WITH AMY BOWING out, Pound lost interest, at any rate for now – he would periodically return to the charge – in claiming the movement. The three writers that he was now bent on promoting were Joyce, Lewis and Eliot: none of them had been imagists, even if Joyce had had one poem in Des Imagistes and Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land, can be read as a series of imagist poems. In the latter half of 1917, Pound, with Eliot’s help, commenced a campaign against what he saw as the excesses of vers libre. Eliot contributed an elegant dismissal of the form, deploring its ubiquity but paradoxically insisting that ‘Vers Libre does not exist … there is no freedom in art … vers libre which is good is anything but “free”’.115 Pound summed up their rearguard action many years later, explaining that:
at a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither engaged in picking the other’s pocket, decided that the dilutation of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some counter-current must be set going. Parallel situation centuries ago in China. Remedy prescribed ‘Émaux et Camées’ (or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and regular strophes.116
The result of this application of ‘rhyme and regular strophes’ would be, on his part, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published in 1920, Pound’s farewell to London and to lyric poetry. From then on in his own writing he would concentrate on his major work, the Cantos, neither rhymed nor in strophe, and owing much to his earlier experiments with both vers libre and his persona poems. Although he moaned in the Egoist that July that ‘it is too late to prevent vers libre’, one can only try to ‘improve it’, he acknowledged that if he criticised the ‘versi libristi’, the ‘anti-versilibristi’ were worse. He stressed, as always, attention to music, and all the imagists would have concurred with the advice he quoted from the composer Couperin on the need to remember the superiority of cadence over measure: ‘Cadence is properly the spirit, the soul that must be added.’117 In Pound’s development, 1917 was important not so much for his attack on Amygism as for the publication of the first three cantos in Poetry, though they would be radically rewritten by the time that version appeared in print, and many times again. Those ur-Cantos are full of his memories of all that had happened to him since he came to Europe, particularly that walking tour, when he felt the presence of the troubadours so powerfully; ‘Ghosts move around me/Patched with histories,’ he writes, recalling his experience on Salisbury Plain, which he links again with the Provençal poets, as he had in his letter to Flint, and he thinks of ‘olive Sirmio’, one of the places where ‘Gods float in the azure air’, and of his time in Venice. Although he would not be satisfied with those versions, they contain, as Ronald Bush has argued, many elements that would remain.118 In addition, 1917 was the year of his ebullient quasi-translation, Homage to Sextus Propertius, also in vers libre. He persuaded John Quinn to fund an American edition of Lustra, a great deal less censored than the English one, in itself an interesting indication of the dramatic speed with which American metropolitan culture was changing; he had Eliot write a pamphlet, entitled Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, which stressed the technical excellence of his work, so the reader could contrast his discipline and professionalism with what Pound called ‘Amy’s gush and Fletcher’s squibbs’.119 (It was published anonymously at the time – Pound was promoting Eliot so busily in so many arenas, it would not have looked good if it were known that Eliot was in turn promoting him.) Eliot himself produced some well-turned stanzaic poems, ironic and polished, such as ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ and the now notorious ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar’ (‘The rats are underneath the piles./The Jew is underneath the lot’); at the time, no one appears to have noticed the anti-Semitism.120 Eliot had always, however, moved between stanzaic, rhymed forms and vers libre, and would continue to do so. Even his last poems, the Four Quartets, use both forms. As he said in early 1917, it is the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’ which is ‘the very life of verse’, adding, in the magisterial style he was so rapidly perfecting, ‘the division between Conservative verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse and chaos’.121 In Eliot’s career 1917 was significant for the publication of his first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, which Pound had worked hard to get brought out. He had failed with Elkin Mathews, with whom his influence was waning in the wake of the Lustra débâcle, but generous Miss Weaver agreed to publish it with the Egoist Press.
Pound in 1917 was himself earning little: in spite of his productivity, few of his ventures paid well, yet over the next couple of years he was perhaps in the most powerful position that he would ever acquire as a shaper of the modern scene. He was acting as unpaid art dealer for John Quinn, aiding several careers and reputations. He was still foreign correspondent for Poetry, and in addition developed a link with Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, now based in New York but in financial straits. He persuaded Quinn to underwrite it, with himself as foreign editor, controlling a certain number of pages where he could publish himself, Joyce, Lewis, Eliot and others, paying for their work with money direct from Quinn. According to H.D., when the Little Review started in 1914 Pound had been rather scornful about it, and he had written somewhat condescendingly to Monroe that it would be a ‘jolly place for people who aren’t quite up to our level’, though in fact they frequently published the same writers.122 The Little Review, however, unlike Poetry, had no money with which to pay contributors, possibly the reason Pound himself did not send any contributions until 1916. Yet he cannot have failed to notice that Anderson was a much bolder editor than Monroe, no doubt why he decided to home in on her magazine. His new position was announced in the issue for April 1917, and almost at once he was able to send the Little Review some Yeats poems. Henderson and Monroe felt betrayed that Pound, still officially Poetry’s foreign editor, should make this new arrangement without letting them know, and disparaging Poetry to boot in his first contribution to their rival: it was the end of Henderson’s warm relationship with him. Pound was undeterred. Lewis contributed a short story, ‘Cantelman’s Spring-mate’, to the October Little Review, which was immediately seized and suppressed for offending public morality – as Lewis loved to do – but the most controversial and significant work Pound obtained for the Little Review was Ulysses, which they serialised; four of the issues in which episodes appeared were seized and burnt, for Anderson, a badge of honour.
In June Pound succeeded in moving T.S. Eliot into the assistant editorship of the Egoist, with John Quinn paying him £9 a quarter, so he now had considerable influence over three different outlets. Pound had had intermittent discussions with Weaver for some time, raising the matter again in January at the time of Cournos’ onslaught, and there is no doubt he was keen to bring the Egoist back on message. In the end, however, the change was probably negotiated with H.D. and Aldington rather than a take-over. Although their old intimacy had not revived, they were for now once more on reasonably friendly terms, which would scarcely have been the case if they felt he had shoehorned H.D. out. Richard had a piece in the June issue, and H.D. a poem in July. Pound was delighted when Aldington came back on leave in June, and appeared to take a personal pride in the fact that he had been recommended for a commission; Aldington was equally pleased to see him, their quarrel no longer seeming of much importance after his experiences at the front. Pound took the Aldingtons out for a celebratory dinner, and at one of his parties they for the first time met T.S. Eliot, whom H.D. very much liked, finding his quiet courteous manners a marked contrast to Pound’s noisy ebullience. She treated Pound with rather more caution than her husband did. Perhaps he had started to make love to her again; Humphrey Carpenter suggests that 1917 was the year in which Pound had a ‘sexual awakening’ and embarked on a series of affairs, and he may well have hoped H.D. would be one of them.123 What did rather shock her, as she told Lowell, was that unlike the rest of them Pound appeared singularly unaffected by the horrors of the war, something on which Monro and Eliot also commented at different times. Was Pound really so indifferent? The poems in Cathay two years earlier had suggested not. Perhaps the relentless impresario activity was partly an effort to escape from the wartime anxieties; if he worked tirelessly for a future for writing, everything else would sort itself out. His latest persona, Petronius in the Homage, is portrayed refusing cavalierly to write imperial war epics instead of love poetry, but Pound insisted that here he was making a serious political point, drawing attention to the shared ‘infinite and ineffable imbecility’ of the British and Roman empires.124 Yet he may also at some level have been refusing to acknowledge uncongenial events around him, as he would do so disturbingly in the build-up to the Second World War, in his uncritical admiration of Mussolini’s Fascism.
At the time, H.D. was disturbed and baffled by his seeming indifference, but many years later, in 1948, after Pound had been indicted for treason and had begun the years of incarceration in St Elizabeths Hospital, when she came to see him as a tragic, misguided figure, she tried to understand what had happened. She wondered if the beginning of his ‘down-curve’ (personal and political down-curve, she meant, not as a writer) dated back to the war years. Many have thought the same, but H.D. linked it, not to Gaudier’s death or just to the war itself, though ‘being there and not IN it’ she felt contributed, but to his pain at the hostility he was provoking in London in those years. Being ‘made much of’ by the leading writers in pre-war London (she mentions Ford, Rhys, Stuart Moore, Hewlett and Yeats) had given him intense pleasure and self-belief after his Philadelphian ostracism; the wartime attacks now took him straight back, she suggests, to the desolation he had felt then, the despair he had felt before he first went to Europe.125 Pound himself later seems to have recognised that time as a watershed. There is a letter to H.D. written in the late 1950s, after she had sent him the manuscripts of End to Torment and of the poem she wrote for him, Winter Love, both of which entranced him, where Pound talks of his ‘2000 memories’ of their early friendship, ‘ten years of beauty’ which ‘the Gods can envy’.126 Perhaps those were the years 1905 to 1915, after which their friendship and so much else fell apart.
News that Pound cannot have entirely ignored came in September: T.E. Hulme, the founder of the School of Images, who had returned to France in April, was killed by a direct hit from a shell. All the notes for the still unwritten Epstein book disappeared with him, and, according to Pound’s Cantos, several London Library books. Apart from the translations of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics and of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, nothing of his had appeared in his lifetime in book form. Eliot may also have noticed this death, having reviewed the Sorel appreciatively that year.127 He would come to greatly admire some of Hulme’s later, more ‘reactionary’ writing – ‘reactionary’ being Eliot’s adjective, and for him a term of praise – and would do much to establish his reputation after Herbert Read brought out a collection of Hulme’s writing with the title of Speculations in 1924.128 Hulme’s opposition to the idea of progress, his conviction of humanity’s limitations, his rejection of Romanticism, all played a part in the kind of modernism that Eliot would evolve.
As it happened, two of the other members of the Tour Eiffel group resurfaced in print that year. Joseph Campbell brought out his last and most powerful collection, Earth of Cualann, which was reviewed in the Egoist for December 1917, the review, unsigned but undoubtedly by Pound himself, reiterating once again his admiration for the Tour Eiffel poet who had most influenced him in those early days: ‘Mr Campbell is one of the half-dozen or so of writers who are responsible for there being any contemporary poetry. He has established his own style of vers libre … The stuff is Irish, with a peculiar bitter flavour, a dourness, of Mr Campbell’s own. He uses Gaelic names with effect, but none of the poems is simply a whoop from the peat-bog … It is the best of recent books of verse.’129 In addition, Flint’s friend Desmond FitzGerald, at that time in prison for his part in the Easter Rising, achieved what seems to have been his first publication of his poetry in the New Age in late 1917 and early 1918, love poems, written in the vers libre he had treated with such caution before. Later that year, while still in prison, he would be elected a Sinn Fein MP. FitzGerald had a play put on at the Abbey Theatre in 1919, but, like Hulme, he would never have a book of his poems published. Quite why is not clear, because Campbell’s Dublin publishers Maunsell agreed in 1918 to publish a collection, but it never materialised. FitzGerald wrote to Storer in 1922 saying he had written nothing since 1919, and the years from 1922 to 1925, of civil war and uneasy peace, cannot have allowed much time for poetry; but he eventually had a volume of poems privately printed in France in 1925. It was entitled La Vie quotidienne – a reference to a line by Jules Laforgue, ‘Ah! que la vie est quotidienne’, the title of one of the poems – and was only circulated to his friends.130 Some poems had been previously published, including those that had appeared in the New Age. They must, one presumes, have been written before his jail sentence, or during it, though perhaps surprisingly, even though he was so immersed in nationalist politics, FitzGerald no longer attempted to use Irish forms or themes as he had done in his early, deeply gloomy play. Many of the poems are still melancholy, but they deserved more general circulation. Yet that this poet was in prison must have seemed to Pound in 1917 further confirmation of the ‘infinite and ineffable imbecility’ of the British Empire.
The Aldingtons, of course, only knew of the Tour Eiffel meetings by repute, and they had in any case other things on their minds. After a brief period of leave in London, Aldington had been dispatched for further training at Lichfield in Staffordshire, and H.D. went to stay nearby. Her room in 44 Mecklenburgh Square was taken in her absence by Arabella Yorke, Cournos’ earlier love, back in London after some time in Paris, and looking more kindly at Cournos than before. He was less impoverished than when he had known her earlier, having recently acquired a well-paid part-time post translating cables from Russian for Marconi, and was much more established as a journalist. Cournos was still bruised by his rejection by H.D., but his passion for Arabella, as strikingly attractive as ever, quickly revived. He had, however, already agreed to go in October as a translator for the Anglo-Russian mission to Petrograd; after the February revolution and the Tsar’s abdication, a broad-based Provisional government had been established, which was still fighting on the Allies’ side, but the British were rightly anxious to ensure their continuing support. The country was known to be unstable and the mission possibly dangerous, but none of the members of the party, or the Foreign Office who sent them, seems to have anticipated the Bolshevik revolution, which took place not long after they arrived. Cournos had written to H.D. before he left asking her to look after Arabella, who moved up to his room, H.D.’s now being taken by the Lawrences, who had been forced to leave Cornwall under suspicion of being spies. H.D., ‘like an angel’, as Lawrence put it to Lowell, gave them refuge, until she and Aldington returned in late November, when the Lawrences moved into a flat in Earls Court owned by the mother of a young musician friend, Cecil Gray, who had been in Cornwall with them and returned with them to London.131 He might well have felt he ought to help them, as it was his playing of Hebridean folk melodies that finally convinced the neighbourhood that they were spies.
While the Aldingtons were in Lichfield, Amy sent H.D. a copy of the chapter she had written on her in Tendencies in American Poetry, which came out that autumn. Like Lowell’s other books it sold well, though she was rightly criticised by Poetry for excluding Pound and Vachel Lindsay, and mocked by Pound for comparing Fletcher favourably to Rimbaud. She had much to say in praise of H.D., in slightly embarrassingly high-flown terms, though the chapter did much to establish H.D.’s reputation in the States. She described her as a ‘great artist’, and employed her own favourite image to describe her poetry, saying that though some thought her poetry cold, ‘let me liken “H.D.”’s poetry to the cool flesh of a woman bathing in a fountain – cool to the sight, cool to the touch, but within is a warm, beating heart.’ But she also had some criticisms: H.D.’s poetry, she said, was ‘a narrow art, it has no scope, it neither digs deeply nor spreads widely’, perhaps revenge at some level for what she saw as the Aldingtons’ critical attitude towards her range of modes. But most hurtful of all was her comment that H.D. ‘seems quite unaffected by the world around her’.132 Harriet Monroe wrote in similar terms, probably only a month or so later than this when H.D. was back in London, rebuking her for not getting into ‘life’ or ‘the rhythm of our times’. As H.D. recalled in 1937, in a letter to Norman Holmes Pearson explaining when and why she wrote her poems, the letter had been waiting for her in Mecklenburgh Square when she ‘had staggered home’ one day from an air raid, ‘exhausted and half-asphixiated. (I and my companion had been shoved off the pavements, protesting to a special policeman that we would rather be killed on the pavement than suffocated in the underground.)’ To explain her poetry, she said to Pearson, she would have to ‘drag in a whole deracinated epoch’, and she goes on: ‘Perhaps specifically, I might say that the house next door was struck another night. We came home and simply waded through glass, while wind from now unshuttered windows, made the house a barn, an unprotected dug-out. What does that sort of shock do to the mind, the imagination – not solely of myself, but of an epoch?’133 For H.D., her poetry was precisely an attempt to find a way of expressing the rhythm – the fissures and explosions – of her time, and she was distressed that Monroe, who first published her poetry, and Lowell, to whose promotion she owed much, could not see this.
Aldington loyally told her to ignore Lowell’s comments, but in other ways things were less good between them. When he had first returned, Aldington had been delighted to see England and his friends again, but his good spirits did not last. In particular, his reunion with H.D., for which they had both longed, had proved an uneasy one. Inevitably, they had both changed. Aldington, like many returning soldiers, quickly came to feel that civilians were almost another species, incapable of understanding the world that existed at the front; in his memoir he recalls writing to Lawrence during the war, ‘There are two kinds of men, those who have been to the front and those who haven’t’.134 Women, with no threat of war service, were exponentially distant from the soldier’s world. He grew increasingly bitter, angry with the establishment that had led them into war, and impatient with the self-interested machinations of the literary world that carried on back home. Like George Winterbourne in Death of a Hero, he resented the fact that when ‘life might in its brief passing be so lovely and so divine’, as a soldier he had ‘nothing but opposition, and betrayal and hatred and death forced upon [him] … born for the slaughter like a calf or pig’.135 The war news was bleak; the sector of the front where he had been stationed was now involved in the long-drawn-out battle of Passchendaele, and there was constant news of casualties. It was to such carnage Aldington could expect to return. He tried to protect H.D., not telling her how traumatised he was by his army experience, yet was simultaneously angry with her because she could not know what it was like. H.D. herself was worn, anxious, over-wrought; Aldington tried to be sympathetic, but traces of irritation undoubtedly appeared. Civilian strain, he now felt, was so much less than his; what were the air raids she dreaded compared to shelling at the front? If their sexual relationship had been going well, that might have helped, but the picture H.D. gives in Bid Me to Live suggests she had retreated even further into her inner, burning world, and found herself shrinking away from this ‘great, over-sexed officer on leave’, whose moods were becoming ever more violent.136 It can’t have been easy for either of them, and, once back in London in the febrile atmosphere of 44 Mecklenburgh Square, Aldington and Arabella started an affair.
This affair was a much more open, not to say more blatant one than that with Flo. Aldington’s relationship with Arabella was physically passionate and consuming, only too apparent to the other inhabitants of number 44, including their outraged landlady, Miss James, but he had no wish to give up his marriage to H.D. As he wrote in a letter to her, ‘I love you, I desire l’autre’.137 In Bid Me to Live, Bella, the Arabella figure, says to Julia, ‘You tyrannize his soul … he loves my body, but he isn’t all there, half of him is somewhere else.’138 But the distinction between loving and desiring is not perhaps so clear-cut as Aldington tried to persuade H.D. to think, and certainly Arabella was very much in love with him. It was, as he acknowledged, a mess. H.D. felt she could not interfere or remonstrate; that would have been against all her principles and instincts, but she felt lacerated living in the same house as her husband and his mistress, who sometimes made love in Arabella’s room, sometimes in hers, Aldington once more blindly seeking the carefree Greek happiness he felt was his due. In Bid Me to Live, Rafe says to Julia, ‘I won’t come back, you might allow me a little fun … I want Bella. Bella makes me forget. You make me remember.’ But then, at other times, he says: ‘I’ll go mad, I am torn to pieces, I love you.’139
As before, H.D.’s pain drove her to write, but what came out must have shocked her with its extremity, because she destroyed it all, some 10,000 words, much to Aldington’s dismay, who thought it ‘fine & vivid & inevitable, though bitter’.140 There was no Cournos this time to whom to turn; H.D. still corresponded with him, but Arabella’s defection was not news she could pass on. The other solace – though it was also a scourge – that she had had during the previous affair was her intense and highly charged correspondence with Lawrence. They had built up a powerful bond through their letters, one which H.D. called ‘cerebral’ and Lawrence ‘ecstatic subtly-intellectual’. They didn’t always see eye to eye; H.D. had been disappointed with Women in Love, which Lawrence had sent her to read in manuscript, so much more bitter and male-supremacist than The Rainbow. When H.D. sent him a sequence of Orpheus and Eurydice poems, he was appalled that she had attempted a male persona; as Rico says in Bid Me to Love, ‘How can you know what Orpheus feels? … Stick to the woman-consciousness, it is the intuitive woman-mood that matters’: Julia is deeply irritated by his ‘man-is-man, woman-is-woman’ attitude, and thinks indignantly of his own lack of inhibition in depicting women.141 But like Julia, H.D. knew Lawrence thought highly of her poetic gifts, and that he valued her as a person. After all, she was included in the select group going to Ranamin; she must have some worth. She saw the Lawrences several times over the next few weeks; both of them had got to like Arabella while they were living in the same house, and Lawrence, in spite of his regard for H.D., disconcertingly appeared to have approved of Richard’s affair, certainly a more sexually fulfilling relationship than the Aldingtons’ intense but strained devotion. Aldington said Arabella had earthy passions like himself; she could give him what he needed then. Frieda, who was, or was thinking of having an affair with Cecil Gray, and who, although she liked and admired H.D., disapproved strongly of Lawrence’s sublimated, spiritually intense attitude to her (and his similar attitude to another young American, Esther Andrews), regarding it as unhealthy if not perverted, suggested, possibly mischievously, that Lawrence and H.D. should pair off to give her more time with Gray. Nothing came of it, for all H.D. and Lawrence’s mutual embrace of the ‘flame and the fire, the burning, the believing’ in their letters.142 In the fictional version, Rico says, ‘You are there for all eternity, our love is written in blood’, but when Julia puts a hand on Rico’s sleeve, he shrinks back, ‘like a hurt jaguar’; ‘noli me tangere (his own expression),’ she adds, in a reference to Lawrence’s late story, The Man Who Died.143 Their relationship was not to be of that kind, but, given H.D.’s isolation and pain, it would soon not be of any other.
Frieda and Gray’s putative flirtation or tendresse also evaporated, and Cecil Gray, like everyone else well aware of the Arabella-Aldington liaison, began to show solicitude for H.D.’s desolate state. He was only twenty-three, courteous and undemanding: as a composer, he was an artist in the musical realm that meant so much to H.D. He came along with the Lawrences on several occasions to 44 Mecklenburgh Square; Christmas was approaching, and if everyone was on edge, and hysteria in the air, it was overlaid by feverish gaiety. They had several parties: Lawrence and Frieda, Gray, the Aldingtons, Arabella, Brigit and her latest lover, Captain Jack White, a supporter of the Irish revolutionaries. At one, which they all remembered indelibly (it is described in both Bid Me to Live and Aaron’s Rod), Lawrence organised charades; they acted out the creation myth – H.D. was told to be the Tree of Life (did Lawrence know Pound called her Dryad?), Richard and Arabella were Adam and Eve, Frieda the serpent, Gray the angel at the gate – with an umbrella for his flaming sword – and Lawrence, naturally, God Almighty. Was it an allegory of their situation? Richard and Arabella, the eternal, ur-couple, Lawrence judging and deciding events, Frieda as temptress – and of course, the Tree of Life and the angel left together after the Fall, just as H.D. and Gray were, though still under God’s, i.e. Lawrence’s, watchful eye.
Early in 1918, with Aldington back at his officer’s training but returning regularly for weekends spent largely in bed with Arabella, Gray, who had a slight heart condition that had saved him from conscription, began to beg H.D. to go back with him to Cornwall, where he had a largish house near the sea, with a respectable full-time housekeeper who could act as chaperon. He returned there in January, and after some hesitation she joined him in March. As H.D. writes in Bid Me to Live, ‘Given normal civilised peace-time conditions of course, all this could never have happened, or it would have happened in sections, so that one could deal with one problem after another, in due sequence … Changing partners, changing hands, dancing round, in a Bacchic orgy of war-time love and death’.144 Aldington was quite relieved to have her find some consolation, but Lawrence, according to H.D., was deeply disapproving, perhaps because H.D., while grateful to Gray, who was quiet, civilised and soothing, as well as reassuringly admiring of her beauty and gifts, was clearly not in love with him. H.D. was very aware of male exploitation of women, but, as she herself would recognise later, there could be said to be something exploitative in the way she used the admiration and indeed adoration of men like Cournos and Gray, for whom she might have liking but not love. Perhaps that is what Lawrence thought, and he must have recognised too that given the price the social world could still make a woman pay for loss of reputation, it could have seemed a terrible risk to take if not for passion, but it was an indication of her anguished need to escape. Lawrence and H.D. would not meet up again, but that was probably largely chance; his references to her in later letters are for the most part compassionate and concerned, and she would never forget the impact he had on her and her writing. Lawrence’s descriptions of Cornwall had made her long to see it, and when she got there, she loved it, an ancient world with a landscape of rocks and crags like that in Sea Garden. As well as translations and poems, she began a novel, the story of those years, which would take so many different forms, Paint it Today, Her, Asphodel, and finally Bid Me to Live. She had gone to Cornwall, Aldington told Lowell slightly tetchily, to get away from the bombing, which although in his opinion not particularly heavy, was difficult for one of her nervous temperament to cope with. He mentioned neither Gray nor Arabella in his letters. Nor did H.D.