violet and the family took their annual holiday to Swanage, not far from Corfe Castle, specifically to be near the Aldingtons and see something of them again. Flint still regarded them as his best friends, and he had missed them greatly in London that year, especially now Ford and Monro, his closest other literary companions, were also in the army. Both Aldington and H.D. corresponded with him frequently, well aware of his frequent bouts of depression, and of what Aldington described as his ‘almost imbecile modesty’; they tried to build up his belief in himself, but he still felt isolated and low.68 Violet and the children had come ahead to the seaside some time before they were joined by Flint, so he must have been lonelier than ever. H.D. saw the Flints several times, and they came to see Richard on his weekend leave. But the tensions in the air made the visit a less happy one than everyone had hoped. Flint and H.D. each managed briefly to upset the other. Flint wanted to come across to see Richard again for a second weekend; Richard, who was working very long hours, had found the influx rather overwhelming – at least according to H.D. – and for her part she was anxious to talk to him about Flo, not something she felt she could tell Flint. So she suggested it would be better if they didn’t come. Flint, always super-sensitive, was shocked and hurt, as it was entirely out of keeping with the way the Aldingtons usually behaved towards him. Feeling aggrieved, he responded by saying to H.D. words to the effect that the fuss she was making about Aldington really didn’t help him. H.D. was deeply wounded, partly because she wondered if he were right. She wrote to Cournos: ‘I am often unhappy to think that my complicated nature has led R. to think I am unhappy. That was why Frank’s remark hurt me to the heart. I think of it and wonder if perhaps it would be best for me to leave England as R first begged me to do. I wonder if I am not causing him pain by staying here.’ H.D. and Flint made it up, but she did not feel quite the same about him after that, and perhaps he too had new reservations about her. When Flint mentioned the visit to Amy, he pointedly emphasised that he had gone to see Richard specifically, not both of the Aldingtons: he and Richard ‘had some good hours together – far too short’. Aldington was looking very well, he told her, but ‘it is a heartbreaking thing to consider the purpose to which all that physical splendour must be put’.69 Flint wrote a poem the next year, dedicated to Aldington, recalling the Easter visit, ‘the days/ we climbed the Devon hills together’, and expressing his desolation that Aldington was in France: ‘I sit here at my table,/holding back my tears,/with my jaw set and my teeth clenched’.70 From now on Flint would be Richard’s friend first and foremost.
Aldington and H.D had a brief visit to London in the second half of September, when they met up with Cournos and Flint and finally saw Fletcher again, who was now back in Sydenham. The bitter quarrels with Daisy had started again, and he was glad to have an escape route to his former literary contacts. They all had dinner in Soho; Fletcher, like Flint, was struck by how well Aldington looked, as he told Lowell, adding that ‘you would scarcely know he is the same, so completely has the army changed him. I find him much more human than he used to be, and much more modest.’ H.D., on the other hand, looked very strained: ‘she is dreadfully thin,’ Fletcher commented, ‘and I think the whole business of R’s going into the army, etc., has had a very bad effect on her. When I saw her first I was shocked at the change; she looked so absolutely frail and wasted that I was afraid she would not be long for this world.’71 He added, however, that the ordeal had improved her poetry.
Flint, who, Fletcher said, somewhat enigmatically, had not changed at all, also mentioned this dinner to Lowell when he wrote to thank her for his latest royalties (£8, which, although not princely, must have helped his meagre finances). It was, he pointed out, ‘the most comprehensive gathering of the clan that has yet happened … the absent ones being yourself on the bay where the tea was spoiled and Lawrence on some little bay in Cornwall’. For Flint, that was clearly a moment of cheer in a largely depressing existence. He had started the letter by saying, ‘I’m pretty down in the mouth at present, and have been sick enough of everything during the past few months.’ He ends by pointing out that less than 48 hours after the dinner Richard had returned to camp, and added bleakly, ‘it’s a rotten mad world’.72
H.D. had agreed at the dinner to collect together everyone’s poems for the anthology by the beginning of November. She was the person, Fletcher told Lowell, who was in touch with Lawrence, and would be responsible for soliciting poems from him. Although she wrote to Lawrence regularly, it seems unlikely that H.D. would have told him more of her personal trauma than that Richard had joined up, though in Bid Me to Live Julia says that she sent to Rico, the Lawrence figure, poems that she had not shown to Rafe; if that were the case with H.D., he may have gathered something of what she was going through. His letters back did not offer unqualified cheer. H.D. mentions Lawrence and his coruscating letters (although she doesn’t give a name, it is clearly him) when writing to Cournos at the end of October. She has started to see people as colours, she says: Cournos is lapis-lazuli blue, and Richard wine-red; then she abruptly adds, ‘But there is another now … There is a yellow flame, bright, hard, clear, terrible, cruel: … There is a power in this person to kill me. I mean literally. For the spiritual vision, his thoughts, his distant passion has given me, I thank God … But … there is yet another side – if he comes too near I am afraid for myself … You, no doubt, know in your heart of whom I write as a cruel-fire! I do not want that person to die. He has a great gift. He is ill. But I must be protected’.
Lawrence was in low spirits, intensely lonely in Cornwall yet unable to face a return to wartime London. He continued to think the war ‘utterly wrong, stupid, monstrous and contemptible’, and though he was coming to the end of Women in Love, which he told Dollie Radford he thought a masterpiece, he was convinced, rightly, that he would find it impossible to publish it in England during the war.73 He poured out his anger with the human race in his letters. To E.M. Forster, at the time in Alexandria, which in itself Lawrence, imprisoned in the Cornish damp, must have found galling, he said: ‘I am in a black fury with the world, as usual. One writes, one works, one gives one’s hand to other people. And the swine are rats, they bite one’s hand. They are rats, sewer-rats, with all the foul courage of death and corruption, darkness and sewers.’74 People, he said to Catherine Carswell, ‘are a destructive force. They are like acid, which can only corrode and dissolve. One must shun them.’75 Probably he was saying similar things to H.D. Yet her comments to Cournos suggest Lawrence was also directly attacking her, as indeed, in the fictional account in Bid Me to Live, Rico castigates Julia. Julia recalls Rico’s letters: ‘He had written about love, about her frozen altars. “Kick over your tiresome house of life,” he had said, he had jeered, “frozen lily of virtue,” he had said, “our languid lily of virtue nods perilously near the pit”’. All the same, the novel says, ‘when it came to one, any one of her broken stark metres, he had no criticism to make’.76 Lawrence’s letters in 1916 and 1917 refer several times to how much he admires H.D.’s poetry, so it is unlikely that the ‘frozen altars’ are an attack on her poetry, more on her attitude to art and to life in general. Indeed, perhaps he was struck, as one is today by reading those letters to Cournos, by the disjuncture between the emotional charge and range of her poetry, and the strained high-mindedness that she strove to cling to in the version of herself she admitted to the world. She and Lawrence sometimes clashed as well over their attitudes to poetry. Lawrence had written to Lowell that August: ‘Hilda Aldington says to me, why don’t I write hymns to fire, why am I not in love with a tree. But my fire is a pyre, and the tree is the Tree of Knowledge.’77 Yet in other ways they had much in common: they shared the sense of the need for a rebirth, a new beginning, one of the themes, according to Lawrence, of Women in Love, as it had been of Sea Garden. He said of the novel to Catherine Carswell that ‘The book frightens me: it is so end-of-the-world. But it is, it must be, the beginning of a new world too.’78 His denunciation of all humankind except the tiny handful that he wished to take to Ranamin (which now included H.D.) was on the grounds that they prevented this rebirth: ‘one is so few and so fragile,’ he told Carswell, ‘in one’s own small, subtle air of life. How one must cherish the frail, precious buds of unknown life in one’s soul. They are the unborn children of one’s hope and living happiness, and one is so frail to bring them forth.’79 If he wrote in those terms to H.D., she must have felt that they were very much in tune: the frail, precious flowers of Sea Garden endured their buffeting world with equal difficulty. But there is nothing in her work like Lawrence’s appalling tirades against swinish or rat-like humanity; no wonder at times she found him terrifying.
Ever since Fletcher’s return, Amy Lowell had been pressing him to find out how the Lawrences were. Fletcher was generally unhelpful, but H.D., whom she had also asked, wrote to say that she knew that Lawrence had been ‘ill and had a miserable, shattering experience before he was exempted from the army’, a humiliating encounter with the authorities that Lawrence would describe in Kangaroo.80 Although he had managed to bring out two books that year, another volume of poetry, Amores, which H.D. particularly admired, and his first book of travel writing, Twilight in Italy, she was sure they were hard up, but it was impossible to ask directly what their financial position was. As it happened, Frieda, knowing nothing of this, wrote without Lawrence’s knowledge to Lowell, asking for help, and Lowell instantly responded with £60. Lawrence was immensely grateful. The money had arrived about the same time as a copy of Lowell’s latest collection, Men, Women and Ghosts, which Lawrence told her he preferred to Sword Blades. This book was a collection of narrative poems, opening with ‘Patterns’, the majority in free verse or polyphonic prose; it was the latter Lawrence picked out, admiring their swirling evocation of the random sounds and colours in the modern city, what he called in her work ‘the shock and clipping of the physico-mechanical world’.81 How much he really liked her poetry overall is hard to say; he told another correspondent shortly after that she was not a good poet, though a very good friend, but he had a fascinating analysis of the American nature of the poetry she and H.D. wrote. ‘It is very surprising to me,’ he told her,
now I have come to understand you Americans a little, to realise how much older you are than us, how much further you and your art are … [in] apprehension of the physico-sensational world … of things non-human, not conceptual. We still see with concepts. But you, in the last stages of return, have gone beyond tragedy and emotion, even beyond irony, and have come to the pure mechanical stage of physical apprehension, the human unit almost lost, the primary elemental forces, kinetic, dynamic – prismatic, tonic, the great massive, active, inorganic world, elemental, never softened by life, that hard universe of Matter and Force where life is not known, come to pass again. It is strange and wonderful. I find it only in you and H.D. in English.82
One can see how this relates particularly to Sea Garden, where the gods are elemental, associated with sea and rock and wind – the only named god in the collection is Hermes of the Ways, the chthonic herm stone; otherwise only dryads, nereids, nymphs and undifferentiated gods appear, the pre-Homeric forces quasi-immanent in the natural world; as one critic puts it, ‘unnamed daimonic presences compelling responses both erotic and fearful’.83 Lawrence’s analysis in some ways suggests Williams’ later, very American doctrine of ‘no ideas but in things’.84 The general thesis was one Lawrence was elaborating much more generally about American culture and literature. He had been reading American novels, Melville, Cooper, Richard Henry Dana and others with passionate interest, and wrote a series of articles on them which were published in the English Review in 1918 and 1919, and then in a revised version as the now famous Studies in Classic American Literature.
By October, Aldington appears to have convinced H.D. that the affair with Flo had been a passing fancy; he had written to say: ‘Hang Flo & damn Carl … For God’s sake, love your Faun’, and she eventually managed to take his advice.85 If she were less distressed about Aldington’s infidelity, however, she was still living under extreme strain. She said to Cournos in early October, about her outpouring of work: ‘Everything burns me – everything seems to become significant – the most sordid, mud-dragged leaf has its meaning. This is wonderful, this life for me – but I am torn and burnt physically.’ The quelling of one anxiety again only served to offer space for another, and she began to agonise over the war; everything seemed ‘worthless, futile in the face of this world-calamity’. The battle of the Somme was drawing to its indecisive end, and the horrific loss of life on both sides appalled many besides H.D. This was the war that Aldington would have to join. Yet she was continuing with her work for the Egoist. In September she wrote a warm review of The Farmer’s Bride by May Sinclair’s friend, Charlotte Mew, which had been brought out by the Poetry Bookshop. This was doubtless partly a favour to Sinclair, who recommended it to every editor she knew; H.D. was one of the few to oblige. When Pound saw her reviews, he commented that she shouldn’t be allowed to write criticism; a surprising judgement, as they seem entirely cogent. Perhaps he was put out that she had praised Mew’s gifts as a dramatic lyricist in the Browning tradition, without mentioning his.
In the October Egoist, H.D. included a poem by Williams, entitled ‘March’, about the desperate longing for spring induced by the drawn-out East Coast winters, the same idea that would lie behind his 1920 prose poems, Kora in Hell. She had made some changes, and Williams was outraged to see it appear in a ‘purified form’, ‘thanks’, he says, ‘to her own and her husband’s friendly attentions’. H.D. had written to him to say she had removed the ‘flippancies’ which to her mind spoilt the beauty of the poem: ‘I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!’ Williams was furious at this aesthetic piety, writing two years later, when he recounted this story: ‘There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.’ He believed, he said, in the ‘inventive imagination’ which gives ‘deliverance from every other misfortune as from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style’.86 Williams’ anger is understandable, though he did admit that what H.D. had excised had been derivative, but without knowing the original version it is hard to judge if she was being blinkered or showing good editorial sense. Williams passed on the story to Pound, who commended him for refusing to write ‘Alexandrine greek bunk, to conform to the ideas of that refined, charming, and utterly narrow minded she-bard “H.D.”’87 Improving other people’s verses was his prerogative. H.D.’s boldness in seizing the editorial pencil possibly increased Pound’s desire to move back into a position of influence at the Egoist. As he had said to Flint, he was well aware that both the Aldingtons were entirely out of sympathy with what Yeats described as his ‘violent’ poems, but if they were beginning to censor his friends he must do something about it.
By October, Fletcher’s warmth of feeling for his fellow imagists had waned once more, and he wrote to Lowell, sending his contributions for the 1917 anthology but simultaneously saying he hoped it would not appear; the other four’s contributions were hopeless, and in any case he wasn’t an imagist: ‘I do not believe a poem should present an “image”, I believe it should present an emotion. I do not believe in “clear, hard and definite presentation”. I believe in complete, that is to say, shifting and fluid presentation.’ In that last point, most modernist novelists would be in tune with him, and one can only applaud when he says he does not believe that the ‘exact word’ is possible. He is, he says, a ‘Rhythmist or a Symbolist, not an Imagist.’88 Intriguingly enough, an appreciation of his poetry appeared in the November Egoist making these very points, and describing him as ‘amongst the most important of modern writers in English’. It was by one R. Herdman Pender, surprisingly for the middle of the war, from Ruhleben in Germany. One might even wonder if it could be Fletcher under a pseudonym, but he told Glenn Hughes later that Pender was a civilian prisoner of war and publisher, who had written to ask for his books; Fletcher must have replied in similar terms to those he used to Lowell.89 But for now he told Amy that she had no need to publish as one of a set of poets who produced such poor stuff: she should bury imagism and start a new American group if she wanted to lead a movement. He continued to protest his loyalty to her, though implying pointedly that the others did not appreciate her. There is no doubt Fletcher’s misanthropic bile would help to fissure the group, but Lowell was already aware she no longer needed her fellow-imagists. Men, Women and Ghosts had sold all but 300 of the 1,250 copies of its first edition by the time of publication, and within a couple of months was in its third, and her lecturing career was going from strength to strength. Despite her affection for the Aldingtons, she felt acutely their coolness towards some of her poetry; Aldington had now taken against her polyphonic prose, and she felt that H.D thought much of her narrative poetry insufficiently imagistic. She brooded over the effusiveness of H.D.’s review of Marianne Moore, which she obscurely felt was a rebuke to herself. All the same, she felt deeply concerned for them and had no wish to distress them further; she had said she would support the anthologies for three years, and she would honour her word.
Although Fletcher had been so admiring of Sea Garden, he now announced that he considered H.D.’s new long poem, ‘The Tribute,’ of which Aldington had written glowingly to Lowell, a sad falling away. ‘The Tribute’ (published in the November Egoist) is more explicitly concerned with the war than H.D.’s other poems, though perhaps less successful for that; it is more insistent on its message, an attempt to write more directly about the political world, which so far she had paradoxically attempted only in her translations from Euripides. Louis Martz sees this and her poem ‘Cities’ as her first move towards a prophetic voice, which would be so important in her later poetry. The subject-matter is still not directly contemporary, but the implications are clear. In ‘The Tribute’, the city has been gripped by the ‘squalor’ of war frenzy; all the old gods are banished save one, a phallic war-god. The young men have gone to war, ‘the songs withered black on their lips’; only a few of those left, including the speaker of the poem, would not ‘sing to the god of the lance’, but instead search for a god of healing to return to the city. Like Pound, the poem associates war-mongering with the marketplace, with ‘the haggling, the beggar, the cheat’, but in the end asserts that beauty can never ‘be done to death’.90 It may have been of poems like ‘The Tribute’ and ‘Cities’ that Pound was thinking the next year, when he told Margaret Anderson that, although H.D. was still doing work as good as the early poems that he had admired so much, she had also ‘let loose dilutions and repetitions, so that she has spoiled the “few but perfect” position which she might have held on to’.91 He of course blames the ‘flow-contamination’ of Lowell and Fletcher, but I think Martz is right that it was a first move towards a different form of writing, which would make possible poems like her powerful Second World War Trilogy and the later Helen in Egypt.
H.D. must have had doubts about the poem herself; having sent it to Lowell for inclusion in the 1917 anthology, she then very firmly withdrew it, but its insistence that it was the duty of the artist to preserve what was of value to the human spirit in this destructive wartime world was increasingly important to her; it was, perhaps, the point she had tried to make to Williams, though he took it so ill. During the autumn of 1916 she wrote a number of prose pieces embodying her feelings about the war, some of which she sent to Aldington or Cournos; they remained unpublished at the time, though one in particular she thought of publishing in the Egoist unsigned. This may well have been a remarkable short review-essay, in the end only published posthumously, about Yeats’ Responsibilities (presumably not the 1914 edition, but the extended version published in 1916). Like the review of Moore’s poetry, it is an indirect manifesto for her own poetic mission: in it she outlines her belief that art and the artist must stand against the forces of war and destruction, and struggle to find a transformative vision of a more humane and healing world. H.D. had never in the past shared Pound’s admiration for Yeats, and she begins by saying she had been wary of what she describes as the ‘misty transient beauty’ of Yeats’ earlier poetry. In Reponsibilities, however, ‘there are poems of another mood of a greater, sterner intensity’. It is a change comparable to her own sense of the need to reject the ‘over-sweet’ and seek ‘a new beauty/in some terrible/wind-tortured place’.
Yeats, H.D. says in this review, tells his readers he is almost forty-nine, but he speaks to her generation, with their world changed irrevocably by the war. Some are dead, others at the front may yet return, she hopes ‘not broken by the bitterness of their experience’, but in spite of it ‘taut and aflame for the creation of beauty’. Those few who are left at home are ‘crouched as in a third line of battered trenches … hanging on against all odds, in the wavering belief that we are the link, the torch-bearers’. The enemy her generation battles against is not, as in the 1890s, ‘the so-called middle-classes’, but ‘a more treacherous force … the great overwhelming mechanical daemon, the devil of machinery, of which we can hardly repeat too often, the war is the hideous offspring’. Worst of all, ‘inasmuch as its cubes and angles seem a sort of incantation, a symbol for the forces that brought this world calamity, her ‘generation did not stand against the enemy – it was the enemy … The black magic of triangles and broken arcs has conquered and we who are helpless before this force of destruction can only hope for some more powerful magic, some subtle and more potent daemon to set it right.’ Her generation must ‘wait, endure, confess the past was all a mistake’, and ‘chastened with old calamities, redefine and reconstruct boundaries and barriers, and reinvoke some golden city, sterner than the dream-cities, and wrought more firm to endure those riveted of steel and bleak with iron girders’.92
H.D. may not have published this because it was too direct a critique of the Vorticists, their erstwhile allies, now mainly at the front themselves, and in the case of Gaudier, dead. After all, ‘Oread’ had been picked out as the exemplary Vorticist poem by Pound, who would certainly have been infuriated, and indeed, given his disagreement earlier that year with Yeats over Lewis’ machine-like art, might have found her analysis of Yeats’ opposition to Vorticism most disagreeably perceptive. But if H.D. was sparing Pound’s feelings, he had no such compunction about blasting Amy’s imagism, which he had described that April in Poetry, perhaps as spoiling copy for the May anthology, as having gone ‘off into froth’, its ‘chief defects’ being ‘sloppiness, lack of cohesion … rhetoric, a conventional form of language … and in some cases a tendency more than slight towards the futurist’s cinematographic fluidity’. But that was largely aimed at Lowell and Fletcher; he picks H.D. out in the same piece as one of the best of contemporary American poets.93
What H.D.’s review-article does perhaps reveal is how, though so near breakdown for much of the war, she survived its lacerations; she positions herself not as a victim, but an artist with a ‘task’, as she puts it in ‘Cities’, that of ‘recall[ing] the old splendour’ and awaiting ‘the new beauty of cities’.94 She and Pound differed over Vorticism, but the war had led both of them to a belief in the role that the artist must play in restoring a broken society. Perhaps this sense of a mission, even if in this war not so clearly worked through as in her Trilogy during the next, was one reason why she was so reluctant to leave England, as Aldington was pressing her to do. He wanted her to return home for the duration of the war, for though crossing the Atlantic was becoming more dangerous, with the number of ships going down soon to be one in four, once home she could escape the strains of wartime London, and live surrounded by the comfort and affection of her family. For a while she agreed, feeling she ought to reduce his worries, but one can imagine that the thought of giving up her freedom horrified her. She went as far as booking her passage for mid-November but changed her mind at the last moment, telling Amy, who was deeply disappointed, that she wasn’t coming because Richard’s transfer to France had been delayed, and she didn’t want to leave the country while he was still there. When Aldington wrote to Lowell about it he said she was having too good a time to leave: scarcely the case, but he was probably right to guess it was more than just devotion to him. Flint, incidentally, strongly advised her not to go; he could see it would have been disastrous for her. Aldington eventually left for France on 21 December 1916; he had been training in the north of England, and was now a lance-corporal. He was sent straight from the training camp without a final leave, but H.D., who had now moved back to London, went to Waterloo to see him off. He would not be back until the middle of 1917.