Mystic Leeway 9780773573963

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T H E

M Y S T I C

L E E W A Y

She loved green things, the sound of water, the chaste, untouched, the gold and frozen daffodils

too much.

Hilda Doolittle on Frances Gregg in Paint It Today

THE MYSTIC LEEWAY

FRANCES GREGG

Edited by Ben Jones

With an Account of Frances Gregg by Oliver Marlow Wilkinson

CARLETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

"Frances Gregg: First Hand" and The Mystic Leeway © Copyright Oliver M. Wilkinson, 1995. Preface, Introduction &. Notes ©Ben Jones, 1995. Published by Carleton University Press, 1995. Printed and bound in Canada CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Gregg, Frances, 1884-1941 The mystic leeway (Carleton women's experience series ; 6) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88629-250-6 1. Gregg, Frances, 1884-1941. 2. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886-1961—Friends, and associates. I. Jones, Ben, 1930- . II. Title III. Series. CT275.G74A3 1995

811'.52

C94-900669-6

Cover concept: Carleton University Press Cover execution and interior: Carrie Colton Graphic Design Jacob Epstein's Adam on page 176 is reproduced by kind permission of Harewood House Trust. Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vi

Editor's Preface Ben Jones

vii

Editor's Introduction Ben Jones

1

"My Hilda" Frances Gregg

15

Frances Gregg: First Hand Oliver Marlow Wilkinson

17

Note on the Text Oliver Marlow Wilkinson

43

The Mystic Leeway Frances Gregg

51

Endnotes

181

Works Cited

191

ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece: Frances Gregg in her teens

ii

Oliver Marlow Wilkinson and Frances Gregg

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Julia Vanness Gregg, with Betty

28

Oliver and the dog, at Oaken Hill Hall

34

Frances and Julia

60

Frances

80

Amy Hoyt

98

John Cowper Powys

102

Frances in Philadelphia

104

Julia and Hilda aboard La Floride

112

Frances, with her mother and grandmother

164

Epstein's Adam

176

PREFACE

P

Published here for the first time is Frances Gregg's memoir, The Mystic Leeway. Frances Gregg was born in 1884 and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In her twenties, Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) were her close friends. In 1912 she met John Cowper Powys. She married the lecturer and writer Louis Wilkinson in 1912, after breaking with H.D. Except for several periods of travel and living in the United States, Italy and France, she lived in England until her death in a bombing raid in 1941- The Mystic Leeway recounts events from Gregg's early years and from later wanderings with her mother, son and daughter. H.D. wrote about events of the early years with Gregg from another perspective in HERmione, Paint It Today and Asphodel. Of central importance to Gregg's life and to this writing was the journey to Europe with her mother and with Hilda in 1911 — three Americans carrying out their obligation to discover "culture." The Mystic Leeway provides a reading of a mythic and an actual journey towards enlightenment, an enlightenment that is both embittered and affirming. In placing this text, both the enlightenment and its disclosure through the act of writing must be accounted for. Frances Gregg broke away from the course of literary Modernism. This break is impor-

tant to our thinking about Modernism, particularly about the typing of women within the ideologies and politics of art. H.D., too, wrote about this problem. Gregg explains her own actions but makes it clear that her resentment against what Pound and especially H.D. were doing is mixed with, complicated by, her deep affection for them. There is personal bitterness in this text, and more importantly there is a countering of the "aesthetic ideology" Gregg attributed to Pound and H.D., and to "modern" artists in general, a countering of what she considered to be the "sickness" of art. I discuss these views in my introductory essay, along with her "messianism," and with what I have called her "philo/anti-semitism." There are deeply disturbing moments in her writing, but they have a context. The text itself provides a testament that contributes to the understanding of our time and past-time. The Mystic Leeway was completed in February of 1941. Gregg, her mother, and her daughter were killed in a bombing raid on Devonport on the 21st of April of that year. On the night of the raid, she was at a school, separated from her mother and daughter. Oliver Wilkinson tells in his account how, during a lull in the bombing, she "locked the manuscript of her book in the safe" and walked through the burning city to be with them. The book was The Mystic Leeway. The scene of her death is movingly re-enacted in a British television documentary entitled Hilda's Book produced in 1986. The history of the typescript, its journey, is told by Oliver Wilkinson in his note on the text.

While we do not have a complete account of Frances Gregg, we do have considerable information. Oliver Wilkinson has written about her in The Powys Review, as has Penny Smith. She is mentioned frequently in the correspondence between Llewelyn and John Cowper Powys and in the letters and thorough notes in the recently published Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg. Richard Perceval Graves in The Brothers Powys has drawn together numerous references to her in letters, personal accounts, poems and works of fiction connected to Llewelyn, Theodore and John Cowper Powys. Although the book focusses on the brothers, a powerful image of Gregg emerges from Graves's careful and generous research. Gregg figures in another text on the Powyses, Recollections of the Powys Brothers: Llewelyn, Theodore and John Cowper, edited and introduced by Belinda Humfrey. References to Frances Gregg and to The Mystic Leeway have been made by writers on H.D., but always — and understandably — in the context of H.D.'s priority. Gregg's importance to our reading of H.D. has been documented in the work of Barbara Guest, Janice Robinson, Susan Stanford Friedman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Michael King, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, Gillian Hanscombe, Virginia L. Smyers, Cassandra Laity and Robert Spoo (Laity's edition of Paint It Today and Spoo's edition of Asphodel, both published in 1992, are invaluable companions to The Mystic Leeway). With the publication of The Mystic Leeway, the

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voice of this woman who played such an important role in H.D.'s life can now be heard. Of particular importance to the study of relationships unveiled in The Mystic Leeway is the role of the mother. Frances Gregg's mother, Julia Vanness Gregg, is an ominous figure in the text, as she undoubtedly was in Gregg's and H.D.'s life. She chaperoned the two women on their trip to Europe in 1911. The Mother, exemplified by Julia, is recreated in Gregg's own life, in her declared option for Motherhood over Art, and in her broken (but unforgotten) relation to H.D. I have included a photograph, probably taken by Frances, of Hilda and Julia aboard ship on the 1911 voyage. It is an image of telling power. The maternal power cannot be missed in the relation between Frances and her son, Oliver Wilkinson. The mutuality of devotion — mother to son and, especially through the publication of this text, son to mother — is always present. Some aspects of the maternal context are examined in the introduction and will, I hope, open the way to further study. We cannot miss the powerful resonances in Oliver Wilkinson's story of finding and identifying his mother's body, along with those of her own mother and his sister, after the bombing raid that killed them. The typescript of The Mystic Leeway was made available to me by Oliver Wilkinson. Gregg's poem to Hilda, "My Hilda," written in the flyleaf of H.D.'s Sea Garden (1916), has been included in this edition. The copy of Sea Garden was given to Gregg by

P R E F A C E

H.D., and is now in the possession of Oliver Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson has also made available other photographs accompanying this text. The text of The Mystic Leeway was typed by Gregg and sent chapter by chapter to John Cowper Powys, at whose suggestion it was written. He returned the chapters to her. We do not have evidence that a final editing had taken place. From correspondence between Gregg and Powys it seems clear this work was intended for publication at some point. Oliver Wilkinson has made several incidental corrections to the text, and he explains these in his essay. The object of this edition is to present a reliable and accessible text. What editorial work has been done? To preserve Gregg's own voice, I have omitted no portion of the text. It is possible that Gregg, had she lived, would have rewritten some parts of the text. But her conclusion makes it clear that the text we have here is what she wanted to say, what she thought it "necessary" to say. Some prominent literary figures — H.D., Pound, John Cowper Powys, Llewelyn Powys, Louis Wilkinson — have not been identified at length, although some of them are commented upon in the endnotes. I have not added to the formidable presence of Gregg's mother, Julia Vanness Gregg, and I have not elaborated Gregg's comments on her own family: Oliver and Betty, Gregg's own children; Margaret, Oliver's wife; or the grandchildren. Nor have I added specific information about Gregg's friends: James Henderson, Amy Hoyt, and

Andrew Gibson. I have provided annotations for several of the writers and artists to whom Gregg gives special attention: Jacob Epstein, Walter Rummel, May Sinclair, Alice Meynell and George Moore. Of these, Epstein is certainly the most important, and his work was, I believe, a powerful influence on her during the time of writing. The others, too, occupy designated positions in the artistic milieu as it is disclosed in the text. Mr. Kenneth Wilson, now studying at York University, assisted me in preparing the text for presentation. He generously shared his expertise. We have made occasional changes in punctuation. In several cases we have altered word order to clarify the positioning of clauses. We corrected some misspellings (on the principle that Gregg herself, or her editor, would have made these corrections). Gregg, American by birth and education but English by intrusion ("adoption" would be misleading), shifts between American and English spelling. She uses archaisms on several occasions, and these we have preserved. Oliver Wilkinson's hospitality, his advice, his readily-shared information, his style, his patience, and his devotion to Frances Gregg, have made this edition possible. He wishes especially to acknowledge the assistance of Amy Gibson. Others have participated: the late Peter Powys Grey of New York City, who first handed me the typescript and who was a constant source of excitement about all things Powysian, and Margaret McCullough, who has seen this edition materialize, and whose work

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on H.D. (and the Maternal) have given shape to my own thinking. Denis Lane, of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), provided support, and "in times of trouble" Belinda Humfrey kept alive the world of Powys through her editorship of The Powys Review. Morine Krissdottir, chair of the Powys Society, who has written so well on John Cowper Powys and the Powys family, has been a generous and eager supporter, as have other members of the Powys Society, especially Glen Cavaliero of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, John and Eve Batten of Montacute, Paul Roberts, and Louise de Bruin of The Powys Journal. I wish also to thank Gerald Pollinger of Laurence Pollinger Limited, agent for the Gregg Estate, for his support and advice. This gratitude particularly applies to the cooperation that he has extended to scholars working on various collections of Powys and Powys-related material. I wish also to thank Stephen Gardiner for granting permission to use his comments on Jacob Epstein. Jennifer Strickland, of the Carleton University Press, gave new and finer life to the typescript in the final stages of preparation. I wish to thank the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, for their financial support. Ben Jones

INTRODUCTION "all that I am is most necessary"

L

/et me start with some cautionary — and haunting — words from The Mystic Leeway: So far, in all my life I have met no single Man— though I have done my best to make one of Oliver Marlow [Wilkinson]—nor has any man encouraged me, or indeed been willing for me, to be a Woman. Mumbo-jumbo, superstitions, muddled mythologies, have been my fate among these artists and prelates and magicians, these escapists from life—from Life!

If no man would speak for Frances Gregg, she could speak for herself, and this is what she has done. She has no illusions about such speaking. About midway through the text Gregg tells us she began this writing as a record of "those people who, in the hurly-burly, the wash and silt of life, seemed to me keen and reputable, not beggars . . . wrapped all about with the rags and gauds and trappings of other people's thoughts and other people's laws and other people's conventions." These would be "the people whom she knew best," Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Ezra Pound, John Cowper Powys, among others whom she tells us about in The Mystic Leeway, But, she says,

more and more it is becoming a tale of the one whom I knew least, this baffled, hag-ridden, bewildered I, about whom I shall never come to say she was this, or that. . . . Oh, if I can but find you, strange companion who is I, then I shall know the secrets of life and death, but I shall not find you, neither I nor anyone.

Gregg's comment here, with its assertion of the search for selfhood and subjectivity, and the awareness of its inevitable failure, sets a narrative pattern. By way of an introduction, I would like to talk about that pattern, to show — with her cautionary words in mind — that her writing is towards her own subjectivity. It is writing directed towards the clearing away of fate: her fate, which was to have passed all her days "among prelates and priests and magicians" who were, in fact, no more than "escapists . . . from Life!" The Mystic Leeway is an uncertain, disconcerting text, until now unedited and unpublished. With its connections to canonized figures of Modernism, it provides useful information. If this tracing of her life does not direct our attention to the centre of Modernism, it does expose its margins. In recent scholarly and critical work on H.D., Frances Gregg has received much attention. For example, Cassandra Laity's discussion of Gregg in her introduction to Paint It Today is both generous and provocative. There is little doubt about Gregg's strange attraction: "uncanny" is an

appropriate word. She was the model for fictional characters in novels by H.D. and by John Cowper Powys. Recent editions of Paint It Today and Asphodel delineate her relations to H.D. and Pound, and it shows her presence in the world of literary Modernism.1 Yet, even in these texts, she remains set apart and enclosed as the Other. Because of the particular kind of woman that Frances Gregg was, and wanted to be, her text does much more than provide information or anecdotal tracing. It is a writing towards subjectivity, and it provides if not a paradigm at least a scenario for a narrative based on the configurations of gender. It is a woman's writing. Frances Gregg's fate among the Moderns was complicated. The Mystic Leeway tells parts of the story: a young woman from Philadelphia who went to Europe with her mother and her lover (Hilda Doolittle) to experience what Henry James called "the complex fate."2 Henry James inscribed the tour. Frances Gregg took the trip. There is indeed a Jamesian twist: she was betrayed by Culture. An American middle-class girl from an Eastern city does middle-class things: becomes educated, goes to lectures, believes — for a time — in art, kisses a poet, tries her hand at poetry, falls in love with a woman (perhaps not, then, an especially middle-class thing to have done), falls in love with a man, goes to Europe, makes a mistake, resolves to live with it. She writes a discourse: The Mystic Leeway. It remains unpublished for more than half a century. She is killed

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in a Blitz, with her mother and her own daughter, in 1941: at the beginning of a war, at the end of Modernism. This was not the end she projected in The Mystic Leeway, not the coming of a Messiah who would be a woman and a Jew. She was herself rewritten from time to time in books about Hilda Doolittle. She has been inscribed in a television production entitled — it seems like Fate — "Hilda's Book." Gregg is gone, but not forgotten; she is remembered, perhaps most compellingly, by her son. The Mystic Leeway is written about, for, and certainly at times against, her lovers: Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, James Henderson, John Cowper Powys, for Amy Hoyt, for and against her mother. It was especially written for her son, Oliver Wilkinson, whose information about the text given in his commentary, his recreation of its origins and its fate, and his hopes for it, provide a powerful witness to the actualities of writing and living in the Modern period. It was, perhaps ironically, a man, John Cowper Powys, who encouraged her to write her own story.3 His own Autobiography (1934) had been both a personal testament and a literary success, and I think he believed such autobiographical writing would provide the same rewards for Frances. Oliver Wilkinson, in his "Note on the Text," discusses Powys's suggestion. I mark only the importance of Gregg's placing of her writing: it will be written from the "god-forgotten, god-forgetting

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material world, the world of the shadow of life (or 'death' as they say in the original)." This shadow world is her "mystic leeway." It is the site of Nothingness and it is, paradoxically, both mystical and safe. In the sense that the book is written for another (for a lover), this is the right place for writing: out of Nothing. Her purpose is to uncover memory, and by memory to recover herself. It is a narrative of disclosure written out of the remembrance of closures. Autobiographical writing, writing of the subject, has at times been faulted for lack of structure. Only recently has attention been given to the structure of the writing subject. Like all narrative, The Mystic Leeway proceeds by repetition. After a discussion of Frances Gregg's particular place in Modernism, her place in the eyes of the Modern, I will discuss, for this preliminary view of the text, five "figures" which make up these repetitions: crossings, differences, mothering and matriarchy, the limits of art, and an ending as an appearance in the void of a "messiah" who hopefully will be, for Frances Gregg, a woman and a Jew. IN THE EYES OF THE MODERN

In the book Writing for Their Lives, Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers demonstrate one view of the woman in Modernism. Their argument is that the Modernist women strove to resolve the conflict between a real woman and a real writer: "Modernism, for its women, was not

just a question of style; it was a way of life" (11). "The body of work they [Dorothy Richardson, H.D., Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, and others] produced is magnificent testimony to the courage of women who refuse to be content with their assigned identities and functions. It is testimony, too, to the total commitment women will give to shaping a literature — and therefore a world — in which the texture of women's experience is central" (248). In her relationships with Pound and H.D. (and to John Cowper Powys as well, who must be placed in the Modernist tradition), Gregg was close to this aspect of literary culture. She wrote poems acceptable to Pound, and her relation to H.D. was marked by both intellectual and artistic connections. But in The Mystic Leeway, Gregg states in retrospect her objections to the culture of Modernism, specifically to its main premise that art and life could, or should, be the same. She objected that these "artists," "prelates" and "magicians" (and she might have added "priestesses") were in fact escapists from life. And her objections raise another problem. Is the role of the woman in Modernism any different from the traditional role of woman in literature: that of the Other — idol, muse, beauty, caretaker, mimic or slavey — whatever form Otherness might take? H.D. herself raised this question, and answered that the woman must overcome being the Muse if she were to become the writer ("Heliodora" can be read this way). Why is it Gregg felt compelled to resist the gaze of these priests and priestesses?

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Both John Cowper Powys and H.D. provide some evidence. In 1911 Powys was a notable, indeed flamboyant lecturer in the United States. He nourished, on native ground, the everlasting American hunger for English culture. As Constance Harsh has pointed out in her article "John Cowper Powys at the Iris Club," he professed himself to be, among other things, the "champion of the immoral against the moral." 4 His lectures were widely acclaimed, and he had a following. He certainly made his mark in Philadelphia. Here I will note only one aspect of the relationship with Gregg, that having to do with Gregg as an "emanation" (for "emanation" is what Powys considered her to be). Shortly after their first meeting on 9 January 1912, John Cowper Powys sent a poem to Gregg, addressing her as Sadista. Gregg seemed to attract exotic names: Sadista here, Lucrezia in a peculiar drama invented by Powys mentioned in The Mystic Leeway, Messalina and Faustine in H.D.'s Paint It Today. The poem is 112 lines long, and it is written in the Swinburnian mode. (Jack and Frances read Swinburne together, just as Hilda and Frances had.) Here is a passage typical for its placing of Gregg as an enchanting, perhaps enchanted, beauty: "Is it not strange? / That a shy white body like yours, Sadista, / Should only grow more and more delicious, / The more it is made to quiver under the lash — / The more it is bruised by the Panther's tongue? / O little gasping cries! / O little arms that vainly struggle!" The poem ends with the speaker's blade "Pointed, pointed forever" at the breast of

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Frances / Sadista.5 The poem "Sadista" does not quite sound like a bagatelle; its sado-masochism is a little too strong. The lovers were, after all, two highly literary, "liberated" and undoubtedly consenting adults. But whatever the tone or intent, it speaks the language of domination and violence. Yet if Frances was a victim on one page, she became a priestess on another. Oliver Wilkinson quotes an earlier Powys letter, written just before the Sadista poem, in which Frances is assigned the role of priestess cleansing Jack's shores: "Even as I write this your being and essence flow over me, like a flood, and I am clean of all — The salt cold Frances at her priest-like task of pure ablution round Jack's human shores!" (Letters 4). The allusion here to Keats's "Bright Star," written from another John to another Frances, is conspicuous. Powys's preoccupation with sadism is well known, and he often confesses his penchant for pornography. Sadism forms a line of narrative in a number of his fictions, and it is central to his confessions in Autobiography. Here it apparently drifted over into his courtship rituals. In the "Sadista" poem the female is fetish. This is a motif to be found over the course of his writing. The central problem in Wolf Solent, for example, is Wolf's realization that his perception of the world, particularly his perception of women, has been devastated by his obsession for fetish making. The Sadista poem has not, to my knowledge, been published. This is, perhaps, just as well. The poem informs us of a particular kind of desire, not always a man's, fulfilling

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itself in narratives that position the woman as object in another person's eye, the usual position of the woman in male Modernist texts. The mention of Powys is more than just a random example of emotional involvement. Powys played the critical role in the breakdown of Frances's relation to Hilda. His attentions to her must have been extraordinary, but more importantly, Powys was instrumental in arranging Frances's marriage to Louis Wilkinson, the blow that ended a direct relation to H.D. Cassandra Laity describes this breakdown dramatically: "Gregg 'betrayed' H.D. for the last time by leaving London to marry lecturer Louis Wilkinson" (Paint It Today xxvi). In the relation with Powys, Frances assumed the role of the "uncanny," the Freudian "unheimlich." The "uncanny" was also a key element in the relation between Gregg and H.D., particularly in H.D.'s analysis by Freud (see Friedman, Psyche Reborn 38-39). Eyes emit and exchange power. Hilda Doolittle records her first meeting with Frances in the scarcely fictional Paint It Today. The meeting provides a context not only for Gregg's relation to Hilda but for her image as the object of the other's gaze. Frances is placed in an iconographic text (in the passage, Hilda takes the name Midget, Frances is Josepha): It was not that the girl, Josepha, was beautiful, judged by the ordinary standards. She came into the room, stood stiff against the oak doors that

closed heavily behind her. She was inordinately self conscious. Perhaps she was shy. . . . The other girl's face [the "other" is Josepha / Gregg] was slightly spotted. Her color was bad. The slate grey raincoat did not do it justice. The grey veil was not altogether an inspiration. The girl (Midget thought), somehow or other felt this, was almost glad of this. It was her eyes, set in the unwholesome face; it was the shoulders, a marble splendour, unspoiled by the severe draping of straight cut rainproof; it was her hand, small, unbending, stiff with archaic grandeur; it was her eyes, an unholy splendour. Her eyes were the blue eyes it is said one sees in heaven; eyes, Angelo would have garnered in a group of holy boys, copied for one face and recreated for another; eyes a Messalina might have wrought (to stab a Caesar) into bright steel; eyes the color of wet hyacinths before the spikes have broken into flower . . . .6 It may have been true, as the family stated, that the girl Josepha, was not a good influence, had an unwholesome quality about her somehow, was not normal, was not quite the friend they would have chosen, at least not the friend to the exclusion of other friends they would have chosen. The young erstwhile fiance [this is Ezra Pound], now on formal terms and friendly with the family circle, may also have been right when he twitched his very young mustaches and thrust out his slight under-developed chin and said:

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"You and that girl, a hundred years ago, would have been burned at Salem, for witches." The hounds of Hecate might have dogged Josepha's footprints. She loved green things, the sound of water, the chaste, untouched, the gold and frozen daffodils too much. She was undoubtedly unwholesome (8-10). If Gregg were Sadista and cleansing priestess to Powys, to H.D. she was Messalina with eyes like a knife, a boy, a hyacinth (it became a password between them), a witch, of the tribe of Hecate, her eyes had an "unholy splendour," and she was (other people told her) "undoubtedly unwholesome." In the scene from Paint It Today, H.D. (as Midget) gazes at the strange outsider Josepha, but she is in turn gazed at by this stranger; she herself becomes the object of Gregg's look. Much is made of Josepha's strange eyes. But Hilda is, after all, writing the text, and is herself the gazer, the painter of all the scenes. There are in the passage nuances of violence (Messalina, eyes like daggers, spikes of flowers) and domination: "She came in the room, stood stiffly against the oak doors that closed heavily behind her"(8), doors in some Gothic castle, not just a door in a Philadelphia drawing room. Retrospectively (Paint It Today was written in the fall of 1921, the scene itself would have occurred about ten years earlier), it seems an auspicious beginning of the lesbian encounter (see Friedman Psyche Reborn 39, and Cassandra Laity's introduction to Paint It Today xxvi-xxxiii). Certainly H.D.

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recorded it as such. The point here is that in the eyes of her beholder Gregg always assumes a role, and this role has a persistently literary and iconographic context. Art, after all, is Life! This becoming "modern" was taking place in her own home town, Philadelphia, with H.D. and Pound. Europe and London, and Powys, would come later. These early years — Gregg and H.D. were in their twenties — set triangular patterns of attachment, often marked by gender fluidity, patterns that were by no means extinguished in later years. Paint It Today tells part of the story: Midget (H.D.) confesses to Josepha (Gregg): "Yes, you tell lies, Josepha. There were never other hyacinths" (55). Now that we have it as a complete text, Paint It Today makes a moving companion to The Mystic Leeway. Perhaps Frances and Hilda still share a life. As recorded in The Mystic Leeway, Frances Gregg's life has a specific context: it is a life surrounded by the intellectual and artistic auras of her time. At the beginning of her connections with Pound and H.D., then with Powys and others, she had opportunities and abilities that could have given her a place among the Moderns. But both in Powys's and H.D.'s case, she was someone to be seen, tempted by, and used. She did not choose to preserve such a role. CROSSINGS Crossings prevail throughout the text of The Mystic Leeway. First, there are the actual journeys which

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took place during the writing. The family (Frances, her mother, daughter and son) moved six times during the period of composition. But this intimation of constant movement was not unusual according to her son. The moves from 1938 through 1940, which stopped when Frances got a job in the Navy, Army, Air Force Institute (NAAFI) at Devonport, are documented in the text, and they presage the larger motif of movement in her life. The narration begins with an episode describing a visit by gypsies to Frances's caravan. She spontaneously identifies herself as one of them. "I am a caravanner" she says, and adds: I want to claim no country for my own, and to take the whole world in my stride. I want to move on, and on, and on. No one, but I, knows the tricks, the subterfuges, the safely argued reasons, the elaborate befoolments with which I have uprooted my parent, and my offspring, together with the dogs, cats, fowls, or rabbit of the moment, and moved them on to sate this unconquerable urge. I do not know why I do it, nor what I seek, nor towards what bourn I am eternally pressing. I don't know. Nor do I know who it is who weeps darkly within me, longing for its "home." Here she is nomad, using family and pets in a cycle of desire and deceit, as she herself explains it. The localized journeys at the time of writing are doubled in the narrative as the obsessive journey of her

life, the longing for home, which clearly is not Philadelphia. A detailed reading of the narration will reveal the repetitions of the journey theme as forming the constituents of the narrative. I shall mention only one other occurrence of the journey motif. It was certainly the most important actual journey she ever took. The trip to Europe with her mother and with Hilda Doolittle in 1911 comes into focus repeatedly throughout her narrative. There are some contraries in her recording of the trip: she recalls the ocean voyage itself as the "happiest and most exciting adventure of my life," yet she wonders why all the other passengers, as she learned at the end of voyage, were waiting "patiently" for her to throw herself overboard. But she knows why her countenance was so sad, and she tells us: she had been "urban born and bred," and her city life had offered the possibilities of picking and choosing a philosophy or a plan for living. The sea, the "vast arena of the unknown, the incomprehensible," offered "no possible answer." I can still feel that awful emptiness, loneliness, grief, of those hours of struggle. It had to be and I had to face it. I remember the feelings of my sharp chin pressed down upon my cold salt hands that clasped the rail, just that frail barrier of flesh between me and nothingness. This left me with an awful tenderness for the flesh, the pitiful poor thing.

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This emptiness was the context for the voyage into exile, taken with her mother and her lover, and the voyage left her with "an awful tenderness for the flesh, the pitiful poor thing." From the multiplicities of eventful crossings, we move to figures of another kind of exile. DIFFERENCES

The Mystic Leeway was written for those people whom Frances Gregg desired, and she names them: Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), James Henderson (who, while courting her, talked about the girl he really cared for), Amy Hoyt, and John Cowper Powys. Each of them offered something different to her, and each failed her. No failure was so complete as her relation to Hilda. On one level, we trace the paths between her love for a woman and her love for (several) men. Sexual difference repeats itself throughout the narration, and there are incidents of revelation, moments of intensity, particularly in her discovery of (her discoveries with) Hilda. Hilda has written about the relation in much more detail in HERmione, in which the triangular desires of Frances, Ezra and Hilda are delineated, and, as we have already seen, in Paint It Today and Asphodel. Certainly Hilda felt that she and Hilda shared a special world. They really were different people, and Frances's seeming occult powers enhanced the difference. Frances recalls a moment of special revelation: the gaze is out the window of a train at night, the

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image is that of a double "medallion." Frances and Hilda are reflected in the glass, against the darkness. It is a moment of "mystic communication of beauty." She stares at Hilda's reflected face and sees, like a "second medallion," her own. There was a "mysterious excitement of being borne on and on through space while the eyes of those phantom girls met, out there, where no thing was." This was the moment when "we knew . . . all that we were ever to know of the meaning of life." She notes how this moment set up a pattern of repetitions in her life: "Afterwards we elaborated upon the theme, and tried it out upon the lovers of our choice who, with marked unanimity, and painful regularity, deserted us." There are other moments of intense involvement, but her memories are mixed. "Hilda was entrancing. / Hilda was ridiculous. / Hilda was exquisite. / Hilda was hideous." Remembering, with the relation broken, she can still say: "My heart turns over in my breast as I remember her, and how, in my loneliness I brooded and brooded upon that face, reading it and re-reading it, like a thrilling endless book." One event is Hilda's "rescue" of Frances from a suicide attempt, bringing her back to the house. It may only be a coincidence that the episode took place in the woods where they had found wild hyacinths, a hyacinth garden. Cassandra Laity has suggested the homoerotic probabilities of many such hyacinth references (see note 6). This scene provides the only incident in the text of physical contact (caressing

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and comforting) between Frances and Hilda. To counter whatever intensity it arouses, the narration ends comically, with some talk about woollen nether garments. Hilda is astonished that Frances wears woollen combinations. "Why not?" she responds to Hilda's wonder. After this event, the narration leaves Hilda and returns to time-present, the hardships of the winter of 1938-39. And in this chapter, which was supposed to be Hilda's, Frances provides a generous portrait of Oliver's young wife who is both person and "sign," a premonition of the overcoming of "that failure, man": Margaret is all woman, wise as the deathless ones themselves in certain woman matters that have not yet been bruited in literature and so are unknown to life. One day a woman will rise up and laugh to scorn all man's analyzing and invention. But the time has not come yet. We women still ape that failure, man, and are still dominated by his colossal bluff of knowing us, we, who do not know ourselves.

Then, as she concludes the chapter, she remembers her original design, but instead of returning to Hilda she moves to "that bright-haired poet who first kissed the lips of Frances," Ezra Pound. The details of the relation to Pound give way to an enigmatic comment she makes at the end of the chapter, a comment that makes it clear that, at least in memory, Pound was no passing fancy:

Mr. Pound, explain yourself. I have raged enough. For your sake I have torn my lovers from dithering limb to limb. You had something — in those first kisses you scattered so widely like stars upon a cerulean field of flowering maidens, you had something of which your poetry has been no more than a dim and vapid echo. Believe me, we have been faithful to you, lover Micawber, though, in very truth I forgot you years ago. So much I know, that a woman has but one lover, one only, one whom she is destined never to know, never to find and to whom she is to be forever faithful.

There is no sense in this text of her recovery either from love of woman or love of man. Neither is there any sense that she should have tried to recover. But there is strong sense that she remained the Other to all lovers. As she has told us already, no man ever allowed her to be a woman, nor did any woman, except, perhaps, Amy Hoyt: flat body, angular hips, little sculptured hands. She is entitled to one short paragraph that ends: "I have known no other woman who was good." I do not think that we read confusion into her recitation of her sexuality: confusion is grounded in the narration. She admits her own, and everyone else's, bewilderment. Early in the text, it is an acceptable bewilderment: "Male and femaleness in sexual matters is remarkably inconclusive and fluid; male and female characteristics weave and intertwine, and run the gamut of a dual expressiveness

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bewildering to the protagonists." Within a year of her return from the trip to Europe with Hilda, she was married (to Louis Wilkinson), had found (was found by?) another male lover (John Cowper Powys), and had committed herself to motherhood. But Hilda remained. As late as 1934, she wrote to Hilda: "I wanted the original woman who poked her head through the womb of time. You are it, and I am your still born twin" (quoted in Guest, 180). Hilda did not forget. Nevertheless, there were losses: Ezra, Hilda, Louis, Kenneth Macpherson, James Henderson, and John Cowper Powys.7 MOTHERING AND MATRIARCHY The figure of the mother is constantly before us in the narration and as an overview we can say that we have a counter-Persephone myth: instead of Ceres searching out the lost daughter, we have the lost daughter unable to escape from the perennial Mother, indeed, lost because of the Mother. The mythic pattern is told with resentment, with unsparing bitterness. What could life have been without her? The intrusions of the mother set out a pattern in the narrative, and the intrusions are not without strangeness. There is bitter rivalry between Julia (the mother) and Hilda. The trip to Europe, made possible by Julia's presence, was nevertheless one long argument. Frances remembers it as a struggle between her deep devotion to Hilda and her necessary obedience to Julia (Frances was aged

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27 at the time; oddly, they are sometimes called childhood friends.) "Needless to say," Frances records, "my mother wept, wailed, and gnashed her teeth across two continents, accusing Hilda of robbing the widow of her orphan, destroying its morals, besmirching its innocence, leading it to betray the sainted duties of daughterhood." Several pages later, after recording her mother's accusation that Frances's conversation was "abominable and filthy" and the fault of her friends, Frances moves into one of the most lyric descriptions of Hilda's beauty in the text: "her heavy-lidded eyes, her chiselled lips, that something glaucous and yet flowerlike that was her very essence, and the mystic light that glowed within her like a flame globed in alabaster." One of the most devastating comments on her mother is her two-page treatment of her mother's own lovers, Rowena, Harriet and Katy. "Once I came upon her and my mother locked in passionate embrace. . . . Had I hissed 'Lesbian' at her, she would have yelled the house down." Each of them is given a repulsive end: Rowena "trundled towards her tomb, ranting in jangled imbecility"; Harriet dead by starvation; an aged Katy the object of the mother's scornful laughter because of her pathetic love gestures. There is no evidence to validate Gregg's reporting, but her malice is obvious enough. Immediately after this scene, she invokes Amy: "My own friend, Amy, was not like any of these." The record of motherhood that Frances leaves of her mother exposes the dark side of Otherness.

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In one of the final statements about Julia, she does not mince words: By one of the freakish elements in my mother's character I had grown up to these years of over twenty in complete ignorance of the phallic in life. I had grown up, too, in a morbid isolation that she had imposed upon me. I was the solitary stamping ground for that centaur-lady of the blue and fiery eye, the limpid moist eye, the lascivious languishing eye. Upon me she poured out all the phials of her perversity, of her thwarted sex, of the hot flight of her blood. . . . What it [sex] was all about came as, first, a ludicrous anticlimax, and then as a menace, a terror in life, a thing by which everything had to be re-stated and revalued, but worst and most fatal of all it robbed man [she means, the male] of his dignity, and [robbed] life of freewill and real personality.

The passage goes on to show how the three lovers (Ezra, Hilda, herself) had had no chance for happiness: Hilda "came out of the nothingness with a message that none could read"; Ezra and Hilda together remained "just out of the range of [Gregg's] comprehension." "I, too, was attracted to them, either, each, the sex made no matter." THE LIMITS OF ART

The cultural roles assigned to sexual difference are, in Frances Gregg's view, obstacles to be overcome.

This struggle is particularly problematic for the artist. The real opposition is spirit-body: "Know yourself as dual, the parting of the ways." Adults should be intelligent, beyond sexuality, asexual: "I would bid them bear their children while they, themselves, were young enough to understand, and guide the child mind. Then, at eighteen, or twenty, or thereabout, I would bid them to think of putting childish things behind them, bid them enter into adulthood, adulthood which would be sterile, sexless and intelligent." It is important to note that these comments are followed immediately by recollections of her visit, with her mother and Hilda, to art galleries in Manchester and Birmingham to look at Pre-Raphelite art. The paintings of Rossetti, Watts and Burne-Jones, which she once had admired, became "cheap sentiment." Because of this experience — she calls it a "revolution" — her life turns round: "I ceased, at this point, to be a nice woman. I was bitter, scornful of my betters, and determined to be a spy. Myself was my nearest quarry. For better, for worse, I determined to follow where the wind of my desire listed, denying nothing, formulating nothing, but knowing, at least, one woman naked as Eve." Art in the widest sense fared no better than the art of the Pre-Raphelites: it was "wishful thinking," and "cheap sentiment." It was made by men, who were soft, or women who imitated men. She had already said: "The male is only capable of a terrific, short-lived effort mentally and emotionally. After that he repeats himself for what it is worth. Take

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any man that you know, he exhausts himself in the first effort, whatever it may be, a life pose, or an art." And somewhat more maliciously, "he becomes an old poseur clinging to his youthful fancies, as Ezra clung to his beret and his velvet jacket and the flowing tie when a round paunch and a ruddy countenance made them pathetic — to those who loved him, and just ridiculous to the young who saw him for the first time in his age." As for women artists: "Show me a young woman artist and I will show you a stealer of some man's thunder." That she has a project in mind, and not just a release of spleen, becomes clear in her assertion: "I am probably the first real woman artist" (emphasis added). She does qualify this somewhat: "If they ever have a beginning, they die young, like Emily Bronte. Not Charlotte. Any man could have written her stuff. But could aught but a woman have conceived Wuthering Heights7." Her writing has taken her to an increasingly hostile position in relation to her mother. Gregg sees her mother's obsessiveness, and possessiveness, countering her own attempts to be a free person in the world. These attempts at fulfillment — the journeys, lovers, friends — were wasted. Among the wastes, art was illusory, having nothing to do with life, a product of male weakness masking as power: "Artists did not seem to me the vanguard, but the rear-guard in life.... They were the cosmic journalists, a noble profession but, as far as creation went, they were sterile and impotent." Art was Joyce's "sewer," the Cult of the Entrails,

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Hilda's Narcissism. Difference engendered perpetual bickering and betrayal, failure. Sexuality, and gender, must be overcome. If this overcoming were to take place, art might be tried again, and in this re-ordering of the human Gregg is "probably the first real woman artist." As for the present, she cannot conceal her malice towards a world that had ruined itself and still, in the winter of 194041, would not give up trying: "never has the world struggled in such contagion as this." But where has her writing taken her? "I am alone in a void. Here, incorporeal, stripped of the phantasms of the senses, reft of imagination, knowing that I know nothing, here I find the thing that I am. It is cold, hollow as a mask, with sightless eyes." It was an astonishing vision, and Gregg faced it alone. AN ENDING

The Mystic Leeway takes form through journeys, large and small, and through encounters of unresolved sexual difference within Frances Gregg's group of friends and lovers. Sexuality, gender and art are to be overcome. Within the overall pattern, we find many passages of great interest. There are character sketches (of the writers May Sinclair, George Moore and Alice Meynell, for example), strange encounters (including a beautifully comic ouija-board session with Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Yeats, and a mystifying occult, or cult, experience with Hilda and Walter Rummel),8 some vituperative comments on the literary world to

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which she was sometimes invited, her arguments (when she departs from narrative) privileging mind over body and, as a continuing motif, her proselytizing for her idea of Jesus (a Jesus best typified by an Epstein wooden sculpture she remembered seeing in London). Within the anecdotes a pattern remains. Frances had a vision to end the torment. It would be a visionary politics. Somewhere there must be a leader, and of this leader she says: "I believe that it is again to the Jews that we must look for a leader, and I would hope that that leader may be a woman." The ending of The Mystic Leeway must be read in the context of Frances's messianic obsession and, connected to this obsession, her philo/antisemitism. She tells us repeatedly of her turning to Christ/Jesus (the names are used interchangeably without, I think, distinctions). This Jesus (who never entered a church and is not the God) is set against what she calls the failures of "art," specifically the sterile world of Modernism. She takes Epstein's sculpture of Jesus (which her memory tells her Pound took her to see) as the epitome of the crucified human, and believes that only such an artist as Epstein,9 with his Jewish inheritance, could grasp the significance of such crucifixion. Epstein's Adam, which Gregg could could have seen, provided her with an image of a reborn humanity (see note 21). Throughout the text, but particularly in its conclusion, a messianic vision is proclaimed. Certainly the coming of the war accounts in part

for such proclamation. But she has recounted her own life in terms of crucifixion, suffering and, possibly, salvation. Gregg writes that she, as woman, shares the fate of the Jew: betrayed by the patriarch, betraying the powers that had been offered, yet always living in the possibility of messianic return, a messiah who would be a woman and a Jew. Gregg has no doubts about the Chosenness of the Jews, but it is through her interpretation, her reading of their faith and history that she proclaims the messianic return: "The Jews are the only Christians of this day, those grand, craven, persecuted and proud people, are the Christians; those same tenacious internationalists." Christ, as Jew, was both internationalist and socialist. It was "out of the lore of his own people that Christ evolved his working system, that socialism that could have revolutionized the world, and that — in the hands of the Jews — may yet do so." If this is philo-semitism, it is so in the context of the messianic return. Her agreement "with the Germans in believing that the Jews have brought us to this pass" can only shock us, but it must be read within the lines of her stated context: what has come to pass is the overturning of a world and a longing for a leader who will be a Jew, a socialist, an internationalist, and a woman. Despite this affirming context, her philo-semitism has a shadow that casts a dark moment in the text: "I do not like Jews." (The strain of anti-semitism that is found elsewhere, and often, in Modernism is explored in Andrea Freud Loewenstein's recently published

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Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women.) The statement of dislike is quickly, and affirmatively, countered: "That peculiar form of clairvoyance, that we call imagination, was strongly developed in them, and they had, and have preserved a sublime integrity in their domestic and social relationships." She returns to the strongest point of her argument on the messianic return, the close association between Judaism and the feminine. Her sense of an ending, beginning with a "Jewish-matriarchy" is hastily, if dramatically, drawn. The history of Judaism and the history of woman are parallel — both have been betrayed by the master lover. Betrayal has been accepted, but it must be overcome. The Jew and the Woman, released from mutual bondage in history, will relieve the world of its insanity. Gregg's statement of her visionary project was, as she says, "most necessary" to her. Above all else her voice, resonating with the energies and terrors of a life both affirmed and endured, must not be denied. Gregg has no illusions about what life has made of her. She is homeless and uncanny, "cold, hollow as a mask, with sightless eyes." She knows that the projected salvation of the world by art, by Ezra, by Hilda, and even by Powys, had failed. Her testament functions as an often embittered counter-statement to Modernism. Yet it is a testament that speaks powerfully to our own time and to our reading of past-time. Gregg will have the final word:

Indeed, a youthful friend of mine . . . rummaging through these pages for scraps of memories of his hero, Ezra Pound, told me, with that eldrich admonition of the young for the old, "Some of this is brilliant, but much of it is so unnecessary." He referred to certain references of mine to "woollen combinations" and all that I said of Christ. And I am moved to say many spiteful things to this young Merlin — (for whose memoirs are these anyway? and to me all that I am is most necessary).

Ben Jones

My Hilda Ah, in the dusk, are you there, Heart of the heart of me What are you thinking? Your hands in my hands And the life in me leaps To the sound of our dreams, O my Beauty of Beauty, Bend me your head Dusk, oh my flower. Purple Iris border the streams And the streams flow clear to a Pool without ripple, White Iris grow on the border. My aching dry lips reach out For you in the dusk, Touch them with wine, the Juice of the grape, 0 my Harp, my gold'Stringed one -

(Frances wrote 'My Hilda' in

Purple and gold of the Iris, 1 hear them singing, Whisper and rustle of reeds by the river. Untroubled and cold are the waters, Gold and white are the Iris My thoughts are Hovering over the stream.

the fly-leaf of [her copy of] Sea Garden: note by Oliver Wilkinson).

Touch my brow with your hands Oh my dreamer of dreams.

Oliver is huge and strong and, from his very little boyhood, has always known exactly how to calm his mother's imaginative fear. Oliver Marlow Wilkinson and his mother, circa 1920

FRANCES GREGG: FIRST HAND Oliver Marlow Wilkinson

T JL he title The Mystic Leeway had a meaning for Frances Gregg, my mother, that she never quite explained. "Lee" is the quarter from which the wind blows. It is also the shelter against the wind. A ship drifts to leeward. There is the leeway of overtaking, the leeway of work not done: "making up leeway." Frances had leeway to make up. There is the shelter before God's storm: unsustained tranquility, temporary shelter. As a family — my mother, my grandmother, my sister and I — did shelter sometimes in caves or behind thin wood partitions in out-of-season bungalows. Where Frances was, the walls were a target for Furies. In "leeway" there is a sense of deviation — that amount by which a ship leaves its intended course. In The Mystic Leeway, Frances believes that the world, in chaos, is being blown on course. Here, snatches of biography and autobiography, written in extraordinary circumstances, are bound together by an evolutionary theme. Sketches of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle ("H.D.") in their youth, and of John Cowper Powys in early middle age, are invaluable. But these portraits are heightened by being transcribed through Frances's belief. That belief makes the work unique. In writing about her hard-lived creed, Frances does not take herself over-earnestly. She is, as she writes of herself, as "real as a carrot." The Mystic Leeway was written in different places. Each chapter was written by Frances in time snatched from looking after us. She peered through cracked glasses for most of the night, to read scripts and translate for the Metro-Goldwyn Film Company.

She was able to turn to her own work at rare intervals only. Frances's book, with its account of the young Ezra Pound and H.D. and others in the 1900s, and of the chaos of 1941, covers many travels. I found the book in the Citadel, Devonport, Plymouth, along with a sack full of letters to my mother from John Cowper Powys, from Ezra Pound, H.D. and others. In April, 1941, I was in training for the Royal Navy. While I was on leave with my wife Margaret, and our baby twins, Jane and Judy, the telegram arrived. My mother, grandmother and sister had been killed by enemy action in Plymouth. I burst into tears. I could not realize the deaths of three people whom I had known as far back as I could remember, but my face burst into tears of its own accord. The train moved into Devonport, stopped before the station. The train was ordinary, so usual that it might have been taking us to work. Outside, the streets were rubble. We passengers looked out on destruction. We smelt the dust: burnt wood and the singed powder of plaster — acrid stink. A door hung two storeys up, but there were no storeys. A door opened on nothing. Lamp-posts were skittled. Steps led to emptiness. I passed nobody in the street, till I saw a Soup Kitchen, with survivors fed by Air Raid Precaution personnel. I asked the way to the Citadel. The Citadel is a fortress by the harbour. Frances had become manager of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute there. Her staff opened the safe for me and there were the chapters of The Mystic Leeway: the chapters sent, one by one, to John Cowper Powys — Jack — and returned by him with praise and urgent pleas to continue. Frances's staff gave me a cup of tea, while I checked the chapters. This room in the Citadel is so solid: great blocks of stone for walls. Outside the window the blocks continue down, under the

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water. The harbour water is outside the window. The room is large and clean and bright. Frances would have loved this room. Her staff told me that the raid had been very heavy until midnight. My mother got them all into the shelter. The centre of Devonport was being destroyed. At midnight there was a lull, and for some reason my mother started washing dishes. She then locked the manuscript in the safe, and said that she was going to see her mother and daughter at Tamar Terrace. They tried hard to dissuade her, but she was insistent. Plymouth must have been burning and smoking by this time. The streets must have been littered with debris, stone and earth. It had taken courage to go on those streets for the half-hour walk. Frances would have been greeted with relief and love by her daughter and mother. She would have reassured them, tried to shelter them more adequately, but my grandmother would have expressed her usual ironic dismissal of danger. Danger had to be met but not taken too seriously, for that would go to its head. The blitz started again. It was the only house in the row that was hit. Men from the Rescue Squad were still working there when I arrived. On the floor lay my grandmother. At age 83 she had had to be killed. She had been proud of her Dutch blood. My grandmother's face seemed a little shrunk. She was a quieter version of herself. It was my grandmother — but she was not there. On the floor was a girl in her early twenties. She wore a neat, grey flannel suit. Of course — my sister. Of course not! The build and the costume were right. The face was the right age. But death could surely not have changed her so much. This girl's face showed a blank repose, an expression alien to my sister. I refused to identify the body. For years, I made inquiries after my sister at Homes, Hospitals and Council Offices.

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My grandmother and sister had dust over them, but they were not disfigured. My mother's body had been removed. In a clearing in Plymouth was a conveyor belt. It moved mutilated bodies. Soldiers passed them along — factory work: bodies to be cleaned: identified: tagged. I passed along the line of mutilated strangers. I found my mother. I recognized Frances by her chin. I should have known that chin: I pulled it towards me often enough when I was an infant. This is Frances. Frances Wilkinson, who wrote under her maiden name of Frances Gregg. I identify Frances. The soldier's eyes flickered above the hygienic mask, a token of sympathy. His gloved hands gave me a document to sign. Frances's epitaph was her name, inscribed on the Casualty List and also on the gun-metal memorial to the victims of the raid. My grandmother's name is there. Priests of five different denominations presided over the mass burial. The Naval Commander-in-Chief was there. I was there in my naval uniform. As I sat in the bus, on the way to the Cemetery, I had decided that I would take no flowers. They would have hated flowers, flowers for the dead! Better to spend the money on a cinema. The mourners were weeping bitterly over the nameless coffins. They had flowers. Why couldn't I have bought a small bouquet of flowers? I had brought nothing. Yet I had loved my mother, grandmother and sister. Living within his own reality on a Welsh mountain across the Severn River, John Cowper Powys stretched his legs out on a couch. A great Bible and a coin that Socrates might have touched lay on the table by him. Merlin in a rock, he had determined to lie at the back of the arena and to write about the arena. Twenty-nine years before this, in 1912, Jack — John Cowper Powys — and Frances had first met in Philadelphia. She was in

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his audience at the Witherspoon Hall. Frances had attended several of Jack's lectures and she had brought her friends to hear him. Jack was an event in Philadelphia, a lecturer of genius, "hollowing himself out as a reed," as he wrote in his Autobiography, in order to fill himself with the subject of his lecture. After this lecture, Frances took one of her poems up to him. In it were the lines "Those that sleep upon the wind / And those that lie along the rain / Cursing Egypt." These lines entered Jack's imagination, and so did Frances. She was beautiful — with that beauty of some American women, strong lines on a delicate structure, with a pointed chin. Frances and her mother were teachers. The women of the family tended to become teachers on the deaths of their husbands, deaths in the Indian Wars, in the Civil War, and in the gold rushes. So, in Witherspoon Hall, Philadelphia, 1912, Jack and Frances met, the one shaped by an English vicarage, the other by American adventurers and women of severest rectitude. Jack miscalculated both Frances and her mother. He played the great man. He had some right to do so. Has there ever been a lecturer of such greatness as John Cowper Powys? But these women were exceptional, too. The mother, Julia Vanness Gregg, had started the first American school for Italian immigrants. Both she and Frances had once had to confront the Philadelphia police when one or other of the Italian boys had been arrested, two lone women standing up to one of the toughest police forces in existence. When one of their charges was killed, Frances and Julia found that he had had hoses turned on him in his cell in the winter night. Julia and Frances would not be dismissed until they found out the truth. They moved heaven and earth for inquiry and justice. Frances had seen lynchings — not common to English vicarage life — and she had seen horrors and cruelties

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Philadelphia, 1912

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Jack's mania

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unknown to Jack (except in his darkest imagination, and that was indeed dark). Their lives were precarious, but my mother and grandmother comforted each other with the thought that they could write to Franklin D. Roosevelt when they were really in trouble. They never did write to Roosevelt — except once when my grandmother wrote about something so trivial that it made Frances furious. They were, in fact, related to the Roosevelts. In their time, Julia and Frances were invincible. Another fact that JCP did not know was that Frances was one of Ezra Pound's group of poets in Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), was Pound's fiancee for a time, and she was Frances's closest friend. Frances had never known any Englishman well, though she and Hilda, with Frances's mother, had travelled to Europe in 1911 (the journey is described in The Mystic Leeway). Frances knew practically nothing about sex: her mother thought she would be far better off without that knowledge. So Frances believed that Jack was a typical Englishman, and that his strange love-making was sex. Years later I often heard my mother still denouncing her mother for not telling her the facts of life, and my grandmother still defending herself. When Jack made faces at other passengers in the Elevated, he explained that this was because they were making faces at him. They were doing nothing of the sort, and Frances began to see that there was a complex infant in this great man. She saw that Jack's mind — apart from the magnificent lecturing — was frozen in a kind of silt of childhood damnation. He had his moments of mania. Jack saw himself as a devil. Frances saw him as a complex infant, a changeling who could rock the world. She saw his perversions as blocks toward development. Frances accepted Jack's sadism, then rejected it as the folly of a man who had to be made

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to recognize it as a distraction. That Jack had genius she had no doubt. All the same, Jack's pretence of being a fiend crushing snowdrops in a corrupt dawn came close to enactment. Yet sadism in the manner of the latest encyclopedia of Sex would not have been conceivable to either Jack or Frances. The sadism was largely cerebral: like a dreadful poem. The strange lust was, even so, translated to some extent into flesh. Frances felt violated, but the power that she could see in Jack made all else trivial. Frances indulged the infant: then tried to guide the mind towards its adult power. Jack looked like animated stone and wood fitted into thick English cloth, and he was a beautiful figure. He was also inordinately clumsy. As insanely brave as he was madly timid, he was, essentially, the Celtic gentleman from an English vicarage. He is lampooned as "Jack Welsh" in Louis U. Wilkinson's ("Louis Marlow's") The Buffoon. The book also has cartoon-like impressions of Ezra Pound, as "Raoul Walsh," and of H.D., as "Eunice Dinwiddie." Frances wrote much of the book. Jack, for his part, saw that Frances was as clean as a rock in the ocean. This added to his peculiar thirst. Other women to whom he had made his kind of love he now saw as gristle, with eyes on stalks. He wrote as much to Frances. Her honesty was commended by Jack's rich American friends: they called her "a darned square shooter." Theodore Dreiser wrote of his admiration for Frances's beauty, vitality and truth. Jack himself wrote to Frances of the "Saturnian cleansing of her carbolic soap," which is not exactly flattering but is as factual as it is metaphorical: Jack did bath in Frances's bathroom, and with carbolic soap. Yet, for years after this, Jack bought books full of pornographic torments and heaved them home for mental raping. The Gregg home on Greenway Avenue, Philadelphia, in 1912, was full of schoolteachers' material: geographic magazines with

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Theodore Dreiser

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James Henderson

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the oily smell of print, encyclopedias and other tomes in glass fronted book cases. There was a seven-branched candlestick and sticks of crystal catching the light in colours. On the walls were reproductions of della Robbia plaques. There were rocking-chairs. There was a horsehair sofa that Jack mentions often in his letters to Frances. In the past, Frances had been wooed on this sofa by a devoted young man, James Henderson: James, son of a rich undertaker, James with his olive-shaped head, his bald dome, his earnest philosophies, whom Frances describes so well in The Mystic Leeway. James suffered when Frances was whisked away from Greenway Avenue within a matter of days. He continued to write to her wherever in the world she was. Jack's condescension toward Frances and her mother vanished. He saw their strengths even while he saw their occasional hints of Southern lethargy, the drops of a swamp melancholy. He noted that the inside of their house looked at times like the interior of a covered wagon: one could almost hear the clatter of migrating kettles. As in all their houses, there were always persons or animals to be rescued. Jack did not realize that he was one of them. The roles had reversed: Frances thrusting new ideas into Jack's huge womb of a mind, and Jack reproducing some of these, consciously and unconsciously, in his writing. Frances once wrote: "John Cowper Powys has no intelligence." "I have no intelligence," he agreed. Jack and Frances loved each other, however strangely. There was a complication. Jack was already married. He had a small son, too. What better, then — thought Jack — than to marry Frances to his fellow-lecturer (his "old College chum" as some Americans called him), Louis Umfreville Wilkinson? Jack made Frances and Louis fall in love with one another before they even met. Jack praised each to the other as only Jack could. Frances and Louis were married within two weeks of meeting each other.

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Frances's mother, Julia, was shocked by the suddenness of the marriage; nor would she be comforted by the explanation that Louis and Jack had to travel back to Britain almost at once. So it was agreed: the marriage would not be consummated for a year. On board the R.M.S. Caronia, Jack made frantic efforts to keep Louis Wilkinson out of Frances's cabin, and he tried to make sure that his sister Marian was always with Frances at rising and retiring. He grew jealous, had stormy scenes with Louis, and was increasingly possessed of a greater, more terrible jealousy than he had thought possible — and over his own creation: Frances and Louis! Louis Wilkinson, Frances's sudden husband, was a fine and formidable figure. The son of a clergyman, he had determined from an early age to destroy the imbecilities of his father's faith. He did this in every way open to him. He had resolved that the moral laws of his country must be destroyed and replaced. Louis was a good lecturer, speaking in what some admirers called his "phallic baritone," and he became a distinguished novelist and biographer. Because of Aleister Crowley's similar attack on moral and religious laws, Louis became a friend of the Black Magician, the "Wickedest Man in the World." Louis was also a friend of Somerset Maugham, Frank Harris, Arnold Bennett, Ethel Mannin, Rebecca West and many others, including all the Powyses. As a boy at Radley, Louis had written to Oscar Wilde. He was outraged by Wilde's imprisonment and started a correspondence with him when Wilde was released from Reading Gaol. I still have some of these letters. Louis was known as a lecturer: highly respected and respectable (he looked respectable), and he was regarded as a pillar of society in the University Extension centres. As a novelist, writing both as Louis Wilkinson and as "Louis Marlow," he was occasionally "scandalous" and always intelligent. He was known, too, as the "Radley boy who wrote to Oscar," and as a life-long

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Louis Wilkinson

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Aleister Crowley

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campaigner against repressive laws to do with homosexuality. After preliminary experiments at Oxford (from which he was sent down), he went on to Cambridge and turned to women, only women. He was a friend of the notorious Aleister Crowley, and he spoke in a beautifully sonorous, satanic voice at some of Crowley's magic occasions, and at Crowley's cremation. He was known also to be an excellent judge of wine. Short-sighted and self-centred, he was never much handicapped by being either. Tall, auburnhaired, and so effortlessly commanding that lesser beings swooned into submissive postures before him, he had a greater effect on his times than is yet recognized. John Cowper Powys writes about him in Autobiography. Frances loved Louis, although in some ways she thought him to be a moral imbecile. Louis had mentioned to her that, of course, she would not expect him to be faithful. Frances had told him that her aim in marriage was to have children. Louis knew what he was talking about: Frances did not. Yet she never lost her love for Louis. He was so normal and healthy a lover. "If I had known what Englishmen were like," Frances once told me, "I would have known that Louis was a good specimen!" Frances was grateful to Louis. He had made her a wife and mother, when secretly, and in spite of her beauty, she had doubted whether she would ever be accepted by anybody. Louis was in love with Frances until 1921. By then, however, Frances had disturbed his self-esteem to such an extent that his love turned to hate. The ostensible — and in many ways, the real — reason for their parting was Frances's determination to keep her mother, Julia, by her: in a separate part of the house, maybe, but within reach. Louis could not stand living with Julia Vanness Gregg in any house, in any way. Louis was also disturbed by Jack's constant love letters to Frances. (They all read each other's letters: there was nothing

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furtive about these associations.) Jack tried to follow them, to be with them at every turn of their early married life. Louis — a "modern" man — repressed outdated feelings such as jealousy. The resentment became more dangerous through inhibition, and it gave him a lifelong, though unadmitted, hatred for Jack. That hatred lived for sure, side by side with a friendship just as profound; it nodded between them when they met, though the friendship was even more apparent. During 1914 and 1915 Frances and Louis lived in Italy. I, their first child, was born there. In 1915 we sailed to the United States, where my sister Betty was born. There, Aleister Crowley threatened Frances and her children because she tried to end Louis's friendship with him. He even tried to have her certified as insane. When the two doctors needed to sign her into an institution examined her, she confronted them, told them she was quite aware of the whole plot against her, and so frightened them with the law that they refused further involvement. Frances became very ill with heart trouble. In 1919 Jack took her away to recover. He sheltered her in California where he was lecturing, and with her the children, her mother, the Italian nurse and the Newfoundland dog, Teddie. Louis sailed for England. As I sat on Jack's great bony lap in the California sun, I wondered at the charms on his gold watchchain, the seals, the glass, the metal. In Sausalito, Frances typed out The Complex Vision for Jack. She altered one word. When Jack wrote that he did not believe in a Christ, she left out the "not." Jack restored it. In San Francisco Frances and Jack together saved a small boy from continual beatings, then made sure he had a good education. They worked well together. But while living together, Frances and Jack argued — not always good-humouredly. Jack finally apologized for his "unlucky constitution," whatever that meant, and it was, I think, physical. He took Frances and

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San Francisco, 1919

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Julia Vanness Gregg with Betty Wilkinson, circa 1917

her children and her mother and the Italian nurse and the Newfoundland dog all the way back East. He put them on a boat to England. Jack shuffled miserably to the empty house. He found that my sister Betty had left her doll behind. When I was four years old in California, Jack seemed to me to be more a tree than a man. I felt obscurely superior to him, secure in my humanity. He was also a magician: a pleasant, harmless magician, but as full of magic as a tree is full of sap. Jack understood children but I must have been a nuisance to him, and in a sense, a rival. My mother paid far more attention to me than to him. She paid even more attention to her mother, her daughter, the Italian nurse Amelia, and the Newfoundland dog. It was a disturbing time in Jack's life — made more frantic by his love for Frances. Frances returned for a time to her marriage with Louis, to a pleasant English house with maids, regular hours, and visits to the theatre. We then moved to Church Walk, Kensington, where Frances and Louis had once lived near to Ezra Pound. From there, Frances ran away to France — with children, her mother, and the Newfoundland dog. She wanted Louis to follow. She took a house near Beaune. My mother and grandmother stocked bottles of Burgundy, prepared bowls of anchovies, put a tin bath on the lawn for Louis's morning dip, and brought flowers into the house in preparation for his visit. Even with this, my father could not bear it, not even with my grandmother barricaded into her own part of the house. He departed from us after a day or so, forever. I met him years later, and we had a pleasant relationship that resembled that between a father and a son. By the time of that Beaune visit, my father was already in love with a girl named Nan Reid. He married her, and they were happy. My mother looked after their baby, Deirdre, for a time, as they themselves were incapable of doing so. Nan wrote two good

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Beaune, France, 1917

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books and died at thirty years old, at Watchet, within a few hours of catching influenza. Louis then started his own kind of wandering: lost for a while, myopic, still formidable, still working, greedy for life, always selective, always in iron command and always vulnerable. Jack continued to write often to Frances, complaining that he wrote far more letters to her than she to him. In the letters, they sometimes show a telepathic awareness of each other. Jack wrote to Frances in 1922: I've got a sudden vision of you . . . angry, devastated, with a streaming flood of tears — out of which that pale face, I know by heart, gleams white like a fragment of an ice-berg, in a driving storm. Is this all nonsense and absurd? Please note — Nov 1 I see your chin — and those steel-blue thunder glints in your eyes against a face of ash — and a queer swollen fury like black adder surging up your thin neck.

This described exactly the emotional state Frances was in at the time of writing, but Jack knew nothing then of Frances's parting from Louis. Divorce proceedings started in the early 1920s. Frances divorced Louis but agreed to take only a little alimony. She wanted to earn her own living. My father, always a careful man, reduced the allowance even further. So there was Frances with two children, and her mother, and a Newfoundland dog to shelter. The dog died. Frances bought a vast Brazier car out of her mother's school pension. She took one driving lesson, then drove it on her own and smashed down a wall. She set off next day with us and a crate of chickens. The covered wagon started rolling again: we travelled right across France, stayed at Cap Feret on the Bay of Biscay, then from France to England, to Suffolk, back to France, then again to 3 0

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Britain, all over southern and eastern England, always travelling in vast old cars bought every time out of Julia's teaching pension. Jack had written to both Frances and Louis that he was most jealous of Ezra Pound. He thought that she would always love Pound. She had had a great love for Ezra, and still had great respect for him. He seemed more adult to her, clearer in intention, more daring in execution, braver, more definite in his effect on life, than the notable Englishmen who fell in love with her, and who, in their childish self-absorption, mocked — deliberately or allusively — the postures of Ezra Pound. When Ezra indulged his madder dreams, it was a terrible hurt to Frances. By then Ezra Pound had vanished, to all intents and purposes, from her life. It was Ezra who in their youth had confirmed in Frances the belief that the artist should be concerned as much with the ugly as with the beautiful in life — should darn well do something about the conditions of life beside reproducing it. He added to Frances's fascination with the study of mathematics. In following his own creed, Ezra Pound became an economist as well as a great poet. It was in part his knowledge of economics that led him to Fascism. Frances felt that he would never realize the dark implications of Fascism. But in his old age, released from the madhouse, he both did so, and confessed it: "How could I ever have fallen for that suburban clap-trap of anti-Semitism . . . ." "Pull down thy vanity . . . Pull down thy vanity! . . . ." 10 Hilda Doolittle, as H.D., was progressing mightily. She created fine work, and a great deal of it, but Frances felt she did this in a way that did not take much account of people. Hilda remained loyal to Frances, in words if not always in deeds. Just at the time when the divorce from Louis finally became absolute, Frances had met a young man, Kenneth Macpherson, who fell in love with her. She introduced him to Hilda, and he became her lover. Almost as quickly, Macpherson married Bryher who was by then financing Hilda. Kenneth Macpherson played a part in the H.D. / F R A N C E S

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Ezra Pound

Kenneth Macpherson

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Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

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Bryher house of fame. He — like other young men whom Hilda and Bryher took up — did pioneering work in the arts, especially with his film magazine Close Up. Macpherson had told Frances that he would always love her, and look after her, and care for her, for the rest of their lives. He looked like a young knight, I remember. We lived in the same London house as the Macphersons. Frances, after the divorce from Louis, hardly dared to pick up the remnants of her emotions, but she had just begun to trust Kenneth Macpherson when Hilda got involved (see note 7 for comments by Frances about Macpherson in her letters to John Cowper Powys). Hilda often sent Frances her discarded clothes at this time. Frances needed them. We were poor. What money there was went on my sister and myself. I remember my mother saying once that she did not possess one garment of her own. Where Frances loved she could also flay. When she and Hilda met again, it was not Macpherson that concerned them, but their own love. In the name of that love, Frances tried to burn some awareness into Hilda. She tried to make her realize that her selfimprisonment in her new arrangement with Bryher was, for whatever reason, a betrayal of love itself, of their earlier love. Even if Hilda had sold herself for the sake of her art, it was still a betrayal of all that she and Ezra Pound and Frances had tried to create, had thought, had planned. Hilda was moved to repentance — for a time. When Frances left her, Hilda reverted to her own beliefs, while admitting, cheerfully enough, that she "lived on the wages of sin." Frances herself wrote several fine stories, and some good poetry. These were published and some republished in anthologies like The American Caravan. Her works could now be reissued.11 She should have written more, of course. Didn't Ezra Pound think highly of her work? Her particular theme, to love people before

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art, and her care for us — her children, her mother, and the many waifs and outcasts we met — prevented her from writing more. We children lacked nothing. Our journeys as a family were beset by lack of money and were often dangerous, as we rode on the rim of existence, but most of them were in fact happy, extraordinarily happy. In 1925, for instance, when I was aged ten and my sister eight, we were in Oaken Hill Hall — that Elizabethan mansion with no running water or electricity, but with secret rooms and passages. Frances and her mother, Julia, prepared a Christmas room for us. They had been making furniture out of the wood of packing-cases mostly, vast pieces of furniture which could hardly be moved but when padded were comfortable thrones. They prepared this room which could only be reached by a steep ladder. Betty and I saw them going up and down this ladder. We knew they spent a great deal of time there. We had no idea what they were doing except that they were making a Christmas room as a present to us. On Christmas morning, Betty and I were allowed up there for the first time, through the trapdoor. The room was glowing with decorations, tinsel and Christmas stars, with an oilstove burning brightly. The floor was spread with pictured rugs. A punching-bag stretched from floor to ceiling. A doll's house with lighted windows stood near the window, every room filled with furniture. There was a big horse that Frances had made from a plank covered with cloth and stuffed with rags, with a mane and tail of coloured strips, and a head smiling with painted teeth, the whole of it hanging by ropes and hooks from the ceiling, and strong enough to swing on endlessly. It was a magic Christmas: but then all our Christmases were magical, and so were many other days. There were even times of prosperity, such as when Frances was on the old Daily Chronicle, and when she edited The Gazette for the John Lewis Partnership. My sister and I were sent to the best

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Christmas

England, circa 1925

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We rode on the rim of existence, but . . . were in fact happy, extraordinarily happy. Oliver, age ten, and the dog, at Oaken Hill Hall

schools, my sister to special schools to heal the curvature of her spine, and I, at the start, to the Wilkinson school, Aldeburgh Lodge, that still continues at Orwell Park near Ipswich. Then Frances sent me to Westminster School. My mother willed this. She did, in some way, regret the parting from Louis, but loved even more being in charge of our destinies — moving, ever moving to leeward, and to the interpretation of Fate through her own mind. Sometimes I returned home from Westminster School, from the great Abbey (a most privileged education), in top hat, tails and striped trousers, to my family living in a cottage with earth floors. We had to bath in the copper. The glow on the soap, from the copper fire, is still a delight in my memory. We hardly stayed a year in the same place: from the first cottage, in Suffolk, where I kicked a football around sodden fields — and where my mother and grandmother cooked marvellous American food — to our last beach hut on the Cornish cliffs. The dogs and cats travelled with us. Sometimes we slept in the open. We would wake to my mother frying sausages on a stick fire, and to the loving rasp of turtledoves. We drove to the ocean off Cornwall. Lack of money kept us by that ocean. We made use of such situations by exploring the regions. In Cornwall we climbed cliffs, my grandmother insisting on being roped with us. Because we lacked the influence of a father, Frances was doubly strict and stern with my sister and me. She did not realize that her fear of being soft made her spank too hard. The spankings stopped when we were seven, but Frances always expected us to bear pain without flinching. This hardy training was mixed with my mother's great care and indulgence of us. Frances's grandmother had travelled with her children across the dividing lines of the American Civil War. The family had moved about America. Travelling, and seizing on possibilities of new places, had become part of Frances's blood. My mother had

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Nellie

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once stopped the Brazier car at a sign in France announcing the sale of a Chateau at a knock-down price. We rode up the drive. The two women deliberated whether to buy the peak-roofed building, deciding reluctantly that it would not be practicable since we were to live in Britain. We kept travelling, living not only in that Elizabethan manor, but in shacks, houseboats, boats and caravans. When we became stranded, by night or breakdown of the car or lack of money, we sheltered until morning in out-of-season beach cafes, or once in a great tent on the Lizard Point, with lights flashing around us. Sometimes we lay on beaches with the tide rolling towards our toes. My mother had to be mother and father about our physical development. Frances's attitude to sex is revealed in The Mystic Leeway. She had to watch over the sexual development of my sister and myself. She did this wisely and practically. When I was twelve or so, my mother made sure I had two testicles. She came in while I was having a bath (we were in an old Rectory, at the time, with the luxury of a bathroom), looked at me for a moment, as I steamed pinkly, then abstractedly dipped her hand through the water, and felt. I was surprised. I did not know why my mother had done this. Her manner was so matter-of-fact that I thought there must be some method in her action, or that she was just being absent-minded. When my heart gave out while I was playing football at age sixteen, I lay on my back for a year. My mother — whose own heart was so bad sometimes that her lips turned blue, and her pulse became so weak it had to be restored by sal volatile — pushed me in a bath chair. My recovery was slow. Frances brought into the house a pretty girl, Nellie, whom she had befriended in the Pimlico area of London. My recovery was then swift after that. We moved with Nellie to an isolated house on the top of a hill. We kept two dogs so enormous that they had to be kept in

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specially made kennels. Nellie was younger than I, but I fell deeply in love with her. It was frustrated love. In the end, to my grandmother's horror, my mother allowed Nellie and me to go on a camping trip, all on our own, just the two of us. We bathed naked in a river, cooked our supper, and lay in the moonlight of our tent. Dark green night surrounded us. She fell asleep. Her pale, ivory, London face, in the golden, green night, was so beautiful that I could not touch her. Nellie left us. I wondered, sometimes, why my mother had allowed us to go off together that time. As it was, I adored the girl, loved her to distraction, but almost in a state of chastity, forced first by my grandmother's watchful eyes, then by my own love. That time, isolated in the house on the hill, was perhaps the worst time for Frances. The dogs baying in the wood, rattling their chains, made fit accompaniment to her mood. My grandmother had her cats and her violin that she practised over the cats as they ate in her room. My sister lived in an enchantment of her own. We had deep preoccupations. Frances tried desperately to write commercially. The electricity had to be paid for, but sometimes wasn't. Then we returned to candles and lamps. In any case, Frances suffered the torments of the damned. We added to these torments. She needed love and praise and happiness. We did not consider that. She was Frances. We were used to seeing her face turn blue: the sal volatile was whipped out, she would not die, she never did. Frances had a scar from the operation to remove one of her breasts. We were used to that, too: a false cup disguised the emptiness. Frances suffered from her teeth that could not be extracted because of her heart condition. Anything but the simplest food hurt her stomach. Still, her strength imposed discipline on the house and gave it happiness, and a sense, too, of beauty and excitement, of greatness, and intense interest in life. We had school every day, sitting each at our own table — even my

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At home: languages, music, theatre

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grandmother, to whom I was teaching Greek, while I learnt the poems of Ovid. My sister and Nellie kept pace with each other in arithmetic, geography and history. Every morning we had Prayers, with peculiar sermons. Every Sunday we went into the Parlour — the one room that was always tidy and beautiful, with the little American desk, the rockingchair, the seven-branched candlestick, the sticks of crystal, the horsehair sofa, thick, richly coloured carpets, plaques from Italy and Spain, and pictures from Siena. We acted plays written by ourselves. We recited poetry. My grandmother played the violin. Frances played the 'cello. My mother helped to build a puppet theatre, and occasionally we had performances with dragons and witches. She woke us in the mornings to music on the gramophone. The sleeping brain opens to a world of immortal sound. The days after that were often very good. We had treats, too. Sometimes we went into Norwich, to see two cinemas, with, if we had the money, feasts of fish-and-chips in between. Yet if ever we went mad as a family it was there: in isolation, dreams turned inward, in sickness and pain, love, lust and jealousies. I had decided that I must try to be the man of the house. I would get up early, creep down the stairs, to do the work. Frances, having typed to the early hours, was not always as awake as she looked. At dawn, her hopes and fears had become phantoms. She thought herself beset by devils, and in some ways she was. If some think that Frances was just neurotic, they might consider what they themselves would be, how they would react, if they had the constant pain that Frances had, the lack of sleep, working to keep us alive: feeling trapped, with time so short, and wanting to do so much. Although the house was often very happy and imaginatively active, and not morbid, that time in isolation was the worst time. We moved on from High House. We were never so isolated again. 3 8

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Frances influenced people wherever we went. She brought a new interpretation of life to many, a greater one than they had ever imagined. She made life appear as we might imagine it before being born: a creation under vast skies with a million million stars of possibilities. With her, for a moment or two,we shed our trivialities. Our preoccupations — that she understood all too well — seemed trivial, too. She lent our barns to boys for the production of plays of their own. She took children to their first theatre, when sometimes they did not even know of such magic places. She transformed the world for adults, too. Some of those children, some of those adults, are now theatre producers, writers, archdeacons, musicians, poets. All this time, Jack was writing to Frances — with a pound enclosed, sometimes five pounds on Frances's birthday. Occasionally, the pound arrived in time to buy us food, but often it was on his pound that we went to the cinema. One Christmas Eve we had nothing in the house for Christmas dinner. Five pounds arrived from Jack. My mother and I went out in the twilight and bought the last goose on the rail at a knockdown price. The association with Jack — they always did love one another —• lasted until the end, but after the early 1930s, Frances and Jack did not meet. In the later 1930s, after that hilltop house, Frances grew more philosophical. Our situation as a family did not get any better. In some ways it grew worse. Yet there were more times of laughter that could be called quenchless than depths of melancholy. Frances and her mother prospected for gold even at the edge of the world. On this curious globe of earth we floated, with our feet seeming hardly to touch the ground at time . . . to where . . . to where? To whatever destination Fate and Frances led. If Frances — the chief among various influences — thrust Jack Powys into writing his great books, it was Jack who urged Frances into writing again in the way she wanted to, without thinking of F R A N C E S

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"pot'boilers." Frances's letters made Jack plead for her to write for publication. It was Jack who made her write The Mystic Leeway. The final chapters of The Mystic Leeway were written in Cornwall. (I have given some information about the chronology of the text in my "Note on the Text.") To every place they travelled, Frances and Julia brought that particular American quality of heightened interest, as though looking curiously at the lands of their ancestry, adopting every new place, sifting gold, and minting it. All places were strange and new: each place became their home. During the first years of the Second World War, Frances took my wife Margaret, and our newborn twins, Jane and Judy to Cornwall, while I superintended an Air Raid Precautions Depot in London. Frances got a job in an "A.S. NeilP'-type of advanced school at St. Columb, Cornwall.12 She and her mother and my sister and my wife and twins lived in beach huts, then in cottages. Frances fed them all as well as she could. After that, Frances looked after "difficult" children among the evacuees from the blitz. Marjory Workman, who worked with her at that time, tells me that Frances's influence on the children was soothing and exciting, that the children adored her, loved the way she got up plays with them and told them stories. Frances sometimes fed them haphazardly but never less than to their delight, says Marjory Workman.Frances then moved to Mylor, Flushing, Cornwall, with her mother and daughter. My wife returned to London with the babies, and I was called up to the Royal Navy. Frances typed for local authors, and crossed the river to Falmouth to tutor a little girl in Italian. As my wife was about to have another baby in the Ipswich Hospital (where the roof had been riddled with machine gun bullets), Frances moved her frail cargo into Plymouth. In February 1941 she wrote to Jack: "all three of us Wilkinsons are in the front line." She had a new job "in the heart of an airfield 4 0

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here at Plymouth," training to manage a Navy, Army, Air Force Institute. She got "board and lodging and a guinea a week." In a letter to Frances, Jack described how eels travel vast ocean spaces to be born and to die. Frances wrote to him: "This eel has travelled far." From Devonport, Plymouth, my mother sent me an unsinkable overcoat. It was her last present. Frances's last letter to Jack was written on February 20, 1941. I include a portion of it here because it shows the direction The Mystic Leeway was taking in its final stages. On February 16, Jack had sent her a letter begging forgiveness for making her angry, without his knowing why she was angry. It was his second letter pleading for forgiveness: his first had been written for Valentine's Day. In it were these lines: "So let's 'I forgive you; you forgive me'; as ... said: This is the wine . . . this . . . the bread. If you don't think this is too sacrilegious to be said but O dearie I! you probably do!" Here is part of Frances's response:

Frances and Jack: last letters Plymouth, 1941

Can't you see — my perverse one — that by my code, law, invention and belief — nothing can be "sacrilegious." We are the god, the direct manifestation. — We can't, as yet, manage this heady, chaotic physical mass, this stuff, this cosmos, upon which we have seized, not knowing yet how or why, whether by chance, or by our undissipated design. — Mystery. But no use of words or thought can be sacrilegious — this is my body broken, bread: this is my blood, spilt wine — any of us, all of us, because of this dissipated god working in us, driving us, betraying, fooling us ever on and on and on toward a perfect expression of god, a perfect impression of god upon this earthmass. — Even Christ was not that. He only saw the theme, the pattern, the intent — not actually believing it, but risking all — all — for the possibility. Love, dear Jack — and don't be silly. — Our hands never let go. — Fold your hands one upon the other and one of them will be mine. F R A N C E S

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I will not add interpretation to Frances's beliefs here: there is no need. Christ had to tell his ideas about life through stories, deeds, signs and with his own body. We, too, use symbols. The symbols create beauty and nightmares of human behaviour, do infinite good and harm. Frances does not use the "as if method of writing. She says simply: "We are the god, the direct manifestation." I wrote to tell Jack about the death of my mother, sister and grandmother: All three — just like that — it is unrealizable — as, just as, my mother said they would go, ought to go. She had said she wished they would go like that. It's awful and terrible and not right, even though it was painless, sudden and a solution of a kind. I don't know how all this will affect you. I only know that it was your understanding, and conspiracy with her mind, and stature level with her own, in your letters, that were the balm and the breath and the only sign of the hand of God to her in these last years, these were really the only things that gave her consolation and some rest and happiness — although I don't think she realized it, but yet loved you for them. I did love her, Signore Jack, love her now. It was something else that made that tragedy for her.

There had been a sign between Frances and Jack. It was a Crooked Cross. That was the sign made in their letters to each other. Jack had given Frances a Crooked Cross on a chain, all made out of tortoiseshell. When Frances and her mother and daughter came to Plymouth, she sent this cross back to Jack for safekeeping. When he learned of Frances's death, he took the Crooked Cross and laid it in the River Dee. Jack wrote to me that Frances was "the greatest woman of genius I can imagine or have ever supposed was possible." Frances's life was a tragedy! How can I write this when I know that she took such delight in life? Frances loved life. How can

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one call it "tragedy" when Frances was so often amused by life, and thrilled by it? But she was outraged by life, horrified at it, treated abominably by it. But she remained unbeaten. Frances made her mark on life, and it was a Crooked Cross. A NOTE ON THE TEXT

This note describes the different places where the chapters of The Mystic Leeway were written. Frances snatched each chapter from her surroundings and was sometimes — as in the "baby" chapter (seven) — greatly influenced by events at the time of writing. I have tried to demonstrate John Cowper Powys's influence. Alterations edited into The Mystic Leeway are few, a matter of correcting slips in the typing. One exception is Frances's account of improvising on stage with John Cowper Powys, where Frances has, as Jack points out in a letter, mistakenly called Lucrezia Borgia "Francesca," and used the family name Medici instead of Borgia. This I corrected. I have also taken out a reference to me as having rejected Ezra Pound in my generation. I was in my teens at the time and whatever puerile comment I had made would only add another weal to that already scarred poet, for whom I have (his Fascism apart) great admiration. Jack praised and encouraged Frances after receiving each chapter from her. He sometimes made suggestions about the writing. All his letters to her are now being published. It is of interest here, though, to include Jack's ideas for the book. Frances herself had said the book would be "the fist of Frances thrust up through the waves as she downs at last." On September 15, 1938 Jack wrote:

September, 1938

O it is absolutely damnable that such unique gifts as you have for description of people and things should not be used or used with

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"Frances" signed under them instead of flung to the four winds or lavished over-generously on Jack whom in any case you've no hard task to bowl out when you want to.

Frances answered: It is a lovely idea to write a book for you. . . . Your book must be written from this flickering, mercurial aura of Frances, the god-forgotten, god-forgetting material world, the world of the shadow of life (or "death" as they say in the original) "I will fear no evil" — that is where I shall write your book — in that mystic leeway.

Caravan, 1938

There were more letters about the idea. On November 11, Jack wrote: The point is wherever you begin (whether 6-5-4-3 years ago) you want to throw the full weight of your mind and feelings and spirit as you are now today — You can't have changed very much in these last five years. At least for the purposes of this book we'd better boldly assume that, [in] your feelings and thoughts in the Locality and among the local people where you select to start — And do make yourself recall, as you light the fire on your knees or stand at some particular Scullery window, in brief asides, and as indignantly — as well as with those bursts of infinite forgiveness and tenderness (that are as natural to you as your wrath) — the figures of Ezra and Hilda and Louis and Jack and James. Just go on doing the best you can and depending on asides! And go on industriously even when you don't want to.

Jack wrote this when Frances, daughter Betty, and mother Julia Vanness Gregg were (as chapter one makes clear) living in a caravan on Aston Hill, near the Oxfordshire border with

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Buckinghamshire. The Chiltern Hills are some of the most beautiful in England, and only forty miles from London. The caravan was hired as a present for me, but when I returned to community theatre work in the east end of London, the three women moved into it. A screen of bushes and small trees separated the clearing from the main London road. The clearing itself was like a quarry, but overgrown with grass, bushes and wild flowers, and bordered by a steep bank where paths threaded over rock and earth, upward to a thick woods of beech trees. The woods then stretched for miles. This was where chapter one was written. They left the caravan near year's end, 1938, and moved to a seaside bungalow: Pimpernel, Firehills, Fairlight, Sussex. There chapters two and three were written. The bungalow cost them seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, but it was civilization as they had not known it for some time. The bungalow was perched on a steep bank: below it bushes and sand led down to the beach. Chapters four, five, six, seven, eight and nine were written between the spring of 1939 and spring 1940 at Crutchfield Cottage, Denesfield, Saunderton, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. From here, Frances sent chapter four to Jack in mid-April, 1939. At the time she was trying to turn the bit of ground that went with the shack into a market garden! She wrote:

1939

We are working grimly here. Two acres of neglected land, cluttered with old wire and fencing and chicken houses, that we are taking down and building up again into good runs for the fowls. I have only a dozen yet, but I shall have more. The house is an ugly shack, and we have not much furniture, enough for use, but nothing with which to please or impress our neighbours. We have a market garden on one side, and a poultry farm on the other. There is no available labour, so we have to do our own digging and planting. I have lost my job as a reader, but

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perhaps I shall earn as much in growing food and fowls. Dear Jack you must try to realize that these oddments are done at night after a hard day, usually from ten to one or two in the morning, and then I am up again between six and seven. If my mother sees me at work purely my own she begins to nag me — "Have you finished your Italian? Have you sent off your work? You astonish me by your indifference to important things." So that all that I do upon this is with a sense of sin, that awful sinfulness that parents impose upon even elderly offspring.

Llewelyn Powys's death

Chapter five, delayed because of a short visit Jack was to make to the rest of his family, was sent off in the first half of August, 1939. Six was also delayed. I don't know how my mother wrote it at all. She had driven my wife Margaret, in the old car, to Henley-on-Thames, where I was rehearsing with (of all people) Robert Newton. She had taken me out of the rehearsal to drive us to Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London, where Margaret had the twins. Then Margaret fell desperately ill, and Frances looked after her and the twin girls at Crutchfield. So chapter six did not reach Jack until late autumn, 1939. On December 2, Jack learned of the death of his brother, Llewelyn, in Switzerland. Frances tried to write some comfort to him. A few weeks later, in January, 1940, she sent chapter seven. Her next letter to Jack was written in April, 1940 and shows the growing anxiety of her situation: We have to move by the end of this month, but I don't know where. They want these very large grounds for development by someone who can deal with them. The young owner has been called up and wants everything in shape for his wife before he leaves. With all this business of Oliver's marriage and the babies, I have never been able to get even a decent kitchen garden dug, and I am in debt in every direction. Three people have sued me for their bills, and I don't

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suppose the young Crutchfield has ever had a tenant County-Courted before. Then, too, our electricity was cut off for lack of payment. We are shabby. Altogether we are repulsive to these tight, decent country people who "pay their way." For once I seem stunned by the situation.

My wife Margaret had relapses, and nearly died, but after some weeks she recovered. I borrowed the creaky bike, pedalled to London, and got a job: then moved Margaret and one of the twins, Judy, to London. When I returned some days later for Jane, Frances looked poleaxed. It was unthinkable to take Jane, to whom Frances had become deeply attached. I left Jane with her. Chapter nine followed shortly. (At this point in the writing, Frances and Jack were making a copy of each chapter. The chapters are typed on cheap typing paper, held together by manuscript pins, now rusty.) In the spring of 1940 they moved again, this time to No. 6 White House Estate, Suffield Park, Cromer, Norfolk, where they stayed into the summer. Frances wrote to Jack on June 8:

1940

Would you like to know what my glasses are like? About six years ago I got them for a guinea, when I was doing a lot of night work. Now both bows are broken, and I wear them on a ribbon which goes across the back of my head. The other day I dropped them for the millionth time, and one glass broke so that it is a star from the center. I can still see through the top piece. Without them I can only decipher the very largest print, but my mother [who had cataract in one eye] can still read and sew using her one remaining eye without glasses. "Let me see it," she says complacently, when I frown and peer with the paper close to my eyes. The latest game is to prove that I am a very old woman. "You're an old woman now," she says, smug and content, but she still tells me to "pull down my skirt" whenever there is anything male about. Dear lord those skirts.

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By August, 1940 they were in Cornwall, and on the 5th, she wrote to Jack from Fir Hill, Colan, St. Columb: Margaret came here with me but found that she could not do more than look after the babies — she and Jane and Judy are in a tiny one room cottage on Forth Hill overlooking the bay, about a hundred yards from where my mother and Betty are. Oliver is down for a week's holiday and I saw him last night — we were all all all on the same hill under the stars and the dark sea below us. It seemed like a miracle and as though we had come from many far places — I cycled back here at dawn.

The tiny one-roomed cottage where Margaret and the twins were living was like a caravan — raised up on pitch-painted props, and with a verandah of green-painted wood for a threshold — in sight and sound of the ocean. Up the hill, by the hedge that enclosed the field, was the other, larger holiday shack in which Frances, Betty and Julia lived. Frances and Margaret answered an advertisement for help at an "A.S. NeilP'-type of school. It was at some distance from the shacks, so Frances had to cycle inland very early to cook the breakfasts. Sometimes she cycled back in the evening with a milk can of soup for the family. For a time in the autumn of 1940, Margaret and Frances, Betty and Julia, lived happily, wheeling the pram with the twins along the coast road, with fighter planes in the air and real and dummy aerodromes carved into the fields. All was salty and sunny as if (except for the children, who had escaped from the bombing of London) it was all holiday traffic. On October 28, Frances wrote to Jack:

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The children always like me and are happy — but I don't get on very well with the grown-ups. My typewriter is broken and I can't afford to have it mended so I can't write any more on the book.

One night we were together again. It was in the shack. Frances presided like an enchantress. She gave us a good meal (checking her mother's gesture of warning that they would have nothing left for tomorrow). She was calm and perceptive and amusing. She threw no thunderbolts nor prophecies, not even criticisms. Frances, though, had reached a stage of exhaustion, through typ' ing late and rising early, when in mid'Sentence her eyelids would drop with a moment's weight, and lift, after a second's blackness. But her words were lucid as we sat in the lamplight, and there was protective warmth as though we were all in a bright cave. That was the last time I saw her and my sister and grandmother. Frances sent chapter eleven, the final chapter, to Jack from N.A.A.F.I. R.A.R Mt. Batten, Plymouth, Devon, in February 1941.

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THE MYSTIC LEEWAY Frances Gregg

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CHAPTER ONE

A

gypsy caravan has just gone up the hill. It has a red body splashed and scrolled with white and gold, and sets high on great wheels. Back of it are massed the Chiltern hills, rank and golden in this splendid, fetid, autumnal dying. From the porch of my caravan I can look straight across, hilltop to hilltop, looking down upon the gypsies. This porch has been constructed from the dashboard and driving seat of this van, the high green sides of which slant outwards with a wide casement at the back. A skylight has been built into the roof; a tall thin stove pipe sends whirling, trailing, gusts of smoke into the air; and huge iron wheels, half sunk in the leaf mold, support the whole structure. The gypsies are staring up the hill at me now, two of the men leaning over the white gate that separates my wood domain from the road. My heart gives a jerk of fear, not for today, because Oliver is here and Oliver is huge and strong and, from his very little boyhood, has always known exactly how to calm his mother's imaginative fear. But tonight Oliver will be gone, and the woods will be very dark and still and creep down about the caravan to peer into its windows, with a gypsy, complete with blunderbuss and stiletto, behind every tree. "There are gypsies in the lane," I call to him quaveringly, "I think they are coming up, and if they do, say something to me in a very loud voice." He nods, and I am stricken for an instant by his resemblance to his father. Louis so often looked at me with that same kindness and tolerance when I was being absurd. But I do not linger upon this thought. I have still further bulwarking of my fears to do. "Betty," I call, "come out. Perhaps they will think you are a boy."

The Chiltern Hills, 1938

Betty Wilkinson

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For Betty is taller than any girl I know and recently, in a freakish desire to see what she would look like, I had her hair cropped like a man's, as I wear my own. It has made her look, to me, quite startlingly beautiful, and it amazes me that women should hide their faces and heads in these masses of curls and dangling locks at which I have looked askance, in unwilling jealousy, and with faint, deep, horror all my days. I seem to be seeing Betty for the first time. She has long, beautifully modelled cheeks with a faint hollow in them. Her eyes, too, long and with slanting lids, are more luminous without the shadowing of long hair, and look more than ever eerily and un-humanly intelligent. She comes to peer over my head at the gypsies, now gathered in a group about the gate. They are talking in a high, twanging, gibberish, gesturing towards me. The women flit back and forth, staring from vantage points between the trees. The men stand stolidly. "Water?" one of them calls. Now, from the smart white modern "Trailer-caravan" further down the hill where my mother lives, so that there shall be fifty yards space, and, by so much, peace between us, our dog gives a resounding bark. Mongrel and wayfarer himself, he has ignored the loud Romany wranglings, but when English is spoken, he rumbles out a full-throated warning to beware of him! Now that the man has spoken, an old crone thrusts herself forward. Her thin voice is like the whip of a viper, "Can we get water." "There is a well." I call down to her, and point over my shoulder, further up the hill where my rain tank is. Two girls detach themselves from the group and begin to climb the hill, carrying a large churn between them. They have bright kerchiefs on their heads, banding their hair away from their brilliant faces. They are dressed in beautiful, gaudy, flowered stuffs, and they greet me unsmilingly. I indicate the bucket that they may use to fill the

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churn, lowering it by a rope into the cement tank, bending, lift' ing, pouring the water into their churn, with gestures as old as time. They thank me, meaning it, but yielding me nothing of themselves, and begin the descent of the hill carrying the heavy churn between them. Their waists are very small, and they walk with a beautiful flowing motion, from the hips, with no futile silly bending of the knees, but long steps, as far as possible from the detestable English stride. I am greatly impressed by their treatment of me. Had I met these gypsies on the road, as I have met gypsies so many times, when trundling my family back and forth across England, in one or another of our always second-hand and outmoded cars, they would have talked with a fleering, lilting, sycophantic patter, proffering bunches of heather, or primroses, or charms and fortunes, but here they have treated me on terms of dignified equality. I am a caravanner. My nostrils lift and my underlip twists in a sardonic grin of secret delight. But my eyes close in one dark pang of misery. There has been nothing in the incident, and yet there has been the whole history of a mortal creature. I am like them. I have something in common with jews, and gypsies. I want to claim no country for my own, and to take the whole world in my stride. I want to move on, and on, and on. No one, but I, knows the tricks, the subterfuges, the sagely argued reasons, the elaborate befoolments with which I have uprooted my parent, and my offspring, together with the dogs, cats, fowls, or rabbit of the moment, and moved them on to sate this unconquerable urge. I do not know why I do it, nor what I seek, nor towards what bourn I am eternally pressing. I don't know. Nor do I know who it is who weeps darkly within me, longing for its "home." With a great jangling and creaking the gypsy caravan is in motion again. The men sit astride horses without saddles; or drive

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open carts from which dark, round little heads peer over a helterskelter of rubbish; the women and girls walk behind. The bright parade winds its way up the steep road and disappears over the ridge. Then I leave my caravan and hurry down to my mother's, for if the space between us keeps the peace, it also serves as a pathway to the odd, eternal communings between parent and offspring, which are, as we all know, unaffected by time, or age. An old, old daughter, will hurry to a vastly old mother with a humming burthen of wonders and bewilderments as heady as the smallest daughter's. "Did you see the gypsies?" I ask, as that small, valiant, stalwart, hunched, white-headed one comes peering to its doorway. "Gypsies," she echoes in a tone of unescapable doom. "I saw them. And I heard them. They were saying your name, over and over again, back and forth to each other." I know that this is nonsense, yet, with something that isn't a brain, I believe it, and shiver. She has taught me all my fears. She knows where each nerve vibrates. She believes it all; not, of course, the things that she says — this muttering back and forth, with sinister intent, of my name, by a pack of murderous gypsies; but she believes her fear. It is a miasma in her brain that has risen from those swamps in the Southern States of America where she was engendered. I have never seen them, yet I know those dark steaming stillnesses of water that slither under tropic foliage, the yawning jaws of crocodiles snap, and I stare upwards into the fathomless menace of the eyes of a negro. They are not, yet from her brain to mine flows a darkness of fear that bubbles up from the primeval slime. From my caravan, as I return, a sonorous bass declaims at me, "What is the weather like today?" It is the voice that was to have put the fear of god into the gypsies who are now a mile away. The timing of the beneficent Oliver Mar low has ever been thus. 56

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The gypsies have left the bucket empty and I take it now, with its long serpent of wet rope, to refill it. I lift the heavy wooden cover, and stare, as always into that water mirror eight feet below me. It makes a square dark frame for my head, against a back' ground of sailing clouds. Into how many wells in many lands, into how many rock pools, into how many night-darkened windows, I have stared, seeking out a face that grows more strange and unknown to me as year follows year. I do not like it now that it is old, but I remember moments when it looked back at me with a wild, incredible, secret loveliness. Once, and this was a very ancient well on one of those islands near Venice, there was a perfect blue disc, as pure as any plaque by della Robbia, upon which glimmered the heads of Llewelyn and this Frances. Can time forget the beauty of Llewelyn? I think when vasty centuries have turned and turned again, some wraithe of myself will still hang spellbound over that well's brim to gaze downward at the beauty of Llewelyn. And, another time, several years before this, as a train sped across the then unknown to me country of France, in the night, I got again that extraordinary mystic communication of beauty as I stared at the reflections of Hilda's head, and, like a second medallion, intaglio, beyond it, my own. To that was added the mysterious excitement of being borne on and on through space while the eyes of those phantom girls met, out there, where no thing was. I remember their proud assurance of bearing, and the tragic, unstressed melancholy of their gaze upon each other. We were beautiful, and we were doomed — as indeed, in a sense, we both were, for life was to deal harshly with each one of us in many ways. Dauntless and untried, as we were then, I think that we knew, for those few peerless moments, all that we were ever to know of the meaning of life. Afterwards we elaborated upon the theme, and tried it out upon the lovers of our choice who, with a marked unanimity, and painful regularity, deserted us. Now, with these English clouds asail above my head, and the M Y S T I C

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Llewelyn Powys

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massed forest of the Chilterns at my back, and this English earth beneath my feet that, no matter how far inland I go, seems to me forever shaken by the sea, let me travel backwards, ten, twenty, thirty years, and see these people again. Here are Ezra Pound, Walter Rummel [see note 8], Hilda Doolittle, John and Llewelyn Powys, and Louis Wilkinson. Each one of these was to become, in their due measures, a figure of note in the world of art. Young, and, as they were then, unknown, each one of them bore upon his brow, that mysterious sign that sets men apart, just as the young Oliver Marlow bears it now. By this mystic symbol I was to recognize each one as they came up to me over the horizon of my soul, you, and you, and you. With each one of these I was to endure tangled and erratic episodic flights into what we call "reality" and "life"; episodes that were inconclusive, irrational, often dolorous, and always inexpressibly comic, with a concerted clownishness that was worthy of the laughter of the gods; but apart from this inescapable chaos and folly, from each one of these I was to receive — as I am convinced each one of us does — a reassurance, a divine faith and assuagement for my timid wayfaring soul, of meaning in life, of a secret passed from soul to soul; through them I was to glimpse the shape and purport of infinity and time; I was to know, by fleeting minutes, and to believe, the incommunicable. Nothing could make me believe in chance. I have never known a life that did not have, above and beyond its material dangers, hardships, ambitions, griefs, this mystic leeway in which something infinitely real blossomed, grew, and fed upon the mystic bread, the secret wine, borne to it by stated messengers. So, I would have starved, had it not been for this one; gone blind, had it not been for that other; died, were it not for you. Could the measure of my need be so aptly proportioned to the measure of fulfilment by chance? I cannot believe it. But for what actually, in giddy fact, happened to us all singly and collectively, I'll grant Chance full honours. 5 8

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It was difficult for me to make friends because I had nothing to proffer, neither position, nor distinction, nor cleverness, nor means, nor good looks. I remember once sitting like a specimen insect between Hilda and Walter Rummel. They gazed impersonally at me with lambent great eyes. "How would you describe her?" asked Hilda. Walter struck a chord. Hilda nodded. "Yes," she said weightily, "she is like that, o r . . . o r . . . the daughter of a Grecian slave and Roman Emperor." I felt mightily flattered at this, but my mother, who always listened behind doors, took it as a personal affront, an aspersion upon both her class and her character, so I got little good of it. And after a while I gave up even hoping that the great ones would find out why they tolerated me, and was content just to tag along and listen and watch. They were so blessedly different that they were like dew to the parched. In America there are millions of streets and millions of houses and millions of people all exactly alike. But there are a few typical Americans like Poe and Hawthorne and Henry James and Whistler and Ezra and Hilda and James [Henderson] and Walter Rummel, in whom there seems a residue of all that makes America — vast spaces, plains, deserts, huge mountain ranges, phantasmagoric rivers dredging down alluvial slime to bury whole communities. When consciousness strikes upon a sensitive brain in such a country you get characteristics that cannot be fathomed by the invert culture of a little island like England. The only pity about America is that the population, as a whole, is composed of morons, from whom the sentient flee to live in Italy or England or France, spiritual nomads; for there is no pogrom as frenzied and fanatical as that created by the retrograde for the normal intelligence. To me Hilda and Ezra looked like lifesize natives of a remarkable country, but they solemnly assured me that they were "gods." I forget now which, and I think they varied considerably and slipped sleazily from Greek to Roman and further back into Egypt. This bored me, and seemed to me unoriginal. A D.H. M Y S T I C

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Hilda and Walter Rummel

D.H. Lawrence

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My mother has always been my best listener.

Frances and Julia Gregg on the beach in Atlantic City

Lawrence born into such grandeur of estate as America, would have invented a new mythology and imposed it upon his people. He would have been getting on with life, not foraging out old trappings for a life-long charade. But I was to find myself woefully in the minority in this heresy. I was fated to pass all my days with men who would be gods, even to the great John Cowper Powys who elected himself "Lord of Hosts" at the age of eight.131 cannot understand it. It seems to me the utmost topsy-turveydom. Whatever the gods are, I came out of their mysterious realm. My miracle is that I am born upon this earth, a link, buckling up infinities. Whatever the gods are, I have known, and, quite probably, will know again. But to be — incredibly — man, is a thing that fills me with awe. Of course there are indications of power playing upon us, psychic forces, electric currents, this, that. They have been there from the beginning of time, but Man has not been. I want to know me, the miracle of the moment. All their mythology — including God — can wait till I am dead. So far, in all my life I have met no single Man — though I have done my best to make one of Oliver Marlow — nor has any man encouraged me, or indeed been willing for me, to be a Woman. Mumbo-jumbo, superstitions, muddled mythologies, have been my fate among these artists and prelates and magicians, these escapists from life — from Life! I expect that I am dull. I have often surprised a look of apprehensive misery in the eyes of my friends when I "got started" upon my theme for life upon this queer planet. Oddly enough, my mother has always been my best listener. It is the solemn truth that she has sat through a whole night, and that many times, while I followed, in intolerable excitement, an idea picking words out of space as though I were interpreting the falling sparks from the tail of a comet. "What a wonderful flow of language you

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have," she has often said to me, when, with the dawn creeping palely and coldly in, she has risen, her face somewhat pallid and luminous from her long vigil, and gone away to make us coffee. Never has she had the faintest inkling of what I was talking about as I piled star flake upon star flake till, from their very scintillation I have stared over the rim of the world into the place of knowledge. "You know Frances's extraordinary ideas," she apologizes for me to her own friends. I think it must be this migratory soul of mine that dictates the migrations of my physical body. Somewhere, always just beyond, is the one fair abiding place for us both, and I often vision myself, this transient body left at last to the chemistry of its economical planet, while I — I — burst from the coffin planks, up through the whirling particles from the semblance of whose reality I am at last released, and on and away to that bourne the memory of which I have shielded so passionately, and to the creation of which I have gone armed with the vitality I could cull from minds, from philosophies and from the speaking earth. On, on, scattering friends, religions, emotions, possessions, peace, in a race to keep up with life. But it was not the chimera of what they call "reality," the "normal" life of the people on this planet, that I sought. That was the thing I fled. Just as I fled from robust and happy people, people who could be consoled for their earth's servitude and death, by the violent and tawdry contortions of sex, and the misty and mean contortions of religion. I grant now, after my own clownish contortions over many years, that man has to learn the ways of these things, but I capitulate only in so far as to grant a way of terrestrial life only to such masters of earthiness as the Christs who appear from time to time, especially to that one of our own cycle in evolution, Jesus. There seems to me in his philosophy a vast comprehension of the principles, the first laws governing life upon this earth — and upon this earth alone, for Christ had no traffic with heaven

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and never entered a church — that almost stuns the mind with its profundity. There is no way to express the peace and the refreshment, to a simple and uncorrupted earth being such as I am, to find, in an earth ridden with gods and demons, spirits, witchcraft, and all the barbaric folly of religions, one MAN who was of the earth earthy; who was, as are we all who have the simple animal courage to face it, solitary, upon this strange planet; and who pronounced, as my soul had spoken from its birth, "I am the way and the life," that "I" with which we are each endowed, which links us eternally to the past and the future, and which is our only guide. As a guide to terrestrial living I have found no one comparable to this Christ whom they have buried so deep in the vast sarcophagus of the church. But you, for whom this book is being written, do just see the thing for a moment with me as I have seen it all my life — "you believe in God, believe also in me." Man, if he could but be persuaded to accept his destiny, is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. He is born on this planet. What the past holds in secret, and the future in promise, is not for him; those are the spoils of death. His destiny is to live, and he has to do it by the rules evolved from his brain, his soul, his conscience, the — for lack of a better phrase — the Godwithin-him — which is his sole endowment from the mystery from which he has sprung, from which his planet has sprung, from which all life comes. No one has had such fidelity to the earth as Christ. His delicately elaborated rules for living have a perfection, a discipline, a fine equilibrium that is like a notation, treble and bass, between the eternal mysteries and our daily tasks. Whatever the earth is, it is we who carry the mystery within us, we who have been driven on by this urge to fight our way out of the slime, out of the jungle, into the consciousness that even in such men as Christ, does, as yet, burn dimly. All that I asked was not to be dragged back into the jungle in the awful

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"a few great actors"

rout of religion that at its queasy pinnacle evoked God, and at its dire gut end spawned devils, witches and all the other totems of the senses. At this early point in my career I was like some weird product of the vegetable world, a huge nodding cranium on a thread of a body. I had no friends. I knew nothing of love. The heavens were dark since Christ had reft God from that kingdom. Men and women were inconclusive, staccato, mimbling-mambling, infinitely mean and small, and enormously self-preoccupied. Children and negroes were helpless and could be, and were, tortured mentally and physically. I was alone and life was huge and powerful, it was, as well, inimical. Upon this strange stage a few great actors were to strut, making spectacular entrances, and, in most cases, undignified exits while I hissed in the stalls. Never was there a person less fit for friendship than I was, nor indeed than I am, for now, after a quarter of a century, I find that the play is over; the friends are gone. I have watched for this little while in a tumult of emotion, carried away — but now, I am going out into the night again, alone with my strange thoughts. But first I'll set the little stage again, puppet Hilda, puppet Jack, puppet James, puppet Louis; here in the wings stand an outrageously beautiful trio, Ezra, Llewelyn and Andrew [Gibson] who will pass mutely across the stage other than the utterance at inopportune moments of curlew-like pipings; smack in the center of the stage, complete with secret panels and trapdoors and a swivelchair screwed into the planking, will sit my mother; while down from the clouds will stride the last of the knights, Oliver Marlow, followed by a flapping little penguin-like angel, who is Betty. The curtain will go up now with Hilda alone upon the stage.

CHAPTER TWO

H

ilda was entrancing. Hilda was ridiculous. Hilda was exquisite. Hilda was hideous.

And there is no doubt that one may be of two minds, and each sincere, about a thing. What Hilda calls her "small and faithful public" has set the seal to her beauty and she was beautiful, but it was more in forecast, and in memory, than in fact. I am probably setting the seal to my own limitations when I confess that I walked delicately for all the years that I knew her intimately, shuddering back from the perilous slopes of bathos. She was very like a young witch, with a face that was long, lined and chaste as an angel's, then belying the seraph by a nose that was snubbed, a dark mole on her lip, and glacial, heavy-lidded eyes, so that she peered out between folded wings, up-pointed and iridescent, with a face that was daemonic, sexless as death, and as sub-human as a plant. My heart turns over in my breast as I remember her, and how, in my loneliness I brooded and brooded upon that face, reading it and re-reading it, like a thrilling, endless book. Hilda had no traffic with love. She had invented a state of soul that I can only describe as "lecherous." There emanated from her a constant etherial drumming, like the communications beyond the bounds of the meagre senses of humans, sight, hearing, that insects have as part of their sexual equipment.

There are many planes upon which man lives simultaneously, so that his years are many times more than those sparse years accredited to him, but this is not true of all men. Some of us hurry through these simultaneous incarnations more rapidly than others, scorning, or ignoring, or finding ourselves incapable of learning the tricks and habits of the lower grades, with the result that we are most uneasy, awkward, and clownish in every day life. It is people such as these who fall most easily victim to the lure of the old mythologies. Their souls faint: they are alone, misunderstood, classed among the zanies and the fools, while their delicately exploring souls, their massive and constructive intelligences, see as they are the world and those who torment and condemn them. It is not enough to cry, "God forgive them for they know not what they do." These supernormal intelligences of the advance guard in evolution feel that they must have power, and what easier way to power than to play upon the superstitions, the hopes and fears of the ignorant, by the tricks and chicaneries of their forerunners, the magicians. Earth-magic is a fact. The secrets of the jungle are as old as time. Nature was before man, and those occult powers by which the whole physical, material universe is being shaped were undoubtedly recognized, and even exploited by primitive man. But for its own purposes — and what they are, it is the role of man to find out — a blindness and a dumbing has been put upon the senses as civilization advances. Within that silence, and in a strange dim solitude, the soul of man matures. If Man is to make his way out of the valley of the shadow of death by a mythology, it must be a new mythology, and by his own inventing. When Hilda announced that she was one, or another, youthful god, and John Cowper Powys proclaimed that he was the Lord of Hosts, they were each right, but this Frances, who wandered desolate in another part of the wood, could only rage and mourn and hiss and spit vituperatives, because they were wasting their 6 6

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substance on states of mind that had been done before, and darn better, many centuries before they were bom to be leaders of men. I hope I explain myself, for this is intended as an apology. I only said that you were Judas, you and you and you. Christ, whether you agree with his system, his working policy, or not, had a personality that has dominated the world for two thousand years; he was able to impress himself upon race consciousness, and to establish himself in race memory. Will you do as much, even to the short memories of your own generation? Will you create, and give your name to a cycle of evolution? Christ did, as the unique mind has always done, in its time and season throughout the history of man. The unique mind wears no masquerade, "Lord of Hosts," and youth-god Hilda. It lets the dead bury its dead. It permits itself to be born again, and walks fearlessly in solitude. It does not run panicking back through the ages, clutching at this gaud and that. It speaks with a new authority . . . I am the way and the life. Judas was all but Christ. All he lacked was that ultimate imagination, that ultimate intelligence, that breeds perfect skepticism. The unique mind allies itself to nothing. Man, in the processes of evolution, has invented terms for many things — "time," "space"; "past," "future"; "life," "death"; for all the phases, or aspects of the eternal mystery which he was able to draw within the circle of his consciousness. Among these inventions were the gods, and God. The unique mind, the heritor of the ages, does not even ask himself to believe in the terms that he has invented himself. They are merely the props, the gadgets, the ways and means, by which he has made his way upwards from the slime. The Christs of this universe do not believe in the pomp, the glory, the circumstance of the moment. Judas did. He entered into a bond with the Priests of the Past to destroy the future, and thought to establish the then reigning Lords of Hosts, and god-youths, in eternal power, the few dominating the many. It was easy enough to bring M Y S T I C L E E W A Y

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Wild hyacinths

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about the destruction of a human body, but the Word had gone forth, the I, summoning the I, in every last fastness of the earth to enter into eternity with it. Ineluctably that vast army is shaping, moving upon the future, in silence, in humility, nameless and without nationality, while you, who should be their leaders, mop and mow your antique grimaces, and dance your ritualistic capers at the end of the rope from which hangs Judas. This, I think, ends my apology. The above, and suchlike, was the basis of long conversations, in many places, and over the course of many years, of which I remember — not one word. The only conversation with Hilda that I remember with almost verbatim vividness was on the subject of woolen combinations. And that was a conversation, the inwardness of which, the subtleties and variants of which, the pride and humility of which, it took me many years to resolve to my own satisfaction. I wore them. They buttoned to the neck. They had long squiggly legs which encased my lean shanks — or, to appease, my solitary reader, "my slender limbs, my most beautiful legs" — to the ankle, swathing those "thighs more worthy than most to dream upon," in chaste folds of spun lambs' wool. And very nice that was, too, in the arctic winters of America, in that city lying low on a morass between two rivers where I passed my days until the annunciation of Hilda. It was one of those clear cold days of early spring when the air still had the snap and sparkle of ice in it. Hilda had taken me for a walk in the woods somewhere near her home and we had found wild hyacinths [see note 6]. It was the first time that I had seen those strangely lovely heart-searing flowers, and what between their beauty and the sadness of our talk, I had pressed my furies against old mythologies too far and Hilda had left me in a fury. I was young enough in those days to despair. I sat by that little clump of hyacinths till I was nearly as cold as they were, and then, it being night, I determined to "end it all," and F R A N C E S G R E G G

walked into a narrow, black-running, nearby stream. There was a glitter of stars through the tracery of bare boughs over my head, and a glitter of stars about my feet. However, the stream in which my sorrows were to be drowned barely reached to my kneecaps, but, of course, even at that it drenched my woolen combinations. In the meantime, Hilda, sitting in fireglow, and lamp glow, at supper among her kindred, suddenly leaped to her feet and rushed out into the night. Used as they were to such eccentricities — and I can tell you that, in those days, we kept our families on the hop — they were nevertheless startled. Hilda has always declared that she saw me, stars, stream, boughs and all. Perhaps she did. Anyhow she came, and saved the situation, for then by this time bedraggled and shivering Frances had lost all taste for suicide on a cold spring night in such very shallow water. So, deeply impressed by ourselves, we started on what was a truly remarkable walk. We covered the mile or more to Hilda's house in an incredibly short time, seeming not to walk at all but to be skimming over the earth. It had something to do, of course, with our walking so closely entwined, and my falling into the rhythm of Hilda's long, loping step, but it has always remained in my memory as the nearest thing to the supernatural that I have ever experienced. Hilda undressed me herself, and oh her hands were swift and gentle. She warmed my hands against her breast and called them her birds, and made crooning, soft, witless talk that eased my childish, overcharged heart. There is a tenderness that can exist between two girls that is more exquisite than anything on earth. So I was put to bed, a doctor summoned, and all my things taken away to be dried below stairs, all my things, including, of course, the woolen combinations. And next morning, while the sun streamedt through the window upon my breakfast tray, the following conversation ensured. "These ???" said Hilda, touching with a long, attenuated M Y S T I C

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finger, my neatly folded, now dry woolens. "Uhhuh." I replied. "They are new." And they were, too, new, and not out of those packages that are the delight, and the shame, of the needy. "Yes, BUT . . . my dear Frances!" You may believe I stared. Hilda's tone implied that I was among the most benighted of the lower tenth. "Of course," she continued, "I don't." And, of course, I was instantly convinced, she wouldn't. "Why not?" I blurted. Hilda's laugh rang out, and Hilda's laugh was a lovely thing, like a waterfall, or a tinkling cascade of bells. Her face was as wild and fleering as a maenad's, and the light of, whatever laughter is, bubbled in her eyes like the play of a spring, and she was looking at me with meaning, with the secret dark communing of women, but from this I fled, for if there is anything more terrible than the confidences of women with each other I have yet to discover it. By nature I am an old maid, a cold, snowy, prim one. "Why not . . why not?" Hilda mocked me. "I am only surprised that you do." I was kissed, I was gently ridiculed, my simple asininity was passed over, and there was bred in me a fealty to woolen combinations such as, I am sure, has never been between woman and a nether garment before or since. But here was bewilderment, here were mysteries. I knew, of course, for we come into the world knowing all things, but what I most woefully lacked, were those assorted exactitudes which I was now to discover were "the facts of life." But I didn't go to any woman to repair my ignorance, I went to James [Henderson], sweetest and best of all my friends, and how, between us we acquired information, I have probably told you before, but I shall tell you again, because it is a story I particularly like.

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James was the son of an undertaker and was, and has ever remained, an embalmer at heart. He has always embalmed everything, his hopes, his fears, the emotion of the moment, the thing he should do, the man he should be, everything is laid away in myrrh and sweet cerements, until some grand resurrection day when James is going to feel "well" and truly "alert" — one of his favorite words — alert enough to deal with life. Could he have been bald at twenty-three? It does not seem probable, but I can never remember any hair upon that great cranium, within which turned and turned again that massive philosophy, like a gothic sarcophagus designed as a tomb for man's waywardness. Could his eyes still, at twenty-three, have been as wise and limpid as a child's, as soft and startled and bemused as a fawn's? I remember them so. His mouth I know was beautifully modelled and sweet to kiss. I kissed it, and, in the extremely long intervals between kissing listened patiently to his long, meticulous, pedantic, stuffy and abhorrent descriptions of the girl he really loved, in the course of which I gathered that a lady's charms were more readily indexed if unswathed in woolen nether garments. James, however, did not really know very much, but he enquired painstakingly from his fellows at the University. But James was far more enthralled with his digestive tract than his generative tract, and what between anxiety about his liver, some sleuthing of a missing kidney which was, if I can believe my memory, floating upwards into his trunk, and the highly inaccurate information gleaned from ribald fellow students, all couched in the peculiarly heavy philosophic style that he affected at the moment, I soon abandoned my passion for information and led James firmly in the path of demonstration. But that human beings should not disdain these follies of behaviour struck me as incredulous nonsense. I could imagine a world in which children disported themselves after this fashion

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James Henderson

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"year's end" 1938

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of kissing and clinging, and of a day arriving in adolescence when, their children begot, parents and teachers bade them put by these childish things and get themselves on the way to being adult men and women. It seems now infinitely far away, and those little figures so earnestly acquiring folly, so painfully and unwillingly acquiring wisdom, are like dolls. Life is now. The snows came while I was trying to find some point of contact between the days when those tricky, scintillating, illusive fragments were reality, and this very now. Overnight this trailing autumn turned to winter and we were all witched and made a fairytale of. My caravan, so lovely in its shape and so incredibly romantic, was fringed all round with icicles, some quite two feet long and others small as the finest daggers. The snow was piled high on the porch and darkened the windows so that the light was blue inside as I have not seen it since my childhood in America. The woods were under their own enchantment, white tall silent trees, each one more delicately shaped by the snow than it had ever been by leaves. It was a soundless world, no roar of traffic, no voices of children, no birds, and not a footprint. The fires were out and the water was frozen in the bucket. Then came my mother, all sooted and tearstained, with a long tale of a lamp that she had tried to keep burning and how it had smoked. The dog went out and went mad in the snow, catching it in his mouth, hurling it about with a rooting snout, playing the fool alone as though with wild, dear, unseen companions. The cat stepped daintily, examined her paws and came back, and, as I stroked her in the dark cave of our room, her fur glinted and gave off crackling sparks. All this was thrilling, and the whole aspect of things was of incomparable beauty, but it was cold, miserably, bitterly cold. There was no way to get to the well, and the coal was under a drift, some feet

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high, of snow. Something had to be done about it. The smutted parent, the excited daughter, the dog and the cat, had to be housed and that very quickly. The roads were still passable and so when the fire was lighted, water thawed, and everything fed, I set off in the car, beating back and forth all day from house to house with earnest, startled, kind young house agents; telegraphing at intervals to houses advertized, and before the day was over I had found a house in Sussex that I could have. The next day all the neighbouring children packed the car for me, and piled high with luggage, and with even the dog and the cat swathed in mufflings, I set out to go more than a hundred miles while the wireless and the automobile societies were sending warnings in every direction to keep off the roads. And it snowed and it snowed and it snowed, all day long as we crept down hills and roared up them, not daring to stop for fear the engine would freeze and carry us no farther. Not till we were within a mile or two of our destination did we come to grief, and there in the dark of the night, and the solitude of far stretches of salt marsh and meadow, we skidded, half way up a steep hill. To back down that glassy slope with a heavily loaded car and in enshrouding snow was courting death. In a dither of apprehension I made a mistake and slithered into a ditch. There was nothing to do, not a house in sight, and the newspapers had been full of tales of cars lost in the drifts, snowed in and abandoned. We had not even a chance of abandoning ours, for where were we to go, three females and a dog and a cat? Then a lone car appeared at the top of the hill. I did not dare leave my driving seat to hail it. Would it stop, or would it not? It did and a tall young man, whose face I never saw, so swathed he was in wrappings gazed in upon us. He saw someone, little and old and woebegone; another very ancient in a huddle; a helpless Betty, warm and rosy and sleepy; a crazy exuberant dog, and a golden cat.

M Y S T I C L E E W A Y

Moving again: "it snowed and it snowed"

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Sussex, Christmas 1938

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"I can't get up the hill," I said in a small, humiliated voice. "I know. I saw your skid marks up there. You have no chains on the wheels," he accused me. I shook my head. There was no use trying to tell him that I was poor, the car old, and that we had always chosen luxuries instead of necessities. It seemed to need such a lot of explaining. We tried putting rugs and cushions under the wheels. The wheels spun and sent cushions flying in every direction. The youth roared with laughter. "All this is getting us nowhere. You sit tight. Don't worry. I'll be back. I'll go home and get a spade and some sacks." So the knight departed. They all slept and after a while he did come back. He dug us out, put sacks under the wheels. "Now," he directed, "give it all you've got. If she doesn't come out, I'll take the chains off my wheels and put them on yours." Knight errantry can go no further than an offer like that. I started the engine, put the wheels at a possible angle, and then gave it everything. It shuddered, the wheels spun, they caught, and the car moved. For a moment it hung and then quivering it began to climb. We were going up. Now I am a polite American. We have thousands of aching manners, manners that groan and creak, wrung out of the travail of an uncouth nation. I did not dare stop the car, and I had not thanked the young man. I looked wildly round. There he was panting along, uphill, by the side of the car. "I know," he gasped, "for God's sake don't stop. Keep going. Bless you. Happy Christmas." And I roared on up through the night. When I dared look round again he was gone. It was close on midnight when we arrived, high up on the edge of a cliff with a muffled thundering of the sea far below. We were met by a huge great ex-policeman, who had made up great fires and had lights burning in every room. He panted, he sweated, he

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bellowed. He put the stiff dog carefully on its legs in the snow. He carried my mother all but bodily in. He bounced Betty up the snow steep steps. He put on the kettle, shut in the cat, bundled the car in blankets, and turned on the bath. He was ugly as a gorilla and good to the depths of his soul. So twice in one night I encountered angels. What peace, what pleasure, there can be in food, and deep hot baths after great effort. How warm and safe it seemed when our doors were shut against the snow and the night, and how we slept! The next day was Christmas Eve. It was still snowing. Oliver and his little fey Irish girl were coming down in the afternoon and had to be met. They told me it was impossible, but I met them and brought them back, for these old cars are very valiant and trustworthy, better stuff altogether than the modern ones that are turned out in their thousands. Our adventures were not yet ended, for there was a strange, eerie tale about the house. It had been taken by another trio for four months, and given up at the end of three days because of some obscure tragedy. Some of their luggage was still in the house. My wire had come just as they were giving the house up and that was the reason I got it. It seemed there was a mother and she had lost her son. How, I do not know, and — so strange and selfish is the human soul — I, that one in me that is primitive, devil-fearing woman, knowing the magic formula that what has happened cannot be repeated, I was glad, because it drew off tragedy from us, and I and my son should be safe in this place. Suddenly this mother arrived, and by all that was uncanny, in an old rust red car the very same, unusual colour that ours is. She was extraordinarily like a huge edition of my mother, the white curls, the blue eyes, the high bright colour, the something a little unwont, and unreliable, yet very strong and staunch and self-resourceful. It was all

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uncanny visit

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James Henderson and Jack Powys

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my mother on a very large scale, as well as the air of extracting the last drop of drama from a situation. "We left here in such a hurry and under such terrible circumstances," she apologized. I did not encourage her to go on with the tale for I am easily frightened, and I thought, "if I know, the house will close in and clutch me by night and I shall be afraid of its loft and its shadows." So I helped her to find her things. And this distracted and so recently bereaved lady had returned to collect — one odd stocking, a little pasteboard box with two small brushes and half an open tin of blacking, and an empty bottle. On Christmas morning it was still snowing, but the postman had made his way through the drifts by car, and had a whole bundle of letters and Christmas cards for us. There was one from James and one from Jack. I opened James's first. He had sent me twenty dollars. Then I opened Jack's. He had sent me five shillings. I read James's letter, and time rolled backward. "I have borrowed a daughter," he writes. "She is now 22. She was younger and less filial when we began. She had occasional gestures like Jack, and a disposition like yours, hence my feeling at home with her. She watches herself with a detachment worthy of your youth, though barer of ideas than we were and much fuller of passion. She spent two hours in 1935 telling me, accurately, what she thought of me, which made me nostalgic for my youth in spite of the wreckage." And for mine, when, after long evenings of experimental kissing I would receive pages and pages and pages and pages of analysis, comment, and directions for further endeavour. No, we were not "bare of ideas," but James knew singularly little and I can only believe, as I review now his strange array of information, that his fellow students at the University, from whom he gleaned his information, made a mock of his ignorance. Not but what he repaired this ignorance at a later day, and I well remember a shameless incident, when, having embraced me

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behind one door, my jewel-dark serving maid behind a second, he called reassuringly to my scandalized mother, "Your turn next." And having thought on James, I thought of Jack, and to bring him in all but physical presence before me I turned to that page in his last book where he speaks from the heart of the world to all of us who wander blind and confused within this dark earthglobe of mystery, talking to us in magic rigmarole of "vast Cosmic Dolls, who, rising on the rim of our round world, nod and wail at one another, bow and bend to one another, and hurl at one another bleeding thunderbolts of meteoric malediction."14 How those few, all but meaningless words, release us from our terrors, bring into proportion the griefs, the tragedies, the terrific endeavours of our tiny existences. "Read that," I directed Oliver Marlow, putting the book into his hands so as to set the note for Christmas. The sun was glittering on the snow, and on the pewter sea, and on the coast of France etched so faintly far away opposite our windows. Inside there was a huge fire, and a little gleaming Christmas tree and that smell of spice and cedar that goes with Christmas. "Do read just this one page." He had chosen for his best Christmas gift an Odyssey with the original Greek on the opposite page. Word by painstaking word he had made his own translation of that first page and along with the ancient poetry, I wanted the mighty shadows of the beings that are real to fall upon us. "Let Margaret read it too." Margaret is so tiny, and so untutored to fall among such sophisticates as Oliver and me, with our over-wary approach to situations, and our over-subtilized reactions. We have sat so long upon the fringe of that circle where the deathless gods speak endlessly, and we have never known a woman, not really intimately. Margaret is all woman, wise as the deathless ones themselves in certain woman matters that have not yet been bruited in literature and so are unknown to life. One day a woman will rise up

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and laugh to scorn all man's analyzing and invention. But the time has not come yet. We women still ape that failure, man, and are still dominated by his colossal bluff of knowing us, we, who do not know ourselves. Margaret is not a creature formed for one's sensuous delight. Far from it. She walks with an ungainly, short-legged stride, and those legs are too huge for beauty. Great girl of twenty-one, as she is, she still refuses to cover them with stockings, and out they go in snow or rain, bare from ankle to hip. Her mop of hair is never tidy, she eats with a gargantuan appetite, and never knows the things "one should not say." "We always have potatoes," she will confide with her mouth full, "at every meal, and nine pounds of ginger biscuits every week for the three of us. We have those at every meal, too, with lots of tea, and we all dunk." "'Dunk'?" queries Oliver in a pained, gentlemanly voice. "Yes, dunk — you know, dipping them in." Margaret's dark and tousled curls lean to the noble Egyptian cranium of my son while they read in Signore Jack's book. That extremely odd godfather has so shaped his godson's mind that now, all that he reads, is like an echo in his brain. He trifles, for a moment, with putting an aspect of the Odyssey upon the stage, with mighty decors and a god-like commentary invented by Signore Jack. Oliver's metier is the stage, and that is a direct heritage from his father. Something of his voice, his histrionic poetry of utterance, his ability to see the spectacle, the spectator par excellence, these he inherits from Louis. What he inherits from me has not yet clothed itself in flesh. Sometimes, at odd moments, it has lifted that grieved and wounded head that Christ first recognized as the ineluctable heritage of man. Sometimes, too, I have heard, eerily, his mother's Cassandra-like cursings and waitings through those still full and tremulous young lips. But the utterances of Oliver

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Marlow are, as yet, derivative from us all, with his father's dramatic urge predominating. The time is not long, now, when he will begin to cast off these magic cloakings, that sheath within which he has grown to man's estate. Certainly he gets nothing of the dramatic from me. I made but two appearances upon the stage, the first, when as Pygmalion, I was too ignorant of the technique of love to know how to embrace my Galatea "passionately" as the stage directions put it. Long conclaves of those girlish spinsters who had cast me for the part, only had issued in directions of such maidenly modesty that the case was no better, and Galatea had to look to her passionate embracing herself. The second occasion, yes, on that second occasion I was certainly an older and a wiser woman. That second occasion occurred a year after my marriage to the incomparable Louis Umfreville [Wilkinson], and I played opposite no less august a person than the great John Cowper himself. John Cowper was inventing a new art. Why, with his clairvoyance, lecture? He could be ... who could he not be, if he gave up his personality with sufficient lowering of all boundaries between present and past, between soul and soul. No one had fathomed as he the illusion of personality. Thus, they might be named, Homer, Christ, the Borgias, but they spoke, every one of them, with the solitary voice of the Ancient Ones. With his gifts of porous, plastic, submission, of amorous adulation, for those nameless beings, could he not bring back any one of their Chosen, to astound and instruct his audiences. Modestly, he chose Lorenzo — and I was to be sister Lucrezia. "Have you written it yet?" "It is not to be written. I shall speak from inspiration." "But what about me? Or don't I speak?" "The words will come to you, believe me, my dear, you will know what to say."

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Powys's "new art"

Frances on Lucrezia, 1912

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By this mystic symbol I was to recognize each one as they came up to me over the horizon of my soul, you, and you, and you.

Frances Gregg, circa 1912

I did not believe him, and I haunted the public libraries searching for some utterances of Lucrezia's between poisonings. When the night came, Lucrezia, in a hired costume — hired by Jack without regard to the structure of his Lucrezia — caught to her form by a myriad of safety pins, made fruitless endeavours to gather her scattered wits together after the first sight of Lorenzo in tights. Those legs were out of a nightmare of Durer's. They suggested a monstrous offspring of Don Quixote and Rosinante. Lucrezia could, and did, fold her garments round her in swathes, but I don't know what held those tights up. At the crucial moment, when Lorenzo said "But hush, my sister Lucrezia comes," the opening in the velvet curtains got lost and Lucrezia could do no more than feebly scrabble behind the folds. Drawing upon the occult, Signore Jack was off upon the winds of soliloquizing again, until he worked round to an agonized, "My sister, Lucrezia . . Lucrezia . . . comes." This time she did, bearing a most unconvincing phial of poison which she endeavoured to persuade Lorenzo to imbibe, with the air of a competent Nannie with the castor oil. When it came to parcelling out occult inspiration Miss Borgia just wouldn't play, and John Cowper did not invent a new art. Not that he needed to, for his lecturing was an art on its own such as, one feels, the world will never see again. Oh melancholy! What became of us all, I wonder, those ardent, excited young people who defied their parents and their mentors and went to those maddening, exalting, incredible "lectures." Amy [Hoyt] and I went together. We sat, my thin fingers entwined in her soft square little hands, while the boundaries of our souls fell like the walls of Jericho. Our hands were cold, our hearts beat, our eyes were dark with excitement. I can remember nothing of what we heard, elfin horns, the horn of the angel Gabriel as that Merlin stalked the platform, gesticulating like a puppet, wrapping himself in his black gown like a scarecrow. Christ, Don Quixote, M Y S T I C L E E W A Y

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Shelley, Hardy, all were the same to him. The message came through to us — these approached life with poetry and a new authority; the good, the bad; Nero or Catullus; it did not matter. Who knew what was good, or what was bad? Was it any wonder that clergymen preached long prosy sermons against this man, and that Amy and I were publicly prayed for before the whole congregation of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia. We followed like the witched children after the Pied Piper on, on, our eyes dazzled. Dear magician, you gave us a grand and glorious youth, but there seem few of us who have lived to do you any honour. And that voice is stilled, except for its incantations in its ancestral Welsh. It is all over. Yes, this is melancholy. It has to do, perhaps, with this uprooting from the fairytale caravan in those Chiltern woods. Here a gigantic, fantastical and burning moon blazes down upon the sea, and the little lights spring up in cottage windows all up and down these Fire Hills, but the place is alien to me. I can not imagine either of my chosen people, the Jews or the gypsies dreaming their dark ways over these gorse-covered hills. Like me they are under the power of Taurus and bright Venus. Not our violence, nor our power, nor our cult of freedom and of peace are native to this soil. I have wandered far from the theme of Hilda, and I have forgotten. . . . forgotten, mark you that, to make one single reference to that brightest star of our American firmament, that brighthaired poet who first kissed the lips of Frances and opened the gates into his houris' paradise to her with a bang like the explosion of a Chinese cracker. In my next chapter I will keep a steady course and tell you all that I can remember of Ezra Loomis Pound who so roused the ire and the envy of the Powyses.

CHAPTER THREE

zra Loomis Pound was a phenomenon. He was a poet, and he Ezra Pound was an American. This had not happened before. Poets we had had, and Americans in plenty, but never the two in one. The magic of Poe came singing upon a tide that rose in Egypt, or before. That dark, sinister-lovely countenance was old when time was young. Those rhythms echoed something that was of America, but of an America that pulsed and beat with the clangour of old and decadent civilizations that were before the continental emigrants that people the country now. These echoes have stirred other Americans, given them a twist, forced from them strange utterances, like the chaunt of a beast, a wild, bitter, insensate liveliness, that creates a type of tortured beauty in writing unlike that of any other race, but that is an accident of American environment, rather than typically American writing. Poe, Hawthorne, Cabell and Wilding are all authentic echoes of a very old culture, but they are not representative American writers, nor is the great Walt Whitman an author who captures, sublimates, and gives voice to the essential spirit of America. Whitman gives a grudging American veneer to Wagner, and all that is essentially teutonic. There are other pleasant, well-mannered rhymsters, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, who uttered nothing very much in gentle English cadence. But Pound was American, blague, blatancy, and youth, just as Dreiser was American in dreariness, mugginess, and youth. Youngness is the keynote, and both these men had the essential values of adolescence, one the gaiety, pretentiousness, bombast, and creative vitality of the young; the other the tedious, meticulous, deadly, but vigorous informativeness of

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the young. And they looked their parts. Pound was beautiful in a blunted, unfinished, exciting way that a young artist might sculpt a young god; and Dreiser was blunted in the beautiful way that an old god might sculpt his last creation. Those two seem to me alone, authentic American writers. Dreiser was old when I first met him, forty or fifty, huge, bulbous, with a crooked, flabby face, and one eyelid that drooped. He was a great, a noble, a gargantuan squire of dames. Ezra Pound was young when I first met him, twenty-three or four, lithe and tall, a praxitelesian face imperfectly conceived, eyes blue but small, fattish cheeks, slightly blobbish nose, a beautiful mouth with lips of dark infolded sorrow, and a poll that was radiant, glorious, spectacular, and endearing to a cruel degree, to us lorn and lamentable maidens by reason of its golden curls. "Beware," said Ezra to a damsel's timid caress, "of those bright heights. My mother has just been anointing them with oils. She is afraid of my going bald in the center." Needless to say, Ezra Pound, too, was a great, a noble, a gargantuan squire of dames. "Love as an Art" had not, I think, been bruited in America until Mr Pound corrupted us all to his way of thinking. I remember well a heated, and tearful afternoon when the dearest of all my friends, Amy Hoyt, tried to persuade me that nice girls did not love as an art. But, alas, I "on honey dew had fed," and walked enchaunted, though that graceless, heartless, and incomparable lover, having placed a timeless seal upon my lips, had sped away with a most unflattering speed, declaring — if I can believe my memory — that he "was too fine an instrument for the untutored emotional gropings" of what he termed "ignorance," and my mother, so much more nicely, "innocence." Ignorance could be enlightened. The blood of pioneer women ran in my veins. My mother wept, Amy wept, even I wept, but — with, of course, the help of James, Jack, and my very nice and

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only husband, Louis — I ceased to be ignorant, but, alas, by that time the thin glorious enchantment of first love had fallen from me, and I never proved the case for experience with Mr Pound. Was Ezra Pound a great poet? All the tribe of the Powyses would say "No," John Cowper in many just words, Llewelyn in few and rather rude words, Theodore in gently spiteful ignorance that any such ever existed. And I do not know, for there is nothing of the poet in me by which I can judge such things. Will the centuries see youths and maidens bending in curiosity and delight over the pages of Ezra Pound as we of my generation bent over Catullus? I should like to think that that will be so, as it may be, for the breath of life was in him. I should like to be able to talk learnedly of Mr Pound's work, on the chance of there being other readers of this book, that my son calls my "punchinello bible," than the two for whom it is written. But quite frankly I know nothing about Ezra Pound's work and never liked it. I like what he set out to do, and what he did. He was a great man. It is the fashion of the moment, and I have done it myself, and in print too, in my all but unique review, to praise the stories of Mr Saroyan very much. In a literary gathering at the house of Edward O'Brien not so very along ago, I was told that there is even a Saroyan "school." But those stories are no more than good Poundese, in blocks instead of spriglets, taking the fleeting moment and recording it in contemporary speech, with the mammoth impartiality of the deity, sparrows and dynasties on equal terms. What editor would have accepted a Saroyan story had Mr Pound not prepared the way, and created the state of mind that could appreciate it. It was Ezra Pound who made America Art-conscious. Poetry ceased to be, for the multitude, something fit only to be written and read by "professors." Mr Pound had put poetry on the plane of "big business." He did everything with it

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that any "ornary" man might do, short of advertising a toothpaste in it. He advertised himself, he made himself a figure, he stalked across Europe shouting "I-me-Ezra" and got away with it. He was the friend of the literary mighty, he discovered genius, he was lampooned in Punch for weeks on end, and he bawled that divine indignity from the housetops. His countrymen had never supposed that poetry was a business, roundly disreputable, a game to be played unscrupulously; nor had they realized, squeamish buffoons that they were, that to be ridiculed, in a certain way, was the finest advertisement that any one need. A wave of healing and assuagement swept through America. It could dare to be poetic, America of the poker face could wear its passionate heart upon its sleeve. The little enclosed garden of the Boston poets was no more. The prairies sang because of Mr Ezra Pound. I have heard Ezra Pound called charlatan, pirate, buccaneer of the arts, cheap]ack, and tenth rate for a great many years and by a great many people, no one of whom has been capable of prancing across two continents on Pegasus — but he was no charlatan. He was a rebel. I liked all that he did, the slashing off of the simpering head of rhyme, and the swollen heads of long-winded versifiers. I liked the idea that one had the right to adapt a word from any language to fit one's onomatopoeic need of the moment. I liked to think words might be buried, or resurrected, that they were living. These things were new to us who sat at the feet of our young prophet a quarter of a century ago. We were Americans, reared up in awe of culture and the scholarly. Ezra Pound delivered us of the body of that death. He stepped backwards to the pure source, the classics; and forward into the pure effect, vers libres. He did for poetry exactly what Epstein did for sculpture, linked up the primitive with that super-artifice that we call "progress," or invention, or creation.

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I remember once being taken by Ezra Pound to some little underground, cellar cafe in London, and there, against a wall, fronting untidy little tables and a muddle of untidy little souls, stood a wooden image of Christ. It was one of the early works of Epstein.15 It was a shapeless thing, as compared to the suave, pretty lines of Greek sculpture with its naive credence that men and women were beautiful. The body was inordinately long, and dressed in a gaunt, shapeless petticoat. The feet were splayed. The head was the long head of a jew, a mournful, blubber-lipped, cadaverous head. It was tortured, horrified, stricken, dogged and exultant. It was Christ contemplating the plight of man; seeing himself as he was, but half emerged from the ape; an ape-man in whom has been born the certain knowledge that he is god. This was an extraordinarily neat and apt stroke of consciousness on the part of Epstein. It had the curious curve of authentic art. Christ came with the simple enough message that man was not civilized, that his morals and manners were but little better than an ape's, and that as he was god it was about time he got on with the job. So they crucified him, set god back among the clouds, and instituted the Christian era, a period during which vast altars were built, and mighty temples wherein an infinity of victims were slaughtered. Insensate folly ruled the universe. Men were content to be slaves, and move across the earth in vast murderous hordes slaying each other, all among the hymns and the prayers and the ringing of cathedral bells. Now there are the first faint rumblings of the imminent collapse of religion. One day churches will be swept away, and all the clergy, and a simple and humble ape-man, with an agonized and tortured and ecstatic countenance will announce that god is within him, that all men are equal, and that he loves his neighbour as himself. Many eons of vast, windy, dreaming will have gone between the first utterance, and the last;

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the first, the original, and the second, the artifice, the rebirth, the reconstruction of the thing that is, the thrusting forward into consciousness that we call art, or creation. Epstein simply missed out the intervening eons; he represented Christ as he was, and as he will be some thousands of years hence at the moment he ceases to be. That is the function of the artist — not creation, far from it. His material is the past which he reconstructs and brings to a second birth in consciousness, at which point it ceases to exist — a new Christ rises, a new art is born, the ape-man that was Christ becomes Man and a new era is launched. What Epstein did for the Christ legend, and is doing for the art of Sculpture which he is resurrecting out of all that death that was Greece, Ezra Pound did for poetry. That "daring young man on the flying trapeze" swung well over the heads of all the scholars and gentlemen, from the candid poetry of the ancients to the artifice, the reconstruction, the candour of vers libres. And now, as I write, Yeats is dead. There is no other minstrel, for Mr de la Mare is too captive to his tower and his window, and a magic mirror in which many things are reflected, he is no wanderer abroad, as Yeats was, he cannot sing that wilful, witless loveliness that is the stuff of minstrels. I could weep that Yeats is dead. It is a loss. He had that element of sheer foolishness that is a characteristic of those who are "possessed." It would be difficult to say what it was that Yeats knew with such joy, grief, frenzy, tears, laughter, passion and agony. To read his works, to listen to him, was like trying to remember a dream, that dream that haunts our slumbers, in which all the mystery is resolved and we know, at last, only the dream, the dream, the dream evades us. His grief over Ireland was genuine, and just. He saw the Irish as all just people must see them. The Holy Grail is in their keeping, and they choose to grow drunken and besotted upon its ineffable content.

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He knew that those bog'dwellers had an understanding of the mystic secret of life, of the hidden witchery in life, that could lift the world upon a new psychic plane. He had heard, he had seen things, in Ireland, among his people, in his own mind, things that are, that we need science at work upon, things that it needed a race of heroes and knights to interpret and bring into the stream of life, and not a race — like his own, sluttish, treacherous, bestialized. Caught thus, between his personal ecstasy and anguish that his people, his people who should be the vanguard of the universe, lay instead in slavery, dreaming in a drunken lethargy their glorious dreams, caught thus his poetry pours forth like the silver froth upon a fathomless stream flowing through bottomless caverns. He says — "I believe in fairies" — and leaves the world so little less thickwitted, and dull-eared, notwithstanding that an oracle has spoken with the hollow, slight, crystal clear utterance of oracles. It will still be eons before he, too, is heard, as is the fate of all these christs. I suppose that is the only test of what is genius and what is talent, of what is Judas and what is Christ. For genius, and for Christ, the fruit of the tree of knowledge is never for their eating. They are the betrayers who cry "eat . . eat . . defend your sensualities." They are the Christs, who, like Yeats, that great poet, can know, with all the fulness of ecstatic knowledge, the sweetness of that fruit and yield not one whit of it to his palpitating flesh. With knowledge, with consciousness the revelation becomes the past, and must be abandoned as being part of the ineffable dead, or left to the dead for burial. It is not to be exploited, made a mock and a business of as among the black magicians, the spiritualists, those who live by creating cults, either in religion or art, in which through sensuality the seeds of life are spilled upon the ground. So Yeats saw his own people, pigs who wallowed and rooted beneath the tree of life.

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I only met Yeats once. I was very hero-worshipping and he was very kind in a vague, dim, general way that accepted me as quite probably of the human species — but one never knew. He had a large, kind face, like a pleasant middle-aged woman, down which, at the sides flopped heavy, black sea-weedy locks of hair. His mouth was moist and pendulous. The room was curtained, from floor to ceiling on every side with fold on fold of black velvet, covering the windows, and though it was day, a small electric lamp glowed upon a low table. I posed as "psychic" in those days, and very soon a ouija board was brought out and Yeats and I sat down to it. My young husband sat nearby, against the velvet background, tall, beautiful, silent, faintly like a copper-headed ancient Aztec indian. On two separate occasions he said "ha," one of several infantile grunts with which he was wont to punctuate existence. His wife wore a grey corduroy frock, with a high waist, a long narrow skirt to her toetips, pointed lace collar and cuffs, a small circlet of sapphires at her throat, a peaked fur cap upon her head, and on her feet boy's pumps. She thought that she looked very beautiful, apart, of course, from her face about which she was not sure, though she hoped that her eyes looked a little bit like the sapphires. It was obvious that Yeats saw her, if at all, as no more than a faint stain upon the ether. The ouija board pranced under my fingers, and I began to cheat. I have always cheated with ouija boards, or tipping tables, or in telling fortunes. Invariably, as the makers of religions in all times, I have used a cloak of superstition from within which to say whatever was wise and good, or kind, or unkind and malicious but true and even, at my most feeble and despicable, to sway the fates in my favour, giving myself a timely boost in the interest, or the favour of my victim. I put this dilemma to Mr Yeats, for I knew it to be equally true of my fellows. These faked predictions, warnings, judgements had, on occasions, an uncanny way of proving very exact.

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"How do you know," Mr Yeats replied, "that you are cheating? Why should you endow yourself with these powers of cryptic utterance? It is impossible to say who, or what is striving to speak through you. Let us go on. Your husband need not stay if he is bored. You can stay all night if you like. Yes, do stay all night." "Ha," said my husband, and shortly afterwards we left. And this brings me back to Ezra Pound and the annunciation of love that was his strong suit in life. What happens the first time one is kissed? What gate is that which opens? What mystery is revealed? Those wiseacres who tell me of nerve tracks and reactions, who talk of "procreative instincts" just get nowhere with me. Ezra directed my inquiring mind to Freud. I read Freud. After Freud I read everything I could find in three languages. I could discourse learnedly on all the complexes and neuroses in existence. Where textbooks ended, life took up the tale. Was I not well and soundly married for a number of years to a most excellent husband? Did he not most generously share his wide experience with me? No one could ask for a more fully equipped sex-laboratory. My literary twin soul was that lamentable little bear who has bleated through the centuries — "Somebody has been sleeping in my bed, and she is there now!" Where this intensive instruction ceased, were there not philanthropic philanderers to explore any idle nerve track, cerebral or otherwise? Did I not, in the hopeless jangle and confusion left as the wrack of my neurotic loves, take unto myself, like an abstract and intent queen bee, a lover who was as simple and uncomplex as a young Priapus? There was never any moment when, for pure sensual gratification, I would not have preferred an ice-cream or a box of chocolates? Never any phase, or aspect of sex that could compare with the delight of a book, a theatre, or even of that invention of pernicious puerility, the cinema. Now I am old, and my nerves are dead — and I am a baffled, unassuaged, and unassuageable

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woman. Nothing has ever happened that has borne any relation to that first kiss. Mr Pound, explain yourself. I have raged enough. For your sweet sake I have torn my lovers from dithering limb to limb. You had something — in those first kisses you scattered so widely like stars upon a cerulean field of flowering maidens, you had something of which your poetry has been no more than a dim and vapid echo. Believe me, we have been faithful to you, lover Micawber, though, in very truth I forgot you years ago. So much I know, that a woman has but one lover, one only, one whom she is destined never to know, never to find and to whom she is to be forever faithful. There is no single child in all this universe that is not "born of a virgin, and fathered by the holy ghost."

CHAPTER FOUR

Those were the years of thought, those glorious young years, scrabbling underground, like a mole, at the souls of people; experimenting wildly in the open like the industrious and incomprehensible ant: dashing from one extreme to the other; formulating theories to discard them in the next breath; loving passionately, hating furiously, weeping copiously, laughing all the time underneath because one was still free, still uncaught. What gratitude I feel to my friends as I look back. I had four, Amy Hoyt and Hilda Doolittle; James Henderson and John Powys, a patient, long-suffering, wonderful quartet. To them I owe everything that was rich and beautiful in my youth; within their beauty, my soul, whatever of me is of god, of eternity, opened luminous petals. All four had great hearts, scintillating intellects, a rich and varied fantasy in their inventions of themselves, their personalities. Them I have flayed, I have treated unpardonably, unfairly, with worship, with reverence; with that mysterious, inexplicable, unpredictable, and incredible emotion — love. There will need to be no dossier of Frances, laid by some spiteful archangel upon the throne of God. All that I am will be found clawed into the hearts of those four whom I loved. It would seem that Ezra Pound should be added to that Philadelphian trilogy, Amy, Hilda, and James, but Ezra was more a cacophonic calamity in all our lives than a friend. Youth ends irrevocably with the first kiss. I speak for my sex, for of that bland and secret creature, man, I know nothing. I married one, reared one, and loved several, and the sum of real knowledge obtained by experience, pertinacious observation, and malicious spying, is nil. Believe me, while in God's good time the sexes, like

"four whom I loved"

the lights of the sun and the moon, are one single thing, for practical working purposes it is very wise to regard the sexes as two, neither one of whom can, with any profit to himself, or life, imitate the ways of the other. I am, of course, not touching upon those fantastic laws and conventions that have been evolved to regulate the manner and methods of love-making for the sexes. Male and femaleness in sexual matters if remarkably inconclusive and fluid; male and female characteristics weave and intertwine, and run the gamut of a dual expressiveness that is bewildering to the protagonists and has certainly befogged whole benches of musty law-makers. All that is just a silliness, the fatally inept illusion about the import and meaning in life. People ought not to "make love," and if they do — and I grant that in the present state of emotional ignorance they must — then it should be freed of all guilt complex. Laws and conventions only make matters worse. Say this to any company in the world and there is an instant outcry from moralists and immoralists alike. Both these worthies have their own reasons for wanting this pleasaunce safely railed. Moralists because they like nice safe railing, and immoralists because they like something to jump over. No, my problem was none of this, but only how to be the woman that had been summoned from space. Woman, or highly evolved female ape, that is the dilemma that faces a girl with her first kiss. We are before our time in saying that we "are descended from the ape." We are ape yet. I wonder if there are any simple words in which I can explain what was a very vital and tragic dilemma that faced me as I turned forever from my youth. That kiss of Ezra's stirred me to the unsounded depths of my undiscovered womanhood. It fired my imagination, made my blind eyes to see, put song and chaunts into the air, flung wide my soul to an ineffable mystery — and after all this preparation I was offered the sickly indulgences of an

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ape species to sate my ecstasy. I did not want them. I had no use for them. I was outraged and affronted. I saw no more "men as trees walking," but only the crooked-leg Pan. I have nothing against Pan. I hasten — remembering the diatribes of my most intimate upon this theme — to put it upon record that I can see no reason why, if there is God, there should not be the Other God. The one implies the other — the Good, the Evil; God, and the Devil. Let those who will make obeisance to them. I have no use for either. I am a woman, adult, grave, Christian. Such puerilities as good and evil, God and Pan, are not for me. Only intelligence is of interest or importance to me. Actually, the kiss, as practised by so many races, is as repugnant to me as it is to the Orientals. I do not like the trailing caress of hands, nor any contact of bodies. I should like a world in which individuals walked freely, and alone, without family ties and relationships. This, not because I am cold and incapable of love. On the contrary, I am wholly love, or, as I would prefer to express it, wholly intelligent. I have been called so many kinds of a fool over the course of many years that it gives me peculiar pleasure to write myself down as wholly intelligent. Let me shape out for you the fate of an intelligent woman. We find her of indifferent education, but very well read. She lives in a small mean house. Several of the rooms in this house are furnished but they are not lived in. Their solemn, huddled, wellmeaning furnishings lie under a perpetual blanket of dust. They are going to be dusted as soon as the last two pages of the last book in the universe have been read. Here, after nearly half a century, in this far alien land of England, they sit all about me, still dusty. Here is the great old horse-hair covered sofa, deep, square, solid as a sarcophagus. It has added an itchy and prickly commentary to many scenes of passionate emotion between Frances and Ezra, or Hilda, or James, or John. So many scalding tears have

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been wept against its cold harsh bosom, because a kitten was dead, a doll broken, a friendship ended, a lover lost. Here is the little carved French walnut desk, sitting so high and airy upon its spindling legs. I can see my grandmother now, returning radiant from an auction sale, having spent all the money we so woefully needed for food upon this same desk and a red and gold Venetian glass pitcher. "I have bought a secretary. You shall have it after I am gone," she promises me. She is gone, and the desk and the jug remain. They are beautiful; a very neat rejoinder to those carping critics who looked askance upon that fantasy of squandering in which she bred us both, her daughter and myself. Here, too, is an ancient workbox within which lies crumpled some embroidery of my mother's. It is a pale blue bed-jacket which I am to wear at the birth of my son. Somehow the years have slipped away unnoted. This same son is now looking forward to his son's birth. I have no doubt that my mother will resurrect her embroidery for the lyingin of his little Irish wife. She will work passionately upon it, by day and by night. Dynasties may fall, war be declared, plagues annihilate millions. My mother will work upon her embroidery. It must be finished in time. She will grow sick of her own eagerness. She will loathe the very thought of it and stuff it back into the workbasket, where it will lie in company with a broken fan, a box of tarnished beads, four odd gloves, and a faded ostrich plume, for the sun, falling through the broken reeds of the cover, to fade new stripes upon it. A thousand thousand beginnings and never an end, a thousand thousand strange disorders, that is my mother's history. Her restless, exuberant energy is at the mercy of a panicky boredom. Nothing must be as it should be, but always other; nothing in its place, nothing with its due, and no fact faced. Her life has been one long, riotous rebellion. If ever she goes to heaven she will begin her angelhood by yanking all the feathers from her wings,

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leave half of them about quill upwards for the unwary seating of archangels, thrust the rest back in reverse, crown herself saint and martyr for the resultant discomfort, and justify the whole proceeding in argument that will go on and on like an eternal requiem. Three satellites were about my mother at this time when her daughter whirled beneath the hand of the potter. They were Rowena, Harriet, and Katy. Rowena was a dark slip of a girl, soft and plump, with the eyes of a doe, and oily dark hair. Once I came upon her and my mother locked in passionate embrace, their lips parting slowly only to cling again with a new intensity. I was highly shocked. I did not think that my mother ought to know anything about such things. I had always disliked Rowena for something that was dankly earthy and unwholesome about her. To this I now added an obscure jealousy. But oh she brought confusion to my evil feelings, for death was at work upon her. Soon her face grew tiny and puny, and the soft, innocent eyes had a wild, distraught expression. Strange manias coursed through her fibres, and the last that I heard of her, this girl no older than myself, was that as they pushed her along upon a stretcher, from train to ambulance, her helpless head lolling with the motion, she gazed about and made strange accusations about the passersby — that one had been her friend but was now avoiding her, another in some other way had affronted her. So passed Rowena, being trundled towards her tomb, ranting in jangled imbecility, victim of a feckless dread malignity in life. Harriet fared no better. She was fair, ethereal and Scotch, all golden hair and huge blue eyes and delicate, bitter, shell-like lips. Her hands were large and I found that unforgivable. She married and lived in poverty with a sad, ugly, plaintive baby that rolled its head from side to side and would not come to terms with life. Somehow there came into the story an Estey organ that was pride

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and joy to that strange household and that was not sold though when Harriet lay dead and pinched and frozen in harsh bony outline the doctor said that starvation had been the chief cause of her death. Katy was a different story, for she was my mother's age, though, having been always of small stature she thought of herself as a creature of childish loveliness and marked nothing of the changes of time and the lapping of many waters. She had a stately and beautiful father like God-the-Father in the Sistine Chapel; a grim tenacious mother, with beady black eyes, smooth and implacable as a squaw; a husband, a son, and tragedy for her lifemates. Her first baby had been dropped to its death by a careless negro girl, a beloved brother had turned a convulsed face to her and died, her sister had shot herself, yet Katy, wizened, all twisted and distorted with rheumatism, would let down her masses of rippling hair to fall like a cloud about her to her feet, and turn wild great black eyes upon my mother, moistly luminous, her thin splayed lips quivering up for a caress. My sturdy, ruddy mother would laugh about her afterwards, that high, giggling, inconsequent laughter, cruel as a child's, "Poor Katy, she takes my hand and draws it down over her breast as though she thought those poor withered things could give anybody pleasure." Had I hissed "Lesbian" at her, she would have yelled the house down, yet she took no stock of all that her comment was revealing to her goggle-eyed daughter. Needless to say, Katy and I circled round each other in mutual hate, like young, and aged, witches. And here, as I unpack in the heart of Buckinghamshire, I have come upon a packet of yellowing letters, tied up and docketed by my mother, "Love letters from Rowena, Harriet, and Katy." My own friend, Amy, was not like any of these. She had a sweet, massive, boyish head, with thin, wispy golden hair, eyes that were as pellucid a blue as flowers. She had a young, flat body, with

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angular hips, and little sculptured hands of warmest ivory. I remember once Jack taking up that little hand and lifting the fingers one by one, peering as he did so, goat-wise, Pan-wise, demon spy into that dear face. My heart beat. It would have been an intolerable grief to me had she yielded up one whit of her chaste, virginal reticence to that bold intruder. Upon that moment, and upon that episode rests all the faith in woman that I was ever to have. I have known no other woman who was good. My mind flits about the years like a many-eyed moth as I try to disentangle the threads that have gone to the making of the pattern. I was intelligent — as I have said — and 1 was not deceived by any of the old deceptions. Religion I knew for what it was, and Love as the thing that did not exist, and sex as the uninterpreted mystery. I watched all these flittering people scrabbling at the tissue of life as cats drag their claws through a satiny surface, purring upon the edge of frenzy and dangerous passion. They did not know what they were about. They lived mincingly and in little sips, but they were warm, vigorous, companionable creatures. I was not. I was cold, and lonely, hardly alive at all. After Ezra and Hilda and their mountainous evoking of little god-mice, I cried to the universe that there must be something better than that, a godlike, noble being, chastened in spirit, heart-broken for the plight of man, a tragic lonely figure, chaste — and, by all that was ironic, I chose a Powys. I crooked my staff and drew in to me — John Cowper Powys, who, with a few well chosen ape gestures drew me to his bosom — "My darling, this was what I wanted." Whereupon my darling joined the sisterhood who were to minister to the "divine and evil moods" of that dark Merlin. I forgave him, but not at once. I forgive him, but perhaps not yet. It was a childish and puerile state of mind and understanding that produced those ancient ravings, but they had the bitter edge of the emotions of the immature. It is difficult to find words to

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express my grief and fury. Never was chosen lady less grateful to a swain. To express it mildly, and with due restraint, life was ruined, God's bright sweet nimbus dragged in the dust, and even those pallid fingertips, with which I still clung to the rock of age, swept savagely away. What I had already seen of the roaring great honesty of the lust of my contemporaries had disinclined me to regarding it as a pastime for the adult. New and strange, ritualistic and priestlike as were the advances of my new guide, I found them even less a fit pastime for adults. I had, and have, the unshakable conviction that John Cowper Powys was the best that life could offer, the most profound, rich, thrilling personality, a man who had so grasped the mystery of love that he knew that it did not yet exist, a God-like being whose only flaw was that he knew not God and was hag-ridden by superstition. He lacked the one thing upon which I had staked my all, he lacked intelligence. Culture, poetry, a rich and varied imagination, all these he had, but no original intelligence. He could acquire, derive, elaborate, but he could not think: above all else he could imitate, and in the quality and type of that mimicry one could decipher the pattern of the man that might have been. Lust, like a cloud of locusts, had seized upon him and left nothing but this sounding shell of a man. Some wry-lipped Fate, smiled, and clipped one of the three strands of my life. So much for following Merlin into his cave! After that blow I was for some few years ripe for any folly. My woman's pride had been too rudely shattered, though my vanity did indeed peer forth, wanly pleased that so great a man should linger upon my threshold. But it was more than that, there was real and poignant grief at the heart of all this. I sought a saviour for my people, someone who would take me in his stride of loving all men. To be the focus of those dark, mysterious forces, that make up lechery, was to be thrust into prison. I could, as can any woman, make it thrilling and exciting, but it was not what I wanted. In that

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We followed like the witched children after the Pied Piper on, on, our eyes dazzled.

little, unavowed dream, that fantasy which walks with every maiden, be she never so humble and plain — her lover — I had thought to find one who would seize my hand and drag me after him through the hurly-burly. He was to give me but one glance and say, "Darling. Beloved. I am witless with the pain of life, and the mad beauty of the theme. I will try to remember you sometimes, but, like you, I must be about my father's business." And so I saw us, rushing on, side by side, working where it was dark and bitter and anguished, but always our faces bathed in miraculous bright light — "their countenances shone." The catch in life is that each dreaming maiden is given but one choice. It is never the right one and they all break their hearts. This probably accounts for the weeping, wailing, wicked sisterhood that is Woman. In my case, it may be that the difference in race played its part. England is small and lovely. Culture abounds. In so small a space it is possible to create and maintain a suave surface and to display a pretty, nursery-like decorum. In America there is no decorum, no culture, and the capable, economical layout of the cities is very ugly. What I had seen of cruelty to children, animals, and negroes had sickened me with life; the idiot mentality of criminal and the police had appalled me. I wanted to proffer myself to someone who would not take me, because of his greater love; to someone like Christ. It was, no doubt, a childish fantasy, but the more passionate just because it was childish. My naive amaze when I was asked only to invent more delicate delights for a god-like lover, my fury, horror, grief, can twist my lips now with wry amusement, but not then. Then I was savage and bitter. I did as I was asked, I hope, well, in a loneliness of spirit that is indescribable. I was a woman dead. A woman. "No one wants you," was my plaint. "There are no men in all the world." For I could find no man, or woman, role in this lecherous entertainment to which I had been initiated. I shirked

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I want to claim no country for my own, and to take the whole world in my stride.

Frances in Philadelphia

nothing. I found it all there within myself, all the ape gestures, the simian instincts and desires. But there was a woman, too, a woman who had not found her lover, and was foredoomed to grief, grief so wide that it encompassed all the earth. Who enters life, must then abandon hope? The pattern had been there before I met these people, for I had found life, as I had seen it in America, a pestilential thing. Literature and history had yielded up nothing to me as practical guide through that welter except the philosophy, or rather, the practices of Christ. He had seemed a man to me, one who scorned any divinity except such as he found in his manhood. He had relied upon himself, accepted responsibility, foresworn God, and abandoned the Church. He, and his companions, had seen life grandly, as eternal: and themselves, humbly, as ephemeral, yet they had the courage and the honour to love others as they loved themselves. There was no pity, no patronage, no far-Godheadness in that love, the "love of the saints." I had spent years of my life brooding upon what that meant, imagining those secret, unrecorded communings that Christ had with his disciples, thinking out how they went to work to analyze that miraculous "loving of ourselves." How mysterious it was. What did we know of ourselves upon which that love, the deepest, most authentic thing in life, was based? And how fine, and exacting, was the honour that imposed it upon us to love others with a like charity and faith. In that single idea lay all the healing of life, the solving of every problem, the salvation of the vast army of the abused and the insulted. "Good and Evil" — what nonsense, what childish blather. "God and the Devil," those totems of a frightened apepeople, these, too, were put off with the putting off of childish things. I had been summoned to be a Woman, unknown, unnamed forever. It seemed to me a grander destiny than that of any queen or goddess or magicked witch. All the vile seduction of

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Cult of the Entrails

the church, the prayer and ceremony, the superstitions and the mummery were swept away in this new intelligence, this womanhood into which I had been reborn. Under my brooding eyelids I searched the horizon for a man. But they told me, my lovers, that Christ was a creature to be derided, that he was that puling, tear-stained thing deified in the church, that I, thrice-fooled, had only dreamed a dream. They preached to me the Cult of the Entrails, and how fine a thing the senses were, how wise it was to snatch the ecstasy of the moment, since an after-life in which we could be rewarded for loving our fellow men was direly problematic. "You can always pray for your fellowmen," said the wiliest of these sophists. But I had no use for prayer. I had set the pattern of my soul by that of a hardheaded, simple-minded son of a carpenter — "By their deeds ye shall know them." So I departed from them, and set myself upon a secret way. So began, and forever ended, the love-life of a woman who was intelligent. I suddenly realize that in rushing on to that crucial turning point of my life, I have omitted to record the most remarkable peregrinations of those three innocent ladies, Hilda, Frances, and my mother, who "went abroad" in the American fashion. You shall follow them in the next chapter.

CHAPTER FIVE

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e set sail in the spring of 1911, on a small one-class French boat, La Floride, our spirits athirst for El Dorado. I know now that our hearts were very secret; that longings, passions, frustrations were lacerating each of those woman souls; I know now, in part, what it is to be a woman, but all these things were hidden from me then. No rout of maenads, no clashing of cymbals, no bacchic or orgy, held more of the authentic frenzy of joyous life than did the souls of those three staid ladies who trod tentatively, for the first time, the planks of an ocean liner. We were dizzy, drunk, with excitement, and we made prim answers to pursers and stewards and our fellow passengers. We examined the stateroom fittings, the baths, the wonders of dining rooms and saloons with all the vivid curiosity, the ecstasy, that are the dregs of our simian inheritance. Out of what long boredom, long long captivity that excitement welled! If, out of the long dead years, I could choose one episode to relive, it would be, I think, that embarkation. I had no premonition then, that, in the course of years, I would embark many times from that same pier. It was a unique, an impossible, and an incredible adventure. And our clothes were in keeping. They were the handicraft of my mother, her invention, and her achievement, as, indeed, was the whole conception and achievement of the trip. For weeks I had been stitching miles of seams under my mother's direction, pulling out bastings, having my tender flesh pinned to her patterns. Every time I brought home news of an addition to Hilda's outfit, my mother set off to go it one better. It took us years to wear out the garments begun, and dropped for

LaFloride, 1911

other beginnings, in that remarkable briding of us to a ship. Never will I forget a blanket greatcoat of a large checked pattern, blues, and greys, and greens, that, my mother said, "would go with the sea." It was soft as lambs' wool in texture, and beautiful in colouring and weave, and warm as a nest. It was made, I remember, with both sleeves cut for the same arm, very thick seams in which were embedded a porcupine harvest of broken machine needles, and the pattern going up the front and down the back. And yet it was beautiful, and my heart's desire. Wrapped in its awkward folds, I stood long hours, day upon day, in the prow of that boat, dream-ing such dreams as the first men must have dreamed launched for the first time upon the sea, those inarticulate dreams which lie ever beyond the pitiable mind equipment of man. It was not till the end of the trip that I learned that my fellow passengers had waited patiently for that exciting moment when I would cast myself over the rails. It is strange to me to think how sad my countenance must have been though I look back upon that trip as the happiest and most exciting adventure of my life. "Promise me that you will bring Hilda back with you, Mrs Gregg," said Mrs Doolittle. "I promise," said my mother. Hilda's long, thin fingers wound into mine, her cold, lambent grey eyes groped in the depths of mine, "I shall never go back," she said. I am a mother now and I know that they are human, but I don't think it occurred to us then. Mothers were an infliction, a painful necessity, but unimportant in the scheme of things. We loved them, of course, but that was because we were very very good. They provided for us, which was only natural considering that we were indispensable to their happiness. Their abortive attempts to share our pleasures, to disport themselves in the full stream of life only went to show how enfeebled were their powers

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of understanding by the weight of their years — not quite fifty in the case of my mother. We regarded it as one of the acid pranks of destiny that these phantom parents should be forever whimpering in our path, their spectral presences forever strewn in the way of our most dramatic, our most tragic, our most holy enterprises, ruining our lives, US, the important ones. Oh, foolish life, is there no way to deal with you! Needless to say, my mother wept, wailed, and gnashed her teeth across two continents, accusing Hilda of robbing the widow of her orphan, destroying its morals, besmirching its innocence, leading it to betray the sainted duties of daughterhood; while Hilda, on her side accused my mother of battening upon my soul, denying me a life of my own, and exhibiting herself as a monument of selfishness. Well I remember one afternoon at Le Touquet, while the clouds mounted over the sea in regal splendour, boats at picturesque angles were reflected in the mirroring sand, the wind blew, Bretons shrimped in fluted caps and kilted petticoats, and fishing boats sped with gaudy sails upon choppy waves, that my two beloved, but vituperative companions were going at it hammer and tongs. I, leaning in poetic abstraction, against an anchored boat, heard from afar sundry warning shouts. Short of a Solomon come to deliver up my disputed carcase to summary judgment, it did not occur to me that the shouts were directed at us, so I continued to give bored attention to the waxing and waning of the battle, as each lady wept in turn, till a last violent outbreak of sobbing announced my mother vanquished. Then I abandoned the romantic pose that I considered the due of the wind and the waves and the foreign shore and set myself to comfort my mother and placate my friend. To my horror I saw that a vast gulf of water separated us from the mainland, and that the sand bar upon which we stood was but a thread of its former self. A sailor was already putting off in a boat to come to our rescue,

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but my mother, her cheeks still bedewed with tears was waving him frantically back. "I'm not going to be robbed by any officious Frenchman. Take off your shoes and stockings." We gathered up our voluminous skirts, with their voluminous petticoats beneath, as high as the conventions of the day permitted, to our knees, and stepped into the water. As the water deepened we did not abandon decency, but we gave up the attempt to keep dry. When the water surged under our armpits, Hilda, who was by some inches the taller, put an arm about each, friend, and foe, and so interwoven we came to shore. There the natives jabbered excitedly at us, gesticulating in Gallic frenzy. Hilda and I, our rimed and lanky locks about our damp cheeks, our bedraggled clothes sticking to our chill bodies, stood by while my mother, her uplifted petticoats forgotten, jabbered back at them, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, for by one of the outrages of nature, it was my mother, without a verb to her name, who could make herself understood, and get anything she wanted, while Hilda and I, with all our syntax, could only dither. Nor was this the only time that we risked our lives. Aboard ship, the only spot that provided us with the privacy that we considered essential to our happiness was that narrow space of deck outside the lifeboats. On La Floride, it had a little rim, about two inches high, but no guardrail. We crept, on hands and knees, over ropes and stanchions, then, grasping books and candy boxes under our arms, we held on to the edge of the lifeboat till we found a place between boats large enough to spread a rug. There, with nothing between us and the sea and the sky, we sat happily for hours. I remember once that Hilda tripped over the low rim of the deck, lost her grip on the lifeboat and hung in precarious balance over the side, with only my mother's hold upon her skirts, until the reverse swing of the boat brought her upright again. She sat down then, rather pale and breathless, and wrote furiously

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poem after poem for the rest of the afternoon. A day or so later a tall and thin official, all buttons and gold braid, jittering like an anxious hen, escorted us from our eyrie and we were never permitted to risk our lives again. Hilda, indeed, showed distinct reserve about following us about the boat after this. In common with the rest of my family, my mother and I, are singularly indifferent to the blind and dangerous forces of nature. And now we entered a belt of storm. The halcyon days of glittering sun, and unstirred wind, were over. We woke one morning, after a night of pitching and tossing, to see our shoes, books, and kodaks, floating in a foot of water about the floor of the cabin. As we dipped in one direction, a wave lapped at my mother's bunk, and as we dipped in reverse, it lapped at Hilda's. Waves dashed against the portholes, and the boat moved in wide, lolloping circles. "A plate he have come off the side and the propeller he is gone also," explained our steward cheerfully. At breakfast the racks could not keep the dishes in place, nor the stewards' acrobatics keep the food from shooting across the room. We were none of us seasick, but Hilda was very quiet. Passengers were ordered to stay below, but my mother and I watched our chance and slipped through a doorway out upon the top deck. The waves rose, high as houses, hovered a moment and clashed down upon the deck so that the whole rolling little ship was under a smother of water, and it fell from the decks like a roaring cascade. We clung to a ladder, drenched and blinded by the water, but thrilled to the core of our beings. We were discovered of course and sent back with commands, decorated in vigorous patois, that it is probably just as well we could not understand. Hilda greeted our scarecrow figures with a sour smile. Long afterwards she told me that she had never hated her kind as she hated us at that moment, with our wet red faces, riotous spirits and incredible clothing. She, herself, she told me, was in the throes of fear such as she had never

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There, with nothing between

us and the sea and the sky, we sat happily for hours.

Julia and Hilda aboard LaFloride, 1911

experienced. She was certain that the ship was going down, and we, with our idiot grins, were just the last straw. For three days, with every beam creaking and moaning, and all of us battened below, the ship plunged into the depths, came up shivering, took the shock of the next assault, plunged, shivered, creaked, and gained not a yard, for we were at the mercy of the waves without the propellor. The food got bad and ptomaine poison laid most of us low. Then the sun came out, the winds died, the waters calmed, the ship rang with the clang of iron upon metal as they replaced the plates and mended the propeller, and, a week late, limped into harbour. The steerage passengers suffered the most, and it is difficult to forget them, as they crawled upon deck, to lie limp and exhausted in the air. We were doomed not to reach port without tragedy on this momentous first crossing. Leaning idly upon the rail, staring down at that bear-pit of humanity, we had all been diverted by the crazy antics of a man who balanced precariously upon the rail. He was a blue-eyed, black-haired, swarthy Greek, and there was a wildness in his songs and dances, that brought memories of lost centuries with it. Suddenly he stood for one breathless moment upon the rail, then with a gesture, plunged to his death. In a moment his black head bobbed in the midst of the glittering waves and then he was swept out of sight. The ship was stopped, with a great clanging of bells and shouting of orders, the lifeboat lowered, and lifebelts sent afloat upon the water. I was still weak from my bout of ptomaine and my knees bent under me. The little ship's doctor stretched me upon a hatch, covered my head with a shawl to spare me the stares of the passengers, and then applied a wad of cotton soaked with chloroform to my nose. I drifted away upon a tide of troubled dreaming, through which I was perfectly conscious that, with one finger, he was following and following again the indentation of my parted lips and the round of the chin. Never, before or since, have

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I been so impressed by love-making. But there were other fainting and hysterical ladies claiming his attention and the doctor hurried away. There was a hail from the sea, and soon the lifeboat was back with its still living burden. We watched over the rail as the inert body was lifted aboard, the dark head gleaming like basalt. No more was said of the incident, nor was any note taken of the stopping of the ship in the night, and the thud of the weighted body as it entered the waters of its grave. Two days later we were in port. It was the red trousers of the gendarmes on the dockside that thrilled me with the sense of foreignness, far more than the climbing huddle of ancient houses that rose above the quayside. By those scarlet pantaloons I knew that I had left my own abhorred country far behind and was stepping out upon a new land. So much had happened to me in those fourteen days that I, too, was a new being for this new land. It is difficult to analyze all that had passed in my soul from the moment that, over a glitter of water, I had stared at that lumpish figure of Liberty and bade farewell to my country to that moment when I set foot in France. First there was the immensity of sky and sea, the million stars, the ceaseless moving waters, and I, grim atom, brooding in the prow of that little ship, with hardly mind enough to record what, out of infinite wonders, I could manage to see. I was urban born and bred, narrow streets, straight houses, glimpses of sky, a plethora of people. It is easy to pick and choose philosophies, religions, plans of living in such surroundings, but out there in the vast arena of the unknown, the incomprehensible, there was no possible answer. Such clingings as I had to God snapped like threads. What now was the mean script recording the doings of a solitary, lost people? The Psalms, yes, one could mutter them in the face of the sea, wind, and the fathomless starred night; they were paeans to mystery. Alone in the prow of

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that ship I fought out the dilemma of man. Abandon hope, that was the first step, abandon hope, hope that life had a meaning for me, that I had a personal destiny; give it all up, the precious I. I can still feel that awful emptiness, loneliness, grief, of those hours of struggle. It had to be and I had to face it. I remember the feeling of my sharp chin pressed down upon my cold salt hands that clasped the rail, just that frail barrier of flesh between me and nothingness. This left me with an awful tenderness for the flesh, the pitiful, poor thing. Out of that trip grew one of the major weaknesses of my life. It was to affect not only my own career but my son's as well. It is impossible to serve two masters. The way of the spirit is cruel to the flesh. I could take the hard way myself, but when it came to the tender, ardent, eager waywardness of my son, I could never steer a straight course. By turns I demanded Spartan discipline from him, and then broke down and pandered to that sweet simplicity of the flesh that is so enchanting, so beguiling, leading him on to earthiness, egoism, holding him to his childishness, using all my harshness against my own flesh. You must be patient with me here. I record these things because by this way one passionate, bewildered, mortal passed. I was bewildered. Who was I to say that the mysterious call of the senses, those nerves vibrating to the same beat and rhythm of the pulsing earth, the moving sea, who was I to say that that was a less true guide to life than this strange, cruel ecstasy that I sought to impose upon my spirit? It was my choice however. Root by root, on that lonely, mystic voyage, I tore away my quivering flesh from its fastnesses in the world of the senses. I had no fellow wayfarer on the path that I had chosen. Hilda would have none of it, for, whatever "the gods" are or may be, the first thing that they demand is a super claim upon the delights of mortals. What had I to offer in rivalry?

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"an awful tenderness for the flesh, the pitiful, poor thing"

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"there was so much that I wanted"

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First, that the flesh was the body of this death, and that all its delights were rooted in death; then, that the spirit was the vehicle of life, the unproved, the unknowable — chaos. I asked them to see the body as finite and perishable, subject to laws of which we knew neither the beginning nor the end; a fragile, puny thing having but few years at its disposal into which had to be crowded all those indulgences with which the nerves came primed out of mystery. Then, having painted such a tragic picture of the body, I asked them to abandon it to its fate, snatching such food for it in passing as would just keep it alive as temple, as housing for that nothingness that was the spirit. My own idea — if such an incoherent, formless state of mind can be called an idea — was that in the spirit lay the mysteries of wisdom and that "love of the saints" of which we know nothing, and that in that wisdom, or love, there was an ecstasy that would transcend anything that the senses could offer. The fact that man had emerged from the slime was the demand that he should press on and on and on till he had freed himself of the dominance of the animal altogether and had become the species — man. I saw us as children, knowing not what we did, as witness the suffering world. Suffering was an abomination. On the tree of life I saw but one fruit, and its name was pain, though its other name was pleasure. The strong could eat and escape the consequences, but they took their toll of the weak and the defenceless. Out of delight grew the sickness of the world, wars, cruelty, maladies, and that deadly and equivocal panacea, the religions. It was not easy for me to say to myself, this sensitive, vivid body of mine has not long to live, yet I must deny it its innocent delight for love of men whom I shall never know; not easy to say, "There is no God who will see my offering to life, and bring me at last to heaven where I shall find my gifts increased by a hundred fold." It was not easy to say: "Live in darkness, unknown, unnamed, to the glory of life." There was so much that I wanted; there was a table spread and I had to turn away, hungry. F R A N C E S

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You will say, "but with all this pother of dedication and renunciation, what, in actual fact, did it amount to?" And I am hard put to answer. As near as I can express it, nothing personal was, from then on, to be considered an end in itself, neither fame, nor wealth, nor well being. I made a certain number of rules for myself, as though I belonged to a secret order — I was to be faithful in the least of things, that is I must meticulously fulfil all duties, all responsibilities, pertaining to my relationship with my fellowmen. This was a source of endless argument between Hilda and me. I held that duty to my family came before any attempts at achievement in art. Hilda held that duty to art came before all else, and that it was right and just, even meritorious, to sacrifice any human relationship to it. With sensuality, and the life of the senses, I had to steer a narrow and uncertain course. Abstinence was as abhorrent to me as indulgence. I knew myself to be, along with my kind, but half emerged from the animal. I knew that any attempt really to live by love and the intellect alone would be false. That was the theory, the ideal, but not the fact. Each one of my mentors preached the life of the senses to me, its riches, its mystery, its necessity for the artist, its importance in the conception of beauty. I was skeptical. The most that I would yield up to it was acceptance in rejection. I meant to have children, I meant to explore my own nerves and their reactions, I meant to face everything that I was, in loathing if necessary, but I meant to do it all, with myself as specimen in my soul's laboratory. So I wound myself about in a winding sheet, and stepped off that boat dead to myself, never to live again. Does it seem fantastic to you? I record it as one more example of the secret bitter things that the young mind evolves. It was neurotic, if you like, perhaps a little mad, but I had seen so many terrible things in America, known so much suffering, heard the plaints of children and of negroes in my waking and my sleep. I had to do something, I had to believe that I was doing something. As I looked about at M Y S T I C

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Hilda's "duty to art"

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St Ouen, France, 1911

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life I could find the root of every sin, every evil of which the innocent were victims, in my self, therefore it had to die, and I live by some other plan. I was not giving up as much as another, for, if truth were told, I had no talent that would reap me fame, I had no place among men for never have I known a being more universally rejected by all classes and manner of men than I; I was Hilda's, James's, Jack's protege, never really their friend, and never never did I master the art of easy communication with my fellow men. So that it was not as though the strange nunnery to which I had got me deprived me of rich and vivid living. It was from this time on that I began to read into the words of Christ that sad, saturnine humour, the wayfulness of that — "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." There had been no crucifixion, other than this that was offered to us all, that we should die for our fellow men, there was no "God the Father" except this, our love for man; there was no resurrection except for that alien, mindless body, and there was life everlasting, in which we played so short a part. And now I was going to France where they had conceived the profound truth that it was not God whom we must strive to worship, but man. Over a century ago they had striven to abolish religion, and to raze all churches to the ground, and, as usual, man had systematically defeated his own ends. It was to a church that we three wayfarers made our first pilgrimage, St Ouen. I shall never forget that first great cathedral. So eons before, mind had conceived a coral reef, blindly and by instinct. Now it was done consciously and by man. Hilda wrote a poem in her diary, but I could only stare, inarticulate. It had the vast tranquillity of the changeless stars, and in the piercing upward flight of those superb arches there was the loneliness, the vigilance of hope, of man seeking a god. I remember that we read Baedeker assiduously, lighted candles upon altars, and that we prayed.

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You must remember that this was the first cathedral that I had ever seen. I had not been educated up to these things. I stepped straight from the blaring newness of America, its gadgets, its efficiency, its shallow flickering minds, into this past that could conceive, and execute, over the course of many years a perfect expression of the grandest, most poetic dream in life. I had had no real preparation for all this, except the impassioned and lyrical descriptions of John Cowper Powys in his lectures, and one had felt with those that they were not so much descriptions of the things, paintings, sculptures, buildings, but the imaginings of a superman dreamer. It was that that enthralled us all, the listeners — not that there were marvels of art in the world, but that there was this marvel of personality; so rich, so varied, with its maniacal passions, emotions, desires, in the thrall of the most articulate spirit that ever dominated mortal man. We went to learn, and stayed to marvel, but it left us totally unprepared for the impact of this superworld of the inanimate that had been created by men. I was stunned by it all, awed — and impatient. So much of this effort on the part of man impressed me as silly. Beauty of form and invention was not enough. I was a born moralist. I could not understand art nor artists. If a man was sensitive to the beauty of the material world, it seemed to me that he should be sensitive to the misery of man, and the wrack and muddle of life. The artists claimed that by refining the appreciations of man, they were making him more sensitive to the plight of his fellowmen. But, in a world of wars and sickness, cruelty, starvation, and inequality of means, I saw little to prove their case. So that that beautiful pile, St Ouen, remained in my mind as the mausoleum of my God, and my Self, the spot where I took leave forever from the world, its faiths and religions, its standards of beauty and morality. I meant to be bom again, and I was glad that the saturnine, witty, doublespeaking Jesus had lived and walked the earth before me.

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I became interested, now, in the fourth, and other dimensions, for the soul must have some place towards which to turn its unconquerable hope. It was easy to imagine that some future race, not my children, nor my children's children, but perhaps theirs, would move freely in those sealed and hidden dimensions where life and death, and time and weight and space, are but one single energy, where a mirrored scintillation of stars resolves itself into the brilliance of a few conscious bodies, speaking as we do with a million tongues, but with thought emanating from a single consciousness. I peered through an arched tracery of stone upon the shadowed moon and wondered if I had there a moon-maiden counterpart whose glaucous eyes were slumberous with death. I dreamed .. . but it does not matter. We all dream, and take it as a matter of course that the shadows passing through our brains have no known world from which they emanate. Are they memories, or are they immediate, living fact; happenings to us in some one of our many co-existent lives? Out there, in space, where there are many worlds, or proof that there is but one, I could find God again, not the babyish conception of our churches, but God, the mystic source of energy. I stared back into the dim vastness of the cathedral, where shadows fell in colour, the just complement of the colour through which the sun shone in the narrow, jewelled windows. The light was mellow and dim, starred with candle-pointed flames. These were real peasants, black shawled and white coiffeured, who knelt there telling their beads. And that was Hilda, lissome, curved, withdrawn, writing assiduously. And that, my mother, wetting the corner of her handkerchief in the holy water to sponge out a spot upon her skirt. Was it only I, then, whose head seethed with speculation and with thought, who brooded morbidly, tilting at the church's pinnacles; choosing a way where there was no way, abandoning the sweet logicalities of religion? From what source came

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those ideas that gave up the world to chaos, but fashioned out worlds moving in conscious rhythm out there in the other dimensions. For that was the way my new philosophy was leading me, to see the world as chaos, and men as fragments of a greater thought. It was, for me, a case of living selflessly without the comfort of the priests and without Christian burial. That must have been the thing that the boy Christ discovered and imparted to the dignitaries of the Temple when he first rejected that mammoth man-demon that they called "God." Certainly he brought no tale of miracles, nor the supernatural, except just that — that for no reason, but by faith, it behoves us to live in honour with our fellowmen, pressing no advantage, but subduing every desire that disturbed the peace and equilibrium of this fragment of a universe. I can believe that he told them: "We have no need of Churches, we are, ourselves, in the flesh, the Temple, the living portent of the mystery we call love." But when I tried to share these thoughts with Hilda she mocked me for a "salvation lassie," and for passing through an "adolescent stage of getting religion," as our negroes back at home call it. People of our intelligence, said Hilda, should concentrate upon refining it to the point of clairvoyance in the interest of the arts. Art should come before everything. The artists were the vanguard of consciousness. Goodness and evil did not matter. Sex did matter, for its colour and richness fed the senses as nothing else did. Sex should be treated, and developed, as an Art. Responsibilities, relatives, fidelities, none of these things mattered. All that mattered was that we should be artists. I agreed with none of it. Artists did not seem to me the vanguard, but the rear-guard in life. They gathered up the crumbs from the rich man's table. What man had experienced, they could record. They were the cosmic journalists, a noble profession, but, as far as creation went, they were sterile and impotent. This cult

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of the entrails, too, which Hilda put so high in the scheme of things. I could not see it. It seemed retrogressive to me. As man evolved, it seemed to me that the focus of attention had to be diverted from the region below the diaphragm to that above; first to the emotions and then to the brain. Our bodies were weighed down already with a great weight of viscera. As a superanimal species we were comic, terribly grotesque and undignified. As we heaved and panted in the throes of nervous ecstasies, I could see that we were in the thrall of mystery, but I knew that our mimic sprawlings and our sighs and bleatings were sadly silly and ineffectual. All that we had garnered so far from the mystery of sex was a cheap and vulgar and highly specious entertainment. There was an intimation in the withheld, withdrawn, exquisite pain and thrill of being "in love" that had no fulfilment in any actual sex expression. There was an intimation of superlative things missed that they were disregarding. I thought them essentially stupid, and I was laughed at for my earnest plans for striding across the gaps in evolution. My world would have been strange indeed. I thought of sex as an attribute of youth. I knew when those first mysterious stirrings summoned us from the flighty joys of youth to the grave sweets of adolescence. I knew, too, all the meddlings and the sickly rubbish of the adult, pouring out its jealousy and its guilt-complex in tirades of admonition, reproof and instruction. I knew the harm it did. I knew how quickly innocence was tarnished by their ignorance. The young knew, perfectly and without sully, all the inwardness of sex. I would have summoned youth into that fair garden, for sex, as an animal trait, and for the animal mind, is a pure and perfect thing, joyous, thrilling. I would have brought in the children and bid them learn their medium until puberty brought them ripe organs fit for conception and birth. I would bid them bear their children while they, themselves, were young

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enough to understand, and guide the child mind. Then, at eighteen, or twenty, or thereabout, I would bid them to think of putting childish things behind them, bid them enter into adulthood, adulthood which would be sterile, sexless and intelligent. In my world there would be no draining off of energy from the serious problems of life, while mature men and women, and even the senile, indulged in fornication. I would rid the world forever of those sly, contaminated men and women. They should be adult. But I was howled down and mocked. Yet my way will be the way of life. So we argued passionately every step of the way about Europe, seizing upon every intimation in sculpture or painting to add to our armoury of invection. I peered at the potent and cryptic Leonardos and claimed them for my own, and argued from them, while my mother tugged at my sleeve and whimpered, "Why do you never talk to me — not that I don't think that your conversation is abominable and filthy — where you get your ideas from, I can't think, except, of course, from these new friends of yours — that ever a daughter of mine — why don't you talk to me?" Much that I said was nonsense; all that Hilda said was poetic and well informed. And she was beautiful. I see her now, her long woollen skirt to her instep, an hourglass coat to her hips, her flat-heel shoes, her little hat above a small bun of fair brown hair, all hopelessly ugly and ridiculous, but she was there, her heavy lidded eyes, her chiselled lips, that something glaucous and yet flowerlike that was her very essence, and the mystic light that glowed within her like a flame globed in alabaster. We went the round of Museums and Art Galleries and were ciceroned by Ezra Pound and Walter Rummel. We met many people. All doors were open to Hilda as friend of Ezra's, half doors were opened to me as friend of Hilda, and no doors were open to my mother, the friendless one. This seemed to us quite right and

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proper, and her laments and tears most unreasonable. Were we not the elect of life, being a generation younger? But of these things I must tell you in another chapter.

CHAPTER SIX

I

wish that I could remember. It seems so silly to have lost the detail of the sweet magic of Paris. I remember the pavement beside the Seine, the way it looked like a pavement of silver after a little weeping rain and how the leaves drifted down, one here, one there with an edge of silver because the sun was very pale and thin: I remember the book stalls and the head of an old man, that I see and then it is gone before I can see it again; I even remember the exact contours of one of the book barrows and the seamed and threadbare look of the waterproof cover drawn over the books to protect them from the rain, but I cannot see myself walking there, nor who was with me. Ragtags and odd ends of memories are all that come back to me, the parting of the river to make way for the island and the disappointment at the first sight of Notre Dame. It looked squat and ugly to me then. I remember the weariness of all the long alleys of the Louvre and the weariness of living up to ourselves, of being "appreciative" of all this art. I began to turn away from "art," the deity of America, there in the Louvre. There was something suspect about this rigid, fixed state of mind that had held thrall for centuries. And secretly I was bitterly disappointed. There was the Mona Lisa, and dinning through my mind were Pater's effusions — "She is older than the rocks upon which she sits" —, and I saw a pouter pigeon of a woman with a fixed simper. I suffered the bitterness of self-disillusionment. I had certainly expected to go Pater one better in poetic interpretation. The Virgin of the Rocks looked turgid and cluttered to me, though the exquisite eyelids of the little babies, and the dotting of starry flowers gave me that aching welling up of the heart that one

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has before greatness. I tried to imagine that terrific intellect, that subtle malign brain, that giant and superman, seeing the sweet clear lines of a baby's eyelids before life has had time to mar them: I tried to imagine the ruthless hand, that penned the fragments in those notebooks, at work upon each tiny frond and petal of the smallest of earth plants. The Venus de Milo I remember, too, where it stood at the end of a long aisle, its whiteness and beauty of proportions stirring memories of Greek temples and old worship. It was beautiful, but it was more than that. There was courage and nobility in the utter skepticism of the Greeks that made them deify the physical aspects of life. I could see that we had lost something exquisite in the wild panic plunge of man into Hebraism. Christ was the only way back, but religion of any kind, with its muddle of hopes and fears, seemed niggardly and even tawdry as one stared down that blank alley at that emblem of positive and essential beauty. There was a grand and lovely winged figure, too, in the entrance hall of the Louvre, a poised billowing figure like the flight of the wind. This I loved. It gave scope for the freedom and the exultation that was my American heritage. I knew now that I would never be an artist, nor have the fine and keen appreciation of the artists. What I sought, and my intention, were elsewhere. There was to be a little time of authentic beauty, however, before we ran full tilt upon the snobberies, the pernickities of the artist world upon that comic island, England. Walter Rummel was in Paris. It seemed to me a long time since Mrs Pound had rung the cowbell to summon him and Hilda in from the dewy dawns of Pennsylvanian night, though it was, in fact, but a few months. Then, in my enthralment with the clangorous Ezra, I had formed but the dimmest impression of Walter Rummel, and even now I cannot remember him, except that his hair was long and hung upon his cheeks, and that those cheeks were pallid, a dewy robust

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pallor: his eyes were blue and like the Ice King's, so that to look into them was to think of Norse icebound wastes of water and scudding clouds. I remember him as tall and that he looked down upon me, for the most part, kindly. To a large extent I am intolerant of music, but he played very beautifully. His rooms were at St Cloud, no, at Passy, and we went by steamer first, the little steamers up the Seine, which was a most captivating way of travelling, and then we climbed long stairs and had a heavenly tea that included rhum babas. Walter and Hilda were a shade preoccupied and deep in eye to eye, but my mother and I always enjoyed teas. Afterwards he had some strange Egyptian books and pictures to show to us. I was not only ignorant, but very dense, particularly where the erudition had to do with sex. There was one plate, some god, who held upon the tipmost point of his fingers the tiny posed figure of a naked woman. "Do you know what it means?" It was easy to gather that it meant one of the things that, by the tenets of my upbringing, it should not, but difficult to know which one. I shook my head. "Ah," said my friend, who must have been all of twenty-six, "you should." Then with tender paternal admonition, "You are quite old enough now." I was indeed, being not far off twenty-six myself. The flaw was not only in my upbringing, but in something in me that was wilfully alien to life. Did I but look full tilt upon that face, as they did, these adult beings, I too might suffer that dread Gorgon gift. I might even become an artist, one of that company of ghouls at work upon their spiritual offal. That last, I know, is bias, and prejudice — perhaps even sour grapes, but there is a large proportion of my personal truth in it, my life invention. No, if I was going to face life, I meant it to be forever as the young Perseus defended by my mirror shield. Of sex I knew, as yet, very little, but enough to have made my vow that what I took, and what I experienced, in that direction, should

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be forever adolescent, fashioned of dreams and airy fancies, but shallow, violent, greedy, curious, and well-laced with a sane disgust. So I planned, and so I have lived, and so I should have lived without any rote; for adolescence is the measure of my development. "But you understand?" Walter Rummel turned to Hilda and there was warmth and vibrancy between them, and something cold and passionless and most mystical and mysterious. Yes, Hilda understood, and oh, those heavy-lidded eyes and the mute still face, the dreadfully beautiful snake-woman. And after that communing of eyes to eyes, Walter played. It grew dark in the studio, but from outside, across a space of darkness there were vast chimneys from which sprang flames, flames of all colours like fountains leaping and playing. They were the chimneys of a chemical works nearby and those lovely pyrotechnics were a nightly phenomenon, but never will I forget that dark silhouetted figure swaying above its keyboard, the flicker of the white skeleton hands, and that long Egyptian head with its wings of hair wreathed by the multicoloured flames. He played and asked us to interpret it, which we did after our kind. I cannot understand music but this was Debussy's water music and the notes fell most magically upon that charged air. And now there occurred a very strange happening and one which I have never had explained. The curtains had been drawn against the cascades of fire outside, and the falling dew of sound was still. The lights were artfully shaded so that the room was at once dusky and luminous. There had been food and coffee and a high piled bowl of fruit and my mother had been drawn back into that esoteric circle from which she had been excluded. She, who could most readily and fully have understood that Egyptian print had sat back in the shadows as she always did, for any party that included Hilda was prone to end in deepening gloom and a

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general purple physical and emotional haze. I often wonder what my mother did. Did she sleep comfortably, or did she watch with bright small eyes and uplifted head like a tortoise? Did she laugh to herself, or was she awed, or envious, or just parentally contemptuous? Now before I go on with this story I must go back a little to events that had gone before this last of those Paris meetings. When we had arrived in Paris my mother had taken us to a small hotel which bore the American name of some town through which her movings back and forth across American had led her. That was enough to deify it in her eyes, any link with herself. The food might be bad, and was: the corridors might be suspect, the bath a horror, but it bore a magic name. However, even she was not able to cope with the plague of nameless fleas that also inhabited that hotel, so she set off one morning to find us a new abode. Her wayfarings brought her at last to Montmartre and there she engaged a sort of garret flat for us, of which the landlady, hearing that she had two "jeune filles" under her "protection" — as my mother's French had phrased it — gave her the key, as well as the key to the entrance gates, having leaped to a completely erroneous conclusion. When she saw these two "jeunes filles" in all their American innocence, there was a great to do — to which none of our French was equal, but my mother, by the simple expedient which has served throughout her long life — J'y suis, j'y reste — kept possession of her keys, though we were locked into our quarters by the landlady every night, and never knew or heard what else went on below stairs, though sometimes we saw ladies flitting through the garden gates at a very early hour and disappearing down the flowery ways of this Jardin des Fleurs. At about ten or so we were released by Madame, and allowed to partake of huge bowls of delicious coffee in the garden, after which we had to go out and return by nine o'clock to be locked

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in upstairs. All of which we took in our stride as part of foreign aberration. Not so Walter. He was horrified, and insisted upon our moving at once. None of his arguments moved my mother in the slightest till he produced the carcase of a bedbug that he had abstracted from the seams of the sofa. My mother then agreed to leave, and forthwith decided to take us all to England the next day. The arguments, with their triumphant conclusion, had spread over a fortnight, as you may believe, knowing my mother. I suppose that my memory is not playing tricks, yet it is difficult to believe that all this time we were sleeping, like the Japanese, upon pallets upon a polished floor, but certainly it is so that I remember it. I can see the little pile of books upon the floor beside my bed upon a level with my head, and the roofs of Paris coming slowly out of the dawn mists far above through the panes of a long window set high in the wall. Down a low broad step and partly walled, for this was a converted garret, Hilda had a tiny bedchamber to herself with even a chest of drawers which she guarded so jealously that it roused my most intense curiosity. She forbade my prying, in terms of measured scorn and anger that turned the trick nicely, and I took the first opportune moment to inspect her bluebeard cupboard. There I found, to my surprise and disappointment, only some books, odd things with numerals, but also some most strange reading matter. Little I realized that I was having the first glimpse of the literature of a Cult that was to bring us each much fear and unhappiness. I read then, and was vastly amused, and set myself to catch Hilda out, asquat upon the floor, her lean figure rocking, and those glaucous eyes fixed in hypnotic trance upon her small brown petal-folded navel. This I never saw happen, and I forgot the episode for many years. It did however link up with the strange, and to me mysterious, happening in those rooms of Walter Rummel.

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It was no more than a picture that Walter had to show to me, the portrait of a girl, but across the lovely face there was the cruel barring of a cross. It affected me horribly. I had no idea why. I heard his muttered explanation of the "secret rose" and the cross, but that was meaningless. What I saw was known only to the old old soul within me. It shook my body with its convulsive sobbing. I cried to Walter, as over weary wastes of horror, "No," and "No" again, but had no idea what I would deny him, nor what was the terror against which I strove to warn him. My body trembled in a rigid convulsion that made my feet beat a strange tattoo upon the naked floor. I remember that its darkness swirled like a pool, like night about my feet. Then I must have fallen for it was some hours later when I came to myself out of a deep sleep. They were very gentle with me, Walter and Hilda, sitting there upon the side of that wide couch, and there was perfect comprehension and union between them, and I was not of them. That was the end of Walter's association with the story of my life. I saw him, of course, but we were friends, each, of Hilda's rather than friends to each other. Hilda builded many false hopes upon the malign spiritual alliance that bound them — I say "malign," for so it would have been to me for I am the enemy of Cults, and must be free to touch the mystery of life direct — and I was used as go-between — certain things that I must say at given moments, certain times when I must bring them together. I remember Walter towering over me once in a frenzy of impatience, "Why did you do that, Frances? You knew that Hilda was in that room. Why did you send me there? Do you know? Do you indeed know anything?" "Nothing," I muttered humbly, and I can see now the gilded edges of the leaves of a vine that blew in the sunlight beyond the door that opened upon a garden. "Nothing." Nor yet I did, except that Hilda wanted him, and I was all for anybody getting anybody that they could.

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One last single memory I have of Walter Rummel. It was at a tea party somewhere, with a great concourse of celebrities, and Hilda, Walter, Ezra and I had drifted apart. I wore the most beautiful of all the dresses I was ever to have. It was a white China silk gathered at the neck into a silver band, bound at the waist with a heavy silk cord from which dangled silken tassels. There were no sleeves except long silken white strands of fringe. It was so "Greek," they said, and admired me, in a faint measure, with my own intenser admiration. Walter held the long silken cords and tossed the gleaming tassels. "Don't," said Ezra, "Don't dangle the lady's girdle. It gives a quite false impression of your intimacy," and then dangled them himself.

CHAPTER SEVEN

This tale was begun as a record of those people who, in the

hurly-burly, the wash and silt of life, seemed to me keen and reputable, not beggars in the mart their shiningness wrapped all about with the rags and gauds and trappings of other people's thoughts and other people's laws and other people's conventions. These were the people about whom I set out to write, the people whom I knew best, but more and more it is becoming a tale of the one whom I knew least, this baffled, hag-ridden, bewildered I, about whom I shall never come to say she was this or that, for by turns I am both a grand and wise superhuman being moving with sure and stately tread where truth is and a scrambling ape tearing their silken woven scarves into idiot tatters, making a mock of their human gestures, chattering ribaldries with my high ape gods. And for the actual living of life I have but one law — I serve. Oh, if I can but find you, strange companion who is I, then I shall know the secrets of life and death, but I shall not find you, neither I nor anyone. I have put down on paper this turmoil of frantic memories, scraps from a ragbag, the oddments of the raimenting of those elusive beings whose souls had summoned them to walk the earth as Jack and Ezra and Hilda, names that are fraught with some secret meaning and that are intricately woven with our destinies. Have you ever noticed how some people cannot be nicknamed, and the panic into which others will fall when they have been, as they believe, "named out of their name." I remember, in my childhood, seeing a huge Irish labourer dancing with rage and shrieking "He called me out of my name the . . . nameless one." That last,

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most dire insult, "the nameless one" being a concession to the decencies as represented by myself, a female, though small. Louis, for instance, could never be nicknamed, but must have been Louis screaming in his nurse's arms, and will be Louis carven upon a tomb. But John Cowper Powys must have been called John, consistently, by very few, by his mother always, I am sure. He was her firstborn and the secret of his blood ran darkly with her own. She knew him in his fantasy, in that deep welling tenderness, that abounding love, that urgent terrible and terrifying pity that — men should be men; even perhaps she knew how this Lover pre-eminent would slay so many many gentle ones with the deathkiss of disillusionment. I remember once how Llewelyn, whose wit flicked like the tongue of a golden asp, described his mother and his envied and adored elder brother, "seated, hand in hand, in a corner of the fireplace, weeping over the nothingness of the universe." Yes, she would have called him John always, I think. But to the rest of us, he was Jack, master of the world's marionettes, the clown who could not weep, the sweet mad Punch who fed law and order to the crocodile for us, or hanged it from a gibbet. Ezra fancied himself as Osiris, and as Azrael, and, I have no doubt, as Catullus and Confucius, as any of those angels whose passing cleaved the universe, but he was Ezra to the world. And Hilda, as a round-eyed wondering infant, or as a slender girl-child all glorious within because the rose has burst into golden flower upon the housefront, or as her mother's debutante daughter, or the young Greek priest of neophytes, would yet be Hilda. For myself there seemed a marked unwillingness to name me at all. By a fury of endeavour I have got myself called Frances, but actually I was christened by a nickname, a name that is no name at all and the Church should have known better than to limn down upon a christening card — this soul is named "Fanny," a name which, upon my first astonished seeing, I associated with a fan, and saw

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myself as an eternal waft breezed upon the universe. Fanny Josepha was what they gave me with which to broach a universe. Josepha was the name of a centuries dead Spanish ancestress. Wherever her blood flows steeply and darkly again she names us by her name, one here, one there. Inevitably we are taunted, thwarted, frustrated, passionate women. My grandmother was such, and so am I. Now, in one dark night of weeping, I have taken my own tears and traced a cross upon the brow of my little baby companion, Jane, and called her also Josepha, for have I not seen in her infant eyes that awful look of the eternal watcher. Her flesh will hold her but an uneasy captive and all her garnering will be the bitter fruit of very life. Judy, her younger twin, is absolutely different. She is a child of a large face and Rubanesque buttocks, the very prototype of all the cupids, dimpled, fleshy, roguish. Her tiny mouth is a bow, her blue, gay, and astonished eyes are rimmed with curling lashes. There is no secret menace in her gaze, nothing cold and inimical, such as I see within the lifted lids of Jane as she returns from sleep. No, Judy's eyes are like the summer, like drifting cloud, pellucid water. She is the eternal constant of the sweetness of humanity so her I have christened Frances, that alias for the Fanny that I really am, for well I know that this small granddaughter will live riotously, kicking over the traces; her brain will be a lively machine driving no whither; her heart at once shallow and bubbling over with affection; she will be glad and mad and yes, bad, and always merry, and with it all, Frances, little tough guy. My son peers down upon his offspring appraising them already as individuals. He adores Judy, yet, caught unaware, his gaze at her is sharp and grave. He knows a thing or two already about that young woman of five months. Of Jane he says, "she will take some getting used to." He has been astounded by his parenthood, that

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it made, to begin with, no impression upon him at all. "These extraordinary strangers," he wrote, "must be kept warm and fed." Later on, he seemed to think, they would reveal themselves. This tale, however, has not to do with the fascinating race of infants, but with their spore, their seeding, the adult, with whom unfortunately I am far less adroit, understanding, and sympathetic. The keen, flexible, quick-witted mind of the infant — its retentiveness, the swiftness of its observation, theory and practice — devices for living; the sensitive genuineness of its emotions — all these things appeal to me enormously. Its size, too, and the fact that it can be cherished and tended, lift all the floodgates of my deep loving. I am wholly myself with an infant as surely as I am all but wholly artificial with an adult be he never so dear and near. My great astonishment is that adults can be so disappointing when you think that each one started in the brilliance of infancy. I attribute it to the fatal hiatus of childhood. Children carry over the knowledgeableness of infancy, the purity of judgment, into a phase in which, of necessity, the innocence of the flesh must be lost. They have now to pit themselves against the tyranny of physical power and established order. They are at a disadvantage and expediency becomes the law of their being. With their pitiless observation they judge the people about them, but they pattern themselves upon these same soiled and spoiled adults, whose infamy and nobility bewilder these small logicians mightily. Pity and indifference are born, equally morbid growths. Children are moral, adults are not. The child struggles with this devastating disillusionment in great bitterness of spirit before it finally succumbs to its destiny of lies, lust, greed, and cruelty. And how they suffer! Their joyousness is proverbial, but really to plumb the depths of human misery, victimisation, tragic pity, infamy, perfidy and abomination, spy in upon the world of these pretty little beings. Upon me they exercise an awful fascination. I am

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enthralled by their cleverness, their subtlety, their depths of emotion. Now that I am grown, children are very kind to me, but when I was young they were infinitely cruel. It is an awful thing to be a child. Think back and tell me if this is not so. I, for instance, having lived a life scored over by something utterly malign, can face anything, deal with any situation, rise and run again, but speak to me of my childhood and I break down and weep. All suicides, I am convinced, and all the inmates of madhouses, are victims of child-fixation. And here again the accuracy of that great psychological poem, which has so enchanted my imagination through the years, is manifest, for it counsels, that the world should be redeemed, that "man shall be born again" and become — not as a child — but "as a little child"; and again it reads, "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not for of such is the kingdom of heaven." What wisdom. This is dawn on Jane's fifth monthly birthday, January 18th. She sleeps through my typing, but just now, as always when the world swings us into the sun's path, she stirred, unfurled her close folded hands and stretched away from the pre-natal pose into which sleep draws her back. Her sleeping and her waking have a rhythm as certain as the turning of the tides. She sleeps, she wakes. These are mysteries to which we grow too soon dull. Now she will lie and talk to the light for some little time before I take her up. She will woo it, coerce it, command it imperiously, plead with it, or, with arching body and frantic hands wax furious with it that she may not enter in and become itself, exactly as she will woo, command, coerce and plead with some luminous souls named this and that who will sail up out of the nothingness to be her friends and lovers. The Christmas dawn was so spectacular that I wrapped her up and we two stole out of the sleeping house. There was a white frost and every twig and blade of grass was sheathed in ice; not a

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flaw upon the white hill that stretches up to the woods above the cottage, nor upon any of the hills that surround us. What was left of the moon hung silver in the sky on the right hand, and on the left came up a silver sun. The ducks stirred at the sound of my crackling footsteps and came out of their house, flying low across the frozen earth, their grey feathers silvered by the moon, silvered by the sun. It was lovely, but Jane's little nose grew red as a cherry so we hurried in.

CHAPTER EIGHT he sadness of looking back is the realization of precious time T, lost in false starts, foolish efforts, misguided and ignorant states of mind. I blame our retarded sex life for most of the calamities of our later existence. We should be swiftly and smartly educated for living. Culture, art, should be approached reverently in our maturer years. It seems to me a pity that all those years of earnest and vital learning of the ways of the spirit should have been daubed over with the undignified, imbecile agitations of sex starvation. People, who should appear to me now as burning rushes, I remember in all the folly and degradation of their animal carcases. There is no doubt in my mind that this awful wedding of the flesh and the spirit, responsible for so much monstrous and abortive growth, should be abolished. The education of the primitive man, and of the holy spirit should not be one titanic effort, but two. It is absolutely essential to the future of the world that man should be taught to regard himself as a dual personality, potentially and certainly one as are night and day and life and death, but, for the purposes of education, two. That simplifying of our formula would abolish malady, madness, and war in a few generations. Straws do show which way the wind blows, and the hopeless blight of the adolescent should be sufficient to indicate to science the need for a new ordering of existence. Is not our adolescence always the same? We have been the victims of infantile, and senile, pruriency throughout our childhood. There have been suggestions, intimations, holy and unholy secrets, whisperings, and, almost universally, an exploitation of our ignorance for the delectation of some elder, or elders. Does not each adolescent

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suffer agonies of shame, pitiful disillusionment, and passionate disgust allied with passionate indulgences? Is not adolescent insanity a commonplace of pathology? It is a period in which the phases of evolution through which we each must pass, as in the embryo, are speeded up. All the spiritual and physical development and subtilization experienced by man in his forced flight from the jungle, must now be packed into a few years. It took centuries to achieve, just as the phases through which the embryo speeds in a few months took centuries to evolve. No one says to the adolescent: "It's all right. Take it easy. All this pother will boil down in a very short time. In the meantime do thus, and so: bask in your jungle sun while you may: note the way by which you have passed through the centuries: you are without sin." No, all the universe is sickened by guilt. The world is afraid. No one says — that is, no one says with coherence and conviction: "You are now approaching manhood, a state of consciousness dragged over from the unknown by the sufferings, the passionate enterprise of millions of forebears. It is a sacred heritage and life's greatest gift. Protect it, young knight, add your own riches to what is already glorious, for well we know, we educationalists, we priests and prelates, how your young spirit aches for high and noble deeds, how your young eyes search the universe for beauty. You are ape, but you are also man. Go in peace. The ape must die in you, just as thousands of lives have already died in your making, from that protoplasm which was your first beginning, through reptile, fish, and eyeless newt, through the stage when you might equally well be cat or dog, or fox or tiger, up to the point in which you are projected upon the universe in the guise of man. To be man is your destiny: that is your species, a species which, in its turn, is but a wayfaring for a new species beyond, hidden in the folds of time, a species which already summons you in those incommunicable longings that possess your

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soul. Life is an illease at best, between this tragic wistfulness, and your nostalgia for the jungle. Do not try to see it whole in your fragile youth. Know yourself as dual, as the parting of the ways, and we, who are wiser and older, will give you sane rules and regulations and beautiful example till the welding of the flesh and the spirit make you one whole man for the use of life." No, there is no one to say these things to us, so that those in whom the spirit is strong, break their hearts and go mad, and those in whom the jungle is strong wreak their awful victories upon the world so that the cries of the victims fill all the universe like the beating of the wings of birds. And all this has come from a surging up of my memories and impressions of the arrival upon your little island of those three American ladies, Julia and Hilda and Frances. Her teutonic majesty, Victoria, was only shortly dead, a decade dead, just long enough for reactions to be gathering snowball weight. All England's passionate endeavour to deny the stool and the deep domestic sea of profligacy and fornication, was turning into a passionate endeavour to avow the stool and the welter of the marital couch. Mr James Joyce, fishing in this mighty sewer, brought up for the hectic delight of his audience, a kindly middle-aged gentleman at stool, and other beings of spit and vomit, all of which couched in terms of pedantry and bombast, brought him lasting fame and a good deal of trouble with the censorship. He was right. The only cure for putrefaction is to open up the sore. But we three ladies were unfortunate in that we arrived in space just when the Cult of the Open Sore threatened to doom a great period in literature. All this has been provoked by my irritable memories of those English parties and the English people whom I found so completely a foreign people though we spoke the same tongue. I was very ignorant in those days. I had never heard of address-

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ing a letter as to — "Ezra Pound Esq." — and laughed rudely and uproariously when he begged me to do so. It struck me as ineffable affectation and preposterous conceit on his part. True, there were many old envelopes among my grandmother's papers, addressed in faded purple ink, in a writing that was painstaking and elegant, with quavering thin lettering, to "Archibald Wood Lang Esque," her husband, and to her "dear father" Christopher Heartt Esque. But that went with the period of coloured broadcloth coats and high satin stock under thin jowls. I could not believe that so gauche a creation as our Mr Pound was due an esquire upon his letters. He explained to me fully, foully, and with rude emphasis that it was his due and that I was an ignoramus. Never did a maid more need a Cophetua than I. My fleering locks and tattered gentility could neither be controlled nor concealed. I am as real as a carrot. How well I remember another party, of a far later date than these first English tea-parties, when I sat in slightly bedraggled black chiffon, upon a lowly stool, guarded and upheld by my tall and lovely son, whose young chivalry was put to so stern a test always by the gaffs he knew his mummy would make. To the right of me sat bunched and Richard thirdish-hunched, John Cowper, his little eyes fleeting snake-wise from one to another of the puppets he had staged in that riverside room. To the left of me with ash-gold head, and face dyed copper-hued partly from illness, partly from the strong Swiss sun, that laughing, mocking, most dear demon, Llewelyn. When he rose and came across the room to light my cigarette, I blushed because he was so very beautiful, so alien and like a god that I was moved, but terribly abashed that my traitor blood should so give me away to that battery of eyes, for facing me were the Powysian ladies of the moment, they also American. One, a large flamboyant lady was named Florida, and the other, was a sweet, incredible, horrid little product of our New

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England States. I did not like her, but oh how she brought back my country to me. She was like a wooden doll, those stiff, rudely carved, and highly coloured penny wooden dolls that are more authentically toylike, and have more the mystery and magic of toys than any others. Perhaps you know them. Their little faces are round and tight, and their hair is a painted black cap with undulations. Their eyes are round and staring, painted, too, and their cheeks are red. They stare out infinitely with a gaze of appalling innocence, and they are infinitely prim. This lady was like them, and wore a little knitted shawl folded about her shoulders. Both these ladies were very learned and talked endlessly in the clipped, cryptic phrases of the cultured elite. Their talk was of new writers in whom I was interested and I wanted to say a lot of things, but every time I tried to speak they talked me down so that I kept opening and shutting my mouth, silently, gaping like a fish. Bright spates of words they hurled at me. "Don't you agree, you do agree, don't you?" they appealed to me, falsely, maliciously, those spiteful women. "I don't know," I blurted, "I haven't understood a word you said." And in his dark corner Jack gave a little hoot of laughter, and in his bright corner Llewelyn grinned like a gargoyle, and my son was pleased. Then I saw those three, the two dear men and my tall son, his deep-lashed eyes glinting from one to the other, grouped at the end of the room, so very male and apart from our female trio. They were stalwart in a stable world, and we were thin and like quicksilver in our world of mist and water spume. But to go back to those earlier parties and why I felt that those learned people were strangely crude and adolescent. First, naturally, because I could not believe that great art was evolved in so constricted a space as was between the tea-table and their bedsitting-room divans of delight. The universal bemaulments, and

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something foetid and anaemic about these spirits, troubled and depressed me, the more deeply, no doubt, because no one was in love with me. One party that I particularly remember was at the house of May Sinclair.16 I had heard much of her, her genius, her devotion to the young artist. Hilda was a young artist. I had published — with all of Ezra's influence to back them — a few poems. The amazement of seeing my own name in print, of reading those most unrhythmic outpourings of my crooked-crabbed uncertain young heart, was still as sweet to me as a secret sin. Surely the Forum sponsored nothing less than a "young artist." I don't know quite what I hoped. I was as poor and as lorn and wistful as any Cinderella. But Miss Sinclair failed to enthuse about my four weak poems. She turned a bleak eye even upon Hilda's pretensions, though she brightened when she heard that Hilda "might have come over with the American Ambassador." ("There would have been war if you had," my mother always replied to this proud boast.) An indescribable sense of futility, of meanness of origin, of meanness of intention, descended upon me. I had no place among these people. I was a creature fashioned in the manner of those fantasies in the song of Tom O'Bedlam: "With a heart of furious fancies . . . with a burning spear and a horse of air ... in a wilderness to wander." These people were smug, they leaned together for support and shouted in each other's faces. I hated them. And my hands scrabbled feebly for the way of the portal that would let me in. So, torn between repugnance and desire, I hovered miserably on the outskirts of this circle. Miss Sinclair was a tight, neat spinster, to whom Freud had come as the angel of the annunciation. She would give birth in time to a spawn of nether progeny in whose printed blood would riot all her complexes and suppressions, all those decent reticences of her Victorian upbringing in rout. I knew that I would, and I did, read each of her books with thrilled interest. F R A N C E S

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She was little and mean-souled and repellent, but she could write, and I envied her. And seeing myself against that fine tough woman soul, I learned something of my own destiny that was like a revelation, like a miracle for me in that stuffy room, with its agitated moving of urgent aspiration, passionate interluding, those butter-dripping bits of food stuff, that insane ritual of teacups and icing: I learned a just proportioning. She knew her stuff, and was no sentimentalist. No woman is, of course, though the false, fair, sidling creatures ape that quality. Sentimentality is the invention of man, the casuist, the rationalist, the explainer away, sentimentality is his emotional figleaf. No, May Sinclair was no sentimentalist. She did help the young artist, and she was hardheaded and economical. She helped the young male, gave them introductions, made chances for them, banking on the swift vitality of their reactions, and upon their short range of emotional activity. The male is only capable of a terrific, short-lived effort mentally and emotionally. After that he repeats himself for what it is worth. Take any man that you know, he exhausts himself in the first effort, whatever it may be, a life pose, or an art. He does not write better books, he writes more; or he becomes an old poseur clinging to his youthful fancies, as Ezra clung to his beret and his velvet jacket and the flowing tie when a round paunch and a ruddy countenance made them pathetic — to those who had loved him, and just ridiculous to the young who saw him for the first time in his age. Women gestate in all that they are. It is not that there are not artists among us. It is only that life is not long enough. Show me a young woman artist and I will show you a stealer of some man's thunder. Thousands and thousands of them paint their pictures and write their songs — till — they marry and get on with life. If they remain spinsters, that is bachelor women who have their affairs, then they may develop this abortive art, as, for instance, Amy Lowell. It is true even of actresses. Are they ever M Y S T I C

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content until they have disported themselves upon the boards in the guise of a youth, from Sarah Bernhardt to Elizabeth Bergner, with their PAiglon, and the boy David. Why? Because that is the groundwork upon which they have built up their life fantasy, their art. No, I will believe in the woman artist when I first see a grandmother bursting into song. I am probably the first real woman artist. If they ever have a beginning, they die young, like Emily Bronte. Not Charlotte. Any man could have written her stuff. But could aught but a woman have conceived Wuthering Heights7. I don't claim that I gathered all the above in one toneless and unglowing scrutiny of my yearning self by May Sinclair. I only gathered that May Sinclair knew a thing or two about our sex, and that she was a just and clever woman. I accepted her verdict then and there and determined to fight for my life. The result of this was that I became a most deplorable wife, a devastating mother; and infernal daughter, and a most base and conscienceless lover — but I exist, whole and uncontaminated. Hilda was far more adroit than I at picking up the patter of this group. It was almost a code that they had evolved from the technicalities of their trade. They spoke as the craftsmen of old, though their medium was the new craft of words. They were linking them up more closely to thought processes, and training the ear to catch, and the eye to see the rhythms natural to the speech of man. Grammar, syntax, punctuation were the dragons to be slain by these knights of the pen. I had no quarrel with them, but their mannerisms, affectations, and the revivalist atmosphere put me off. They were too extatic, and just at this period Ezra cultivated a sibilant way of speaking, a way of sucking in breath and saliva at the corners of his mouth that, while it added a special kudos to his most idiotic avowal, was most irritating. There were cults within cults within cults in this group, and a

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great deal of lying together both with and without sin, for the sake, they assured me, of their art. No one considered my art and I, therefore, remained chaste. I do not remember whether I saw May Sinclair more than this one time, but I have an imperishable memory of her. She was the first English spinster that I had met, and I could easily devote a book to her for the recording of the impressions and intimations of English life that were about her like an aroma. I should have liked to have known her better — had I not been then, as I was to remain, incapable of knowing intimately any woman — but I was a very pariah among these. How much I suffered from this humiliation. Is it not strange to think that in this small, precarious planet there can be such cruelties of dividing away people from each other; Hilda wooed, and Frances suffered, not even gladly. I bore my lot humbly, and indeed gratefully. I was upon a mission — no more than the finding of a woman who might pen "I" with some truth — yet it was a sacred mission, undertaken for no personal ends — though I grant that I dreamed of fame when I was young, and later on I thought to succour my dear son and to give him, oh the thousand and one things that fortunate youth might have. And, of course, I was going to prove to all who thought me a fool that I was a genius really. My friends, too, should know at last how brilliant was their violent and erratic companion. Then suddenly my son was grown and he had never had the things that I had dreamed of: those who thought me a fool had long forgotten me; and one by one the dearest of my friends have died still knowing me as I am. Yet here I sit, typing with old, work-roughened hands, still indomitable, still pressing on towards my goal, this, most tardy rib of Adam, shall yet be a woman. Speaking of women, are there, I wonder, any adequate memorials to Mrs Meynell?17 There was an unforgettable creature, the

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most artless, single-minded, pretty being, as nobly conceived and foolishly executed as the Albert Memorial. I simply don't understand women. Have they no sense of humour? How do they invent and maintain their poses? They will encase themselves in a pose until it is a veritable armour. I remember myself when young posing for weeks on end as a young girl mortally stricken and about to die in the flower of my youth, till upon being told by our physician that I was literally not far off dying in the flower of my youth unless I mended my ways I grew heartily sick of the pose and became, overnight, a boyish athletic creature, with but a gutless tennis racket to uphold my fantasy. We all do it. My little daughter-in-law, if there is a mirror in the room, talks only to her own reflection. She may converse with the rest of us but it is with her eyes upon her own pointed chin and caught-in lip. She will smile to this image, talk learnedly at it, be coquettish, wayward, but all with her shadow self. Once we thought to tease her out of the habit by all talking into the mirror at her, but she only became wayward and annoyed for the mirror. When my son drew the little figure against his breast and read it poetry she neither noted the embrace, nor listened to the verse, but only stared upon the pictured group with ineffable satisfaction. Though when she holds her babe up to the glass it is all upon its tiny face that she broods with a most exquisite adoration and admiration — her baby, for she has taken her second born to her heart, and is cold to tiny Jane, her first born and the frail one. Never have I seen one so completely mummified in an Olympic pose as Mrs Meynell. She was a poetess and a mother but both on a scale suited to the deathless daughter of Zeus. She was Elizabeth Browning and Mrs Siddons and Dido and I know not what. As a poetess she had vapours and the fine languishings of an earlier period; she rolled her magnificent dark eyes in sustained ecstasy.

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As mother she spoke and gesticulated in the grand, measured cadence of classical maternity. She wore, always, a tall black vel' vet turban, and this headgarb, and the stiffness of her mannerisms laid her open to much secret ribald jesting by her coterie of poets and young proteges. It was a little like the awful ribaldries that associate themselves with love and birth and death, with things too grand for the ordinary mortal to come to terms with except in irreverence, but it was inevitable. I can see her now, the flowing velvet robe, the high velvet bonnet, her foot upon a stool, and three beautiful daughters, all in Kate Greenaway frocks of printed linen, grouped about her knee, the youngest with her round bare arms gracefully encircling her mother's waist while a curled head nestled in her lap. Behind this pretty group stood a most beautiful youth who addressed his mother most touchingly always as "my darling mother." About them all hovered the raddled shade of Francis Thompson, probably the most lucrative bit of patronage that was ever the windfall of a family. They lived on memories, literally. The youth intrigued me, for there was no doubt that he was completely ingenuous in his filial devotion and admiration. He took his place in the pattern as a cherubim in a sacred composition, those seraphs of Botticelli who look out to summon us to adore. When, in far later years, I saw all his Nonesuch volumes done up in flowered linens like his mother's daughters, I was shaken with the same laughter and helpless admiration that one gave to his mother's version of existence. When we came away from that momentous tea-party, Hilda bore away with her inscribed volumes of the works of Francis Thompson, and a little garland of the verses of all the Meynell children. She gave them both to me and they are upon my shelves at this moment, drab little volumes with faded gilt tracings.

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CHAPTER NINE

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sed as we were to the vast distances in America, it did not occur to us that there was anything extraordinary in setting out for Manchester and Birmingham in the morning to see the Art Galleries, with the intention of returning the same night. This was one of my mother's projects. Hilda said nothing but heaved an A.B.C. into a prominent position. A.B.C.s were, and forever were to remain, the rigmarole of the blackest of black magicians to me. Not so Hilda. She could flip their pages and announce that trains would leave at given hours from given stations, and they did. I decided that it was the mathematical genius of her family plashing among her more angelic and demonic powers.18 Notwithstanding which, I flipped the pages of the abhorrent volume with what I hoped was a convincing air of competence, and assured my mother that we could not get back the same day and what about giving the trip up; for this was the command that had emanated from Hilda along those airy psychic waves common between friends. My mother countered by packing nightdresses and tooth brushes. We went. With that odd finality that marks the ways of life, this trivial separation was the end of the peculiar fascination that had held me thrall to Hilda. This was the very hot summer of 1911. Both Birmingham and Manchester lay under a pall of dust and smoke, train connections were appalling, the heady excitement of travel failed us, my mother was peevish, I fretted for Hilda, and the turgid, gaudy paintings of Watts and Rossetti and Burne-Jones brought no assuagement for my yearning spirit. I loathed Rossetti with a deep and vindictive hatred. His stuff looked to me as though painted in treacle; his mind seemed treacly, his emotions saccharine and his

"the end of the peculiar fascination that had held me thrall to Hilda"

Watts, Rossetti, Burne-Jones

imagination too respectable for words. Watts, with a huge sentimentalized Christ the pathos of whose luminous eyes drew a guide-ridden group to hypnotized reverence, filled me with repugnance, the more so as I knew, for a fact, that only a few months before and I, too, would have thought this tawdry appeal to my sentiment, most beautiful. Oh, I was bewildered. I distrusted this new sophistication of mine as much as the ignorance that had preceded it. Perhaps Christ standing in neat-lined stickiness by a closed portal with a lantern radiating points of white paint was nearer to the soul of man than that artfully clumsy log carved by Epstein that had seemed a true Christ to me down in that cabaret cellar. Watts was so easy, lovemaking was so easy, beauty was so easy. Why not? Perhaps we were no more than the flashing of a falling star. Why strive after the impossible, the ineffable, God? Truly it was with a sick and jaundiced eye that I returned to London and Hilda, a Hilda full of ultimatums and decisions. I was never again to feel the old enthralment of love for Hilda that had brought me so much happiness in the old sad American days. There is, I suppose, nothing more exquisite in life than our young adorations, half composed of the thrilling discovery of our own beauty, and half of the focusing of all beauty upon one human creature. But it had all gone misty and unreal when I returned to London. I remember walking round and round some gardens, first in the hot sun, with an eddying of dust and rubbish sucking in and out of the railings, and the still young leaves weighed down above our heads with their coat of soot; later there came a gusty rainfall and we walked still, with slapping feet and hair draggling in wisps against our cheeks. The long long English twilight had dissolved into night and I saw Hilda's face in the flashes of the street lights as we still plodded round, greatly to the distress of a neighbouring constable.

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Hilda was putting it to me that she meant never to return to America, and that all was over between us unless I would see that my mother returned alone to her native land while I remained with her, satellite and protegee, for I was penniless. It could not be, but "I will return in April," I promised her, having never an idea how that fantastic promise could be fulfilled. I did return in April, but as Louis Wilkinson's wife, so whatever god spoke through my lips that night, he spoke truly. I wish that I could remember the actual things that we said to each other, Hilda and I. How can they think ever to communicate with the dead, when no word returns from our dead youth to be a revelation to our age. I can remember the little names that we had for each other, "Twigs," and "Flowers" were her names for me, and I seem to have found nothing more apt for that tall gaunt girl, with her flawed Greek beauty, than "Wee Witch." This was, of course, before the day when the Powyses were to teach me to stun my simplicities with ribaldries, or humour. Those little names were our own invention for ourselves, passed on to the companion in that secret way that is always between friends. They were accurate compensation, my "Twigs" and "Flowers" was a washing away of all the stale and fetid growth of the American half-slum in which I had been bred. In them I forgot the brutalities and the horrors that made such a sickness in my soul. Hilda's "Wee Witch" was what would be called now a "wish fulfilment" for that overtall girl who had had to "stoop her head, in Church beside her mother, so that they would not notice how tall she was." The griefs of the young are so pitiful, the more so as they are usually stupid. That was my quarrel with the world, and with these recondite friends of mine. Here were we, two women. We were worthy of education, the kind of education that I visualized, an education fitting us for the mysterious magnificence of life. We had vigorous,

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curious brains; courageous souls; rich and varied emotional faculties and a quivering, apprehensive psychic power. We were suitable mediums for apprehending the unknown. Why were two women such as we doomed to maunder, to droop, to grieve, to sicken in the thrall of the wornout traditions of the entrails' dominance of life. Ezra, I remember, was propounding vague doctrines of the proportioning of life's interest above and below the diaphragm, but he did not elucidate it sufficiently to interfere with his pleasant dalliance with damsels such as we. Obscurely, but only with a fleeting insufficient clarity, I was grateful to him for letting me go, but ah, how sick at heart I was for so many years. Only the other day I came, folded between the pages of a little leather Paradiso, and, yes, tied up with ribbon, to that letter written by him from shipboard, that began: "I don't suppose that you will ever understand." And for a moment, a sickening, heart-searing moment, I was again the girl who had read it so many years ago. There is an agony in the stripping away of the petals from the young that I fancy is only duplicated when death strips us of the intricate, soul-enwoven flesh. Only one thing worse could have happened to me, and that would have been a "happy ending" to my languishings after that great poet. Have I made it clear, I wonder, that all this time Ezra was the recalcitrant swain, the reluctant lover, the soul-affianced of my friend, Hilda? I was no more than a flowering weed, plucked idly, stared at abstractedly, and dropped unwittingly by the wayside. How many many times have I seen John Cowper of the Powyses stoop to gather up just such fading flowerets to lay them tenderly by the wayside out of the path of unheeding feet, and never have I seen this without thinking of all the languishing ladies, the spinsters, the hopeless ones, the nearing forties, the abandoned and heartbroken, whom he has with that same tender generosity, healed and rehabilitated with adroit, or maladroit,

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but always well-intentioned sensuality. I was one of them, so I should know. But there you have us, two girls in love with each other, in love with the same man, and making our plans for the waylaying and the snaring of nice, safe husbands in due course. We got them, too, Richard Aldington for Hilda, and Louis Wilkinson for me. Nice husbands, they were, but safe, they were not. Such comets were never designed for safe domestic hearthsides. They addled our wits and fuddled our hearts and managed to remain impeccable British gentlemen to the last. It would seem that the subtleties of the situation, the intrigues, the treacheries, the fealties, the tenderness, the love, the pain, all the spectacle of woman's passionate, timid, involuted and icily cruel handling of situations would have been enough to satisfy my desire that life should be thrilling and dramatic. It was not. The basis in these confusions of the entrails was too suspect. I could see the drama of the gut clearly enough, just as I could see the drama of the life of any primitive people, but I could see no sane or rich life of man while they were at the mercy of these animal impulses and instincts. There were lovely intimations in love-making of rare and elusive relationships and of a clairvoyant understanding, but they were ruined by the trouble and the anguish and the disturbance of nerve indulgences of these powerful, dominating viscerae. By one of the freakish elements in my mother's character I had grown up to these years of over twenty in complete ignorance of the phallic in life. I had grown up, too, in a morbid isolation that she had imposed upon me. I was the solitary stamping ground for that centaur-lady of the blue and fiery eye, the limpid moist eye, the lascivious languishing eye. Upon me she poured out all the phials of her perversity, of her thwarted sex, of the hot flight of her blood. I came into my youth a mass of blind and quivering nerves. What it was all about came as, first, a ludicrous anticlimax, and

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then as a menace, a terror in life, a thing by which everything had to be re-stated and revalued, but worst and most fatal of all it robbed man of his dignity, and [robbed] life of freewill and real personality. We, Hilda and I, were sick with an old and enfeebled, and thought-defiled state of the fundament. Hilda, who had moved towards me out of the mass of humanity with a spirit hovering like a dove above her head; she had come out of the nothingness with a message that none could read. Ezra stood at her other hand and there were flashes of light about them, and vast shadowy powers that moved with them, just out of range of my comprehension. And were these two to be at the mercy of their degraded nerves? I don't care what their attraction to each other portended of other relationships. I, too, was attracted to them, either, each, the sex made no matter. My nerves yearned after them, but, my god how I resented it. Nothing will ever convince me that these were not matters for an expert obstetrical department, to be dealt with scientifically, coldly, and with rational utility. It is difficult to describe the revolution that had taken place in my soul after seeing the Rossetti and the Watts and the BurneJones. I had admired them so much in the days of my innocence. Now I found them full of lust, wishful thinking, and cheap sentiment. I resented my former ignorance, and a state of life and thought that could create such ignorance. The best that my new friends could offer me was a term for my degradation. I could be, it appeared, a pagan, a puritan, or a pervert. The terms, and the ideas sustaining them, struck me as blatantly silly. I was none of those things. I was a woman evilly and ignorantly instructed and I foresaw that I was going to have the devil of a time between my fresh and vigorous mind, uncontaminated critical faculty, and my primitive and undisciplined body. I ceased, at this point, to be a

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nice woman. I was bitter, scornful of my betters, and determined to be a spy. Myself was my nearest quarry. For better, for worse, I determined to follow where the wind of my desire listed, denying nothing, formulating nothing, but knowing, at least, one woman naked as Eve. Perhaps if I had been a poet, as these others were, I could have seen this business of sex differently. But beyond their yearnings and sweet languishing I saw the awful bondage of marriage. It wanted but that to complete the ignominy of man, that a male and a female should be bound together for life because, for a fleeting season, blood called to blood and they were sexually attracted. Law and convention decreed that the grotesque bond that drew them together was never to be broken by either. Never, I swore, would I marry a man to whom I felt an atom of such attraction. I would marry to get me a son someone whom I deemed fit to father him and never would I yield up the surge and fever of my blood except to one who was abhorrent and obnoxious to me. Other women, stricken by my same malady, had their own solution to the problem, but I had no wish to become a spinster, or to bring an unfathered child into the world. It suited me to conform to the conventions and to be a rebel in secret, and I had no heart to break now. So I set myself to take refuge in the leeway of marriage. And, for my soul's comfort, I took as pattern that internationalist, atheist and celibate, Christ. If there was to be any question of "God," the black magicians were right, who set up the devil and took for pattern and ritual all the vagaries of the lusts. They at least had the meticulous logic of the mad. I have little doubt that puritan, pagan, and pervert flock to their fold, such, of course, as the Church has not yet snaffled. Between the two inanities of God and the Devil I found little choice, though the devil, on the whole seemed less imbued with malice. No doubt I poured out my grief and sorrow to Hilda, claiming

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George Moore

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as "thought" all the sick fantasies of my disillusioned heart, giving the pain of the moment the prestige of considered reasoning; haranguing her the more fiercely because of the insecurity of my ground, for this has ever been my way, and all too often my undoing. It is not my fault. People will argue, answering me out of philosophies and poetry, or biology and science, or even the old and magical voices out of the woodland and hills, to me, out here in the cold vacuity beyond the rim of the world clutching the clouds to my breast, seeking words for the things that are not yet. Ah, well, we came to no understanding and it was with a certain depression that we donned our best the next day and set off to see Mr George Moore,19 the only authentic and established genius of our group. Secretly, we were, I think, setting great store by that visit. Hilda was going to prove her case somehow by it, and I was hoping to find myself, with honour, again within her fold. I don't know what we thought genius was. I do know, however, that genius should never be seen at home. George Moore was living in Ebury Street, a street that has sheltered so much that is strange and unchancy that it has acquired a peculiar witchery of its own, its girls are too beautiful, its youths too dandified, its geniuses too down at the heel, its landladies of too bedraggled a gentility. It is a street that has wandered out of the quartier and taken to itself an English sobriety that sets quaintly upon its askewities. But to us then, in our ignorance, it just seemed a dusty thoroughfare that bordered on the slums, for the romance of Pimlico was a sealed book to us. This is all close on to thirty years ago and George Moore could only have been in the fifties, but to us he seemed a decrepit and dilapidated old man. Never have I suffered such sharp disillusionment in such a gulp as I did that morning. No, I don't know what I had expected, something a little like Villon perhaps, someone with the verve and the pathos of a

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beggar masquerading as a lordling. The affectations, the blatancies of his books had led me to expect one of those timid, sensitive, wincing liars, those fleering, wild-eyed poets who hold the soul of the Irish secret from man. What we saw was first an English sitting-room: a bit of plush, a thick rug and a frayed rug; shiny surfaces, some mirrors and dark sad paintings: fireplace and firescreen and a dotting of ornaments: portieres, deep chairs and a gilt chair, all in fusty elegance like an ageing belle. Into this there fretted a little old gentleman in a dressing gown. His face was small and peevish. He gave us scant attention till he had concluded some rounded periods to an invisible goddess on the subject of a burnt kipper, a lost slipper and a little dog that had misbehaved on a heap of manuscript. These were, I grant, of a soul-shattering irritation. They still fret me after thirty years, he was so miserable. The goddess fluttered in with the slipper and out with the dog. She gave us a distracted glance as she left. She was fair, faded, and blowsy, and still in her dressing gown. I wonder now, why on earth we chose ten o'clock of a summer morning for our visit. Perhaps we had an appointment. I had nothing to do with it. I just "went along" with Hilda on these expeditions which were all arranged by Ezra. I can imagine George Moore fussily declaring over the telephone that "between Photographers and pressmen he had not a moment except at dawn," and hence the ten o'clock visit. George Moore read Hilda's letter of introduction, gave her a small acute stare and turned away. She was not his type. And alas, I, with my beauty dimmed by the ordinary flesh that I was wearing, could bring him no joy. Ebury Street was certainly the place for that sad little old man. The muffled drums of his greatness will sound forever there in that street of outcasts, and forlorn hopes, and shoddy elegance. That afternoon Hilda and my mother and I went off to the

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Pall Mall

American Express to collect our post. "And to think that this is Pall Mall," said my mother, all eager tourist. "Most people pronounce that Tell MelP," said Hilda. Incontinently my mother wept, standing poised upon the kerbstone. I think that we all felt that the party was over and the next day my mother took reservations for home.

CHAPTER TEN

I

n trying to analyze what it was in life that so moved and terrified me at this time I come again and again to the word — inevitability. I was astounded that all these people took man's predicament as a sexually controlled animal, as inevitable, and that in the face of evidences of evolution that stunned the imagination. Why were we necessarily the victims and the playthings of our entrails, if we had thrust our way through the ages from primeval slime? We were obviously creatures of change and growth. I had to be part of the world, my thoughts were its thoughts. Why then, was my restlessness, my grief, at this impasse of sex, not just as formidable, and just as much a thing of forecast, as the first thrusting out of fins from the sides of a primeval reptile. It must always have been by way of discontent, of obscure, unreasoned, blind striving, that we emerged from chaos. Whatever the struggle is between these conflicting, finally to be affiliated, urges, matter and spirit, it is certainly not my struggle. My life is too short. I am too feeble. I am no more than the vessel into which this divine intelligence is poured, for a season. We must die, and die, and die, for the force is mighty and we are fragile. The IDEA must embody itself in ever renewed mechanisms till it is made flesh. For them to laugh me down when I spurned their puerile conception of love and life seemed blasphemous to me. It was not I who spoke to them. I, this very I, almost, as against the spectacle of vast ages, as short-lived as a butterfly, was a poor thing, a thing that yearned for shelter, for caresses, for warmth and ease of living. The thing that spoke, that spurned both me and popular conceptions of existence, was the voice of the ages.

"I was, I am, a beacon"

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If you have ever turned from a world all green and colourful to stare into the sun, and turned back to find the world gone grey, you will understand what has happened to me. I had been roughly disillusioned about love and everything was suspect. I saw that we fastened upon what was rare and called it beautiful. Hilda and Ezra had seemed so beautiful to me. I saw them now, as I was to see people for many years, as both ugly and grotesque. They stood up on those stilt-like props cased at their nether end in leather. They had tubular bodies, and small darting heads. Their arms dangled. I saw their mouths open and shut, and the usual teeth and tongue were monstrous. I saw their pretty poses, but this other being that I was gazed with weary boredom. There was nothing pretty about those poses, unless one accepted as gospel all the vast connotation of the ages. I loathed all women, and saw them as bulbous and blobby. My state was that of the child who having taken the blue vault of the sky as the solid floor of heaven, is told that it is vapour. No more, perhaps, than a disgruntled and embittered woman, but I say that I was more. I was, I I am, a beacon. I was absolutely clear in my mind, at that time, as to what I meant by "love," but I was young then. Now, over many years I have pondered and wearied over my own meaning, examined and re-examined my evidence, and, if I am to put down, in sober sense, my meaning, I shall do it with both diffidence, and difficulty. I have heard the pulse and the beat of the universe, as others hear it. I know that the mighty rhythm of the sea flows with the tide of this same life tide of man. I know that the law of the atom, and the law of the planet, and the law of the universe, is one law, and that sex with its mysterious urge, its all-powerful command, is one with that law. But I know, too, that by my most mysterious mind, I can think all these things away. These beings of liquid and fragile bone, dissolve away, invisible to my mind as

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they are, in fact, invisible to many insects. I can unthink the stars. I am alone in a void. Here, incorporeal, stripped of the phantasms of the senses, reft of imagination, knowing that I know nothing, here I find the thing that I am. It is cold, hollow as a mask, with sightless eyes. It is stern of purpose, relentless, and dominated by a sensate pride. If there is God, it is God: if there is Man, it is Man. With a thought, it can re-people the universe. So, turning back from this excursion of the soul, I contemplate man and the life that he leads. There is an instant demand that I accept the evidence of my senses as "reality." Why? When my mind ceases to function upon these phenomena, I have no evidence that this "reality" ever existed. Let the beasts of the field accept "the evidence of their senses." I am man. I neither accept the evidence of my senses, nor the inevitability of functioning in accordance with that evidence. Evidence is infinitely variable. I am told that fire burns. It does. Yet if I am swift enough to forestall this knowledge, I can pick a burning coal and transfer it to another part of the grate and not be burned. Fire, then, does not, necessarily burn me, and I have discovered a primary, and serious flaw in my education. By "accepting the evidence of my senses" I have made myself vulnerable, and subject to death. A million eager cloyed mouths tell me that all beauty, all delight, emanates from sex, and as a cloyed mouth closes upon my lips, I see an idiot face and eyes as sad as an ape's. No, I refuse to accept this "evidence" as anything except popular misconception. Out there, where my soul excursioned, I have known the ineffable. This "pleasure" does not interest me. I have known gravity, and stern purpose, the purpose of attaining consciousness. I have echoed witlessly the paean of creation. I know that my destiny is man. These vulgar delights that I must share with the beasts weary me. I do not want to be excited, nor to suffer this warm gorging of the veins. All my mechanism is moved in obedience to

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Let me shape for you the fate of an intelligent woman. Frances, age ten, with her mother and grandmother

mind — mind somewhere. Let the sap rise in the trees, let the beasts bring forth young, grant them their ecstasy, but let me away into my dimension of mind. Believe me, I did not reach these conclusions solely by the way of fantasy and imagination. I was born into the world in America at a moment when the odd phenomenon of a social conscience was shaping to confound and startle the naivete of that continent. My grandmother was a lecturer on "Woman's Rights" and "Temperance." 1 marched in a parade, with banners inscribed with "Votes for Women," before I was six. I signed the pledge when I was eight; and trailed up the sawdusty steps of a Camp Meeting platform to avow myself "a child of God" in skirts too short and wisps of hair flicking against my burning cheeks, when I was ten. I was a thin child, with birdclaw hands, a white face and dark excited eyes. Ladies with "Movements" declaimed at me, and predicted a great future for me. I played up to them all with the cynicism common to the young, and as they were all extremely hideous ladies I shunned their "Movements" and became an atheist on my own, but I had learned that "women were wronged" and man "the great enemy." At the same time my mother was tenderly instructing me in what a "nice little girl" must, and must not do, if she ever hoped to marry, instructions that included "never kissing a gentleman unless mamma had said I might," and just how, if a gentleman should stare too boldly, one should smile and lower one's eyes in confusion and then give a quick, shy upward glance. For some obscure reason I never forgave her that bit of instruction and for years glared ferociously at any male who chanced to glance in my direction. With two such diverse schools of thought shaping my infant mind, I summed the world up as a witless sorry place and the elders very foolish people. And since negroes and children were left to the mercies of savage and conscienceless people, it was

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Dr Garrett Anderson

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obvious that there was no God. The prevention of cruelty to children, and of cruelty to animals, were among the "Movements" in which I was initiated, and for years and years, there was not a night when I did not hear, or believe that I heard, the cries of the tortured. The agony and terror of the vulnerability of the flesh of man stirred that supermind that we call the soul, that mind in which lie folded the past and the future, dual germ of what we are. I knew that I knew the fault, the flaw, that had brought man to this pass, and that I knew the way by which he might be liberated, and I set myself to solve the problem. Forty years have gone and still I am at work upon this diagnosis of this sick and sorry universe. Lust is the flaw, and love is the healing, but it was long years before I could begin to define to myself what lust was. Love, I do not yet know. The one who shall come after me has that mystery still in his keeping. I shall die and never know this thing for which I have suffered so much. Step by step, I could trace the way that man had come. I could see the perfidy, witless and naive rather than infamous, that had created "God" and called up the devil. I could see the beginnings of the Christ legend. The perfection of the conception suggested that we had to do with the writings of a great artist, rather than the actual figure of a living man, but the point is immaterial. It was obvious that the sex instinct was vitally important for both plant and animal life. As the years went on, I could find nothing to condone it as an aspect of man. I remember once, in one of those soul-deep, bitter, veiled and polite conflicts that are ever between the women of any family, that my mother-in-law tried to deflect my gaucheries into more seemly channels. I had had the temerity — for I was the typical American, bumptious and timid by turns, opinionated, violent, and easily disconcerted — the temerity, I say, to cross swords with the great Dr Garrett Anderson, herself. This pioneer among

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women doctors was an old woman and a great woman, a woman who had done more practical good in her time, had broken more ground for women, than any woman in modern history, but she happened to say something, what I have now forgotten, that smacked to me of the old vicious order, the Victorian state of mind, that accepted an upper class, and a divine ordering of a doomed mass of hapless victims. I only remember that I blurted out something, in ill-considered opinion, an emotional, clumsy attack, and that all the heads at that tea-party were turned to me for an instant, and there was one of those awful hushes, and that my mother-in-law's little pink mouth was slightly pursed as she offered tea in a very steady soft voice to a newcomer, and that then the tea-party sprang back into place again, and my lapse was ignored. Deepdene was rented for the summer, at the time, and we were living in rooms on the front.20 The shingle came up to the very sill of our drawing room bay window, and I can remember how cold and powerful and eternal the grey North Sea looked, stretched there to the horizon, and how invincible and implacable my little mother-in-law stood before me, like the soul of all women rolled into one, one that defended a system which had brought her to old age still round, and pink cheeked, her pretty blue eyes undimmed by truth. "Don't you think," she queried — and how that cooing English voice found out my weaknesses, showed me to myself, a neurotic, uncertain young woman, moving on life with face averted, sick, sick of soul. "Don't you think that you are very presumptuous, in your ignorance, to question the ways of the Lord? If God had wished that child to live in ease and comfort, he would have placed it where it would have these things naturally, just as my darling little pets had them, but that was not His will. Whom God loves He chasteneth, and not a sparrow falls but He notes it."

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"Louis's little wife"

"But don't you see," I urged, and knew that I spoke to something as cold, as powerful, and perhaps, as eternal as that lapping sea, "don't you see, it was a child that suffered, a thing that was already helpless and in need of succour and protection, and it was made to suffer abominably." "It was God's will. And now I want my little darling not to think of these unhappy things anymore. There are so many beautiful things to think about. We must not sully our minds with these impurities. Think of the flowers, and the beautiful things in the world of art, and think how fortunate she is to be her darling Louis's little wife. I am old now, but I too, know all about the delights of love." But I took no delight in love, and her God seemed a better devil than they had made of the devil. I went out and walked the uneasy, stumbling way that one must go who stumps along in the shingle by the edge of that North Sea. I thought incoherencies about life and sex and God and man, through which there threaded the cold oblivion that lay not half a yard away from me. I had but to stumble, and beyond that ridge of shingle there lapped six feet of icy water in which to cover all my false starts, all my feeble efforts, all my loneliness and terror. I could still that passionate heart that ached so fiercely for all the children in the world, and round and over all, ached too for its own lost loves and pitiful weakness and isolation. I was late back, having missed dinner and forgotten that Louis was delivering an important lecture to his home town. "How could you?" they said, and "You might have thought...." As indeed I might have, but I had never been trained or disciplined into anything except a following up of the immediate emotion. I went to the lecture, and my husband was feted and flattered, and my little mother-in-law beamed and was glad and modest, and I was cold shouldered by everyone and stood alone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

This is January 1941 and the world is in the convulsive throes

of madness. Any war is an insanity, but never has the world struggled in such a contagion as this. It was inevitable, the logical conclusion of centuries of the creeping manias of our religions, with their massing of lies, their trading upon the cowardice and superstition of man. Now the young of all races must pour out their seed upon the ground, all that individual courage and nobility that distinguishes primitive and undefiled man. Let this spilt blood cry to the very heavens a curse upon the foul "godliness" that has brought this murder and madness in its wake. This is not my indictment, but a harsh paraphrasing of that long dead, that infinitely misrepresented, young man, that Christ whose peculiarly devilish fate has been that the very religion bearing his name is his vilest betrayal. Now, out of these things must come a new religion, or the world dissolve in chaos. Two thousand years too late, the simple, homely, sane, practical instructions of Christ are, perhaps, a shade less impotent now that the predicted horror is upon us. To what race can we look now for a leader, when even the Americans are succumbing to this world insanity. I believe that it is again to the Jews that we must look for a leader, and I would hope that that leader may be a woman. Christ, who would have stripped off the festering scab of religion two thousand years ago, was a Jew. He came, not as a beginning, but as the end, the culmination of an era. He did not deal in prophecy, but in history. He based his verdict upon man upon what he had seen, and studied, of Hellenic, Egyptian, and Hebraic cultures and social ethics. "Believe in God, because, being men, alone, and born in mystery, we must; but work with the living stuff

War

Jacob Epstein

"all that I am is most necessary"

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of men. Let your belief in God be an act of faith, and leave it at that. God has no need of your worship, no need of your love; love and reverence are the need of man." Epstein, the Jew, has made a portrait of man as Christ saw him, and as he is. The Jews rejected that vision of man, and their unique and incomparable leader. But time has yet to examine that rejection. The Jews are the only Christians of this day, those grand, craven, persecuted and proud people, are the Christians; those same tenacious internationalists. I say this because it was out of the lore of'his own people that Christ evolved his working system, that socialism that could have revolutionized the world, and that — in the hands of the Jews — may yet do so. I know that the pages of a trifling memoir such as this, with all its vanity and folly, is not the place for theories of this kind. Indeed a youthful friend of mine, one Frank Shelley, dark and tin' kling sprite, rummaging through these pages for scraps of memories of his hero, Ezra Pound, told me, with that eldritch admonition of the young for the old, "Some of this is brilliant, but much of it is so unnecessary" He referred to certain references of mine to "woolen combinations" and all that I said of Christ. And I am moved to say many spiteful things to this young Merlin — (for whose memoirs are these anyway? and to me all that I am is most necessary) — but I refrain because he is young and passing beautiful, though not of noteworthy stature, and my son's best friend. Wherefore I refrain from recording the truth with which I bepepper my letters and our passionate conversations. And now for pages and pages and pages I am going to talk about the Jews and Christ. Woolen combinations I will eschew because these are the lingering sun-warmed days of a Cornish winter and not pertinent to the subject. There are violets in the hedgerows here very sweetly fragrant, and the sun lies in a rose haze over the high banks of the river,

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topping the bare tall trees like a phantom of flowering, and down below between the marshy banks flows the dark Fal river all in shadow. Two swans rock upon its white crests, asleep, with their heads curled into the soft down of their backs. Sometimes they rise and flow through the air in peerless motion, their wings tearing the air like silk. It is a sound that draws the heart out of my breast, particularly when I hear it above the house at night. Sheep dot the hilly meadow across the river, and a heron stands upon the brink of a pool, on one leg, hour after hour thinking — I doubt not, most unnecessary thoughts. I stare at him so often and so long. Sometimes he has a perfect double reflected in the stream, but more often it is a twisted and broken reflection. The river flows away, out to the Carrick Roads, out and out to the sea, and nothing is left but a narrow strip of deep, swift-running water, between mud and seaweed and dark shapes of derelict logs, and the boats lie with tilted masts. There is no piping of curlew as in the Essex marshes, but thousands of parti-coloured tiny birds are everywhere. They are so many that they can even crowd away the greedy starlings. From time to time these pastoral hills scream and echo with falling bombs, and the sky is spangled with the white bursts of cloud from exploding shells; barrage balloons fall in flames, and great ships break and sink. I am in agreement with the Germans in believing that the Jews have brought us to this pass. Christ came to the Jews, his own people, in a vain attempt to save them from themselves, and to save the world from the curse of Hebraism. The betrayal of Christ by Judas, was as nothing compared to the betrayal of Christ by Paul. The early Pauline Christians were Jews and remained Jews, and the present Christian Church is the living embodiment of the Jewish curse. Jews and women, there you have the combined menace of the past, and the combined hope of salvation for the future. They rule

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the "woman Judas"

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the world. Men are nothing. They are catspaws; the Pauls and Pilates in the grasp of the most subtle, most evil, most destructive, earth powers — and the earth powers are all. This is the earth. Paul kept the accursed God of the Hebrews as the core of Christianity. That was his betrayal of Christ, who came to destroy that terrible God of the Hebrews, and to tear down the temples, and to abolish the sabbath day — "You believe in God, believe also in me." No more than "also" at that point. Now it is, in these dire days, a time to cry openly, "believe in me, Jew, woman, this earth." "In three days I will tear it (the temple) down, and in three days build it up again," and "every day shall be as a thousand years." Two thousand years of that tearing down of the Church have passed, and we have now before this deathless earth another thousand years before the Jews will be finally persuaded to yield up their God-devil to that night, that death from which his monstrous shadow was evoked. Then will begin the three thousand years of building the temple anew. These will be the years of Jewish-matriarchy, the years of the Christian era, when men will seek God anew — and perhaps find both God and immortality, but these are things that we shall never know. We are the crucified, who die with Christ daily, we who know these things, who see in a glass darkly, but see. I have been called, for many years, by many different people, for many different reasons, the "woman Judas." I forget now, who first coined the phrase, or why. I think it was because I never played the woman's game except to betray it. I loathe, despise, abhor, woman and all her works. I have a horror of women, mentally, spiritually, and physically. Yet I have no desire to be a man. Men have made themselves pathetic and ridiculous in their cult of the power and the poetry that we women have as second nature. Their brute strength is as nothing compared to our spiritual strength. We are of the earth, earthy. They belong to the realm of

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fantasy, idealism, fairies, knights, emotionalism, sentimentality, and all else that derives from that treachery and betrayal that evolves from the god-ridden universe. Eve wished God on Adam in a moment of tender ridicule, and something less tender fury. And Adam, perverse, secret, sly, malicious, and withal noble and grand, took God into his slighted bosom for keeps. Out of wars and pestilence, out of sound and fury, torn from his very vitals, Christ yielded up God for all men. So it is, and so it shall be. We Jews, and we women, know these things. We are the betrayers, but through us alone will the way of salvation be found. Judas was innocent. That Judas episode was the first great publicity stunt. Judas did as Christ bade him. I have a friend, Andrew Gibson, and indeed my son too, upon both of whom I could bring such pressure to bear that they would betray me, as Judas did the Christ for love of Christ and for his love of life, of man. Follow Judas to the tree upon which he hanged himself, if you doubt my interpretation, and try to read the thoughts that were his at the last. No he was no betrayer, he was one of the few authentic Christians. It was Paul, that sly, bigoted, narrow-minded theologian and moralist who betrayed the Christ, and is the father of all the churches and of this Hebraic cult that we know as the Christian religion. I do not like Jews. But only they can save the world now, if but a leader will arise from their midst. They have retained a certain grand, effulgent simplicity throughout the ages. Such culture as is available in our dark process through the centuries, they have acquired. That peculiar form of clairvoyance, that we call imagination, was strongly developed in them, and they had, and have preserved a sublime integrity in their domestic and social relationships. They had a genius for barter and finance, and were, and are perfectly equipped for the socialism and internationalism that Jesus preached. Just as Jesus presents a duality, a male-female

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psychology, so the Jews are, of all peoples the most feminine, and have the virtues and vices of the female. Like women they combine a strong sense of the mystery of life, with a practical, materialistic, realistic way of dealing with existence. A woman, when her ideas of God interfere with her immediate desires, makes sure first of her material needs, and without hypocrisy, nor even discomfort, praises, lauds, and regards with fervent reverence a God whom she has safely ensconced in a very distant heaven. So with the Jews. So little did they allow their ideas of God to interfere with their natural cunning, greed, and efficient materialism that they carried their very bartering and money-changing into the temple. The creed of women and Jews is, that life is most certainly here and now, and that there is no evidence of God except in their own imaginative appreciation of the miracle of life. If the idea of God is sufficiently divorced from life, if an elaborate cult of the poetic idea of God takes the place of a living and immediate cult of God, then there is a splitting up of the personality, a cleavage between matter and spirit that produces chaos and madness. Now the Jews, with their feline, feminine, cold-blooded wiliness, drained away all their poetry, idealism, in the setting up of an image of God before whom they made such irreproachable obeisance, before whom they performed rites so deeply reverent with so flawless a piety, that none could gainsay their grandiose nobility of soul, while at the same time they were creating a vicious nationalism, with the intent of exploiting every other people to their own advantage, which was to become a pattern for the world. This splitting up of the personality into matter and spirit, each denying and vilifying the other, a mutual degradation and defilement, has created the madness which stalks the earth today. Christ saw the danger, and, at the same time, saw the power of his people, and how it might be used to create a world fit to house a

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concept of God. God, that monstrous tribal deity, such a credit to their invention, so flattering to their racial vanity, so convenient, so partial to their interests, so easily pleased and grateful for their love and piety; that God whom with feminine inconsequence and lack of social morality, they could summon to condone murder and theft to advantage them, had to be — Christ saw — reft from his people, while, at the same time, their concept of domestic decorum, and the social order that they had evolved for the benefit of their own race, was freed to act as a spiritual leaven to the rest of mankind. Take from them that vain, grandiose image of a deity, pour back into life those libations set apart for this chimera, and you had a pattern of living that might lead, eventually, to God, but had first to create men and women fit to house their own immortal spirits. The idea of God was magnificent, but if it was not real, said the man-woman Christ, it was not worth having, and if it was real, it was worth the pain and sacrifice of attaining it. It had to be lived, or left. He set himself about the colossal task of making man understand that faith in man, and reverence for man, was only possible faith in, and reverence for God. The first step was to cast out God, till they were men and fit to conceive a God worthy of the name. God and the Church, with their concomitant fear of death and belief in evil, had to go, and man had to walk alone with only faith in himself as evidence of his spiritual inheritance. His plan of life had the profound simplicity, the exact logic, and the fantasy of woman, not man. But it had something else, and that else was all male, the will to die for an objective idea. Physically and spiritually, the woman's role in life was to conceive. She is the soul of the earth, and man is the living soul of God. There is no death. What exactly this phenomenon is that dissipates the physical body, and the bodies of the suns and stars that whirl in space, I do not know, nor did Christ. Whatever it is he, as I, relegates it to the findings of the

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There is a heart-rending pathos and an ineffable beauty in that figure of a Man. Epstein's Adam

distant years. It can wait till we have tidied up the universe and the lives of men. Fear, this fear of dissolution is the rock upon which the mind of man has split, so that he wanders maddened, and wars and pestilence follow in his wake. By some irony the whole weight of the Christian religion has come to rest upon the single idea of the "divinity" of Christ, whereas Christ came preaching solely the divinity of man. I wish that I could put into concise and accurate terms just why the Jews, who are to my taste, a detestable people, should yet appeal to me as the "Chosen People." Epstein has done it in his "Adam," that urgent, ape-like seeker after life, and God.21 There is a heart-rending pathos and an ineffable beauty in that figure of a Man. It epitomizes the power, purity, sinlessness of Adam, his dark, blind flesh held in the full surge of the mystery of creation. From those mammoth loins will be bred beings who will eternally seek God. This is the Jew, as he was, as he is. Christ asked too much of them, to relinquish their grandiose dream of a tribal God, to tear down their temples, to substitute reality for fantasy, to humble themselves to be born of a virgin — for the womansoul in life is never confused, or bewildered, or led away from the fundamental simplicity of actual life by any dream, be it even the divine vision of God. Life, the immediate, the actual, the formal pattern bounded by her senses, that is the medium of woman. In that is her strength, in that is her weakness. She is the body of the earth, but unless that body is informed by the spirit, it becomes static, and the body of death. Man, whose very consciousness of God betrays him into the giddy bypaths of fantasy; man, wilful, perverse, vain and untruthful, eternally fleeing the passionate, possessive, bound-to-earth woman, with her seeking to compass his vision about with truth, man is the leaven, the soul, the vision that must inform the body of the earth. Neither the one nor the other is the true way, but only that marriage that was made in heaven. Christ, that clairvoyant man-woman soul, born of that M Y S T I C

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clairvoyant man-woman people, the Jews, is the unique offspring of that marriage, born of a woman impregnated by the holy spirit. The allegory is perfect. That the Jews did not see it then, at the time of the living Christ, is nothing. They will see it. Under the Hellenic influence they had lost their virility, they were swayed by all that female viciousness, the cult of power, beauty, the sating of the flesh that reached its apex, at that time in Greece. History repeats itself. Over and over again, woman has led a people to a pinnacle of culture, riches — and doom. Nations rise, but to fall. But the Jew has no nation, and he has given to the world a being who has dominated the imagination of the people for two thousand years. Christianity is not a religion. It is a social system evolved from the actual facts of existence informed by the actual faith of non-existence. It is the marriage of the truth of man and woman. Here, in our own times another Jew has risen up to repeat the simple formula. Epstein has given us an Adam, stripped of every Greek folly of physical beauty, a feminine concept of Adam, a fact, truth; a man concept of Adam, exquisitely informed with the spirit, searching vast space for God, alive, virile, accepting existence, revelling in it, but having faith in the thing that does not exist. At this point in time, we find, not one nation as hitherfore toppling to ruin, but the whole universe. The vicious materialism of woman, the foul hypocrisy of man, have done their work. The whole structure of the universe is convulsed by mania, rushing headlong to its doom — yet it will not fall. But from whence will come its succour? England? That man-ridden, god-haunted, senile old nation, making gobbling noises in the grand manner, committing the same old bestialities for God and Empire. England? Go look into the faces of those degraded, outraged men and women who have been spumed up out of the darkness to live and die — cheering their king and queen — in the shelters in London. Go stare into the depraved, idiot faces of your politicians 1 7 8

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sprayed over the screens in the cinemas, and see if you can find any way of life to come from this hypocritical, double dealing, false-hearted people. America, that woman-ridden land, blubbery with sentimentality, and crass with "Big Business," all blah and bunkum, moving now in wild circles of hysteria, not quite sure whom to hit, or why, or if it shouldn't lie doggo, no, not America. Russia, the betrayer, Russia who has done for Communism what Paul did to the Christian faith, not Russia. Germany, rushing back through time, fleeing its impotence, seeking its primitive virility, confusing the issue, staking all on the savagery and simplicity of their nordic forebears to regain their power, not being able to see that that savagery and simplicity was the accident, the incident, not the source of the power. No, the Germans will run wildly backwards till they fall over the rim of time, like the swine over the cliff. From Asia, will it come, the Oriental, that boiling, seething womb of time; the gut of the world, the entrails, the fume, the rot, the glut of the female, wise and secret and subtile, the charnel house, it cannot be from Asia. Where then, except from a people without a nation, from the Jew. Think of them, scattered all over the universe, retaining their racial characteristics uncontaminated, having that profound feminine integrity that has preserved the simplicity and decency of their domestic relationships, the purity of marriage and the sacredness of children: having the magnificent masculine integrity that has preserved their tribal God through all the ages. Can't you imagine them, driven from one country to another till they are finally massed, one great international state, from which a Jewish-ChristianCommunism would flame with the power, the psychic, magnetic, power that would eat away the disease of the world, as the minute particle of radium eats away the disease of the body? It could be, it must be, for from nowhere else is there any hope.

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ENDNOTES

1. For details of Gregg's involvement in H.D.'s fiction, see especially

Barbara Guest's biography of H.D.; Janice Robinson's H.D., The Life and Work of an American Poet; Susan Stanford Friedman's Psyche Reborn; Cassandra Laity's introduction to Paint It Today; Robert Spoo's introduction to Asphodel; and Gillian Hanscome and Virginia L. Smyers' Writing for Their Lives. See also Deborah Kelly Kloepfer's "Flesh Made Word: Maternal Inscription in H.D.," and Dianne Chisholm's H.D.'s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Within the context of Powys studies, Penny Smith has an article "Hilda Doolittle and Frances Gregg" in the Powys Review. There is a connection between Gregg and Christie Malakite in John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent. Wolf meets Christie, his "true" love, shortly after his marriage to another woman; the relationship is sustained by mutual intellectual exchange; Christie "sees through" Wolf just as Frances saw through Powys; at the end, they are separated, without hope for a renewed relationship. Powys, of course, did continue to have a "written" relationship with Gregg, and he proposed the writing of The Mystic Leeway. 2. "It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe." James's "complex fate" and its configurations are traced in Marius Bewley's The Complex Fate: Hawthorne and Henry James and Some Other American Writers. Of the trip to Europe in 1911, Gregg says somewhat sardonically that they (Gregg, her mother, and H.D.) '"went abroad' in the American fashion" (106). 3. The first volume of the correspondence between John Cowper Powys and Frances Gregg has been published under the title The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg. The collection provides many

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details that contribute to our understanding of Powys and Gregg and of the difficult and extraordinary times in which they lived. Constance Harsh. "John Cowper Powys at the Iris Club." Powys Notes 8 (1992):4-36. Harsh recreates Powys's lecture in Lancaster, Pennsylvania of 4 March 1916 and provides a perceptive view of the place of the "visiting lecturer" in American culture in the earlier years of the century. Powys was in Pennsylvania in 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912 and 1916. He met Frances Gregg in 1912. The full text of "Sadista" has not been included in the recent publication of the letters of Powys to Gregg. The exclusion was an editorial decision based, I assume, on the need to preserve space for the letters themselves. The copy of "Sadista" which I include here is from the typescript Frances and Jack provided by Oliver Wilkinson. For an explanation of the sign of the "hyacinth," I quote Cassandra Laity's note in her edition of Paint It Today: "For H.D., as well as a tradition of Romantic/Victorian poets, references to hyacinths or to Hyacinth often encode homo-eroticism. In Greek mythology the beautiful boy Hyacinth was slain by Apollo accidentally during a discus throwing contest. Apollo mourned his beloved Hyacinth's death by creating a flower out of the boy's blood. References to Hyacinth and hyacinths appear frequently in H.D.'s poetry and prose" (94). In a poignant recollection of Gregg in End To Torment, Hilda includes a poem she wrote "to Frances in a Bion and Moschus mood": "O hyacinth of the swamp-lands, / Blue lily of the marshes, / How could I know / Being but a foolish shepherd / That you would laugh at me?" (35-36). See also the discussion of the poem in Hanscombe and Smyer's Writing For Their Lives (19). James Henderson and Gregg were friends in Philadelphia before her trip to Europe in 1911. He receives brief mention in The Mystic Leeway, but a fuller account of his continuing love for Gregg is included in The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg (240). Gregg's relation to Kenneth Macpherson was a painful one, and it

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bears on the relation to H.D. The following is an excerpt from Oliver Wilkinson's notes on him in Letters: Macpherson was "the young man in the London 'apartment house' [a reference to Gregg's story, "The Apartment House," ed.] who was in love with Frances in 1924, but who left her for Frances's greatest friend, 'H.D.'; but married Bryher. Kenneth was handsome, intelligent, imaginative and rather slippery. His father had been an artist, and Kenneth himself drew and painted with flair. He looked like a lean, pale knight from one of his own drawings. The film-as-art magazine 'Close Up', that he founded and edited with Bryher's money, broke new ground" (240-41). In a letter to Powys dated 6 May 1925, Gregg describes her love for Macpherson: "Thank you for that letter. It drew me back towards you and until this boy [Kenneth Macpherson] gathered me in I was very much adrift. Our drama, yours and mine, goes steadily on. If this boy loves me, then the light will pour backward and flame through my love for you. But if he does not love me then I shall draw away from everybody — from you most of all — and go on to the end alone" (151-52). For more on Macpherson's place in the artistic culture of the 1920s and after, see Susan Stanford Friedman's "Modernism of the 'Scattered Remnant': Race and Politics in the Development of H.D.'s Modernist Vision." 8. Walter Rummel is listed in several dictionaries of music and musicians, but the following passage from Humphrey Carpenter's A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound is especially useful for us. It establishes the Pound / Rummel connection, and by association, connections to H.D. and Frances Gregg: Walter Morse Rummel, two years younger than Ezra, owed his second name to his maternal grandfather, inventor of the magnetic telegraph and its code. His father Franz Rummel was a concert

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pianist of some reputation in Europe and the USA, and thanks to the Morse fortunes young Walter had been provided with an extensive musical training on both continents. At present he was studying in Paris, and was a hanger-on in the Debussy circle. Isadora Duncan, who fell in love with him in 1918, describes him as "the picture of the youthful Liszt," but she told a friend that he "preferred to make love to himself behind the closed doors of his room." In Canto 80 Ezra describes Rummel living in chilly Paris bohemianism: and dear Walter was sitting amid the spoils of Finlandia a good deal of polar white but the gas cut off. Debussy preferred his playing. (143) 9. Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was born in New York and moved to Paris in 1902 to study art. In 1905 he moved to London where he lived in poverty, studied his art, sought commissions, and made friends, Ezra Pound among them, in the artistic and intellectual community. This passage may refer to the 1911 visit to London, although it could have been later (assuming that Gregg met with Pound after she returned to London in 1912 as the wife of Louis Wilkinson). Stephen Gardiner's recent study Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment, traces the artistic and social turmoil in Epstein's career, and, by implication, it suggests a connection to Gregg's own position as a rebel against the establishment. See also notes 15 and 21. 10. The debate on Pound's recantation has not, of course, ended. Readers may wish to consult E. Fuller Torrey's The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St. Elizabeths (particularly pages 226-31) for information about Pound's continuing associations with anti-Semitic and racist groups. In the television

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documentary Hilda's Book, a scene is imagined in which Pound acknowledges he will be held responsible for the bombs falling on England, and especially for the raid that killed Frances Gregg. 11. Oliver Wilkinson, in The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg, lists the poems, essays and short stories that Gregg published in The Forum, a literary magazine edited by Michael Kennerley, and in the American Caravan series (Letters 238-39). Gregg published two stories in The Second American Caravan (1928), "The Apartment House" and "The Unknown Face." The second of these is less story than personal statement, barely disguised under the cover of a "ledger." "The Unknown Face" is the formative statement of the text that became The Mystic Leeway. Here is the note on Gregg in the "Contributors" section of The Second American Caravan: "She studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. She has contributed to The Forum, The Dial, Poetry, The Smart Set, The Adephi, The Monthly Criterion, and the London Mercury" (867). An autobiographical short story "Male and Female" was recently published in That Kind of Woman (Virago, 1991), and a story, "The House with a Garden," set in Philadelphia before Gregg's trip to Europe, has been published in The Powys Journal 3 (1993): 133-55. A full list of Gregg's publications is being compiled. 12. A.S. Neill (1883-1973) founded the famous Summerhill School in 1921, and he was one of the most important — and radical — of English educators in the 20th century. His ideas were based on freedom for the child balanced by self-regulation. His book, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, sets out both the concept, practice and history of the school. In one of the essays in Summerhill: For & Against, the anthropologist and educator Ashley Montagu describes NeilPs ideas on education in this way: "Neill's view of education has always been socialistic, in the best sense of that word: the function of education is to make humane, live involved beings,

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and all else is secondary. Fear and punishment must be abolished; love and trust should be placed in their stead. Education should lead the child to think and feel for himself, giving him the faith in himself which will enable him to become an effective, concerned, and involved member of society" (54). 13. This reference to Powys's proclamation of himself as "Lord of Hosts" comes from several such passages in Powys's Autobiography (1934), for example: "I recall to this day, and it is one of my vividest memories, the exultation that poured through me like quicksilver, when walking once a little ahead of the perambulator, which carried my brother Littleton, I turned to the nurse-maid who was pushing it and announced triumphantly that I was 'The Lord of Hosts'" (11; see also 26 and 34). 14- From Powys's essay, "Greek Tragedy," in The Enjoyment of Literature (77). 15. There is no record of any early "wooden" images of Christ in either Buckle's Jacob Epstein: Sculptor or Silber's Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings. 1911-12 seems early for Epstein's sculptures based on the figure of Christ. His first major work on Christ is "The Risen Christ," begun in 1917 and exhibited in 1920 (see the chronology in Silber). Although it was a bronze and not a "wooden image," it makes a statement that coincides with Gregg's didactic and messianic views. Stephen Gardiner, author of Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment, has this to say of the "wooden" Christ: "Regarding the wooden image of Christ, to my knowledge he only carved one figure in wood and that was called Cursed be the day wherein I was born (height 116 cms) which could I suppose be mistaken for a Christ. The date was 1913, but it could have been a year earlier or later. It's interesting, because Pound knew the sculptor well and was unlikely to be mistaken. His first Christ I know was The Risen Christ, 1917, an incredible work which was cast in bronze and which I saw recently at the Barbican Art Gallery. Magnificent" (Letter, 6

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January 1995). Evelyn Silber and co-author Terry Friedman give details on the evolution of the statue and the controversy it caused (208-210). Richard Buckle's commentary (99-100) on the statue is also of great interest, both for our reading of Gregg's specific interest in Epstein and for our understanding of her (and his) messianism. Buckle writes that "The Risen Christ" is the "first of the sculptor's works with a message" (100), and he cites this passage from Epstein's An Autobiography: "I should like to remodel this 'Christ'. . . . I should like to make it hundreds of feet high, and set it up on some high place where all could see it, and where it would give out its warning, its mighty symbolic warning to all lands. The Jew — the Galilean — condemns our wars, and warns us that 'Shalom, Shalom,' must still be the watch-word between man and man" (102). 16. May Sinclair (1863-1946) certainly could have been a kindred spirit for Frances Gregg. Social activist, particularly in the suffragist movement, feminist, and writer, she traced a career Gregg might have aspired to. Sinclair's connection to Pound was her poem published in the "Imagist" number of The Egoist in 1915, and her articles supporting the work of H.D., Pound, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington (Zegger 24). 17. In 1911, Alice Meynell would have been 64 years old. The three daughters would have been Madeline, Viola and Olivia (in 1911, all in their twenties). The "most beautiful youth" was Francis Meynell (born 1891) who by 1919 had become, to his mother's distress, an active supporter of the Russian revolution. In his autobiography My Lives, Francis Meynell comments on his companionship with Ezra Pound. Pound was invited to read at the Meynell's London flat, an event somewhat counter to his parents' style but, Francis says, it showed their "broad-mindedness" (69-70). His friendship with Pound would have been the connection that led to Gregg's visit. In addition to his radical political activity, he became an eminent

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typographer, type-designer and book-designer (for the Pelican and the Nonesuch Presses): hence Gregg's reference to "all his Nonesuch volumes." This "mathematical genius" of H.D.'s family refers to her father who was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and her half-brother, Eric, also an astronomer. If Gregg and H.D. visited George Moore (1852-1933) in Ebury Street in the summer of 1911, he would not have lived there long. He moved in January or February 1911 and became known as "the sage of Ebury Street." Although Gregg's portrayal of him is not flattering to his person ("genius should never be seen at home"), she acknowledges him as the "only authentic and established genius of our group." In 1911 he was at an active point in his career. The first part of Hail and Farewell appeared in that year, and he had begun to work on The Brook Kerith (see Gerber 196-97). The figure of Christ delineated in this book (published in 1917) shows similarities to the Christ of The Mystic Leeway and to Epstein's ideas of the "Risen Christ." It would be interesting to know Gregg's response to The Brook Kerith which, like Lawrence's The Man Who Died, depicts a Christ who did not die on the cross. "Deepdene" was the Wilkinson home at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where the Wilkinson school was located. Epstein's Adam was begun in 1938, finished in 1939, and exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in London on 7 June 1939. Silber and Friedman describe its appearance this way: "Then, in 1939, came the biggest shock of all: the seven foot high, three ton, Derbyshire alabaster figure of Adam. . . . Towards the end of the decade, as the political situation in Europe worsened, Epstein's attitude toward these sculptures grew more sombre. Like [Henry] Moore, he aligned himself with the anti-fascist cause and wrote of imagining 'a waste world [in which] argosies from the air have bombed the humans out of existence, and perished themselves, so that no human thing is left

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alive'" (237). Gregg's comments on the statue certainly testify to the currency of her thinking. The final section of The Mystic Leeway, with its deep pessimism countered by possibilities of renewed life is, in my view, strongly influenced by Epstein's work, particularly by the statue of Adam. In Gregg's view the statue expresses that same strange mixing of Judaism with Christ which she herself strives to define in her closing words. Oliver Wilkinson says: "I couldn't swear that Frances saw Adam, but I'm almost sure that she did, for she saw may of his works in Galleries. I don't think that Frances would have written as she did about a photograph of Adam. And he adds that "Epstein and my father, Louis, knew each other, too; and Louis thought of him as one of the great ones among his friends" (Letter, 24 February 1995).

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WORKS CITED

Bewley, Marius. The Complex Fate: Hawthorne and Henry James and Some Other American Writers. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952. Buckle, Richard. Jacob Epstein: Sculptor. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1963. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1988. Chisholm, Dianne. H.D.'s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Doolittle, Hilda. Asphodel Ed. Robert Spoo. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Written 1921-22. . Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal). New York: Dial, 1960. Written 1939, 1948-50. . End To Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H.D. New York: New Directions, 1979. . HERmione. New York: New Directions, 1981. Written 1926-27. . Paint It Today. Ed. Cassandra Laity. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Written 1921. The first four chapters of Paint It Today, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, appeared in Contemporary Literature 27 (winter 1986): 444-74. . Sea Garden. London: Constable, 1916. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H.D. The Career of That Struggle. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1986. Epstein, Jacob. An Autobiography. 2d ed. London: Vista, 1963.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. 17:219-56 [1919]. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence ofH.D. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1981. . "Modernism of the 'Scattered Remnant': Race and Politics in the Development of H.D.'s Modernist Vision." In King. . and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, eds. Signets: Reading H.D. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin University Press, 1990. Gardiner, Stephen. Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment. London: Michael Joseph, 1992. . Correspondence with the editor. 6 January 1995. Gerber, Helmut E., ed. George Moore on Parnassus: Letters (1900' 1933). Newark NJ: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988. Graves, Richard Perceval. The Brothers Powys. New York: Scribners, 1983. Gregg, Frances. "The Apartment House." In The Second American Caravan: 285-294. "The House With the Garden." The Powys Journal 3 (1994): 133-55. . "The Unknown Face." In The Second American Caravan: 295-

301. Gregg, Frances, and John Cowper Powys. Frances and Jack: Letters of Frances Gregg and John Cowper Powys 1912 to 1941. This unpublished

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. Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale. London: Heinemann,

1911, 1912, 1914. Neill, A. S. Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. New York: Hart, 1960. Powys, John Cowper. Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934. . "Greek Tragedy," in The Enjoyment of Literature. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938. 70-101. . "Sadista." A poem in the unpublished typescript Frances and Jack: Letters of Frances Gregg and John Cowper Powys 1912 to 1941. . Wolf Solent. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Robinson, Janice S. H.D. The Life and Work of an American Poet. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. The Second American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature. Ed. Alfred Kreymborg, et al. New York: Macaulay, 1928. Silber, Evelyn, et al. Jacob Epstein: Scuipture and Drawings. Leeds: W.S. Maney, 1989. Smith, Penny. "Hilda Doolittle and Frances Gregg." The Powys Review 22 (1988): 46-51. Summerhill: For and Against. New York: Hart, 1970. Torrey, E. Fuller. The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St. Elizabeths. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Wilkinson, Oliver Marlow. Letter to the editor. 24 February 1995. . . "The Letters of Frances and Jack." The Powys Review 19 (1986): 4357.

. "Louis Wilkinson." The Powys Review 23 (1989): 61-68. Zegger, Hrisey Dimitrakis. May Sine/air. Boston MA: Twayne, 1976. 194

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