I saw H. G. Wells there on several occasions. He did not belong to the circle of which I am speaking. He came independently with parties of his own. My friends observed him with something approaching horror. One of them said 'Whenever I see H. G. Wells I feel uncomfortably refined.' In looking over I saw a not particularly butcher-like, but certainly unromantic pepper-and-salt figure, springing about in a suit too tight for him, as he induced ladies into chairs and did the honours. Ezra did not become a frequent figure to this restaurant, anyhow. I saw him once, no more, at all events, beneath that ceiling of glass.
K
CHAPTER VI
First Meeting with T. S. Eliot
It is with a heavy pen, if not with a heavy heart, that I take up my narrative of my earliest 'contacts' with Number Three of my trio of eminent acquaintances, Mr. T. S. Eliot, namely. 'How can we be cheerful with the devil among us?' asks Mr. Toobad in Nightmare Abbey. Certainly Mr. Eliot is not the devil—I am not proposing to claim that honour for him, nor would he himself do so: 'I am no Prince Hamlet,' does not that emanation of his undergraduate days, Mr. Prufrock remark?
No. But Mr. Eliot may be regarded perhaps as not unlike the plenipotentiary of the Evil Principle in the Thomistic Heaven of the post-war—despatched there by his satanic majesty (he of the Naughty Nineties) rather as Ribbentrop is appointed to be his peace-envoy abroad by the wicked Hitler. And one's pen grows languid, it refuses to dance—it moves at a funeral pace across the paper—at the prospect of unravelling the technics of this complicated mission. It shrinks from the obligation to fix for posterity the features of this eccentric missionary. For it is nothing less than this that I have here set out to do.
Of these three friends of mine, Eliot was the second to swim into my ken—some years later than James Joyce. But he slid there rather than swam, as I recall the event, into my half-awakened consciousness. A sleek, tall, attractive transatlantic apparition—with a sort of Gioconda smile. I looked up one day from a brooding interval, as I sat in the narrow triangle of Ezra's flat. And there, sitting down with a certain stealth, not above a couple of feet away from me, was the author of Prufrock—indeed, was Prufrock himself: but a Prufrock to whom the mermaids would decidedly have sung, one would have said, at the tops of their voices—a Prufrock who had no need to 'wear the bottom of his trousers rolled' just yet; a Prufrock who would 'dare' all right 'to eat a peach'—provided he was quite sure that he possessed the correct European table-technique for that ticklish operation. For this was a very attractive young Prufrock indeed, with an alert and dancing eye— moqueur to the marrow, bashfully ironic, blushfully tacquineur. But still a Prufrock!
Pound's flat was a rendezvous for translantic birds of passage. I had not the slightest idea what manner of newcomer had entered the room with Ezra, who had gone to answer the bell, nor did I at all care of course. For these people came and went as the nationals of a distant State drift through a legation. The prepossessing, ponderous, exactly-articulated, drawl, made a sleepy droning in my ear, as if some heavy hymenopter, emitting a honeyed buzz, had passed in at the Kensington window.
The interest I took in any of Ezra's friends was very small, also I entertained a most healthy suspicion of all Pound's enthusiasms—was I not one of them myself? So upon encountering another I experienced a certain embarrassment.
Ezra now lay flung back in a typical posture of aggressive ease. It resembled extreme exhaustion. (Looking back, I believe he did over-fatigue himself, like an excitable dog, use his last ounce of vitality, and that he did in fact become exhausted.) However, he kept steadily beneath his quizzical but self-satisfied observation his latest prize, or discovery—the author of Prufrock. The new collector's-piece went on smiling and growling out melodiously his apt and bright answers to promptings from the exhausted figure of his proud captor. Ezra then gave us some preserved fruit, of which it was his habit to eat a great deal.
The author of this poem had, I believed, already been published. But Pound had the air of having produced it from his hat a moment before, and its author with it simultaneously, out of the same capacious headpiece. He blinked and winked with contemplative conceit and contentment, chewing a sugared and wonderfully shrunken pear: then removed his glasses to wipe off the film of oily London dust that might have collected—but really to withdraw as it were, and leave me alone with Mr. Prufrock for a moment.
Then, that finished, Ezra would squint quickly, sideways, up at me—'grandpa'-wise, over the rims of his glasses. With chuckles, and much heavy fun, in his screwed-up smiling slits of eyes, he would be as good as saying to me in the Amos and Andy patter of his choice: 'Yor ole uncle Ezz is wise to wot youse thinkin. Waaal Wynd damn I'se tellin yew, he's lot better'n he looks!'
A mania like Pound's to act as a nursery and lying-in establishment—bureau de renseignment and unofficial agency for unknown literary talent did involve the successive presence of numbers of people. These I would find either groping around in the dark in the large middle-room of the flat—even playing the piano there; or quite often seated where Mr. Eliot was now installed. The situation therefore was one for which a regular convention existed, of quizzical dumbshow on the part of the incorrigible host, and stony stares back from me.
This very small room, in which Mr. Eliot had alighted, and in which he sat placidly smiling, was, allowance made for the comic side of Ezra's manic herding of talent, a considerable place. Dorothy Shakespeare had become Dorothy Pound and of course was in this dwarf room, too, nodding, with a quick jerk of the head, unquestioning approval of Ezra's sallies, or hieratically rigid as she moved delicately to observe the Kensingtonian Tea ritual. (Long habit in the paternal mansion responsible, she was a good turncoat bourgeoise, who wore her red cockade with a grim peasant gaucherie.) In any event, all social transactions were necessarily intime. One at a time was their rule for genius.
Mr. Eliot would presently be taken to a much larger place— where there would be more than just a crowded little triangle to sit in: not so important, yet an essential part of Ezra's exiguous social machine. For those not familiar with the hills and valleys of London, the event with which I opened took place practically at the foot of Notting Hill. Now almost at the top of that hill stood a squarish Victorian mansion, of no great size but highly respectable, within whose walls Ford Maddox Ford (known then as Hueffer) lived and entertained with Violet Hunt. A gate in a tall wall gave access to it, and standing in the centre of a patch of grass, just visible from the pavement, was a large carving of Ezra by Breszka. Mr. Eliot would have to be taken there.
A number of people were to be met, certainly, belonging to the literary, theatrical, and occasionally monied, world at Hueffers (as it is better to call him, rather than Ford): for he was unspeakably gregarious. But Mr. Eliot would be taken around there primarily to be shown to Hueffer. The latter gentleman in all probability thought he wrote poems like Prufrock just as well if not better himself. A sort of Wild West turn, at whose hyperborean antics he could smile—that would be one thing. But it would be quite another for what was, as he saw it, a kind of Harvardian Rupert Brooke to make claims upon his tolerance. Such I imagine might be the situation arising from such a contact. But by South Lodge Mr. Eliot would have to pass, as part of initiatory proceedings.
There is no exacter manner available to me of dating my first encounter with Mr. Eliot than by stating that before the first number of Blast I did not know him, and he was not known I think to others: but that before the second number I knew him. Blast No. 1 was published in June 1914, Blast No. 2 in July 1915. In No. 2 I printed some poems of his Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. The last of the Preludes (No. 4) contains especially fine lines which I have often seen quoted.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like anc
ient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
It is not secret that Ezra Pound exercised a very powerful influence upon Mr. Eliot. I do not have to define the nature of the influence, of course. Mr. Eliot was lifted out of his lunar alley-ways and fin de siecle nocturnes, into a massive region of verbal creation in contact with that astonishing didactic intelligence, that is all. Gerontion (1920) is a close relative of Prufrock, certain matters filtered through an aged mask in both cases, but Gerontion technically is 'school of Ezra.'
The didactic vocation was exercised by Ezra, unfortunately, in the void (with the exception of such a happy chance as his association with his fellow-countryman Mr. Eliot)—in a triangular box, as we have seen, practically at the foot of Nott-ing Hill. Between Hueffer and himself there was a solid bond. Ezra 'believed in' Ford, who knew what he was talking about, praised the other's verses to the skies. And Ezra regarded it as typical—and very justly—that Hueffer should find no support in England for the English Review.
Although I bring the scene to life in which Mr. Eliot at that stage of his career found himself, it is the scene, and not Mr. Eliot I recreate.
Knowing the principal figure in it still so well does not make the recreation easier—though you would perhaps suppose it would. Some of these figures do not change much : others do. For instance, in 1938 when I was painting Ezra (the picture is now in the Tate) he swaggered in, coat-tails flying, a malacca cane out of the 'nineties aslant beneath his arm, the lion's head from the Scandinavian North-West thrown back. There was no conversation. He flung himself at full length into my best chair for that pose, closed and was motionless, and did not move for two hours by the clock. Ezra was not haggard, he looked quite well, but was exhausted.
'Go to it Wyndham !' he gruffled without opening his eyes, as soon as his mane of as yet entirely ungrizzled hair had adjusted itself to the cushioned chair-top. A reference to my portrait of Mr. Eliot, painted some months earlier, produced the remark that now I had a 'better subject to work from'. A mild and not unpleasing example of gasconade. But that was how I always found Ezra, full of bombast, kindness, but always in appearance the Westerner in excelsis. On the tips of his toes with aggressive vitality, till he dropped, or as good as. (A note here I should like to add: I have had experience of Ezra for a long time: in some respects he does not forget the teaching of Chinese sages.)
With Mr. Eliot it has always been quite the opposite. Appearing at one's front door, on arriving at a dinner-rendezvous (I am thinking of the late thirties, not his more vernal years of course) his face would be haggard, he would seem at his last gasp. (Did he know?) To ask him to he down for a short while at once was what I always felt I ought to do. However, when he had taken his place at a table, given his face a dry wash with his hands, and having had a little refreshment, Mr. Eliot would rapidly shed all resemblance to the harassed and exhausted refugee, in flight from some Scourge of God. Apparently a modest reserve of power, prudently set aside, would be drawn on. He would be as lively as ever he could be or any one need be—for of course it is not necessary to fly about on the tips of one's toes with one's scarf and coat-tails flying.
Immediately after World War One—I had not long left a military hospital and was restarting with a new studio—Mr. Eliot himself is, for me, much more distinct. For instance we went to the Loire and Brittany together—that holiday involving a meeting, the first for both of us, with James Joyce in Paris: after a stay at Saumer, and then the Breton coast in the Golfe de Vannes region.
The intermediate years—since he first sat in Pound's toy room—had greatly matured Mr. Eliot. The 'Gioconda' period seemed a thing of the past, the saturnine vein was strongly fed with the harsh spectacle of the times. He was an American who was in flight from the same thing that kept Pound over here, and with what had he been delected, as soon as he had firmly settled himself upon this side of the water. The spectacle of Europe committing suicide—just that.
The Hollow Men (of 1925) is generally considered Mr. Eliot's most successful attempt to make the paralysis and decay concrete for his contemporaries, in drained-out cadences and desiccated vocables. The date of the Hollow Men takes one on to the times when I was often with Mr. Eliot at the Schiffs, in Cambridge Square and Eastbourne, and in relaxation of a household where we were very much spoiled by our hosts, for my part for the last time I saw Mr. Eliot in a mood that was very young. There he would read his latest work. Even then in the early 'thirties, however, the haggard and exhausted mask of which I spoke earlier was seen nothing of. I must get back without delay to the foot of Notting Hill, in the first twelve months after the 'lights had gone out in Europe'.
Pound possessed in Miss Harriet Weaver, a very substantial auxiliary indeed. Her little office in Adelphi rather than South Lodge would be a place worth visiting for Mr. Eliot. Sympathy, as much as ambition, would cause him to prefer the active Quaker lady, editress, to the ex-editor Ford Madox Hueffer.
The Egoist was Miss Weaver's paper, but at the period of which I write you would rather have supposed that it belonged to Ezra Pound. The Egoist also on occasion published books. And the old files of The Egoist contain much work of Mr. Eliot's. This, I should suppose, was the first place where his work appeared in England. The way was also smoothed by Pound for Prufrock's debut in book form. So, for all his queer-ness at times, in spite of anything that may be said of Ezra, he is not only himself a great poet but has been of the most amazing use to other people. Let it not be forgotten for instance that it was he who was responsible for the all-important contact for James Joyce—namely Miss Weaver. It was his critical understanding, his generosity, involved in the detection and appreciation of the literary genius of James Joyce. It was through him that a very considerable sum of money was put at Joyce's disposal, at the critical moment.
Such is the career-side of Mr. Eliot's association with Ezra Pound. But he met in his company Imagists and others, several of those who at a later time wrote for him in The Criterion— Gould Fletcher, Aldington, Flint. And when I spoke of Ezra transacting his social life, there was nothing social for him that did not have a bearing upon the business of writing. If it had not it would have been dull. He was a man of Letters, in the marrow of his bones and down to the red follicles of his hair. He was a born revolutionary, a Trotsky of the written word and painted shape. Where he detected the slightest hint of a fractious disposition, expressing itself in verse or pigment, he became delirious. It was the schoolmaster—the missionary who instructed the incipient how to construct the infernal machine—he would spare no pains. He breathed Letters, ate Letters, dreamt
Letters. A very rare kind of man. To fall into the clutches of this benevolent mentor was not the making of Mr. Eliot—for he had already begun making himself, after quite a distinct fashion in Prufrock and other pieces. Here was a stiffening. Here was a variety of transformation, technical and otherwise, which it is not my specifically non-critical function to indicate.
Had it not been the earliest period of Mr. Eliot's life in literary circles in England, some account of which was required, the background would not have been dominated by one figure, as in this certainly has been the case. It always seems to be in this little triangular room, practically at the foot of Notting Hill, that I see Mr. Eliot. I recall entering it, for example, when on leave (a bombardier). Mr. Eliot was there—in the same place as the first time (there was nowhere else to sit however). After a little I found him examining me, his head to one side. I asked him what there was about me that puzzled him. He was wondering, he answered, whether the short hair suited me or not. (Before the army it had been thick and long ?) My point is forcibly brought out by the fact that, at that time, I had no idea where Mr. Eliot lived. He appeared— he often was to be found—in the triangle, the supreme figure of Ezra a few feet away of course.
K*
CHAPTER VII
An 'Age Group' meets Itself
The three principal figures on the narrative side of this book being now present
ed to you, in the guise that they first presented themselves to me, I will proceed with the famous tale of the old pair of shoes.
James Joyce, having disposed of his foreign-bred offspring, Ezra's embarrassing present, and his family arrangements for the evening, turned to us with the air of a man who has divested himself of a few minor handicaps, and asked us where we would like to dine and did we know Paris well, or would we commit ourselves to him and allow him to conduct us to a restaurant where he dined, from time to time, not far from where we were just then, and at which it was possible to get a good meal enough, though he had not been there lately.
We replied that we would gladly go with him to the restaurant he mentioned; and so he led the way in a very business-like fashion: he bustled on ahead of us—if the word bustled can be used of a very spare and light-footed cosmopolitan gentleman : he selected a table, took up the Menu before we had sat down, asked us what we liked, inspecting the violet scrawl to ascertain what was available in the matter of plats du jour. And before we could say Jack Robinson he had ordered a large and cleverly arranged dinner as far as possible for all palates, and with a great display of inside knowledge of the insides of civilized men and the resources of the cuisine of France, discovering what wines we were by way of liking if any. And he had asked for a bottle to start with to introduce the soup. And so on, through a first-class French repast, until we had finished, he pushed on, our indefatigable host: then, at a moment when we were not paying particular attention, he called for the bill: and before either of us could forestall him, he had whisked out of his breast pocket a handful of hundred-franc notes, and paid for this banquet; the wine, the liqueurs, the coffee, and added to it, it was evident, a lordly pourboire. Nor was it ever possible for T. S. Eliot or myself to pay for the smallest thing from that time onwards.
Blasting and Bomardiering Page 28