JOHN COURNOS ARRIVED back in April, after a long and hazardous journey home, getting away shortly before Russia, to the dismay of the other Allies, signed an armistice with Germany, and escaping the civil war that then broke out. He quickly learnt that Arabella was Aldington’s lover and no longer had any interest in himself. He was furious with both the Aldingtons: openly yet briefly with Richard, but, though he said nothing to her, much more lastingly and bitterly with H.D. He had decided that the reason she had refused to sleep with him was that she had a morbid fear of pregnancy, and seized on the idea that she had in effect pandered Arabella to escape from her husband’s sexual attentions. It is true that H.D. does suggest in Bid Me to Live that the one consolation for all the pain Julia feels is that it relieves her of the fear of Rafe’s ‘over-physical sensuality’, but H.D. would not have engineered such immolation as a way of achieving this. Before she went to Cornwall they even seem to have had some sort of sexual reconciliation, because Richard wrote to her from the front that he wished she had loved him passionately before the relationship with Arabella started, rather than only after. But that move to Cornwall presaged the breakdown of their marriage, and the final dispersal of the imagists.
When H.D. had left London, although the joint venture of the imagist anthologies was over, her closest friends were all in one way or another linked with her imagist years. Despite her readiness to abandon the imagist label, which she had never wanted in the first place, she had loved working with a group of fellow-writers, the ‘brother-ship’ as she had put it to Amy. For much of the last few years H.D. had been the lynchpin of the imagists, gathering the poems, soothing Amy, placating Flint, corresponding with Lawrence, encouraging Fletcher and keeping her soldier husband in touch with the world of poetry. Now, the direction of her life was about to change. If when she came to London an iron curtain had cut her off from her comfortable American life, now a ravine would open up that would separate her from her imagist years. In August, H.D. wrote to Aldington, who had been back at the front since April, to say she thought she was pregnant; Aldington, though he insisted he still loved her, became increasingly despairing about any future together. He could not bear the thought of this new child in the place of his dead daughter, and wrote H.D. near-hysterical letters, unable to see what to do about her or Arabella; the shell shock – as it was called then – from which he was suffering as the war came to an end, was already taking its toll.
Gray went back to London, probably to evade a threat of conscription, apparently without knowing about the pregnancy. H.D. left Cornwall shortly afterwards, but not before she had been visited by a twenty-four-year-old admirer of the imagists, Winifred Ellerman, who had already published a pamphlet of lyrical praise for Amy Lowell, and who knew H.D.’s Sea Garden by heart. Bryher, as she preferred to be known, was the daughter of a shipping millionaire, Sir John Ellerman, reputed to be the richest man in England, and a major shareholder in The Times and other publications. Bryher was determined to be a writer and was working on her first novel: highly intelligent, rebellious, unhappy and disturbed, she immediately fell in love with H.D., who she thought looked like a Greek goddess. H.D. was touched by her enthusiasm for imagism, and gave her advice about her writing, but their friendship remained formal for some months. H.D. said nothing of the problems with the marriage, and in fact put Bryher in touch with Aldington, as a second literary adviser.
When the war ended – almost as unexpectedly, for most of those involved, as it began – the question of whether H.D. and Aldington would stay together still hung in the balance. H.D. spent the autumn and winter in a cottage in Buckinghamshire with her childhood friend Margaret Snively, now Pratt, herself already a mother. Significantly, she never told Margaret, and indeed hardly anyone else, that the child was not Aldington’s; she was terrified of becoming the subject of a scandal, like poor Violet Hunt. She and Aldington corresponded regularly, though mainly, at her insistence, about his plans for a new series of Poets’ Translations, and Bryher came to see her several times. H.D. continued to act as literary mentor and adviser; but by now she must have been aware of Bryher’s feelings about her, and was discovering something of Bryher’s own inner turmoil at that time: her misery at not being a boy, her impatience with the constraints of her upbringing, her near-suicidal depression. H.D. had other painful shocks as well. Her brother Gilbert had been killed in the last month of the war, and the following March her father died; of grief, she thought. Kind and practical Brigit – who knew about Aldington and Arabella, and, being devoted to H.D. (and highly critical of contemporary male mores), very much took her side – arranged for the birth to be in ‘the decorous St Faith’s Nursing Home, in Ealing’. While staying in a rented room nearby as the confinement approached, H.D. contracted Spanish influenza in the post-war epidemic that killed more people than the war itself. It turned to pneumonia and, as she recalled in End to Torment, it was thought impossible that both she and the child would live. Bryher visited her one day, to be asked by a surly landlady if she would pay the funeral expenses when H.D. died. Shocked and appalled, she immediately arranged for H.D. to be admitted to the home early, promising her, to persuade her to hang on to life, that she would take her to Greece after the baby was born. Aldington visited H.D. in the home, and so did Ezra. Pound clearly knew the father was not Aldington; as H.D. recalled the visit later: ‘Beard, black soft hat, ebony stick – something unbelievably operatic – directoire overcoat, Verdi … He seemed to beat with the ebony stick like a baton … pounding, pounding (Pounding) … “But” he said, “My only real criticism is that this is not my child”.’145
The baby was safely born on 31 March and named Frances Perdita, after Frances Gregg and the lost daughter from The Winter’s Tale, since the baby had arrived, as Bryher would put it, ‘with
the daffodils.
That come before the swallows dare, and take
The winds of March with beauty
just in time to earn her Shakespearean name’.146 Aldington for a while appeared to be ready to resume the marriage, and he and H.D. moved into a hotel in Soho, Perdita having been, reluctantly on H.D.’s part, installed in a nursery. The story now is somewhat confused but it seems that after a day or two Aldington had a violent outbreak of rage, evidently in a state of breakdown, and threatened H.D. with prison if she put his name on the birth certificate. H.D. was terrified, fearing for the baby’s future. Aldington rang Bryher and told her to take H.D. away, and their lifelong companionship began. H.D.’s feelings about Bryher at that stage were a mixture of gratitude and concern. Bryher, she felt, had saved her life and Perdita’s, and she was able to save Bryher from her suicidal impulses. Her relationship with Bryher would only ever be comparatively briefly that of lovers, and there was none of the burning passion that she had felt for Pound or Frances Gregg, but they remained close all their lives, with many shared interests, not only literature, but film, psychoanalysis and gossip. H.D.’s letters to Bryher (they wrote copiously to each other when apart) are funny, self-probing, full of interest in the world; they can express all kinds of pain and self-doubt, but they are free of the intense and self-lacerating high-mindedness of the letters to Cournos. Bryher helped invaluably in bringing up Perdita, whom H.D. adored but had no idea how to look after, and, most importantly, Bryher recognised and protected the centrality of writing in H.D.’s life. Though H.D. would have other relationships, mainly with men, Bryher remained a devoted friend and, though she too would have other attachments, gave H.D. a fundamental loyalty that Aldington and Pound – and indeed Gregg – had never shown.
But this would be her post-imagist life, beyond the scope of this book. For the next decade, to her deep regret, H.D. saw little of her fellow-imagists, though on a visit to America in 1921 she met up again with Lowell, Williams and Marianne Moore. Her life was mainly divided between Switzerland and London, and she travelled a good deal, making the promised visit to Greece. She occasionally saw Pound, who was much disliked by Bryher (it was mutual). She saw Brigit regularly until the mid-1920s, when Brigit’s own marriage finally collapsed, but Bryher also disliked Brigit, and the friendship lapsed. She met Frances again, now divorced and with two children, but Bryher, perhaps more understandably, regarded her with suspicion too.
In 1930 the imagists would come together, at least within the covers of a book, to publish one last anthology, with the support of a keen young West Coast scholar, Glenn Hughes, who published the first book on the group, Imagism and the Imagists, in 1931. Aldington, who took up the idea, wrote to H.D. to ask her to help solicit poems (back to her old role) from those who had contributed to Des Imagistes or Some Imagist Poets. He had got back in touch with her the previous year, having just left Arabella for Brigit. During the 1920s Aldington had had a highly successful journalistic career, the kind that Pound had earlier dreamt of, set on his way by Bryher, whose father used his influence to have him made the French specialist on the Times Literary Supplement, and his writing was soon widely in demand. He was Eliot’s assistant at the Criterion, so at the centre of the literary world. But mentally he had been through considerable anguish, post-traumatic stress as we would know it now; physically, he never recovered from the effects of gas poisoning during the war, nor did the bitterness towards the literary world that he had developed in his time in the army disappear. In 1929, as well as leaving Arabella, he left England and began a new career as a novelist; his loosely autobiographical novel about the war, Death of a Hero, came out that year and was a bestseller. Reading it now, it feels almost mawkishly self-justifying; George, the hero, is a thoroughly decent chap in a corrupt and cynical artistic milieu, much put upon by the women in his life; his men at the front are, on the other hand, the salt of the earth (though George never seems to find out their names): for years the book was promoted in the Soviet Union as an outstanding analysis of the decadent capitalist system. But at the time, for many people who had been through the war, it captured their sense of how their elders had betrayed them. The novel had not yet appeared when Aldington and H.D. met up in Paris, and when, obliging as always, she agreed to do her best to help with the anthology.
Amy Lowell, who had done so much to establish the imagist name, was, alas, dead, having died of a stroke in1925, after publishing several more highly successful collections, Can Grande’s Castle and Pictures of the Floating World among them. Pound’s friend and mentor Allen Upward was also dead; he committed suicide in 1926, a victim, Pound felt, of the ignorance and apathy of the general public who refused to recognise his gifts. But James Joyce, now famous or infamous as the author of Ulysses, contributed an extract from what would become Finnegans Wake, actually rather more imagistic than the somewhat overwrought poem that he had contributed to Des Imagistes. Flint sent Aldington a short play; though he had continued to write criticism and do a wealth of translation, he had for the most part stopped writing poetry since he published his collection Otherworld in 1920, the year that Violet died in childbirth along with their third child. H.D. had written a very feeling letter of condolence to him, which he kept, but did not answer. Aldington told Lowell that Flint had a kind of breakdown after Violet’s death and wouldn’t contact anyone for a while. H.D., to her sadness, never heard from him again. Flint saw Aldington regularly, and perhaps felt he could not be in touch with them both (he told Violet Hunt he had decided after the break-up of her relationship with Ford that he could not see her because he was still a friend of Ford’s, but she would have none of it).Yet Flint sometimes made references to his admiration for H.D.’s poetry in the reviewing he continued to do. Before Violet’s death, his talents had at last been recognised at work: he was given a much better paid job in the civil service and eventually reached a senior position in the Ministry of Labour, becoming an expert on international labour statistics. He had married one of Violet’s sisters not long after Violet’s death, probably desperate to have a carer for the children, who were only eleven and five, but it was an unhappy mistake. Yet as well as seeing Aldington, he remained friendly with Ford and Monro, and found another congenial literary circle, the so-called Criterion club, those who were associated with Eliot’s prestigious magazine, which had first appeared in 1922.
John Gould Fletcher readily contributed to the anthology; he was still publishing prolifically and still, for now, though not for much longer, living unhappily with Daisy. Like Flint he was a contributor to the Criterion, and regularly escaped from Sydenham to the Criterion club lunches and dinners, developing a surprisingly good if somewhat formal relationship with Eliot himself. A couple of years earlier, after a decade of hero-worship, he had finally fallen out with Cournos, who was now married to Helen Satterthwaite, a detective-story writer who used the pseudonym of Sybil Norton. Cournos himself had by then published several novels, but he would be disappointed to know that today, since his fiction mostly consists of thinly disguised accounts of himself and his literary friends, it is mainly read by literary historians hoping for colourful vignettes. Cournos agreed immediately to contribute to the anthology, in spite of his earlier brush with the Aldingtons, but Lawrence, by now very ill (he died before the anthology appeared), acceded to H.D.’s request only in the most churlish of terms. Poor H.D.! She felt that his unfriendly letter was a rebuke to herself, but it was undoubtedly much more one to Aldington, with whom he and Frieda had just had a holiday, along with both Arabella and Brigit; Lawrence, though he always liked Brigit, who on this occasion helped with his nursing with particular kindness, had fallen out acrimoniously with Aldington over his treatment of Arabella. Aldington felt Lawrence resented his rude health, which he undoubtedly did, but in addition, as John Worthen points out, for someone to whom sexual relationships had been so central, to be surrounded, in his frail and impotent state, by the others’ swirling desires, must have been hard to bear without a bitter sense of loss. Yet he sent some poems none the less.
No one seems to have located Fletcher’s erstwhile Parisian acquaintance, Skipwell Cannell, but H.D. wrote to Ford, who obliged with both a poem and a highly amusing if fantastic introduction, in which he suggested that imagism had emerged out of Vorticism and was entirely dependent on his own ideas. Ford had spent most of the 1920s with the Australian painter, Stella Bowen, moving to Paris in 1922 after another unsuccessful attempt at the simple life, this time as a pig farmer. There he founded the avant-garde and international journal the Transatlantic Review, which brought out new, fledgling and established writers, and published his tetralogy, Parade’s End; now often regarded as his masterpiece, at the time it did little to improve his shaky finances. By 1930, when the anthology appeared, he was beginning the final and most happy relationship of his life, with the painter Janice Biala, born a Polish Jew, but American by upbringing. Under her influence he moved left in his political sympathies and in particular campaigned against anti-Semitism over the next few years, something that did not endear him to Pound. Pound, in fact, from whom Aldington had been hoping for a canto, gave the one unequivocal refusal. Both Aldington and H.D. saw Pound when they met up in Paris, and he had been extremely friendly, so they were disappointed, if scarcely surprised.
In 1920 Pound had rejected England, where he felt unappreciated, for Paris, leaving Eliot, for whose work he had done so much, to move into the position of literary leadership he had so much wanted for himself. By 1925 he had become dissatisfied with Paris, and moved his home to Rapallo, in Italy, ardently supporting Mussolini and dividing his life between the violinist Olga Rudge, who bore him a daughter that year, and the long-suffering Dorothy, who had a son the next. In his terms, his refusal was understandable enough. In spite of his recent friendly meetings with both Aldington and H.D., for him to agree to appear, with so many writers he continued to feel were his inferiors, and certainly never imagist, would be to forgive retrospectively and indeed condone Amy’s usurpation of his role as leading imagist. Aldington told H.D. not to worry. He had earlier written to her when the idea was mooted, ‘[Pound] may have invented “Imagism”, but, after all, you wrote the poems.’147 Perhaps 1930 was an appropriate year for the commemorative anthology to appear. If imagism had been, as H.D. suggested to Ford, the ‘curtain-raiser’ to the dazzling show of modernist and experimental writing that followed, 1930 is the year often seen as the end of its most vibrant phase. The world would rapidly darken once more. Many of the former young iconoclasts – Pound, Eliot, Fletcher, Lewis, and indeed the slightly older Yeats – were moving, like the political revolutionaries in Russia, and as revolutionaries so often do, to embrace authoritarianism and the demand for order, albeit in their case on the right rather than the left. For many years that was seen as the narrative of modernism, but it was not the only pattern for the writers of this generation; it was not true of H.D., nor of many other women writers, nor of Ford, nor of Joyce. But that again is another story. Aldington and H.D. were not in touch with each other or Pound again for many years, but after the war, when Aldington had disastrously run off with Brigit’s daughter-in-law, who then left him and their daughter, he and H.D. became regular and warm correspondents, and while they were appalled by Pound’s Fascist sympathies, they both got back in touch with him by letter at various points, and he with them. In fact, his occasional late letters to H.D. are some of his most moving. They all looked back to their friendship before the war as, in Aldington’s words, those ‘magical early years in London’, the period that H.D. felt had made her who she was, and to which she would return so repeatedly in her writing.148 Pound wrote sadly to her in the 1950s saying that never since the four of them, himself, Richard, H.D. and Brigit, had been together in those early years, ‘has there been any harmony around me’.149
Was imagism a poetic school? An advertising stunt? A name plucked from the air to promote a group of varied and disparate talents? A primitivist escape from the elaborations of convention in search of something more elemental and profound? A breakthrough to a strikingly modern way of writing, with its spare syntax, its juxtapositions, its unexpected twists? A response to the rich heterogeneity, cultural difference and multiple sensations of the modern world? A rebellious protest at the status quo? It was all of these. Those involved came from extraordinarily different backgrounds, and they developed in very different ways, but none of them would forget those years, which had a profound impact on them all, and on the course of Anglo-American writing. It has been fashionable, among some critics, to see modernism as proto-Fascist from the start. Yet imagism, a product of the pre-war libertarian years, was as subversive of the cultural power structure as the heterogeneous radicals who published alongside this group of poets. Its aim, after all, was the epiphanic ‘sense of sudden liberation … which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’, and if some of those who formed the movement might later harden their views, and if the war had darkened all their hopes, it had been, for a while at least, personally and artistically liberating for the imagists, and for many of their readers.