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ABSTRACT
In the interwar period, the small town of Rapallo, Italy, was the year-round home of Ezra and Dorothy Pound and a seasonal retreat for W. B. Yeats and George Yeats. The promise of good company, the hope of good weather, and the potential for poetic collaboration drew to Rapallo a number of poets who were influential in shaping twentieth-century poetry. However, Pound’s virulent fascism and the Pact of Friendship and Alliance between Germany and Italy (1939) meant that writers were loathe to recognise the degree to which Rapallo was instrumental to late modernist networks. For the most part, biographers have followed suit. This essay attends to memoirs written by Nancy Cunard, H. D., Richard Aldington, and Thomas MacGreevy to illustrate post-war aversions to acknowledging the importance of Rapallo and to demonstrate how writers negotiated their relationship to Pound in constructing their own literary biographies in the shadow of the Second World War.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
* I am grateful to Trinity College Dublin's Long Room Hub, the Burns Library at Boston College and Boston College's Center for Irish Programs for fellowships that made this research possible.
1 Aldington and Patmore also visited Pound in Rome, but that was in 1930, a year after The Eaten Heart was published by the Hours Press. Cunard incorrectly dates the publication of The Eaten Heart, as ‘about a year and a half before [Aldington’s] greatly acclaimed war novel, Death of a Hero appeared’. However, Death of a Hero was also published in 1929.
2 Richard Burton writes in his biography of Basil Bunting, ‘Pound’s incarceration in St Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital after the Second World War effectively finished him off as a poet and, more damaging yet, as an editor’ (Citation2013, pp. 260–261). More recently, Swift (Citation2017) shows how Pound continued to be an important touchstone for mid-century poets, including Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. David Moody’s Ezra Pound: Poet (Citation2015) which runs to three volumes has recovered in extensive detail Pound’s vibrantand varied literary and political pursuits in Rapallo.
3 Geoffrey Phibbs was married to the artist Norah McGuinness (who designed scenes for the Abbey Theatre); in a letter to George Yeats on 9 March MacGreevy reports gossip that Phibbs has left McGuinness for Laura Riding and was living with her in London, with Robert Graves (‘as No 1 lover’) still occupying the house; that letter concludes with ‘love to E.P. as well as yourselves.’
4 Susan Schreibman follows MacGreevy’s dating of his meeting with Aldington, without presenting corroborating evidence; see Schreibman (Citation1991, p. 154).
5 MacGreevy writes, ‘It was the very Irish setting of the salon at James Joyce’s apartment [… .] The walls were hung with admirable contemporary portraits of Joyce and his family […] and also with portraits of ancestors’; ‘Thomas MacGreevy’ in Kershaw and Temple (Citation1965, pp. 52–64); Aldington (Citation1941, pp. 342–343). Whelpton opts for the Joycean locale for Aldington and MacGreevy’s meeting but provides no reference (Citation2014, p. 316); also see Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Richard Aldington As a Friend’ (TCD MS 7996/1).
6 H. D. wrote about the figure of the fisherman in Pound’s poem, ‘The Goodly Fere’:
He is the center of some kind of communal integration-disintegrating toward rebirth, as personally Ezra severed me (psychically) from friends and family. If having been severed, painfully reintegrated, we want only to forget the whirlwind or the forked lightning that destroyed our human, domestic serenity and security, that is natural. (H. D., Citation1979, p. 48)
7 H. D. was engaged to be married to Pound when he left the US for London, where he soon proposed to Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Olivia Shakespear (who was W. B. Yeats’s close friend and first lover); after H. D.’s break-up with Pound, she married Aldington, but their marriage disintegrated under the pressures of the First World War and their loss of a child. Aldington had a long and tortuous affair with Brigit Patmore, who was with him in Paris and Rapallo in 1929; in 1938, following his divorce from H. D. (from whom he was long estranged), he married Brigit Patmore’s former daughter-in-law, Netta McCullough.
8 Rattray was an undergraduate at Dartmouth; he went on to have an esteemed career as translator and poet, with degrees from the Sorbonne and Harvard. His essay ‘Weekend with Ezra Pound’ is reprinted in O’Connor and Stone (Citation1959, pp. 104–117).
9 Aldington and Garrett include in their anthology five poems by Yeats, but none by Aldington, Pound, or Basil Bunting.
10 Longenbach writes, ‘although Pound felt the impulse to address the European conflict in verse, he worried that without any firsthand experience of the war, his poetry would seem facile and opportunistic, the emotion literary and false’ (Citation1988, p. 115).
11 See Canto LXXX in Cantos of Ezra Pound (1996, p. 514). This canto would have been of particular interest to Aldington since it also contains some of Pound’s most famous lines on Yeats: ‘the problem after any revolution is what to do with / your gunmen / as old Billyum found out in Oireland / in the Senate, Bedad! Or before then / Your gunmen thread on moi drreams’ (p. 516).
12 Pound sometimes saw himself as Aldington’s peer; he signed a letter, ‘yr. disobliged and disobt. shall we say “contemporary” (no other relationship being conceivable)’. Pound to Aldington (31 March 1928, HRHRC Pound/Aldington 5.5). In the next letter in the file, Pound chastises Aldington for not writing a more favourable review of Pound’s study of Remy de Goncourt, and changes their generational relationship: ‘meditate on yr prore ole farver’s wordz.’
13 Marius Hentea compares Henry Green and H. E. Bates, for example, as proof against ‘generation’ as a reliable means of constructing literary history (Citation2013).
14 For a discussion of these three winters, see Longenbach’s Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Citation1988). For Clock Tower and its successor A Full Moon in March as Noh plays, see my essay “Fighting Spirits” (Citation2018).
15 See also Foster (Citation2003, p. 500). Yeats recorded Pound’s other criticisms in a private notebook: the play was written in ‘nobody language,’ which was something Yeats thought he could ‘remedy;’ see Ellmann (Citation1966, p. 491).
16 Pound’s satire is quoted in Ellmann (Citation1966, pp. 470–495, 492).
17 The Queen’s verses are ventriloquised by the Second Attendant, in a psychological turn that anticipates the dramatisation of the interior in later modernist drama; the song evokes lines from ‘Leda and the Swan’ in its equation of death and sexual consummation: ‘He longs to kill / My body, until / That sudden shudder / And limbs lie still’ (Variorum Edition of the Plays, p. 1000); compare, ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead’ in ‘Leda and the Swan.’
18 See ‘A Commentary on a Parnellite at Parnell’s Funeral’ (1935) and Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Citation1966, pp. 833–834).
19 The typescript is undated. Rhiannon Moss writes that the piece was ‘probably written in the late 1930s’ but the proposed amendment that MacGreevy is addressing was not brought before the Dáil until 1958. For Moss’s dating, see ‘Thomas MacGreevy, T.S. Eliot and Catholic Modernism in Ireland,’ in Keown and Taaffe (Citation2009, pp. 131–144, 141).
20 See, for example, the Old Man’s fascistic pronouncements in On the Boiler, the essay that accompanied W.B. Yeats's play Purgatory.
21 The essay was published a year before MacGreevy’s death in 1967.