VI

1916 HAD BEEN a year of stalemate and mutual carnage at the front, and of increasing pessimism at home. In early December, Lloyd George manoeuvred the gentlemanly but ineffectual Asquith into resignation, and became Prime Minister in his stead. Lawrence wrote gloomily to Amy that at least there had been some ‘old English decency’ in Asquith. Lloyd George, on the other hand, was ‘a clever little Welsh rat, absolutely dead at the core, sterile, barren, mechanical’.⁹⁵ There was no immediate improvement in Britain’s fortunes; for civilians 1917 would be the worst year of the war, with increasing shortages of fuel and food as the German blockade began to bite, and, for those in London, a steep rise in the number of air raids. In those terms, H.D.’s return to London was badly timed, but it was where she wanted to be.

H.D. had taken a room in a large Bloomsbury house, 44 Mecklenburgh Square, owned by a Miss James, a Fabian, supporter of the suffrage movement and a woman of immense respectability. She lived on the premises and expected her lodgers to behave with sober propriety, an expectation doomed to disappointment when renting out a number of rooms to independent young people in the later years of the war. H.D.’s room on the second floor was spacious, with three long windows; John Cournos had had a smaller room near the top of the house for some time. H.D. and Aldington corresponded frequently, the delivery of post to and from the front being extremely good; Aldington was stationed near Cambrai in northern France, for the most part away from the main action, so he suffered more from discomfort, dirt and boredom than danger and was able to do a certain amount of writing. Some gruelling action came in the late spring; in Death of a Hero we are told of George that since ‘Arras (April ’17) he had lived on his nerves’, and that by then he was ‘a bit off his head, as nearly all the troops are after six months in the line’.⁹⁶ The only extant letters of H.D.’s in these months are to Amy; mainly about the placing of poems and the anthology, they give little of her feelings away. Lawrence, however, commented in a letter that she was ‘very sad and suppressed’.⁹⁷ She continued to hate the air raids – on one occasion the house next door was struck – but she fell in love with the cinema, much frequented by soldiers on leave, who like her gladly lost themselves in the vicarious terrors of filmic melodrama. In Bid Me to Live, she describes one visit. Watching a car careering round hairpin bends, Julia thinks: ‘the old Greek katharsis was at work here, as in the stone-ledged theatre benches of fifth-century Greece; so here, a thousand doomed, the dead were watching destruction, Oedipus or Orestes in a slim car, dashing to destruction … She was part of this. She swerved and veered with a thousand men in khaki, toward destruction.’ But the car reaches its destination. A beautiful woman comes out: ‘Venus … Persephone in Enna, Primavera … Beauty was not dead. It emerged unexpectedly in the midst of this frantic maelstrom.’⁹⁸ Both Pound and Aldington despised the cinema and its audiences, but for H.D. it was a mythic medium, speaking a universal language.

H.D. was continuing to write and to work as assistant editor at the Egoist, and she saw much of her friends. She was back in touch with Olivia Shakespear, and occasionally saw Pound, and Brigit when she was in London. Flint and his wife she saw regularly, and every one or two weeks she and Cournos met up with Fletcher, who was feeling more warmly again towards his fellow-imagists. In the December 1916 Egoist, he had written a review of Lawrence’s Amores, not wholly uncritical but commenting perceptively that Lawrence was ‘quite free from any suspicion of posing, and nakedly honest with himself and the world’; he had also contributed an article on war poetry, which was, surprisingly, given his recent rant to Lowell, a defence of imagism. In the same issue, H.D. had written an appreciative review of Goblins and Pagodas, commending his ‘moving, whirling, drifting’ poetry. With her love of film she was much more appreciative of his cinematic-like techniques than Pound was, her comments no doubt irritating Pound once more, though reassuring Fletcher.⁹⁹ One might have imagined that Fletcher would be feeling more confident about his poetry, as he had been awarded the $100 Poetry prize that November for his Arizona poems, but he had been so depressed that at first he turned it down, though he changed his mind two days later. He had been deeply upset that Lowell’s ally, William S. Braithwaite, had described her in the Boston Evening Transcript as the only worthwhile imagist; he was sure the slight to him was her doing, and was outraged when he discovered that Houghton Mifflin had turned down a collection of despairing and intemperate love poems that he had submitted to them because, when asked, Lowell had found herself unable to say that they were his best work. For the first time he attacked her directly and angrily, and whilst it would not be the end of their relationship – he would wax hot and cold several more times – it was never the same. Amy herself had had a difficult autumn; she had been seriously ill and in great pain for two months, as the result of a hernia that would eventually prove fatal, and when her beloved elder brother Percival died in November, had been too weak to be told for several days. Fletcher’s bitter and unjustified complaints upset her greatly. She wrote, remonstrating against his unfairness but offering to pay for the book’s publication. Fletcher did not take the offer up, but he was somewhat mollified by the fact that Lowell was working on some lectures, later to be published as a book, Tendencies in American Poetry, on six contemporary American poets, including himself and H.D. She wrote to each asking for anecdotes about their youth, and Fletcher replied expansively, though H.D. said her life was without incident. The resourceful Amy wrote to her mother instead, who was more obliging.

Given Fletcher’s stormy anguish over Amy and Daisy, both women he in very different ways needed desperately and resented bitterly, the meetings with H.D. and Cournos were a lifeline. Daisy became jealous of H.D. – not conducive to domestic harmony should it ever have existed – but if Fletcher was enamoured of anyone it was Cournos, whom he adulated. Just before he left the States Fletcher had fallen briefly under the spell of a young poet called Edward O’Brian, as he had much earlier at Harvard of his fellow student Lyman Rogers, who had introduced him to aestheticism and Nietzsche. Now he hero-worshipped Cournos, entranced by his gentle charm and brilliant conversation. Fletcher’s biographer suggests that it was Cournos who ‘encouraged the evolution from the aesthetic Impressionism dominant in his early London work to the mythic Romanticism’ of his later writing.¹⁰⁰ Fletcher’s career is often described in two stages, his imagist period, which Pound would have agreed was really impressionist, and then the later period when he became identified with the politically conservative and backward looking Southern Agrarian school in the States. But Fletcher was never really part of anyone else’s movement.

What Cournos undoubtedly fostered in Fletcher were the anti-industrialist convictions that had always been there, earlier expressed in his short-lived Ruskinian and socialist phases, and later making him sympathetic to the Agrarians’ rejection of modern industrial society. Cournos himself divided modern artists into two classes: those for and those against the machine. He writes in his autobiography that ‘there was, on the one hand, the art of men like Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh and Gauguin, which rebelled against the Machine and the culture it invoked; and on the other, the chaotic art of the Futurists and the methodical, mechanical art of the school of Picasso, both wholeheartedly, in their own way, accepting the Machine and what the Machine implies in the culture of our time’.¹⁰¹ When Fletcher wrote a book on Gauguin a couple of years later, it would be in this spirit. Perhaps Cournos had influenced H.D. in her rejection of the Vorticists’ ‘black magic of triangles and broken arcs’; she certainly later credited him with being one of her ‘initiators’, the male figures who had taken her through crucial stages in her artistic development, and who included Pound, Aldington and Lawrence. But perhaps she influenced him. Be that as it may, Cournos, Fletcher and H.D. found they agreed in their opposition to what they saw as the machine’s dehumanising force, the apotheosis of which was what Lawrence described as ‘the huge obscene machine they call the war’.¹⁰² It was in fact an attitude that all the ‘Amygists’, with the possible exception of Amy herself, shared. Self-consciously modern though they were, in this they remained heirs to the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites, and felt the distance growing between themselves and Pound, with his continued association with Lewis and Vorticism and his mounting tendency to present, however misleadingly, his poetics as a break with the Romantic past. Mechanised modernity was less of an overt concern for Lowell than the others; her family wealth came from the New England cotton-mills, so she had a literal investment in modern industry and remained a stout defender of capitalism. She could write exuberantly about the noise and clamour of modern cities, yet her poetry is repeatedly concerned, as for example in ‘The Captured Goddess’, with bringing the transcendent and the vibrant back into the urban scene; two of the poets she admired most were Romantics: Coleridge (she saw his influence on Poe as crucial for the development of the line of American poetry that led to work like her own) and Keats, whose biography she would soon start to write.

H.D. may have kept her own criticisms of the Vorticists to herself, but she encouraged Cournos to write a piece about the artist Christopher Nevinson, who before the war had so eagerly embraced Marinetti’s Futurism; whether or not she had realised he would also set his sights on Vorticism, she let it appear in the January 1917 Egoist. In it Cournos praised a recent exhibition of paintings by Nevinson, who had relinquished Futurism after experiencing life at the front and had returned to more representational work, which, Cournos says, ‘preserves just enough of the geometric touch to give poignancy to the mechanical nature of our age and to the machine-like qualities of our armies’. The article was entitled ‘The Death of Futurism’, but not only does he say that Futurism is dead as an art form, he insists that so is ‘Vorticism and all those “brother arts”, whose masculomaniac spokesmen spoke glibly in their green-red-yellow-becushioned boudoirs of “the glory of war” and “contempt for women”’.¹⁰³ That is not entirely fair to the Vorticists who, aggressive though they were, did not glorify war, but the point he also makes that their art could now appear prophetic of the war was true enough, as even Lewis would later agree.

Nevinson was not alone in retreating from abstract forms. Gaudier’s return to more organic forms had been followed by Epstein and Wadsworth, the latter also after experiencing life at the front, whilst Epstein’s work had begun to change even before he was conscripted. The same would happen to Lewis soon after he reached the war zone later that year. The dehumanisation and destruction of the war prompted what he described as an instinctual revulsion from the mechanical and the abstract; in his memoir, Rude Assignment, he writes that when he was in the ‘hideous desert known as “the Line” in Flanders and France … subject matter so consonant with the austerity of that “abstract” vision’, valued by the Vorticists, he found himself impelled to bring humanity back to it: ‘when Mars with his mailed finger showed me a shell crater and a skeleton with a couple of shivered tree stumps behind it, I was still in my “abstract” element. And before I knew quite what I was doing I was drawing with loving care a signaller corporal to plant upon the lip of the shell crater.’¹⁰⁴ Like Nevinson, Lewis never returned to a straightforward realism, but, as in his later powerful portraits of Pound and Eliot, developed a highly stylised, geometric fashion of drawing. In fact, of course, few even of his most Vorticist drawings had been entirely abstract; as he had written in the first Blast, ‘The finest Art is not pure Abstraction, nor is it unorganised life.’¹⁰⁵

Both Pound and Hulme had been dismayed by these defections; it is a pity they had fallen out or they might have consoled each other. In 1916, Pound had begun to plan a book on Lewis, and Hulme one on Epstein; neither was ever written. Ferguson suggests that Hulme – usually a rapid writer – could not make progress because he was too disturbed by Epstein’s move away from abstraction, which Hulme was still advocating as the true modern art. Given Pound’s earlier distress over rumours of Gaudier’s retreat from Vorticism, he may well have abandoned his book on Lewis for similar reasons; though he was not without praise for Lewis’ later work, he firmly expressed his preference for his more abstract style. If, between the wars, Lewis was to criticise Pound as a passéiste, Pound saw Lewis as an artistic backslider. Other artists in Europe, of course, went on pursuing abstract forms after the war (Pound especially admired Brancusi and Picabia), but it was perhaps because the Vorticist rhetoric had so much implied that abstraction, brutality, the machine and aggression were all intimately bound up, that when the bigger Blasts, as Lewis called them, began, and all the horrors of modern mechanical warfare became apparent, abstraction seemed to be on the side of death and carnage. Possibly the very fact that Pound had ignored the praise of the machine meant that for him Vorticism and abstract art had no such connotations. Yet the stylised, geometric quasi-realism to which the Vorticists moved produced some fine works of art, which owed much to the earlier experiments with abstraction, even if they did not fit Pound and Hulme’s theories. And although Cournos was right that Futurism would die in Britain, it would survive on the continent, and be closely linked with the growing Fascist movement. Nor was Vorticism yet entirely dead; John Quinn had put on the exhibition in New York, even if it stirred little interest, or at least not among those who could afford to buy. And Pound had, along with the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, developed a form of abstract Vorticist photography, shown in an exhibition of ‘Vortographs’ that February, at the opening of which, Pound told Henderson, ‘Arbuthnot, Fletcher’s friend, made a few intelligent remarks’.¹⁰⁶ Those were, however, Vorticism’s last rites: Cournos’ assertion that Vorticism was over had a considerable measure of truth, but that cannot have endeared the piece to Pound, and it is surely no coincidence that around this time he began to plan to remove the assistant editorship from H.D., and transfer it to T.S. Eliot.

Reading Cournos’ article now, however, what stands out most is his rejection of ‘contempt for women’ and ‘masculomania’ (his own inventive coinage), a very different stance from that of most of the male artists H.D. knew, perhaps one reason why he was so important to her at the time. As a Philadelphian Jew, Cournos, like her, knew what it was to be treated as a second-class citizen; the belligerent assertion of masculine authority was not for him. Otto Weininger’s enormously popular book of 1903, Sex and Character, reprinted numerous times, had argued that Jews, like women, are inferior to true men, and cannot be treated as truly masculine. It was a widespread view, of which Cournos was undoubtedly well aware. Not that he was free of the macho modernists’ penchant for feminising their opponents, as his reference to the Vorticists’ ‘becushioned boudoirs’ indicates, but he was less aggressively assertive in other ways. In later life, H.D. would recall how in these early days she had to struggle to keep her poetic talents from being overwhelmed by the powerful male artistic egos around her, whether Pound, Aldington or Lawrence. Cournos never posed the same threat. Yet he had his own masculine pride, and was growing more and more resentful that H.D. appeared to see him as a lesser man than Aldington. He finally tried to persuade her to go to bed with him; she rejected him indignantly, saying he should know their relationship was a purely spiritual one. Cournos was deeply humiliated; though H.D. thought their friendship went on as before, he would never forgive her.¹⁰⁷

When Lowell wrote to H.D. in mid-February 1917 with the half-yearly royalties, she was able to tell her that the 1915 anthology was now in its third edition, and the 1916 one in its second: imagism had made its mark. The 1916 anthology had even had an enthusiastic review that January in the Times Literary Supplement, of all places, which had begun, ‘Imagist poetry fills us with hope’. And in America, there appeared for the first time the suggestion, which would be eagerly taken up, that imagism was really an indigenous American form. In February 1917, Poetry had published an issue devoted to Native American poetry; or rather, largely poems by white poets ‘interpreting’ Indian traditions. The passionate interest that Alice Corbin Henderson had developed in the south-west in their culture was shared by Harriet Monroe, who contributed an editorial that showed remarkable if eclectic knowledge of the translations of Indian songs and rituals published by the Bureau of American Ethnology, and made an eloquent plea for the preservation of their way of life, in particular their ‘beautiful primitive poetry’. The Native Americans, especially the Pueblos of the south-west, were now seen by many of America’s intelligentsia as having a culture, albeit now under threat, that fostered artistic creation, unlike theirs, which Lawrence, making the same contrast, described as ‘mechanical America’. But it was Carl Sandburg who made the crucial comparison with imagism. Writing about the translations of Indian songs made by the ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore – which did indeed look like brief, imagistic poems on the page – he commented: ‘Suspicion arises definitely that the Red Man and his children committed direct plagiarisms on the modern imagists and vorticists.’ It was an idea that was taken up by others. The next year Henderson would write: ‘Whether it is due to the spirit of the land reacting upon our poets to make them like the earlier owners of soil and sky, or whether it is due to some other cause, certain it is that those Indian poems are very similar in spirit and method to the poetry of our most modern American poets.’ She compared them with Chinese poetry, thinking of Pound’s Cathay, ‘the same realism, the same concrete simplicity, and acceptance of the commonplace experience’.¹⁰⁸

This Native American issue of Poetry indicated a radical change in attitude to this culture, comparable indeed to the earlier discovery of the Japanese haiku, early Chinese poetry and Tagore’s Bengali lyrics, and to Hulme and the Vorticists’ embrace of non-Western art forms, an opening up to the possibility of artistic work beyond the bounds of European culture. Native Americans did possess rich mythic and poetic literary traditions, and if the comparison with the imagists was based on scant knowledge, misapprehensions and the dubious self-deluding desire to claim an authentic American heritage, it was none the less significant as part of the modernist reappraisal of the value of Western society in relation to other world traditions. Indeed, a good part of the appeal of imagist poetry had always been to the inherent primitivism that was so much part of modernism; its pared-down simplicity had suggested something elemental, a direct apprehension of a deeper truth that had more validity and power than what were now often felt to be the superficial elaborations of modern culture. When another admirer of Native American culture, Mary Austin, argued in 1919 that vers libre and imagism were ‘primitive’ forms, she meant it as significant praise; she too insisted that whether written by Native Americans or her Euro-American contemporaries they were ‘generically American forms, forms instinctively created by people living in America and freed from outside influence’.¹⁰⁹ Given the plethora of influences from which Pound and H.D. evolved their imagism, that was hardly a defensible position, yet H.D. was the poet whose Greek-inflected work was picked as most comparable to the Native American. Harriet Monroe, for example, would later suggest that in carrying English poetry back to the Greeks, who ‘like all singers of primitive races, were never indoors’, she produced work that was more ‘akin to our aborigines than it is the Elizabethans or Victorians’.¹¹⁰

The imagist most intrigued by Native American culture was Fletcher; he had been thrilled by the February issue of Poetry, and must have been delighted two years later that when Henderson reviewed an anthology of translations and ‘interpretations’ of Native American poetry, with the Navajo-derived title of The Path on the Rainbow, she expressed regret that Fletcher’s poems on Native American themes had not been included. In spite of all Henderson’s attempts to draw a response from him, Pound never commented on the Native American issue; for him, imagism was poetry, drawing on world literature, and never solely American. Yet this claim that imagism was indigenous was just one indication of its wide acceptance among educated readers in America. Reviewing the 1917 Some Imagist Poets, Henderson would comment: ‘Nowadays everyone is writing imagist vers libre, or what the writers conceive as such, particularly those who at the beginning made the most outcry against it. Free verse is now accepted in good society, where rhymed verse is even considered a little shabby and old-fashioned.’¹¹¹ If the same could not be said for England, the fact remains that the third Georgian Poetry anthology, when it came out later in 1918, had a far less warm review in the TLS than the imagists had had; its conservatism was now seen as a matter for regret, though in fact the best of the poets that volume published, Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon, were writing verse whose vigour and stinging power the new poetic climate had helped make possible.

Yet if an avant-garde school started to be praised by the TLS, perhaps it was time to shut up shop. And this the imagists did. The 1917 anthology appeared in the States on 14 April, but eight days earlier America had joined the war on the side of the Allies. Poetry sales slumped, and even the ‘demon saleswoman’ of poetry, Lowell, was unable to create the same level of interest as there had been in the early volumes. It was a slightly briefer collection, and overall uneven, though Flint had some of his strongest work there, in poems that came out of his Devon visit and wartime London, and the poems that H.D. had eventually chosen for the volume were all impressive, particularly ‘Eurydice’, a powerful, driven persona poem in the mode that she had developed in her Devon anguish. Disappointingly, by August it had sold just 430 copies. Indeed, only a few copies can have reached England before the end of the war, as in March it had been announced that consignments of books could no longer be imported into Britain. Houghton Mifflin sent plates to be printed on the spot, but the ship went down, and by the time they heard the news, a ban had been placed on printers’ plates as well. Only individual copies could be sent.

Amy decided the time had come to call a halt to the anthologies. She hesitated to break the news to her fellow-imagists, but when Flint wrote to her in June to ask if there would be an anthology in 1918, she had to confess. She wrote individually to Flint and H.D. on 14 July, and then to Richard on the 20th. To Flint, she said that the third anthology had not done as well as the first two, though his poem ‘Zeppelins’ and Fletcher’s ‘Lincoln’ had been much praised. The fact that the anthology had made less impact, she was sure, was nothing to do with the quality of the poetry; America’s entry into the war meant that cultural matters were now neglected. All the same, she added,

I think myself that the anthology has done its work and done it remarkably well. I think it has given us all a wider audience than we should have had without it, but I think its time as a collection has passed, and it would be better for us now to depend upon our own books. Everybody knows what Imagism is, and Imagistic work has become (here in America) a test stone for a certain kind of writing, which is what we desired … Certainly the soil is tilled and ready, and it is up to us to get a harvest out of it. These ‘Anthologies’ have been the plough, and our own books must be the sowing of the seed.¹¹²

But, as she said in her letter to H.D., she was also finding the imagist path too narrow: ‘I know you people do not follow me in all my experiments, but I suppose that is inevitable, as we become more individual we shall each depart more and more from the group ideal. Still, I feel that we shall all be more in sympathy with each other than with any other.’¹¹³

H.D., as it happened, never received this. Though written on the same day as the one to Flint, they must have left the States by different boats. H.D.’s went down, while Flint’s arrived safely. Aldington passed on the news to H.D., who wrote to thank Amy for all her work; she told her how grateful she was for the experience of working as a family of poets, as it had felt to her, but agreed it was right they should move on in their different directions. She and Fletcher, she said, were both in transitional phases, and, aware that Amy felt she censured her less imagist work, added tactfully how admirably Lowell’s work was broadening. Flint was the most disappointed of the group; he told Amy in October that he was ‘melancholy at the thought that the blooming old (it has reached that stage) anthology is to cease’.¹¹⁴ With his pressured life, the co-operative activity of the anthology helped to keep him in touch with his fellow-writers in a way he found invaluable. Fletcher had no such regrets; he was entirely ready to repudiate his imagist years. Lawrence would doubtless have contributed to a fourth anthology if asked, but, never having been convinced that he was an imagist, or indeed that there was really a style that could be isolated as imagism, was unconcerned with the movement’s demise. Imagism would continue to be praised, censured and debated for some time, but the imagist group were rapidly to go their separate ways.