Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  If Aldington was distracted, it was because he knew the war would soon summon him away from his wife, friends and work, possibly for ever. In January 1916, the Gallipoli Campaign ended in failure, and the Military Service Act imposed compulsory enlistment on all unmarried men aged between eighteen and forty-one. Aldington knew it would not be long before this rule was extended to the espoused, and that his old injury would be dismissed as the war intensified. The following month, seeking a fresh start, he and H. D. left their home in Hampstead – associated with the pain of 1915 – and rented a firstfloor flat at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, one of the square’s new boarding houses, managed by a live-in landlady, Elinor James. Around a dozen people shared the building, thrust into haphazard intimacy by thin walls and shared bathrooms. Hot water could be procured by slotting a penny in the gas meter downstairs, while milk bottles were left on the landings by a maid.

  The house had been recommended by a fellow Imagist, John Cournos, who lived there in a tiny room on the top floor, recently converted from a bathroom to a bedroom, where he was awoken each morning by the suffragettes who shared his kitchen scraping the burnt tops from their toast. Cournos had been born in Ukraine, but when he was ten his Hasidic Jewish family had left for America to escape the pogroms. In Philadelphia, he had sold newspapers on freezing street corners before school, eventually securing a job as office boy to the managing editor, then working his way up the ranks through a mix of book reviews, opinion pieces and advice columns. In April 1912, like Pound and H. D. (though he had not known them in Philadelphia), Cournos had emigrated to London in search of literary opportunity: he, H. D. and Aldington had formed a close trio, though his devotion to them both would not serve him well. Partial to polka-dot bow ties and elegant walking sticks, yet with a permanent hint of melancholy in his eyes, Cournos was in love with H. D., though she was oblivious, her attention consumed by the troubles in her marriage.

  On 25 February 1916, H. D. and Aldington moved their possessions to their new home, then dined with F. S. Flint in a pre-emptive farewell at the Isola Bella restaurant on Frith Street. But just a few weeks later, seeking a break from the incessant raids in London, they rented a cottage at Parracombe, North Devon, and left Mecklenburgh Square before they had properly unpacked. H. D. was working on the poems that would form her first collection, Sea Garden, while Aldington wrote to Flint of the urge he felt to finish a book before his inevitable summons. When they arrived, the countryside was hidden under six inches of snow, but primroses were blooming in the valley. H. D. woke early to write, make marmalade and scrub her saucepans in the brook which ran past the house and down to the sea. Cournos came to join them, and to visit his friends Carl and Florence Fallas, who lived in a cottage nearby. The group spent weeks picnicking on the beach, chopping trees for firewood and bathing nude in the sea, determined to forget the war and enjoy their last days of freedom together. But the atmosphere soon grew tense. Since the stillbirth, H. D. had developed a fear of pregnancy, which made her unable to countenance sex with Aldington. ‘How could she blithely face what he called love,’ she writes in Bid Me to Live, ‘with that prospect looming ahead and the matron, in her harsh voice, laying a curse on whatever might then have been, “You know you must not have another baby until after the war is over.” Meaning in her language, you must keep away from your husband, keep him away from you. When he was all she had, was country, family, friends.’

  Her aversion to physical intimacy left Aldington frustrated, his libido undimmed by his sympathy towards his wife’s suffering. In March, Aldington told Flint that he was attracted to Flo Fallas, but wouldn’t sleep with her for fear of upsetting H. D. But in June, he admitted that he and Flo had had sex twice. ‘Don’t tell me I’m a scandalous rotter or I shall weep,’ wrote Aldington to Flint. ‘You can trust me not to make anyone else unhappy.’ ‘Am I blind?’ asks H. D. in her poem ‘Amaranth’, written shortly after she learned of the deception. ‘Was my beauty so slight a gift, / so soon, so soon forgot?’ But H. D. found she could suspend her pain by burying herself in writing, hiding from ‘the blundering world about us’ by an immersion in ‘the living reality of the world of imagination and art’. As it became more and more likely that Aldington would be called up, she tried to set aside her sadness by working ‘like a mad fanatic’ – and was glad, if slightly unsettled, to find that new poems came to her more effortlessly than ever before, as if ‘dictated from without’. ‘The hurt I suffered has freed my song – this is most precious to me,’ she told Cournos.

  On 25 May 1916, the Military Service Act (Session 2) finally ordered the conscription of all married men. A month later, Aldington was inducted as an infantry private in the 11th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, and sent to train at Worgret Camp near Wareham, Dorset. From the moment he was conscripted, H. D. resolved to do all she could to ease Aldington’s transition into military life. The army isolated Aldington physically and mentally from his friends and interests, and he was distressed by the monotony of days in the camp, where he carried out hours of physical labour, dreading nightfall when he would be ordered to the unventilated barracks and, though exhausted, be too uncomfortable to sleep. He felt his imagination infected with endless visions of blood and death; the copy of Heine’s poetry he had taken with him, intending as a small act of resistance to learn German in spare moments, was swiftly confiscated by his commanding officer. H. D. encouraged friends to write to Aldington, to stave off his ‘spiritual loneliness’, and thanked Lowell for her continued efforts to publicise his poetry: ‘My one struggle,’ she wrote, ‘is to make him feel he is not being forgotten, is not dropping out of the world.’ She took a room at Corfe Castle, to be near Aldington’s camp, and wrote to Cournos wondering whether it would ‘be a good and wise sacrifice and a beautiful sacrifice’ if she helped Flo find lodgings nearby, so Aldington could be close to his lover. ‘I am ready to give my own life away to him,’ she told Cournos, ‘to give my soul and the peace of my spirit that he may have beauty, that he may see and feel beauty, so that he may write.’

  It was an astonishing offer. Aldington, for his part, saw her self-sacrifice as far beyond the call of duty, and even resented the willingness with which she gave him up to her rival: ‘Hang Flo & damn Carl … For God’s sake, love your Faun and don’t be nobil.’ But he wrote in August to Lowell: ‘H. D. has been truly wonderful: her affection and unselfish devotion have been the prop of my existence.’ Yet even as she offered this solution, H. D. found herself disconcerted at how easily she could subsume her own desires and interests into those of someone else. ‘I have all faith in my work,’ she told Cournos. ‘What I want at times is to feel faith in my self, in my mere physical presence in the world, in my personality.’

  Her long, digressive letters to Cournos from Corfe – full of mystical allusion and pleas for understanding – show her struggling to establish her boundaries in a marriage which was always intended to prioritise independence and scorn possessiveness. Yet her desire to retain Cournos as confidant and sounding board seems to have overridden her sensitivity to him as a fellow player in the drama. When Aldington left for camp, Cournos stayed behind at the cottage to help a ‘dreadfully upset’ H. D. pack, and in the sitting room, while they were drinking tea, she impetuously kissed him. A few days later, as Cournos recalled in his autobiography, they simultaneously experienced a bizarre sensation: each heard Aldington’s ghostly voice call out Cournos’s Russian name, ‘Korshoon!’ This brought a halt to proceedings, but Cournos’s longstanding feelings for H. D. were no longer concealed. Yet H. D., while accepting his devotion, made it clear that, despite everything, Aldington remained ‘the very core of my life’. Although never rejecting Cournos outright, she gestured at a communion of the spirit rather than the body, and urged him to commit his unrequited passion to the page. ‘If love of me – absolute and terrible and hopeless love – is going to help you write, then love me,’ she wrote, adding – whether out of ingenuousness or calculation – that she hoped jealousy at
their intimacy would inspire Aldington in his work. ‘If it seems best, I will tell him that you have loved me and passionately. I will tell him that I could have stayed happy with you in that little cottage,’ she wrote to Cournos, who had returned, in a grim mood, to Mecklenburgh Square. ‘When I said I could love you, you know what I meant. I meant if it would help R.’

  *

  Richard Aldington did not go to the front with the rest of his battalion – luckily, as it meant he missed the Battle of the Somme – but was awarded lance corporal stripes and held back for officer training. Knowing that he might be sent to France at any point, he begged H. D. to leave England and go back to Philadelphia alone: ‘If I die when Hilda is in America, she will feel it less, I believe,’ he wrote to Cournos. But H. D. insisted on returning to Mecklenburgh Square. When she had first looked round the flat, knowing that it would be her lonely wartime sanctuary, the landlady had sensed her desolation and suggested, echoing Aldington’s entreaties, that she ask a friend to help H. D. leave town for the duration of the war. H. D. certainly had options – Amy Lowell had donated a substantial sum to Herbert Hoover’s scheme to repatriate Americans based in Europe – but she refused to leave London, the first place she had felt she belonged. With Aldington away indefinitely, the room at 44 Mecklenburgh Square took on symbolic importance for H. D.: it was a place that was solely hers to work in, a constant while everything around her was uncertain. While it stood, it offered hope for a future where her values would still hold meaning.

  The flat was one large musty room, with apricot-coloured walls and a blue carpet. A Spanish screen separated the tiny kitchen from the living area, where H. D. slept on a low chintz-covered couch that doubled as a sofa. Scattered candles illuminated H. D.’s version of interior decoration: statues of the Buddha, a brown teapot, its leaves dumped on pieces of newspaper spread open on the carpet, overflowing ashtrays, cups stained with the remnants of black coffee and coloured liqueurs, half-wilted roses and single eggs languishing on a shelf under the bookcase. In the evenings, she could hear the munitions girls from the top floor clattering downstairs on the way to their night shifts. Another occupant of the house was Alida Klemantaski, partner of the poet and publisher Harold Monro, who, like Aldington, had recently been called up: H. D. tried to cultivate the friendship, but Alida made it clear she wanted to keep to herself, preferring the company of the insects she housed in a makeshift terrarium in her room. So H. D. largely spent her time in solitude. The French windows, which led to a balcony, were swathed in night-blue curtains and backed by thick shutters with iron bolts that she drew across during air raids. H. D. would later remember those curtains as a comforting seal of protection, forming a boundary which cocooned her from the dangerous world outside. Yet the curtains also gave her a marked feeling of claustrophobia, of being locked up in the room with her grief and tension, alone and trapped, unable to escape. The room, she wrote in Bid Me to Live, was ‘the frame to the picture’: H. D. would come to see each contour and texture of the Mecklenburgh Square flat as inextricable from the emotional turmoil of this year.

  On 21 December 1916, she wrote to Lowell, describing a scene familiar to women up and down the country: ‘I am waiting at Waterloo to say goodbye to R. He leaves England tonight.’ Alone, H. D. attempted to continue, in Mecklenburgh Square, the frenzied work she had been doing at Parracombe and Corfe. ‘All I want,’ she wrote, ‘is to keep the home-fires of divine poesy humming till the boys come home!’ Yet after Aldington’s departure for France, she found it difficult to concentrate. She was working on a translation of the choruses from Euripides’ Hippolytus, focusing on the doomed queen Phaedra’s misplaced passion for her stepson; she had also taken over Aldington’s position as assistant editor of the Egoist, the magazine that claimed to ‘recognise no taboos’, was a leading proponent of Imagism and had recently serialised James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. H. D. enjoyed the role, working alongside T. S. Eliot and publishing several of her own poems as well as reviews and pieces by her friends. But making art during wartime began to seem futile. In her long poem ‘The Tribute’, published in the Egoist in November 1916, a city is overrun by a contemptuous demon, its people left bereft and helpless, with little language to describe their horror: ‘Squalor blights and makes hideous / our lives – it has smothered / the beat of our songs’. H. D. oscillated between periods of intense productivity and episodes of self-destruction: writing from France, Aldington told Lowell that he had had to persuade H. D. not to burn work which she considered inadequate, and that she had already destroyed ‘some most poignant lyrics and a long poem of about 10,000 words’. She told her friend John Gould Fletcher that she felt ‘broken spiritually’ in London; her creativity was choked by the undercurrent of death.

  As the war continued, it was not surprising that H. D. began to lose sight of any future or purpose. She thought of the London sky as blotting paper, whose misery she absorbed daily. Zeppelin attacks were frequent, and Mecklenburgh Square, being close to the targets of Euston and King’s Cross stations, stood at high risk from bomber planes, whose misfired debris regularly showered Bloomsbury. H. D., sitting on her balcony in the moonlight, grew accustomed to the sight of searchlight beams converging on a silvery aeroplane, the hoarse wails of bombs and shells piercing the atmosphere, anti-aircraft guns bursting like firecrackers, then giving way to the all-clear bugles blown by enterprising Boy Scouts. Since the stillbirth, she had been hyper-aware of the ‘imminent possibility of death’; walking through London, she felt she was traversing a graveyard, where ‘any stone might have been our tomb-stone’. The constant air raids were a powerful psychological weapon which came to dominate the London imagination, threatening to wreak havoc when least expected. When the siren went, the residents of 44 Mecklenburgh Square would gather in the basement, where an atmosphere of false jollity was fuelled by the landlady’s hot and sugary ‘Zeppelin tea’; H. D. always refused to go, preferring to die alone in her room rather than socialise under such circumstances. During one attack, the house next door was struck. ‘We came home and simply waded through glass,’ she recalled, ‘while wind from now unshuttered windows made the house a barn, an unprotected dugout. What does that sort of shock do to the mind, the imagination – not solely of myself, but of an epoch?’

  Aldington asked Lowell to ‘write her cheerful lies to comfort her’, and tasked Flint with taking H. D. to theatres and parties, even attempting to match the generosity with which H. D. had greeted his affair with Flo (or, perhaps, to clear his conscience): ‘For the Lord’s sake don’t interrupt H. D. if she is having a good time with anyone … if you can devise any sort of “affaire” pour passer le temps, so much the better.’ In the meantime, in a poignant attempt to recover the warmth of their early marriage, he and H. D. communicated by an exchange of small chapbooks, made by a small press run out of an Ohio church by Charles Clinch Bubb, a reverend with a passion for printmaking. The delicate volumes explored their shared love of Greece, memories of their travels in Italy, their anger at the war which divided them, and the possibility that language can heal pain. Writing and receiving these private poems heartened H. D., and she wrote to Bubb to thank him for his commitment to the project. ‘You really can not imagine (though I have reiterated this so often) what courage they give us – what faith and courage to “carry on” in another sphere than that of guns and slaughter.’ Writing cheerfully to Bubb, Aldington explained that he had met his wife when he was nineteen, and married her at twenty-one. ‘Everyone said I was ruining my life & that of a charming girl! I am happy to say these prophets of evil were entirely wrong and we have never quarrelled since our marriage although we often did before! You see, I was older at 21 than many men at 30; even now few people will believe I am only 24.’

  *

  Over the early months of 1917, Aldington’s battalion saw little military action. Stationed between Amiens and the Belgian border, far from the main front, his duties involved digging trenches, maintaining roads
and constructing wooden crosses to mark graves. In July – weeks before the Third Battle of Ypres would begin in earnest – he returned to England for officer training at a camp near Lichfield in Staffordshire. H. D. joined him, taking rooms in the market square, where she worked peacefully and spent ‘delightfully lazy’ weekends with Aldington.

  A coincidence had enabled H. D. to sublet 44 Mecklenburgh Square during her absence. When he was living in Philadelphia, John Cournos had been wildly in love with a charismatic American woman named Dorothy Yorke, who preferred to be known more glamorously as Arabella. Possessed of a deep voice, flushed complexion and copper-tinged hair, Arabella made her own clothes and experimented in abstract painting. She and Cournos had at one point been engaged, but after he followed Arabella to Paris in 1912, her mother, who disapproved of his poverty and Jewishness, had insisted the affair be terminated. Two years later, when Arabella was back in America, the romance had reignited through correspondence; thrilled, Cournos had worked for months to raise the boat fare to visit her, but by the time he arrived in New York, Arabella had changed her mind. Furious yet helpless, he had returned to London, resolved never to cross an ocean for a woman again.

  In 1917, Cournos was working as an interpreter for the Wireless Press on the Strand, translating government messages that came over the Russian radio. Towards the end of the summer, he accepted a job in St Petersburg as a translator and journalist with the Anglo-Russian Commission, organised by the British Foreign Office. One morning, strolling down Southampton Row, he was surprised to encounter Arabella and her mother, looking into a shop window. He had parted from her on bad terms, but in the Bloomsbury street cool civility gave way to generosity: hearing that Arabella was staying on in London without accommodation secured, Cournos suggested that she borrow the flat below his, left empty while H. D. was away in Lichfield. Arrangements were made on the spot. ‘A beautiful lady has my room,’ wrote H. D. to Flint on 30 August. Each evening, Cournos came down to Arabella’s sitting room; together they ate, talked and finally confessed love. But it was too late: he was set to depart for Russia in a matter of days. He asked Arabella to wait for him; she said that she would.